Those in business, particularly the product development side, like know about the golden triangle: resources, features, time. The real estate version is: price, location, features. That is the hardest thing to come to terms with when buying a house. It doesn’t help that there are several other dynamics in the market like competitors (other buyers) and inventory availability.
We started looking more in earnest late last year. Before then, I was definitely keeping an eye on the market but wasn’t fully comfortable with buying yet. A lot of that had to do with our moving around so much. Also, as first time buyers we were bound to go at a slower pace. The market of prior years didn’t really lend itself to well considered buying given the competitiveness for the better places.
One unfortunate side effect of looking at listings for nearly 3 years was a level of burn out and paralysis had begun to set in. Too much information can as paralyzing as too little. Hence creating a framework for a decision is important.
First we set some boundaries.
Price. Our plan was to say as close to historical averages of income to price as possible. Modern convention had people buying at ratios of 5x or more but that seemed simply insane. Further, we also wanted to use only one of our incomes in the calculation. Lots of reasons but it boils down to: flexibility in career & freeing up income for other investments and activities.
Location. This was a bit harder. What area is right for you is pretty personal. Obviously location and price do have a strong link in real estate so picking target neighborhoods had to match our first criteria. We don’t have kids, nor plan to, so schools don’t matter. We do like a walkable area, but much of Austin fits that pretty well. At the end of the day, a lot of it was about how we spend out time and where our social life interactions occur. We like our friends and want to see them often, so that was a big factor. Reasonably close to a lot of things is important especially since the cost of driving (cost, time, carbon) is so high.
We ended up focusing on Hyde Park, Brentwood / Crestview, Allandale, and to lesser degrees adjunct areas like French Place / Cherrywood or Windsor Park. Places like Highland Hills, Travis Heights, and Barton Hills are very attractive for many reasons but rarely shook out when considering other factors so they seemed less likely as viable ares for us.
Setting boundaries on price and location help a lot but in many ways the easier part. The hard part is when they start to become at odds with what you want in a house (aka the Features). Defining priorities is critical and seemingly impossible at times. That will be the topic of the next post.
July 22nd, 2008
Needs some mild updating but great bones on this MCM. Love the exposed beams and ceiling (though must be hell on energy efficiency).
Listing Info.
Virtual Tour.
July 21st, 2008
photo: Doug Kanter of the NY Times
The NY Times put up this nifty multimedia tour of some of China’s new modernist building. Not even sure of modern is quite the right phrase as these leap beyond the original form / function thing into the realms of digital art come alive.
Here is the virtual tour. It includes some detail and renderings about the underpinnings of the buildings.
July 13th, 2008
photo: Julius Shulman
Regular readers probably know of my love for John Lautner. If you happen to be in Los Angeles between July 13th and October 12th this year, I fully recommend taking the time to visit the Hammer Museum and see their Lautner Exhibition as well drive up Mulholland or around Silverlake and see some of his work. If you are there in the September time frame there will be a new documentary screened.
While Launter is more known for his later period concrete curved and cantilevered structures, like those pictured here, it is his earlier work that really kindled my love for mid-century modern design.
photo: Joshua White
July 12th, 2008
This place was for sale last summer and then was sold. It is now back on the market. I should have grabbed the picture set as there was a lot more than offered here. If you go the Dick Clark site and click on residential there are more (it is the Mount Bonnell house). Boo for Flash websites where you can’t link directly to anything.
Listing info.
Updated: Price.
New: Virtual Tour yet more pictures (and better than the listing set).
July 11th, 2008
There pretty much nothing showing this this weekend (again) for Open Houses. I was hoping for a post holiday bump in listings but nothing came up of interest except some prices getting reset.
Last week, I mentioned that I was going to write up some notes on the house buying thing this week. This week just slipped by. Sorry about that.
Today I’ll kick it off with some background. We moved to Austin summer of 2005. It was at that time our 4th city in 4 years after a bit of whirlwind of Seattle to DC to Seattle to LA before coming to Austin. I started Modern Austin because we were looking around at places and learning the city and I thought, “since I am looking at all this already, may as well throw up listings and pictures and maybe others will find it useful as well.”
We were planning on renting for a while, learn the city and then buy. Of course, it didn’t work out that way and we were off to DC area again for about 20 months. In my mind, we still lived in Austin but in reality we lived on Capital Hill (Eastern Market Area). Keeping the site going was nice way to stay in touch with what was going on here. We moved back Labor Day weekend 2007. Hopefully for semi-good (I would love to find a way to spend the summer in a more temperate region).
Next post: Coming to terms with the realities of the market.
July 11th, 2008
I was surprised to see this post kick up so many comments. It shouldn’t though given Agave seems always to stir up emotions.
Duncan did kick up a topic at the end there that I’ve been thinking on and off about for many years: what is modern? And how do you conveyed that to others?
Modern seems to have a much wider umbrella than other styles. I certainly can think of principles which embody modernism but it is hard to pin down with certainty the same way you can with Victorian, Federal, or Colonial styles. It seems more often than ‘modern’ falls into the old “I know it when I see it” method of classification. Duncan pretty much implies the same here:
Modernism should be based on a set of design principles and not be considered a “style” so many homes rely on a series of aesthetic embellishments that complete the checklist to qualify as modern.
I agree with this but when it comes to communicating with other people or with the marketplace it gets blurry. One person’s modern is another craftsmen (well not really, but you know what I am saying). It is all too easy for developers and realtors to try to lack into the modern label.
For what is worth, I often post up listing that I feel aren’t really great examples of modernism but if I got too strict, there would be next to no content.
How do you describe modern design to others?
July 9th, 2008
Listing Info.
July 9th, 2008
AD Stenger in Barton Hills. Listing info here.
July 7th, 2008
Likely comes as no surprise butt there is pretty much nothing going on this week. Except this place (and the next door sister home) which seems to be open every weekend.
I’ll be off moving into our new place (we finally bought!) and watching fireworks.
July 3rd, 2008
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