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Tallahassee, FL Real Estate News

By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
528 Truett Dr, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$400000 4 Beds - 2 Baths - 0.27 acres Lot Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Coming Soon till 3/14!! Location is top tier on a lot that would be very difficult to find again! Seller will replace roof prior to closing with acceptable offer. Perfect for large family needing extra space. Exterior space with unmatched potential for entertaining large groups or happy pets! Minutes from the Capital, FSU and the highway. Showings start 3/14! Follow This Home
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
4880 Quail Valley Road, TALLAHASSEE, FL Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Click here to Get Directions$930000 4 Beds - 3.5 Baths - 1.81 sqft Lot OPEN HOUSE 4/20 from 12PM - 2PM! Nestled on a sprawling 1.8 acre lot, this White Oak Construction 4-bedroom, 3.5-bathroom luxury POOL home is ready for summer! This home has a gorgeous updated kitchen with Thermador appliances, Calacatta quartz counters, beautiful solid wood and brick floors, and detailed trim work throughout. The sitting room off the kitchen works well as a supervised study space, play area, or home office. Ample space with 3 bedrooms downstairs, an additional bedroom and bath upstairs, and a HUGE 32x24 bonus space with wet bar is perfect for both watching movies and family game nights. Enjoy the expansive back porch overlook...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
1513 Atkamire Dr #A & B, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$275000 5 Beds - Photos Maps & Local Schools Print FANTASTICOPPORTUNITY on a quiet street walking distance to FSU!! Featuring three bedroom, one bath apartment UP (APT A) and two bedroom, one bathroom apartment DOWN (APT B), this property is an investors or owner-occupants dream. Both apartments feature extensively renovated interiors and many structural updates (APT A - 2019 Roof, 2018 Water Heater, 2020 HVAC; APT B - 2019 Roof, 2018 HVAC, renovated kitchen with new appliances), but also allowing the next owner to put their personal touch on the home. This ideal location is convenient to shopping, schools, parks and entertainment for home buyers or is a great investment opportunity - do not miss this one before it is...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
1003 Hiawatha Drive, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$225,000 4 Baths - 0.25 acres Lot Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Nestled in Southeast Tallahassee, this fantastic three bedroom, two bath lives large with a well appointed kitchen with updated appliances and breakfast nook opening into the living room, a separate dining or additional living space or office space, vaulted ceilings in the private & oversized master suite upstairs with his-and-hers closets, interior laundry and an abundance of windows throughout the home that allow for much desired natural light. Updates have been completed (2020 HVAC and duct work, 2019 Roof & 2021 Water Heater). This ideal location is convenient to downtown, shopping, parks and entertainment for home buyers, or is a great investment opp...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Killearn Lakes 3 home sales are closing at rates far lower than they were during the height of the Tallahassee housing market, and it appears that this popular Northeast Tallahassee neighborhood has got more to give back to the market. The real estate graph below shows declining short, medium and long term trends in KLP3 home values. In the graph above, the gold points show the average value of Killearn Lakes 3 homes sold each month, while the colored lines show the average values over time. The short term trend is dropping rapidly (down over 30% since the peak of the market), while the medium term trend has fallen nearly 10% over the past year. Here are a few points we can glean from the real estate graph above: When we study the home appreciation trends in Killearn Lakes Unit 3, I be...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
The Tallahassee housing market continues to cool, but some areas and some prices are doing better than others. I always recommend prospective home buyer and home sellers look at the current monthly inventory report in the sidebar of the Tallahassee Housing Report. Each one contains months of supply (the inverse of home absorption rate) for all four quadrants of Leon County, Florida. In the real estate graph above, the red line is the number of listings on the market each month, the green line is the number of sales, while the blue bars measure months of supply (inventory of homes) in Tallahassee. Even though we are seeing the supply of homes for sale in Tallahassee continue to drop, slowing sales is actually moving at a faster rate, thus forcing an increase in the relative supply of ho...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
The internet has made shopping for a home so much easier, and many web sites have emerged with some great tools for homebuyers. But I have to admit that I just don’t “get” craigslist when it comes to real estate. Craigslist is to real estate as 8 track tape is to quality recording, but amazingly home buyers are still using the service. All craigslist does is run an old-fashioned bulletin board style site where anybody can post homes for sale. As each new home hits the site, it pushes the previous listing downward. This not exactly what I would consider user-friendly. Typical Display Of Real Estate Ads On Craigslist So just looking at the current ads, you see homes for sale mixed with homes for rent, and no practical way for a serious homebuyer or home seller to sort through the informa...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
