Andrew's Blog

From real estate to clothing…

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 15:18:13 -0500

As you have probably noticed, I have not been active on this blog in quite some time, but it's not because I haven't been hard at work. For the past 4 months, I have been busy designing and running the remodel of a condo in San Francisco, as well as working on a company I founded a few years ago.

In 2005, I began my own clothing line, Nantucket Brand. Originally, I worked on the company along with my job as a realtor in whatever spare time I had. However, things have progressed very well with the company and I am now working full-time on Nantucket Brand. My parents and brother Stephen have become partial owners and my brother Dustin is a manager at our retail store on Main Street on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts.

I have moved back to Nantucket for the summer months. It's exciting for me to get to spend my summer in the place I grew up, work with my family, and see how far Nantucket Brand has come since I started it.

Although I will be heading back to San Francisco after the summer, I have not yet decided if I'll go back to work as a realtor. There's still a long way to go and much work to be done with Nantucket Brand before meeting the goals of the company. I'll post here if I do go back to work in the real estate industry. For now, I'd appreciate it if you'd visit the Nantucket Brand website. There's news about the company, a YouTube clip of me being interviewed (along with a fashion show), pictures of the retail store, and of course, an online store. I encourage you to spread the word and send me any feedback you may have. And, as a bonus to those who read my real estate blog, please use the coupon "mauryproperties" to receive 20% off your purchase.

Comment for a cause

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:06:30 -0500

I am ecstatic to see the number of comments I have received so far. i'd like to challenge commentors to donate just $1 a piece to Megan's goal on their own. Of course, please continue to comment and make me donate another dollar per comment.

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I have started a campaign to raise money for Parkinson's Research on my website. I have decided to donate a dollar for every comment or trackback I receive up until April 16th. The full post can be read here.

The other day, I got an email from a friend who will be running the Boston Marathon this April. She works for the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and will be running the marathon in honor of her grandfather. She is well on her way to her goal of raising $10,000 for the foundation (and it actually appears that she has surpassed it due to a matching donation). However, I’d still like to help her reach her goall.

For my contribution, I will be donating $1 for every comment or trackback left on this post - or any other post on my blog up until April 16th. I also encourage others to make their own contribution, which can be done online at this website - just $1 is a big help.

Please feel free to link to this post and make me open my wallet and again, I encourage you make your own donation as well. It can be very quickly using a credit card or PayPal.

Notable listings in South Beach/Rincon Hill

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:56:57 -0600

For SEO reasons, the full post is not posed here. It can be read at my site.

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I went through the current active listings in the MLS defined area of South Beach in San Francisco and picked out a couple. They have each been on the market for at least a few months. One is a studio - priced at just $379,000 (by far the lowest in South Beach) and the other it is a 2 bed/1.5 bath condo in a small industrial style 3 unit building. There's more info about the listings and the neighborhood at my main site.

New floor plans at the Infinity

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:21:53 -0600

The Infinity has added all 42 unique floor plans to their site. The plans are for their Tower and Treetop buildings. There will be a total of 4 bulildings - 2 towers, 2 mid-rises - when the project is complete. One high-rise is under construction right now and has about 35 floors of the 42 up so far. I've got some pictures on my site.

You can read the rest of the entry or more about the Infinty at my site.

SF Neighborhoods: Rincon Hill

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 14:49:33 -0600

Rincon Hill is another one of San Francisco’s newer residential neighborhoods, although it has been around in some form for a long time. Early on, the area was home to many large mansions. After the 1906 earthquake, many of the mansions were destroyed and the area was replaced with many industrial buildings. Recently many new condo buildings have been built and are still being developed.

Continue reading at Maury Properties...

2006 Condo and TIC sales in San Francisco

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:22:49 -0600

For an end-of-the-year post, I took a look at condo and TIC sales around San Francisco. In total, there were 3083 sold MLS listings in the year with 634 of those being TICs.

About 40% of the listings were only on the market for less than 30 days. Another 30% were on for 30-60 days. The price per square foot for TIC units came in at just over $835 while the price per square foot actually came in lower at $811. For some more stats and charts, continue reading at Maury Properties.

Save money with CF bulbs

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:12:43 -0600

Seth Godin has written a post about compact fluorescent lightbulbs. He has urged other bloggers to write about them in the hopes of gaining wider usage of the bulbs. I wrote a post on my site about how the money-saving aspect needs to be stressed.

Seth has mentioned that he will post a link to your site if you trackback to his post. I'll also be glad to do the same.

SF Neighborhoods: South Beach

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 21:06:18 -0600

South Beach is one of the newer neighborhoods in San Francisco. Located near the new ballpark in San Francisco, it consists of many high-end condo towers, converted-warehouse condo buildings, and some apartment buildings.

