For Sale - $439k - East Austin
2 comments July 31st, 2008
Archive for July, 2008
For Sale - $399k - Canyon @ Red Willow
The basic backstory is a developer planned on building 9 homes, built this one as a model home (which is apparently very well appointed in quality) but then bailed on continuing the development.
I was asked my opinion of it and it strikes me as a hybrid. It wants to be modern influenced but didn’t carry it out to the fullest. It shows up in particular in trimming items like choice of doors. Otherwise, it is pretty close to the FAB designs out at Agave.
Add comment July 25th, 2008
Open House, Sunday 7/27
Sunday, July 27th
Highland Hills - $435k - 1 to 4pm (pictured above)
Rivercrest (Westlake) - $2.990M - 1 to 4pm
Oltorf - $499k - 1 to 5pm
4 comments July 25th, 2008
(un)civil war sale at IF+D
Sale this weekend at IF+D. See below.
Have you ever wondered what the US Civil War would looked like if it had been fought by cute, tiny Japanese toys?
Strangely enough, this is our rather oblique way of introducing our store-wide sale, which is part of the 2ND on Sale event which runs from Thursday through Saturday. Everything everywhere is on sale. Thursday night we will be open until 9:00 to kick off the weekend. Bizarre dioramas will be on display. There will be beer(s).
As far as the actual, you know, sale… we’ll have 20% of all Gus Design (our Canadian friends), mark-downs on everything else in the store, and most importantly, all thimble-sized Japanese figures will be just 25 cents. So yes, even with high gas prices, you too can afford to drive down, buy a couple of handfuls, and build your own bizarre Civil War scene. (The only rule is the Union always has to win and you can’t make any silly comments about state’s rights.)
All proceeds from the sale of ridiculously cute Japanese toys will benefit Austin EcoSchool.
Add comment July 24th, 2008
The golden triangle
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.
1 comment July 22nd, 2008
For Sale - $640k - Balcones MCM
Needs some mild updating but great bones on this MCM. Love the exposed beams and ceiling (though must be hell on energy efficiency).
3 comments July 21st, 2008
Modern in China
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.
2 comments July 13th, 2008
Lautner Exhibit
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
Add comment July 12th, 2008
For Sale - $899k - Dick Clark
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.
Updated: Price.
New: Virtual Tour yet more pictures (and better than the listing set).
4 comments July 11th, 2008
Friday Post
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.
Add comment July 11th, 2008