The Nest Realty Q4 Nest Report was picked up yesterday by two local news stations.  If you haven’t read our report, check out these quick snippets…and then touch base with your favorite Nest Realty agent to get a little more of a recap.

Overall, we’re using the two words: CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM.  For the first time in years, there is actually a string of positive news in real estate.  It’s a combination of positive national news and positive stories locally from the real estate trenches.  Want a great story ‘from the trenches’?  This past weekend, one of our Nest agents, Janice Kavanagh, hosted an open house and had 33 visitors.  Yes, 33!  That’s a sign that buyers are beginning to look.

Here’s the story and video from Charlottesville’s NBC 29.

And here’s one from the Charlottesville Newsplex.

Stay tuned for more analysis on the Charlottesville real estate market in coming days.  We’re really working hard to dig through the numbers so that our agents and clients have a better take on what’s happening in the market.

If you are intrigued, give us a shout and we’ll shoot you over some more info.

Nest Realty is proud to announce 2 exciting additions to our Charlottesville office.  Robert Russo and Janice Kavanagh have both joined Nest and we couldn’t be happier to have them on our team.

You can get to know Robert and Janice a little better by checking out their bios on our web site.

If you do know them, I think everyone will agree that they are tremendous real estate agents that represent their clients and the Nest brand very well.

Welcome to our ‘nest’, Robert and Janice!

At Nest, we’ve been big advocates of using video to help educate customers and clients.  We’ve tried a lot of different video ideas over the last few years: property tours, real estate education videos, neighborhood videos, and even a video about Nest Realty’s values. We decided a few months ago to dive a little deeper with our Charlottesville real estate video.

So, we’re announcing the upcoming launch of our ‘Live Where You Love’ video series in Charlottesville.  The series will take an in-depth look at several areas and neighborhoods in Central Virginia.  But we’re not stopping there.   We’re also producing videos on some more in-depth topics like the impact of the airport on Charlottesville, deep dive looks at local businesses and how they are thriving in Charlottesville, and an in-depth look at the thriving local wine and beer industry.

We’re taking great care to produce short films that are well-produced, fun to watch, and (most importantly) informative.  Our goal with these videos is to capture the true essence of what it’s like to live in Charlottesville and the surrounding areas.  We hope these videos not only inform potential residents on life in Charlottesville, but also to further educate current locals of  some more in-depth aspects of the region.

We’ll be releasing our first video in the series next week.  Stay tuned!

Located on a bluff overlooking the Rivanna River, RiverBluff is an award-winning conservation community of 22 new homes in the Woolen Mills neighborhood of Charlottesville. The houses are clustered on the brow of a hill, leaving the majority of the 19 acres as common land for the enjoyment of all residents. 

The community has been designed to embrace environmental conservation and healthy living. The common land has been designated as a natural area, allowing homeowners to participate in the on-going restoration of the native riparian ecosystem. Residents may also readily access the Rivanna Greenbelt trail, a popular recreational trail network that will eventually encircle the entire city.

Recent Sales by Nest Realty in Riverbluff over the last 2 weeks:

Tom Raney, who represents Latitude 38, recently sold a spectacular home built by Latitude 38 at 120 Riverbluff Circle.  This 3 bedroom home was built to exacting specifications in order to achieve both EarthCraft and Energy Star certifications.  The estimated annual energy costs are $1544!  For more images and information, check out the Riverbluff Circle web site.

Keith Davis and Laura Winn Smith represent the developer of Riverbluff and sold the ‘Grow Green House’ at 119 Riverbluff Circle.  The Grow-Green is ready for a carbon-neutral future. The house is equipped with a state-of-the-art solar hot water heating system and is set up to easily add solar electricity. It features a ductless A/C system and outdoor air exchanger promote a healthy indoor environment.

In addition, Nest Realty has also just put another home site under contract in Riverbluff and we expect for a home to be breaking ground within 60 days.

Interested in learning more about Riverbluff?  Take a look at this video and let us know what we can do to help.

Back to The Q2 2011 Nest Report – we appreciate all of the positive feedback we’ve received with respect to the report.  As many of you know, Nest Realty and each of our Associates takes great pride in not only knowing the market…but doing our best to understanding it.  Based on your feedback and ideas, we’ve got some pretty cool improvements we’re working on for our Q3 Report.  So keep the ideas flowing…

Courtesy of Blacksburg.gov

Blacksburg and Charlottesville have a lot in common.  Beautiful mountains.  Wonderful outdoor activities.  College towns.  But now, they’ve got one more thing in common: they’ll both have a Nest Realty office!

We’re proud to announce that Nest Realty is expanding west…and bringing our real estate services to the New River Valley.  Encompassing the counties of Montgomery, Pulaski, Floyd, Giles, the City of Radford, and the Towns of Blacksburg and Christiansburg, NRV is one of the fastest growing regions in Virginia.  It’s a new challenge, but we’re excited.

In just two short years, we’ve grown our footprint throughout Charlottesville, Albemarle, and the rest of Central Virginia…and we’re serving Hampton Roads also.  We’ve gotten great feedback on our approach.  Want results?  We’ve got them.  Check this out from the press release…

The Nest Realty approach has proven to be successful. In 2010, homes listed by Nest Realty sold, on average, in less than 75 days – approximately two-thirds the amount of time its competitors’ listings took to sell. In addition, Nest Realty agents sold more than three times the number of homes as the average real estate agent in its respective markets.

We’ve won some national and local awards, too.  But the measurable results and happy clients are, by far, the most important things to us.

We look forward to bringing our professionalism, approach and innovation to the New River Valley…and having more happy clients.

Stay tuned for more details over the coming months…

For the 2nd straight year, Nest Realty Charlottesville has been honored with the #3 ‘Favorite Real Estate Company’ by Albemarle Family.  And again, we’re proud of this completely unsolicited recognition.

