Birmingham-Hoover Real Estate

Birmingham real estate sales and inventory levels for December, 2009 appear encouraging after November's spike, which was widely publicized in the local media.  I should note this post is based on preliminary figures which will likely be finalized in a few days.  Two key measures of the market's ...

I get a lot of folks that appear interested in buying foreclosures as an investment (i.e., to rent out and later resell).  As such, I wanted to provide some insight into what to consider to minimize your risk, manage your expectations and hopefully yield a return in excess of 20%.  There seem to ...

I spent over 7 years in the mortgage business, exiting it completely in 2007 to focus fully on real estate sales.  I've been meaning to write a piece about the mortgage business but since John did such a great job on this one it seemed better to simply reblog it.  There is a lot of great informa...

Don Gomez writes an exellent piece of advice for buyers.  I always recommend this to my buyer clients.  In the one case that I didn't do this personally, I lived to regret it. Talk to the Neighbors When Buying a House in Charlotte or anyplace else for that matter. We have a pretty social street....

The path to home ownership is a fast paced reality that is regarded to be one of the great American traditions. Although it is an exciting time for you and your family, it is also one that will require additional responsibilities. In many instances, newly bought homes may need to be renovated or ...

Karen Parsons writes an excellent piece about the role of true real estate professionals and what "sales" is really all about.  I wanted to pass this on to my readers as I believe that realtors are widely misunderstood and Karen clearly sets the record straight for the majority in our industry th...

It seems that everyone in the market to purchase wants to buy a foreclosure in Birmingham.  Even first time homebuyers seem to think they have to buy a foreclosure in order to get a great deal.  While there are certainly some great deals out there and foreclosures continue to represent a large se...

As realtors, we typically look at assessed tax values when representing a buyer or seller as another piece of information to serve our clients' best interest.  We know that doing a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) for a potential seller has little to do with an assessed tax value, but we still l...

One of the most important things for families looking to buy is to determine the best schools in an area.  Most people looking to buy in Hoover know that the school system is very strong.  In fact, when we moved to the area several years ago looking for the best schools, people told us that you r...

The best way to evaluate the expected impact of the homebuyer tax credit for this area is to look at the past two years in terms of composition of closed business. The past impact of the homebuyer tax credit for the Birmingham area can be seen in the sold terms categories of FHA, VA and Rural Dev...