A great blog article yesterday accurately reported that invisible homes will not sell. The author pointed out that one of the primary reasons that homeowners fail to sell their home is due to a lack of visibility on the internet, and I agree (with one strong caveat) with the blogger. In his article titled 7 Reasons Why Your House Won’t Sell, Alan May’s 4th point was: Your property won’t sell because you’re invisible. Today’s buyer comes from the internet, almost exclusively.  Have you (or your agent) simply plopped the property on the MLS, and started praying?  Are you on all the websites…(Trulia, Zillow, Craig’s List, Google Base, etc…) all the places that buyers are searching?  If not, you need to be, now! Don’t try to be a secret, in today’s electronic world.  You want to be found, ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Are you just a real estate lead, or are you a highly prized customer of the top service providing real estate company on the internet? It’s your choice! Most real estate sites are just carbon copies of thousands of other web sites from around the country. All that differs is the name of the area being serviced and the name of the real estate company that owns the site. It’s definitely a case of the blah, blah, blahs. And they do it for one reason only! Real Estate Leads Are Big Business Everybody wants more sales leads, and REALTORS are no different than any other sales industry. They want your name and they want your phone number so that they can call you and sell you on all the great reasons you should choose to work with them. They are even willing to buy leads because they believe ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Home Sellers are finding tougher market conditions as the home sales failure rate continues to climb towards 60%. What this means is that over the past 365 days, roughly 40% of the homes that were listed actually sold, while 60% failed to sell! Certainly not what home sellers were thinking when they listed. In the real estate graph above, the green area shows the percentage of home sellers who were successful, while the red area shows the percentage of sellers who failed. As the red area continues to expand, don’t be surprised if we head back to the 30% success rate that we saw before the Homebuyer Tax Credit. Read more: http://www.manausa.com/market-report/home-sellers-finding-tougher-market-conditions#ixzz16lvQH6jk
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Southwood home sales are reporting strong unit sales, though with 53% of the sales reported are new home construction, it might not be such good news if you already own a home in Southwood. You see, just like everywhere else in Tallahassee, the existing homes for sale in Southwood have too much competition and prices are falling. Subscribers to the Tallahassee Real Estate Newsletter previously received this graph showing the make-up of home sales in Southwood. It shows the homes sold in 2010 broken down into two groups, new home sales versus existing home sales. What this graph reports is that new homes are being built smaller and cheaper in Southwood now compared to what was built in the past, thus creating even more pricing pressure on the homes that exist in the inventory of homes f...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
  Golden Eagle Plantation has been reviewed on this site as much or more than any other Tallahassee neighborhood. It is a solid barometer for how upper end homes are doing in Tallahassee and with me living in the neighborhood, the information that I review is far more than just data. Also, I got my start in real estate selling lots in Golden Eagle Plantation in 1991. Note: Today is Danny Manausa‘s Birthday, so if you happen to see him, wish him a happy birthday! Our recent reviews of the Buckhead Neighborhood and Bull Run Neighborhood were published over the holidays, but in what might be a good sign for our housing market, the two articles were viewed by hundreds of people during what is usually a “dead” time in real estate. Currently, there is about a year’s supply of homes for sale i...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Bull Run home sales have boomed over the past five years, as did many of the “boom” neighborhoods in Tallahassee. Located in a great northeast location, these executive homes have a lot to offer for many Tallahassee families. But this subdivision was “born” during the boom, so this brings on more challenges than most Tallahassee neighborhoods have to face. Bull Run home sales only commenced in 2005, so even as we face the toughest real estate market of our lives, these property owners will also have to deal with normal movement cycles. Bull Run Home Sales When we look at the graph of home sales in Bull Run, we notice a much-better “stabilized” rate of sales than we do in older Tallahassee subdivisions. This is caused by many reasons, but I think the most prominent one is that falling l...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Buckhead home sales have weathered the market a little better than most neighborhoods in Tallahassee. With values down 26.4% since the peak of the market, valuations have dropped similarly to the rest of the Tallahassee housing market. But unit sales today are very much consistent with the average number of sales for the past 15 years, with only marginally fewer sales. Considering the rest of the market has seen unit sales drop significantly higher, I would say that Buckhead home sales have proven this high-end Tallahassee neighborhood to be a “better than the market” place to own a home for the past 10 years. The real estate graph above shows that the average Buckhead home sales price has dropped from $579K in 2007 to $355K in 2010, which is nearly a 39% drop. But we don’t use “averag...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Unfortunately, house prices will continue to fall for quite some time. The imbalance between housing supply and demand can only be cured by an increase in the number of people wanting to live in Tallahassee houses, not by shifting people from the leasing side of the market to the owning side of the market. When I read national real estate reports talk about the real estate recovery hinging on interest rates, tax incentives,  and even on consumer confidence, I ask myself … Where Are These Buyers Living Right Now? I mean after all, we have a simple problem of falling house prices due to an over-supply in real estate. All those previously mentioned things are great stimulants for demand, but I’m not so sure that real estate is any different than other commodities. If there is too much supp...
