SarahGray Lamm~REALTOR~ 60K Hours of NC Real Estate Experience~

This is an opportunity to help build The Mountains to Sea Trail, an ambitious 1000 mile trail across our beautiful state of North Carolina, which will someday stretch from the Tennessee state line to the Atlantic Ocean!

The trail traverses Orange County through the northern community of Cedar Grove as it follows back roads and crosses NC86 and NC57 from Bryan Park in Alamance County on the way to Durham County where the trail is close to the Eno River State Park.

From there the trail heads through Northern Durham County toward Shinleaf State Recreation Area at Falls Lake, crossing I85 and US15 on the way to Guilford County. Clicking the hot links in this paragraph will take you to the topo maps and trailheads in Google maps. You can follow along the entire trail using these maps.

Today's efforts in Orange and Durham Counties begin at 9am at the Cabe Lands parking lot and "the work involves constructing new natural surface hiking trail, and will involve clearing brush, moving logs, picking up debris, and constructing the trail surface."

If you would like to check out other work days across the state visit Help Build the Trail or you can help in other ways by visiting How You Can Help

Governor Perdue has declared October 2009 as Mountains To Sea Trail Month! This is a wonderful project that will benefit all residents of North Carolina. If you are already enchanted by our own greenway system in the Triangle, imagine how much fun this statewide system will be! Get involved!

I've worked with more than a dozen "first timers' this year and not one of them brought up the $8000 Tax Credit as a reason that they are in the market! Not a single one!

This is not really surprising if you think about it. Just because we, as real estate professionals, see this as an opportunity, doesn't mean it is making the TOP THREE or even TOP TEN reasons these folks are buying. (Just because MY RSS feeds stream real estate related info 24/7 doesn't mean anyone else's do...)

The top reasons my first time buyers are buying:

1. They have a new job or a new life and want to live in a house!
2. They recognize that home prices and interest rates are lower than they have ever seen before.
3. They can look at homes in towns and neighborhoods that previously were not affordable for them.

The top reasons my non-first time buyers are buying:

1. They have a new job or a new life and need to move!
   
2. They recognize that home prices and interest rates are lower than they have ever seen before and they want to take advantage of that and move UP!
   
3. They can look at homes in towns and neighborhoods that previously were not affordable for them so they want to sell and move UP!

The ONLY thing new in these lists are #2 and #3. Period.

But I'll tell you what the Tax Credit does do!

It makes me look really good when I suggest, while they are basking in the glow of an accepted contract, that they might like to consider ammending their 2008 tax return in order to get some money back from the government! You'd think I had just put a cherry on top of their milkshake!

My Carrboro neighborhood has always been friendlier than many. Most everyone knows who lives in each house and we usually wave to each other as we drive in and out every day. Our newest HOA president has taken us into the 21st century, well, at least the 20th century, by setting up an email contact list. Amazing how much easier it is to schedule neighborhood get-togethers. Just because technology is part of my daily life at work has nothing to do with how I think about communicating with my neighbors. After all, this is the south. We knock on the door, borrow a cup of sugar and then share the fresh baked goodies that result.

I know which of my neighbors have children, which are retired and which ones have local businesses. I know who goes for a walk each evening but beyond that our lives are pretty separate. After all, nobody really wants their neighbors knowing everything.

Last week I was included in a group email from one neighbor, Grey Brown, responding with her suggestions to a neighborhood project scheduled for the coming weekend. I noticed a weblink in her email signature. It simply said www.greybrownpoetry.com. I clicked.

An hour later I had read every poem on her beautiful website. I now know she has published two books of poetry and I know that writing is, for her, intensely personal and the way she copes with adversity and regenerates her spirit. Her just published book of poetry, When They Tell Me, is about her experiences “raising a child on the autism spectrum.” There are selections from it on her website. I have no words.

From her website I also listened to a radio interview she did last month at our local radio station WCOM in Carrboro and another done on NPR’s State of Things. I now know that Grey works with the Duke Health Arts Network, “one of the first arts in health care programs in the nation…integrating the arts and humanities into a variety of health care settings…” integrating her poetry with medicine in a very unique way. What a fantastic project and I didn’t even know such a thing existed.

I now know how very talented my neighbor is and also how very strange it is that a simple web link at the bottom of an email can change the way I see my own world. If Grey Brown is behind the front door of her house, imagine who else might be behind the other doors in my neighborhood.

You can hear Grey read her poetry at the West End Poetry Festival on October 17, 7:15pm at the Carrboro Century Hall, 100 North Greensboro St, Carrboro, NC. See you there.

We keep hearing there are more foreclosures coming and it's just common sense that those bad loans will affect our marketplaces.

If you could see what percentage of these troubled assets your local banks or credit unions own relative to their capital and loan loss reserves and relative to the county as a whole, would you want to know?

The BANKTRACKER UPDATE was launched 16 September 2009 by The Investigative Reporting Workshop, a part of The American University School of Communication in cooperation with MSNBC.

The search tool these talented investigative journalists have built is intended to allow the public to see graphically the percentage of troubled assets owned by any bank or credit union in the United States. Pretty interesting stuff. According to the BankTracker Methodology, The FDIC requires banks and the NCUA requires credit unions to submit certain data quarterly and these are all public information. The workshop members have extracted and organized certain data points and organized them into this easy to use tool.

There are a few caveats and explanations about this data which I recommend you read before jumping to any conclusions about what this data shows but still, it is window into the operations of your bank that would have been tough to find on your own until this tool was developed!

FINALLY...Orange County, North Carolina has rolled out it's long awaited new website! Well, long awaited by me and probably the other real estate agents who specialize in Chapel Hill, Carrboro and other parts of Orange County!

We use the information available in the tax records and GIS maps to determine all kinds of things...like who actually owns the property we are looking at (yes, folks have tried to list for sale a home they are only renting) and if any improvements have been made to the structures. We can find out if the taxes are current and how much the taxes are and determine the tax value of the property. We also look up legal descriptions (so we don't try to sell your neighbors property instead of yours...again; it's happened) and we can tell who owned the home before you bought it or find an adjoining property owner to see if they are interested in buying that lot you want to sell. All that is fun for me but then I live real estate!

Did I mention that the new website is pretty, too? The link screen opens against a picture of the Old Well on campus and changes when you reload.

So what's fun about it for you?

INDYWeek.com has just written an article called "Who Owns Franklin Street" in which they used the new Orange County website to figure out who, exactly, owns the heart of our city! It's a pretty interesting read with a seriously cool map showing locally owned parcels (including UNC land which is defined as local), vacant land and land owned by out of towners. Check it out! They even link to the Orange County website so you can completely geek out on land records.

Trust me, this is a sweet piece of research and took the authors some time, not to mention, skill. I so love the map! If you love maps, love Chapel Hill and just like knowing stuff nobody else knows...you'll be in heaven!