Austin Property Appraiser

Did the appraiser just use REO comps and killed your deal? Have you ever wondered why some appraisers have been using totally run down, dilapidated dumps and used them as comparables for your seller's meticulously-maintained home?  Unfortunately, due to the present state of the National economy, ...

Out in a field in eastern Travis County, Texas. This guy was about 25 feet long and maybe 4 feet high at the front. Made from metal with a nice old rusty patina. Strangely, he was surrounded by an electric fence - perhaps because the cows kept getting tripped up? Just in case any of y'all though...

Have you driven through a ghost town lately? One that was once a vibrant community and is now the shell of it's former self? Today's photo is one of my absolute favorites that Alison took this spring. We were in Lockhart, Texas, home of Black's BBQ, shootin' the town. Lockhart, fotunately, is NOT...

We were trolling downtown Austin last week, looking for interesting spots to photograph. The area around 6th Street and the streets that run north and south near 6th and Red River are a treasure trove of graffiti, rust, crumbling limestone, ratty tatty store fronts and rocking bars hiding behind ...

  Alison has shared some data on the traffic patterns on one of our sites, Appraisal IQ with the AR community. Some good questions are in-line there - do YOU know what kind of traffic you're getting and which sources are sending you the traffic that converts?   I read a blog post recently about t...

Driveway Art - you might not see it in your suburb, but you can't go far in the older areas of Austin without seeing something unusual. Well, sometimes what you see is usual - junk - old cars - hundreds of plants in broken pots. And sometimes, well, what IS IT? This thing looked to be all metal b...

I want a steady-cam, one of those things that helps keep your camera stable when you're moving while shooting video. I've been pricing them on-line, and whoo-whee, them pups are expensive. My wife is all for photo gear but the prices of these even give her pause. So, in the spirit of YouTube, whi...

We don't have one - yet. The kids are *really* working us over, though, so a nice board for everyone to share might be in the near future. We visited two this week looking for bearings for a steady-cam I'm trying to make, which only escalated the kids' clamoring to a near-fevered pitch. If you li...

Something that makes Austin extra cool is the number of locally-owned businesses - ones that have survived despite the push of the big-box stores and chains into the area. We had the opportunity twice in the last week to admire one of these. The first was a few days ago when Alison finally had he...

We were driving around Central Austin this past weekend when we got lost, then found something better than what we were trying to find. The side street we pulled in to, right off of a busy feeder street (feeder onto the highway) had one of the more interesting fences I've seen recently in Austin....