Alison Moss - Cincinnati Real Estate

As we settle into winter everyone we know is thinking about their heating bill. We gave tips about winterizing a home in Cincinnati in a previous post, and hope everyone took that advice. If you are still interested in energy savings you could get a home energy audit from a company like Energyque in Cincinnati 513-319-7382.

Energyque spends one to two hours doing a thermal scan of your home and can provide you with some in depth knowledge about how you can improve your home’s energy efficiency. Making certain can save significant amounts of money over the long term. Their pricing starts at $95 for homes up to 1,500 square feet, $145 for home up to 3,000 square feet, and $195 for home up to 4,500.

If you or anyone you know owns residential rental property in Ohio please read the following information so that you are not in violation of Ohio Code. Owners must register with the county in which their rental property is located. The forms are available through the Cincinnati area county auditor websites. Ohio Revised Code Section (R.C.) 5323.02 requires an owner of residential rental property to register a contact agent for that property with the auditor’s office within 60 days (including weekends and holidays) following the day a real property conveyance form for that property is filed with the county auditor. Failure to file this information in a timely manner may result in the assessment of a penalty of up to $150 against the property that is the subject of the violation. Residential property under this umbrella does not include a hotel or a university dorm. If there are multiple individual owners of the residential rental property, only one owner has to file as the contact agent. If the property is owned by the following ownership vehicles the individual who must file is in parentheses next to the type of the ownership: trust (trustee), business trust (trustee), estate partnership (executor or administrator), limited partnership (general partner), limited liability company (member, mgr, or officer), association (associate), corporation (officer) or other business entity (member, mgr, or officer).

If you need assistance with this process please contact me and I can email you the form for your county.

Each year Newsweek puts out a list in the spring of its top 1300 public schools. This year 5 Cincinnati area public schools made it into the top half of that list. Sycamore (585), Mariemont (449), Indian Hill (120), Wyoming (87) and Walnut Hills (56) are excellent examples of the high quality public education available across greater Cincinnati.

Everyone I know has been asking us “So how is the Cincinnati real estate market doing … really.” The honest answer is that it is not as bad in Cincinnati as other place but of course, we would like it to be better. When we pulled up numbers and took a statistical look at both sale price and units sold the number show a decline, but not the catastrophic drop some other parts of the country have seen.

Hamilton County saw a decrease in sales of 14% (3137 to 2697) in the first five months of 2008 compared to the first five months of 2007. In the same time period sale price fell slightly by 11% ($169,617 to $152,360). The challenging part about these numbers, particularly the sale price is that there are so many bank owned homes being sold now at a fraction of their market value. With fewer overall sold properties, the higher volume of bank sales is having a greater impact on the average sale price in Hamilton County.