Wayback Wednesday… SPICY!
A couple of years ago I wrote a post about blandness. I don’t like bland and I think most people agree that bland is… boring. It applies to food, advertising, movies, art and anything else. Maybe everyone won’t like the spice, but almost nobody will like a complete lack of spice. But, I guess there are just a few people out there that really like boring.
The story is about a grandmother ‘protecting’ her grandson from something she thought was too spicy for his young palate. Of course, I applied it to real estate advertising… and even tossed in one of my favorite spicy commercials…
This is what I feared… Gwinnett Market Report – July, 2010
- Image by lane.bailey via Flickr
I have been kind of expecting this, but of course it will take a couple of months to confirm…
The Tax Credit did not kick the Gwinnett Market into gear…
Instead, its expiration killed sales. Looking over the last few months of sales we see that for 2010, sales were (compared to 2009):
- January – down 10.9%
- February – up 1.7%
- March – up 10.1%
- April – up 14.1%
- May – up 17.3%
- June – down 0.8%
- July – down 26.2%
As we look over these numbers, there are a few things to keep in mind… To start with, the July numbers will likely get a little better. Although sales are supposed to be reported within 48 hours of closing, there are always stragglers that take a few weeks to make it into the reports. Contracts had to be written by April 30th, and sales here usually only take 30-45 days to close. That would be why sales were up in May, but not in June… those sales were likely closed. I didn’t see a lot of buyers playing chicken with the contract dates.
All isn’t doom and gloom… Inventories are down a bit from last year. This is helping to keep the absorption rates at a reasonable level. But they are still decelerating.
Look for specific reports over the next couple of weeks for Lilburn, Lawrenceville, Duluth, Suwanee, Sugar Hill, Buford and Norcross.
Motoring Monday… What Makes You Wheelie Happy?
I ran across these while surfing YouTube with my sons… It seems that they really like construction equipment, school buses and rear engined muscle cars…
53 Cool Concept Cars… Part XVII…
- Image by The Brain Toad via Flickr
I like strippers… That is going to make Google go nuts. But before you rapidly click away, hear me out for a moment.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the ‘Big 3′ used to produce a few cars that were heavy on the performance options and light on everything else. Sometimes they were hard to find, and at other times they were sitting on the dealer lots in big numbers… They were kind of like the ‘cop car’ versions of 2 door hardtops.
Dodge turned it into an art… There were Hemi Challengers and Coronets with rubber floor mats and no radio or AC.
I’d love to see some of those come back… and the PERFECT car to make a concept from would be a new Challenger SRT-8. This is what I would do…
- Non-descript color. Those cars weren’t Sub Lime, Plum Loco or Hemi Orange… they were dark blue or maroon. I’d go with dark blue.
- Dog Dish hubcaps on steel wheels. You know the look… think cop car. They are the little hub caps on the black steel wheel.
- I might be willing to keep the A/C, but we could dump the power seats, power windows, power door locks and even the radio.
- OK, I’m not too hip with vinyl seats… leather would be better, but that is because cloth would look wrong.
- There would HAVE to be a shaker hood…
- No chrome badges… and no badges at all on the sides. In fact, minimal brightwork inside and out.
It wouldn’t be the cheapest Challenger on the lot, but it would be the meanest…
Related articles by Zemanta
- 53 Cool Concept Cars… Part XVI (lanebailey.com)
- 53 Cool Concept Cars… Part XIV (lanebailey.com)
- 53 Cool Concept Cars… Part XV (lanebailey.com)
- 53 Cool Concepts, Part XII (lanebailey.com)
Occupational Hazard…
There are a few occupational hazards we real estate agents face… moldy foreclosures, rotted floors that we can fall through, angry undisclosed dogs, getting locked out of a house on the back deck 40′ off the ground (don’t ask). But there is something even more dangerous…
Houses we really like… really, really like. Ones that we can afford…
As a real estate agent, I look at a lot of houses. Some of them are amazingly cool. But, I’m not dropping half a million bucks on a house. Those aren’t so dangerous… Not to say that I don’t love the media rooms, pubs on the terrace level and the 10 car garages… especially the 10 car garages… but those aren’t that dangerous, because they are out of MY operating range.
And then…
So, I was out checking out some new cool garage homes in Gwinnett County, and I ran across this one. I shot a few videos to use in ‘discussions’ with my wife. Seriously, I didn’t shoot these to show the world, just one person.
The problem is that we don’t want to change schools yet… So, unless this house is hanging out on the market in 8 months, the best I can hope for is to find it a good owner.
Not bad for about $160k…
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