Laurie's Blog

Everyone else is jumping on my bandwagon lately. It must be the economy - not everyone's got a streak of Scottish thrift in their blood like me :) I've always mowed my own lawn, pulled my own weeds, painted my house, fixed leaky sinks & toilets, repaired appliances and my lawnmower. For people wh...

Lot's of people want to know when the housing market will come back. Today I read a blog by a venture capital guy who makes a lot of good comments from an investment perspective about the current housing market as a good place to invest if you want to own rentals and manage them for anywhere from...

It has been awhile in the making ... but people can actually afford to buy a house in the Maryland suburbs of DC again. That's the good part about this economy.  Of course there are a lot of short sales and forclosures on the market now ... a very rough estimate after looking through the MRIS is ...

Here's a new one ... international phone calling. I'm probably not going to call overseas ... but we got an internet lead looking for US$2.5M properties, so I wanted to know where this person was from. I used a website called http://www.countrycallingcodes.com to find my client's phone number.The...

Ok ... this time I was looking up an area code with the new site I just blogged about, and got the information that the number was in California. However, being a native Californian, I know that there is a difference ($$$) between communities like Los Gatos in the Bay Area and Corcoran near Baker...

In my first posting, I put a link for an area code look-up webpage -- that I constantly use even now-- ,but today when I went to use it, it did not list an area code someone had entered into my database. At first I thought it was a fake #, but then I thought I'd look for another area code look-up...

We have been working with buyers this summer who have shopped the short sale/foreclosure market and as a result have been seeing lots of properties that have not have the TLC they really need for years.  Lots of these properties have needed new roofs.  One pair of clients went ahead and bought a ...

I have driven past Suburban Florists on Old Georgetown Road in Bethesda for years ... I have probably even received an FTD flower arrangement via them, but I have never stopped in the shop until today.     They have their own parking so that makes getting in the shop easy ... but the best part ar...

I know I am a transplant to Maryland, so I have to check myself when I feel my blood pressure going up when drivers out here do not pull over to the right and stop and wait for emergency vehicles to pass before they start driving again. At least once I have been honked at and given the finger BEC...

This website was written up in the Washington Post Real Estate/Business section today, Sunday, April 13, 2008. It is an interesting tool to show buyers average cost of homeownership, renting and transportation costs in a particular area on a map. The site currently has...