Bob's Blog

I have been working with computers since the mid 80's, but one of my sons is the computer guru in our family. He has gone on to work at levels of programming where I am left nodding as he speaks, not understanding everything of course, but very glad to learn what I can about what he is doing.Rece...

After a difficult fall and winter, we saw a fairly signigficant bump in the average sale price for homes in the Quinte Area (Ontario, Canada) last month. Here is graph I set up for the stats:Most often, real estate statistics are compared to the prices one year ago, so some people will be quick t...

I run a fairly powerful (Quad Core Processor) computer as my main machine, and it is only about a year old. Recently, I noticed that the fan was making unusual noises, surging as it cycled between fast and slower speeds on a regular basis. It's not something I was used to. Thanks to my son, who w...

Some of the new bluetooth gadgets are really helpful. I walked around with one of those bluetooth headsets stuck in my ear for a while. It worked great, but I did feel a little conspicuous in the lineup at the grocery store.Around Christmas I started to see ads for this device:It's a bluetooth re...

It's been an interesting start to my real estate career. The economic downturn left almost everyone I talked to "hanging on" to see what would happen next. Now, just as the market comes alive, Ooooopps!For the first time in my life, I have laryngitis. It came in over a couple of days last week, t...

AR is worldwide, but a lot of us are from the US and Canada.As a Canadian, I want to ask my American colleagues. Do you you know that Canadians have been fighting in Afghanistan from the very beginning? Do you know that we have been on the frontline in Khadahar where we have been taking a lot of ...

There is a 30-second video on YouTube that is humorous, but it comes close to describing the discrepancies that we sometimes see in terms of how different people view the value of a home.  Sorry, I don't know how to embed video an AR post, so I will need to ask you to follow this link:http://www....

Hi. I have a couple of questions for those of you who more experienced in using the paid outside blogs. I have started setting mine up, but I see that I still have the old, unpaid, outside blog showing on my account. Is it a good idea to trash the old blog to avoid confusion, and, if so, how do y...

Up here in Ontario, Canada, the snow has melted and we are just a couple of weeks away from having an explosive growth of beautiful spring plants. I can hardly wait! Here is a picture of a trillium (the provincial flower for Ontario) that I took last spring:

Here's a cute story that I heard recently: An agent was showing a home to a young family that included a 4-year-old daughter. The little girl seemed to be quite nervous and she kept asking her parents if they could all leave.  The tour continued with all the usual aspects of a showing, including ...