The area boasts a number of fine restaurants including the new Sutra, 21st Amendment, Momo's, Paragon, Town's End and many more. The area is convenient for grocery shopping, getting to the Financial District, and getting on 280-S or the Bay Bridge.

Read more about the South Beach neighborhood of San Francisco at Maury Properties.

5 things about me...

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 20:23:36 -0600

For SEO reasons, I don't post my full posts here. This post can be read on my site.

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I’ve been watching it go around and I knew it would come to me sooner or later. I have been tagged in this meme-game making its way around the blog-world by Mike Simonsen at Altos Research. In case you don’t know, the idea is that you reveal 5 things about yourself that most of your readers don’t know. You then “tag” 5 more people to keep it going. I’m not sure how it got started, but it’s all over the web now.

Anyway, you can read my 5 things and see who I tagged on my site.

San Francisco New Developments - 170 Off Third

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 19:43:49 -0600

For SEO reasons, I don't post the full entry here. It can be seen on my site.

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The 170 Off Third condo project should be opening their sales center early next year, according to an email I received the other day. The opening is somewhat behind schedule, as it was originally scheduled to open this past summer....

Casey Serin in new ebook

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 19:12:11 -0600

For SEO reasons, the full post is not here. It can be seen at my site.

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Last week I purchased Ramit Sethi’s new ebook, Ramit’s Guide to Kicking Ass. Much of the book is based off of Ramit’s post from his own personal finance and entrepreneurship blog, iwillteachyoutoberich.com. If you haven’t ever read his blog, I’d recommend checking it out. Although from the title it sounds like some sort of “get rich quick,” it is anything but that.

Anyway, Casey Serin, best known for accruing over $2.2 million in debt at the age of 24 from poor real estate deals, has a chapter in the book. In it he talks about how he accumulated the debt, what he has learned, and what he is doing now. (Of which one thing is writing his own blog).

Casey encourages people to “take a stab at it and fail a few times.” This seems like the wrong message to me. If you are going to try any real estate investing, whether that be buying a property to renovate, rent out, or even to live in, you really need to learn as much as you can and do your research.

I hope that wannabe investors look at his results thus far rather than just listening to his message.

San Francisco Condos: Radiance

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 16:44:58 -0600

The full post can be read at my website. For SEO reasons, I don't put the full post here.

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According to Socketsite, the condo development Radiance will open their sales office in January. Radiance is located off 3rd Street in Mission Bay between China Basin Street and Mission Bay Blvd.

According to Socketsite:

<blockquote>Radiance at Mission Bay will consist of two 16-story towers, two 9-story midrise buildings, and townhomes with condominiums ranging in size from 850 to 2,175 square feet. The current website is simply a placeholder, the sales office should open early next year, and while ground has been broken, we don’t expect to see delivery of the condominiums until mid-2008.</blockquote>

This development sits a little further away from most of the Mission Bay developments, but that area should be filling in the next few years with the various condo projects, office buildings, and UCSF buildings. At my site, i have a condo map of my posts on the cities' condos.

Condo Update: One South Park in San Francisco

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 20:28:26 -0600

One South Park is a condo project in San Francisco's South Beach area, right at the corner of 2nd St and South Park. The building is a former tobacco warehouse being converted into 35 high-end condos. The project includes studios, 1, 2 and 3 bedroom units with penthouses on the top floor of the building.

The sales office is projecting a mid-January opening and occupancy should begin in July or August. Pricing is expected to be around $900-$975 per square foot.

There are a number of different floor plans. A few can be seen at my post on my site.

I have a copy of all of the floorplans in a PDF file, but it is too large file to post here.

EDIT: Nevermind. You can download it here.

A breakdown of One South Park with square footage and HOA fees is available for download from my site in a smaller PDF.

Really great marketing

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:15:23 -0600

I've watched a few episodes of a fairly new real estate show on VH1 titled Really Rich Real Estate. It's similar to MTV Cribs - large, celebrity houses - but they are looking to buy and sell the homes . The show focuses on agents at Westside Estate Agency, a firm in Beverly Hills, that attracts a lot of high-end buyers and sellers. The clients have included people like Frankie Muniz (Malcolm in the Middle), Master P (a rapper/owner of an entertainment company), and Cindy Margolis (the most downloaded woman on the internet). So its not exactly a who's who of Hollywood, but they do have some serious money.

When I first heard about it, my thought was that they probably wouldn't reveal much about listing and selling prices. Many clients that I have had - from the $500k range to the $8 mill range have preferred that I don't put the final sales price on any of my marketing materials and I assumed that these very high-end clients would also rather not make it such accessible public knowledge. However, the prices are revealed along with graphics showing the potential commissions for the agents. The commissions, by the way, seem to be oddly calculated sometimes. The percentages just don't make much sense - although when I watch it with others they just seem to focus on the big number and don't worry about what percentage it is.