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By William E. Lewis, Jr., Bill Lewis - Vero Beach, Florida
(William E. Lewis, Jr. & Associates)
Source:  The Credit Report with Bill Lewis - Highlands Today, an edition of the Tampa Tribune - Media General Group.  http://www2.highlandstoday.com/content/2010/nov/21/bbb-accused-pay-play-scheme/  Following an ABC News 20/20 investigation into the Better Business Bureau's controversial grading system, its national president apologized to consumers and business owners for "errors," while regional leaders met to discuss grading reforms. Known as the nation's top consumer watchdog group, the BBB is accused by business owners and the Connecticut Attorney General of running a "pay for play" scheme in which A plus ratings are awarded to those who pay membership fees while F ratings are used to punish non-members. On its website, the Better Business Bureau indicated that its executive commit...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Pricing a home to sell has always required a balance between science (looking at comparable sales and current competition) and art (determining the initial market positioning and key marketing features), but today it is more important than ever. With roughly 60% of all MLS-listed homes failing to sell over the past 365 days, we know how important every part of our progressive marketing program is going to be for the home seller. Yesterday’s blog post about defining “Shadow Inventory” in real estate generated quite a few emails and questions, but it also prompted a response from our recently retired Tallahassee real estate agent, Bill Peck. You see, Bill and his wife Bonnie decided a few months ago to retire and move to Alabama, so we had a perfect situation to see if a CENTURY 21 agent...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Shadow Inventory was the hot topic for Inman News this morning. They reviewed a report by CoreLogic which showed the inventory of “not on the market” homes that need to be sold is growing at a disheartening pace, stating demand as the primary culprit: Weak demand for housing is “significantly increasing the risk of further price declines in the housing market,” said CoreLogic Chief Economist Mark Fleming — a problem that’s exacerbated “by a significant and growing shadow inventory that is likely to persist for some time” because of the length of time it takes loan servicers to liquidate properties. What hurts so much about the growing inventory of homes that have yet to reach the market is the known fact that we have such a large volume of homes that failed to sell in the past and are ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
With so much buzz about distressed properties for sale, I like to pay close attention to the Lis Pendens filings in Tallahassee. By monitoring this “first step” of the foreclosure process, we can get a feel for the volume of distressed properties likely to show up in the Tallahassee real estate market. This is obviously not just a “passing thought” for us at CENTURY 21 First Realty, as you will see a foreclosures tab in our navigation bar on our Tallahassee Real Estate Web Site. We provide a weekly summary of lis pendens filings and a monthly and quarterly review of all that is happening with lis pendens filed in Tallahassee. Of course, sometimes our readers want more . Lis Pendens Filings By Zip Code The following graph shows that the lis pendens filings in Tallahassee seem to be broa...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
If you are a long time reader of the Tallahassee Real Estate Blog, then you know there is lots for sale in Tallahassee (meaning a lot of homes for sale in Tallahassee). But if you have actually ever wanted to have a custom built home, you should know that there are also lots for sale in Tallahassee! The average price for a lot in Tallahassee has dropped from over $110,000 to $45,000. While I am a big advocate for buying an existing home rather than building due to the fact that most homes are now selling for less than it would cost to build them, I will admit that it is a good time to build if you know it is something you are going to do. Most builders in Tallahassee are very hungry, so you would get very competitive bids right now for your new home construction project. Short Sale Lot...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
There really is a huge difference between the two different types of plans for home selling on the internet. It has taken me three years to complete the evolution from where I was, based in traditional realty methodologies, to now being a much more active marketer on the internet. You see, the two home selling methods are diametrically opposed, but very simple to understand. Passive Internet Marketing occurs when a real estate company starts the evolutionary process from traditional methods to the use of the internet. “Ads” are placed on the world wide web in the hopes that consumers will contact the real estate company and then a business relationship can begin. This is how our industry used newspapers, magazines, signs, and flyers for home selling in the past, and passive web markete...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
I was talking with a buddy of mine today about short sales in Tallahassee, specifically about what it is like dealing with local banks and national lenders in the sale of a home that is sold "short." Distressed properties are becoming a larger percentage of homes sold now, and it appears that most banks "get it" and are working to push the market through this difficult phase. But sadly, not all banks really "get it." They believe that if they keep procrastinating, then the market will improve and their losses will be reduced. But this is not going to be the case. The banks that recognize a falling housing market will find themselves in a better position approving a short sale than those banks who just fold their hands and wait for the full foreclosure process. When all of the dust settl...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
    This article is long overdue, so my tribute to Tallahassee REALTOR Bill Peck might not be timely, but it is very much sincere. Bill & Bonnie Peck have moved to Alabama to rejoin family members, but I can tell you they left behind a real estate family in Tallahassee that will miss them greatly. Just a reminder, the most recent Tallahassee Real Estate Newsletter went out today. You can subscribe to the newsletter and have it delivered each month to your email inbox, or you can just check out the past editions in our newsletter archives. Bill Peck has been a Tallahassee REALTOR with Century 21 First Realty since 2003. He left the Travel Industry and I was fortunate enough to meet Bill through our mutual friend Dr. Roy Barineau. Bill immediately became a valued member of our team. His d...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Tomorrow, Veterans Day in Tallahassee will be observed with the closing of schools, the CENTURY 21 real estate office, and many places of work, so I thought I would take the opportunity to remind everybody about the importance of this day of remembrance. In November 1919, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as the first commemoration of Armistice Day. This new holiday was to remember the end of the “War To End All Wars” where a cease-fire had been initiated on November 11, 1918,  “Armistice Day”, and served to honor all soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines, both past and present, who serve our great nation. Later, an Act approved May 13, 1938, made the 11th of November in each year a legal holiday—a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace and to be thereafter celebrated and...
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