Austin Texas Real Estate Blog (and other stuff)

I wanted to write this post to publicly recognize one of our favorite family restaurants, located in the La Frontera Shopping Center in Round Rock, near the intersection of I-35 and Toll 45. It's in the same strip with Chipotle and Maggie Moo's Ice Cream. They have three locations in Austin and o...

  Falcon Pointe is a 700-acre master-planned community in the fast-growing Pflugerville, Texas area, which is adjacent to Austin on the north side of town. As the largest master-planned community in Pflugerville, Falcon Pointe offers homes priced from the $200,000s to $380,000s by leading builder...

Some buyers and sellers wonder about whether they can save money by not using an agent for their home sale and/or purchase. I'll do my best in this post to explain the variables for different types of transactions. IF YOU ARE SELLING A HOME, you will probably be best served to hire an agent to li...

I've written nearly 1,200 posts on this blog, starting in 2007. Over the past several years, I've had dozens of sales that have resulted from referrals from my ActiveRain friends around the state and country, and from consumers finding me directly on my profile or from specific posts (my Austin T...

This question is not typically one that I hear asked out loud, but I know it's important to educate our clients on the importance of obtaining a pre-approval before shopping for a house.  There are multiple reasons to do this: You won't waste your time looking at properties that are too expensive...

This is a relatively common question, especially for first-time buyers that we work with here in Austin. There's a very quick answer to this, but sometimes there are underlying questions as well, so I'll try to address this as clearly and thoroughly as I can. If you're selling your home, you will...

I decided to start a new series of posts with questions suggested by clients and other agents. The question above ("What is Earnest Money?") was the first one I received when I opened this topic up on Facebook.   In a nutshell, earnest money is a deposit that home buyers submit whenever a contrac...

  Over the past year and a half or so, my wife and I have been running a ministry for homeless and needy families (mostly single moms and their kids), Luke 6 Ministries. We've had some wonderful blessings, having helped three different homeless families to get established in their own homes (one...

I will be interested to see if the title of this post attracts people who have no idea what I'm talking about.  "Must be some weird autocorrect feature." Nope. Meatball Tag is the name of a game that was invented by my 4-year-old daughter, Jenny, and her older sister, Abby, who is 7 now. Before i...

This is a question I've faced many times in my career. Sometimes, the answer is a simple, "No, it really looks fine to me. I wouldn't bother." Other times, it's rather obvious that the carpet is in need of replacement before we can list the house. Maybe it's just really worn, with traffic patter...