Notes From The Trenches

Looking at home sales figures, we can see that a decent new year’s traffic caused home closings to be up fully 20% over 2010.  Since there were no mitigating factors during this time frame last year, we can say that this rebound is almost surely the result of pent-up demand for housing being rel...

  One of the things that may bite you as a homebuyer is missing a deadline set in the contract, and one of the most troublesome deadlines is the inspection contingency deadline. Most buyers don’t realize the urgency of getting everything done in time to meet that deadline, and the loss of rights...

Today I’m in Denver, PA at the offices of Fulton Mortgage Company speaking with manager Gary Seidel about what mortgage reps actually do, and why it’s so important to talk to one early on in your home search. Gary points out that mortgage reps have a critical role in getting you the house of you...

  Today I gripe a bit about some recent encouragement found in a trade publication for real estate professionals. The encouragement was to engage in “positive messaging” to our networks of consumers, in response presumably to news media negativity over real estate. It’s been bugging me because f...

Lancaster Township PA Homes For Sale update - In December of 2010, the Lancaster Township Board of Supervisors adopted Ordinance # 2010-07, changing the regulations pertaining to smoke detectors by adopting the Uniform Construction Code standard as its' own.   The biggest change is that the towns...

Thanks to all the Lancaster PA Twitter gang who came out to Prince Street Cafe yesterday at 7am (yes, 7am) for the kickoff "Lancaster Breakfast Tweetup" of the new year! We had some great conversations and met some new people who braved the cold to come down to grab some hot java and breakfast.  ...

Today I’m discussing my favorite real estate home search apps for the iPhone (or smartphone of your choice that supports them). All of the following apps utiltize the geolocation feature heavily, and this is also where they are the most useful. Apps are as follows: 1) Realtor.com – this app is v...

I wanted to catch us all up on what the Lancaster County PA real estate market looked like as of the end of November – I’ll have the December and year-end review up next week.  Since there were some important trends to make note of in November, here’s my summary. Remember, in 2009 we were dealin...

A number of PA house members have signed on to a new legislative effort to curb the cost of new homes in Pennsylvania. House Bill 1196 extends the 2006 Uniform Construction Code and removes the sprinkler mandate for all new construction starting in January 2011. Lancaster County delegation member...

Lots of Lancaster County foreclosures happening these days.  One came across my desk recently that I thought I'd share with you. This place is along River Road in a nice corner of Lancaster County and sits on 1.2 Acres!  The house looks to have a decent layout and would probably remodel quite nic...