And congrats to one of our many super-agents, Bob Hughes, for being recognized as one of the ‘Favorite’ Realtors.

On behalf of the entire Nest team, thanks to everyone out there for the continued support.

Turns out the photo was a lead-in to an article on 3D video and how researchers at the University of Arizona have made a breakthrough with holographic technology.

Remember this classic scene from Star Wars?  Well, this may be reality sooner than you think.

Pretty cool, right?  You’ll be able to take a video and show it in 3D…like something out of Star Wars.  (And what’s best of all?  You won’t need to wear those corny 3D glasses to see it)

But this got us thinking: how cool will this be for real estate?  Answer: it could, once again, transform how buyers search for homes.

Here’s how we see it: You stroll into your local Nest Realty office in the morning with your cup of Starbucks to prepare for a few hours of house hunting.  But you’re not going to hop in the car and drive from house-to-house for the next 3 hours.  Instead, you go back into one of our three Search Rooms.  Each Search Room is dark – black walls, dimmed lights – and has 6 comfy chairs located around a Microsoft Surface-type touch screen table.

Your area tour begins.

Your Nest agent takes you on a quick tour of Charlottesville, Ivy, and Crozet…you watch a few quick neighborhood videos to get the feel of the area and overlay all of the coffee shops to make sure you are within a mile of one.  (Or we could even take you on a tour of Virginia Beach, but that’s a story for another day…)

Then you ‘arrive’ at your first house.  You tap the house twice and a holographic image of the listing agent pops up on the table, welcomes you to the house, and begins to tell you about the house and neighborhood: ‘Welcome to 123 Rugby Road.  This is a great house – built in 2007, this 4 bedroom home is just a 5 minute walk to UVa…’

After the intro, you are literally taken on a tour of the house – through the front door, into the kitchen and family room, upstairs through the master suite, into the garage, and through the back yard.

During your three hours of searching, you toured 20 homes and made follow up appointments to see 3 ‘in person’ the next day.  All in all, it was an efficient morning – you got to preview 20 homes (probably about 12 more than you would have if you had to actually drive to each house) and the sellers didn’t have to leave the house for you to see it.

The utilization of these 3D videos are pretty amazing and far-reaching.  According to the article, this could happen in 10 years…maybe sooner.  Until then, we’ll have to keep marketing and showing houses with the technology and resources at hand.  But you can bet that we’ll be tracking this technology over the coming years…

Want to learn a little more about technology in real estate?  Check out Jim Duncan’s RealCentralVA for his post and series on real estate technology.

New Home Page
Thanks to our friends at Google Analytics, we’ve gotten some great feedback on who clicks where and what was interesting to our web users.  So, we’ve simplified the home page by removing a bit of content and focusing the home page on 4 major pieces…

1. Home Search – it’s the ultimate reason why people come to real estate sites, so we’re putting this even more front and center than it was previously.  (We’ll talk about these search options in a second…)
2. About Charlottesville – besides searching for homes, people want to know about the area they are searching, right?  We think so.  So, we’ve kept our ‘Area Guides’ accessible…making it easy for you to take a quick snapshot of our 13 Areas or dive in more if you’d like.
3. How’s The Market? – We wish this question was easier to answer now…but we’re still tackling it head on.  If you’ve read our blog, The Nest Report, you know we like to dig into the numbers.  But we’re integrating auto-generated monthly charts and graphs to give you more of a snapshot of the market.  (This is currently just a quick market snapshot, but stay tuned for some pretty sweet searchable graphs…coming soon!)
4. About Nest - We may catch a little grief from the web design gurus for putting our story front and center on the home page, but we actually think the belief system of a brokerage and their agents is important.  At Nest, we’re different.  And before you choose an agent, you should know a little about their brokerage and support system.  The video is 3 minutes and 47 seconds…maybe a little long for some…but if you watch it, you’ll probably know if we are the right firm for you. (And that’s a pretty good use of 3:47.)

Home Search Improvements

Ultimately, users on real estate web sites want to be able to search for homes.  We think search is done poorly on most brokerage sites. Most sites have one way to search and it’s clunky and not intuitive.  At Nest, we want to put the options in your hands – everyone searches differently and we’re aiming to offer as many search options as is possible.  We allow you to search by price, beds/bath, county, zip, street name, acreage, home type, mls number, area, neighborhood, and school.  And now, you can search by homes with price reductions and also by homes listed in the last 1, 7 or 14 days.  Want to search for 3+ bedroom homes, under $500k, in Forest Lakes that have been listed in the last 14 days?  Go for it.  Or how about condos in Charlottesville with a recent price reduction?  You can do that, too.

How’s The Market?

If you are selling a home in Charlottesville or Albemarle County, you probably don’t want to know.  But guess what?  We’re going to tell you anyway.  Our Market Reports section is in Phase I right now – just a quick snapshot of the Total Sales, Days on Market, and Median Home Price by City or County.  But, as we mentioned earlier, we’re expanding on this shortly.  Soon, you’ll be able to see trendlines and charts for these stats…and also search the charts for 1, 3, and 5 year charts.

We get asked a lot: why are you giving clients and web users all of this data?  The answer is simple: because they want it….and it’s helping them to make informed decisions when they buy and sell homes and investment properties.  The days of hoarding information is long gone.  At Nest, we believe in empowering our clients with the right information and guidance to help enable them to make wise real estate decisions.

That’s it for now (but definitely stay tuned for the next phase of Market Reports).  We’ve got some more plans to not only improve our web site, but the overall experience of our clients when they work with a Nest agent.

Market conditions aside, it’s going to be a fun next few months at Nest Realty.