Aside from the focus on the huge commissions, I find the show pretty entertaining. At least it doesn't portray agents in nearly as negative a light as Million Dollar Listing.

When I watch the show, I constantly think about what this must be doing for the agency, WEA. Clearly, they were already known as an agency of choice for luxury homes, but this has got to be just putting them through the roof. Look at the exposure this company is getting! How do I get some of that??

Zupdates? Zhanges? Zillow's new features

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 14:30:00 -0600

I don't post my full posts here because I've been told it isn't good for the SEO of my site. So, for the full post, please go to my site, mauryproperties.com/blog.

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I won't go into this too much, since Zillow's changes have been talked about all over the web, but I'll mention it anyway. There are posts all over for more details and I a few good links on my full post.

Anyway, Here is a basic rundown of the changes.

- "Make Me Move" - Allows homeowners to post a price on their home that will make them move. It's pretty much like a "Buy It Now" price on Ebay.

- Listings - Homeowners and agents can post homes for sale.

- Real Estate Wiki - Zillow has added a Wiki section to the site, which should develop into a great resource for buyers and sellers as more articles are written. I'm sure many blog writers will be adding to it.

- Search changes - When searching, the homes with a "Make Me Move" price or homes that are simply for sale, will have signs next to them.

These are certainly some big changes, and it has certainly gained a lot of attention in the blogging world already. For any of these features to be valuable, the use will need to be pretty widespread - which is something they've done before. Some questions that I have are:

-Will "Make Me Move" prices be anything close to realistic?
-Even if they are somewhat realistic, I imagine that those "Make Me Move" prices will generally be above the market value - will buyers be willing to acknowledge this and still buy the home?
-Thinking about new developments that haven't yet made it into the Zillow database - will users be able to add these for sale?

Comparing San Francisco housing index to the consumer price index

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 14:52:10 -0600

I don't post my full posts here because I've been told it isn't good for the SEO of my site. So, for the full post, please go to my site, mauryproperties.com.

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I mentioned this site, Swivel, yesterday. Techcrunch reported that it has gone live. I just checked it out a bit after having some problems earlier in the day - maybe due to high traffic.

I tried creating a few graphs with some data sets already uploaded on the site. Here is one comparing the San Francisco metro area housing index to the national consumer price index. I can't vouch for the accuracy, but check it out anyway:

Links - great clients, choosing an agent, Redfin's latest

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Mon, 04 Dec 2006 19:44:36 -0600

Just a few links and comments on some posts about great clients, how homebuyers choose agents, and Redfin's latest idea.

Mike at Altos Research had a great post the other day entitled “The Perfect Home Buyer.” His post was actually inspired by a post at SEOmoz, but as Mike says, it relates perfectly to the real estate industry.

There’s another post by Kevin Boer at 3OceansRealEstate about Redfin’s great new idea. Apparently, Redfin wants people to go around to open houses, take pictures, and blog about them.

RealBlogging has a post about a new survey that says that 80% of homebuyers start their search on the internet and most of them then go to an agent. While that isn’t anything new, an interesting point is raised about how homebuyers choose their agent. I would think that traditionally, people go with a friend’s recommendation or just start calling agents. That could be changing some with the use of the internet and blogs as they allow readers to get to know them a bit through regular writing. And I completely agree with this comment at the Future of Real Estate Marketing: “Online reputation management is going to be a critical part of any agent’s marketing strategy going forward.” I know there have been some sites attempting to do this, but it will be interesting to see what really sticks.

The full post can be seen at my site.

Glass on One Rincon Hill building

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 23:16:46 -0600

Just wanted to post some pictures of the One Rincon Building. They've started to put some glass on the building. It still has quite a few more floors to go as it will be 63 stories. Here's one picture. I have another on my site, as well as a map of the various condo buildings in San Francisco.

An update on The Infinity - SF Condo building

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 18:34:37 -0600

I took some pictures today of The Infinity - a new condo building in development in San Francisco. The tower is starting to look very nice. Here is one picture. I added a new feature to my site to show the pictures in a better. Check them out at mauryproperties.com.

Do you do your job for the prestige?

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 20:07:50 -0600

According to a Harris Interactive poll, a real estate agent is not a prestigious job. No kidding? I could have told you that without looking at a poll. But that isn't why I became an agent. Read the rest at my blog.

SF getting young and more educated

Andrew Maury (Bay Valley Real Estate) — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 19:14:26 -0600

College-educated people between the ages of 25 and 34 are still moving to San Francisco in high numbers. I feel this is one reason that cities like San Francisco will remain strong as much of the country sees downturns. Read more at http://mauryproperties.com/blog/2006/11/29/sf-getting-younger-and-more-educated-2/.