Eric Blackwell's Blog: All Categories

The Louisville rental market is getting ready to ROLL. Why do I say that?

Think about it. Over the last few years, whoever wanted a house (and had a pulse could buy one. With the changes in the loan market, we now are in a position where many otherwise decent people now can no longer buy their own home. For those with cash and good credit, it's

TIME TO BUY, PEOPLE!

What are we seeing? GREAT deals on the market. Homes that will ACTUALLY cash flow and less and less folks to buy them. The banks are getting nervous about their inventories of REO and it is time to move in my opinion. The choices haven;t been better in a long time and there is a ready market of people to rent to.

All that having been said, the same rules still apply. Caveat Emptor.… Read Full Post

One of our agents came into my office the other day with a quite a tale to tell. Seems she had just gotten out of a closing on an investment property for one of her clients that ended about as wierd as she had seen, so she decided to tell me about it.

The home was rather dilapidated but the investor client of hers wanted it anyway. So the price was agreed to and the bank he bought it from sold it "as-is". There was a small lien on the property as reported by the title search, but the day before the closing, the agent did one last check on the online courthouse records. She found another small lien.

She brought it to the attention of the closing attorney so that any proceeds could be adjusted. The attorney left the room to call the city government to… Read Full Post

One of the things that I have wanted to do for quite a while is post about the office that I work at. It is truly and amazing place. The people that work here are amazing. 120 of the best real estate agents in Louisville. They all have their own business plans and agendas. And yet they get along, work together and help each other every day.

It never ceases to amaze me.

The building is pretty cool too. Not many single real estate offices can say that they do over $400 Million in real estate transactions every year for the past 8 years. Here are a couple of pictures of the building itsself:

In the second picture you can see the "auditorium". That's where everyone hangs out, learns together and deals are done. There are computers all around the edge…

It's been killing me.

My normal commute from Southern Indiana is about 30 minutes to my office in Louisville. I LOVE the drive. It is a pleasant trip down the Ohio River to the Kennedy Bridge and across to  Louisville. All of that has been thoroughly messed up by a month long construction project on I-64 that has snarled traffic and put much more congestion in Southern Indiana. Folks from Utica and Jeffersonville (like me), end up getting stuck on the bridge  and I have had to leave home EXTRA early and leave work EXTRA late to avoid the crunch.

Now for the good news:

The good folks at the government did a very smart thing. Realizing that they were crimping the style of us Southern Indiana folks, they offered an incentive (a LARGE one) to the… Read Full Post

Why are condominiums and patio homes remaining strong in today's real estate market? In my opinion, it goes back to the basics of supply and demand. While home sales are strong in Louisville, the inventory levels keep rising...meaning that there is an inevitable reckoning coming where the two must meet up again.

So I started researching at our local board of REALTOR  for which segments of the market had the lowest inventory / sales ratios. Condominiums and patio homes in Louisville and particularly  in the  East  End of Louisville had the most demand and the least supply!

if you have a condo to sell, this still means marketing, but it is an encouraging thing to see these market levels more in balance than the rest of the market. Read Full Post

When I first moved here to Southern indiana from California, my wife told me two very important things about the area, #1--We would ALWAYS live in Indiana and #2--the area around Louisville that I had come to know as Kentuckiana was to be referred to as Indi-ucky...an obvious slap at my friends from Louisville.
i have since heard so many things back and forth about the two that I thought I do a little comparison of my own:

Fact #1--Taxes are lower in Southern Indiana. That's not an opinion, it is what it is. the government take less of your money there.

Fact #2--Schools are good in BOTH areas, but the BEST way to compare schools is to look at the specific school and not the district.

Fact #3--Both areas are VERY good in regards to the cost of… Read Full Post

On the wall in the offices of RE/MAX Properties East in Louisville Kentucky hangs a sign:

"The strength of the pack is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack."

For 20 years, they have thrived on the notion that the basic economic unit of the real estate sales industry is the brokerage. A patriarchal broker built a caring staff and helped agents develop thriving businesses of their own, and yet all hunted together by buying space as a group in newspapers and other marketing ventures, sharing office expenses in lieu of the agent getting an ever increasing share of the commissions. It has worked and worked well.

As brokers in general are aging and looking toward retirement, franchise chains are looking to grow, agents are looking to increase…

I know you are bracing for "My best FSBO advice is to use a REALTOR". You are cringing at the thought, thinking that Thousands of MY dollars are at stake here. You'd be right. Choosing to go FSBO (For Sale By Owner) means that you are choosing to do some or in many cases ALL or the work yourself... So let's look at it a piece at a time and see which pieces you REALLY want to take on and which you'd prefer to leave to a full service REALTOR.

Pricing--The simple? act of deciding how much you home is worth can be difficult. Lately the market has been all over the place. Some markets are up! Many are down. What you need here is an HONEST and FACTUAL answer about where things stand relative to the location AND CONDITION of your home. And bear in mind that this…