Articles for June 2nd, 2009
Every Realtor Needs An Open House On Their Arms
“Open House” cufflinks. So special, I’m placing my order right now…
D CEO Wins Major Major Magazine Award
D CEO Magazine, edited by the brilliant Glenn Hunter, scooped up a major national prize for the best ancillary publication at the annual City and Regional Magazine Association conference in New Orleans last night. CEO covers business including, of course, real estate.
Real-Life Real Estate Agents Sue CSI Over Episode
God I wished we could cover LA realtors — just so much good stuff to post.
Getting Your Home ready To Sell: Live Eye Candy — Swans!
June, the biggest month of the year for brides and home sales, is here. Every agent will be back in town selling. Or at Neimans’ sales, spending. (Ebby Halliday promises a real “barnburner” of a month, stay tuned for deets.) If you’re selling, you know what you have to do –clean, pare down, stage. You might also want to try some live eye candy, especially if you live near water. Our staff photographer snapped these beautiful Black Swans a few weeks ago. They belong to the flock of Braden Power, who owns one of the most delectable listings in Dallas at 3816 Turtle Creek Boulevard. (This video was shot when the house was listed for $13 million with Eleanor Mowery Sheets. It’s now reduced to $9.8 million and listed with the fabulous Doris Jacobs, Allie Beth Allman.) Could ornamental swans enhance your property value? Most definitely. Knox Swan & Dog sells and ships swans humanely throughout the U.S. , Delta being the preferred airline carrier because, as a company official told me, sometimes the Post Office (which charges $360 to ship a pair of birds) is idiotic enough to leave the poor creatures sweltering on a hot dock. The Mute Swan, immortalized by Tchaikovsky, is the company’s most popular and economical bird. You can buy a pair of healthy Mute Swans for $600 that are guaranteed to breed. Some folks buy or rent them for weddings. The lovely creatures pictured here are Black Swans from Australia, slightly more costly: $800 for a one year old pair (Will they breed? Is he really into her as a life-mate?). $1500 for proven breeders — Black Swans who do not, apparently, need Viagra. Swans are generally faithful to each other and mate for life. Clutches (litters) average five eggs but can be as many as ten. So say you shell out $600 for a pair of Mute Swans, plus $250 air freight, you could end up with two or three clutches a year — 18 baby birds! But then you have tend them, and I’d hate to think of what might happen if they met up with a Dallas coyote. Still, what better way to make a buyer fall in love with your manse than to have graceful swans in full view.
Is Highland Park One of The Most Expensive Places To Live In The USA?
Highland Park, Texas made Business Week’s top ten list of the most expensive suburban communities, though we know HP and UP are not really suburbs but an island within the city. Frankly, I was surprised: Atherton, CA was first — no shocker, all the Silicon Valley big wigs live there — median home price $3.8 million, then Highland Park, Texas median home price $937,500., then Scarsdale, NY at $1.23 million. I guess it was HP’s nonretail spending at 245%, which was really a shocker, that upped the cost of living ante. Seems that some financial gurus are suggesting that folks who live in places like HP/UP and are finding it hard to make ends meet sell their homes in the pricier communities and seek shelter in lower cost areas — but to do that here would tack on the added expense of commuting if you moved to, say, Frisco. Or if you moved to a North Dallas ranch home you might end up forking out $20K a year for private school. Why not stay in HP and pay the high property taxes (ouch), at least those are deductible. I don’t know yet what I think about this article. Or this. What do you think?
Real Estate Value Security for UP, PC: the End of Helicopter Parenting
I am STILL a helicopter mom, though my children are grown. Which shows you how out of style I am. Mommies du jour now apparently embrace “free range-parenting”, raising kids like the hormone-free turkeys we buy at Thanksgiving and Christmas. That is, unstructured time rather than six activities per week to stimulate their brains. (I flashed educational flash-cards at my infant son after taking a course from the Better Baby Institute before he was born — and supplied him with non-violent toys. My daughter was getting brain stimulation from classical music the second the rabbit died even though the first test was a false alarm. That is all now so eightes.) Whether or not just letting a kid ride a bike all summer long and build tree houses is psychologically healthier or not, who knows. But I smell rising real estates values. This trend will clearly point parents to buy homes in communities like Highland Park, University Park, and gated neighborhoods (Vaquero) where the kiddos can run free safely — ditto safety capsule vacation communities like Watercolor, Seaside, Sea Island, Park City, Snowbird, Deer Valley, Jackson Hole, and Cornerstone, CO near Telluride. I think it was our quest for a Harvard degree in the family that drove us all to driving them to perfection. But we were scared, too — a young girl on roller skates was approached by a child molester the week we moved into our home on Ricks Circle in 2000.
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