Real estate is always a "good news-bad news" business. The most obvious example of this is an overheated market: great news for home sellers, lousy news for home buyers. An article I read recently in [...]
A few weeks ago I came across an interesting post on Baristanet. The author, Jessica Stolzberg, and her family (husband, son, daughter and dog) make do with only one car. This is a very unusual arrangement for a suburban family, and Stolzberg recognizes that it isn't always possible. Given the right circumstances, however, it's quite [...]
One of the many reasons I'm proud to be affiliated with Keller Williams Realty - NJ Metro Group is because of the spirit of community that inspires the company culture. Last Thursday, May 12th, my colleagues and I turned a vacant, overgrown lot in to an arable plot of land, ready to nurture a community vegetable garden. In conjunction with [...]
Here's a scenario: New home buyer-client comes to me to find a house. My first question to them is always "how important is it that you can walk to the train and to shopping?" My second question is then "Have you been pre-qualified for a mortgage?". If it's from a lender I'm familiar with we're all set to go look at houses. If it's from [...]
In this CDC-sponsored video the narrator says "(walkable communities) are no longer a fairy tale - they're a reality". I had to laugh! it's like the government just stumbled upon this concept. In towns like [...]
I don't know about you, but I've certainly noticed a pattern and apparently, so has the mayor of Montclair. In yesterday's Montclair Times, mayor Jerry Fried observes "In so many things green, Montclair has been there first". What is it about this town that fosters green innovation and attracts so many like minds? Fried attributes the [...]
It's unusually cold for this time of year, but since it is in fact April, I assume that we'll see warmer weather soon. For me, that means more time outdoors, specifically in Brookdale Park.
I've been going to Brookdale Park since my kids were babies: I spent many afternoons pushing their strollers along the paths and later helped them [...]
One of the things I love most about Montclair is its diversity. Over the 20 years that I've lived here, I've become friends with a number of people whom I probably would never have even gotten to meet in a more homogeneous suburb. These friends come from different religious, ethnic and economic backgrounds from my own. I was thinking [...]
I wanted to share this link to home design trends for 2011, which I found on the "Greenhouse" blog on usatoday.com. This Montclair Realtor is happy to report that among the trends listed is a growing interest in urbanism, and correspondingly, walkable suburbs.
The New Urbanism movement originated back in the early 1980s as a reaction to [...]
