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

Who knew a thermostat could be:

1) Beautiful?
2) Adaptive?
3) Disruptive?

A bit like Nest Realty.

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!

Since launching our web site in January of 2009, we’ve gone through a couple of iterations and improvements…nothing too dramatic…just small to medium-sized updates to freshen our look and  enhance the user experience.

So, based on feedback and a desire to freshen things up a bit, we’re embarking on a month-long journey to improve our web presence.  As of today, we’ve launched Nest 3.0, which, in actuality, is just a small change.  Nest 3.1 is a much bigger change – expect that in the next month or so.

So, what’s Nest 3.0?  The need for it is founded on our fortunate growth and expansion over the last 10 months in Hampton Roads and the New River Valley. With web searchers coming to our site not just from Charlottesville and Central Virginia, but from other points in the state of Virginia, we needed a way to jump quickly to the right ‘city’ to start searching for homes and learning about Nest.  So, we created a new – yet simple – landing page where you can easily select your desired market and jump to the right location.

We’ve taken a slightly different approach than most real estate companies, though.  Whereas we are taught (via conferences and web design gurus) to load up home page ‘links‘ and ‘keywords‘ to enhance our search engine optimization, we’ve gone the opposite route.  We’ve kept it clean, simple, and free of clutter.

Just like we are aiming to be be ‘not just another real estate company’, we don’t want just another real estate web site.

Stay tuned in a few more weeks for our next update (Nest 3.1).  This will include more content, an updated look to our Charlottesville pages, and a full site for the New River Valley.

Think we’re done there?  No way.  We’ll have some more surprises coming in late September and early October.

As always, we appreciate your continued feedback and suggestions with everything that we do – please 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.

There are some services out there that pull real-time (or almost real-time) market data, turn it into graphs, and allow subscribers to post it.  These actually work pretty well in larger markets with a high volume of transactions.  However, in the Charlottesville area where we do about 3000 (give or take a few) transactions per year, the formulas/charts/graphs for those vendors don’t really work as well.

Along those lines, we get a lot of requests for up-to-date market stats.  How many sales have there been month-to-date?  What’s the median price? What’s the average Days on Market in the City of Charlottesville this year?  We spend a lot of time checking the stats and staying on top of the Charlottesville area real estate market so that our buyers and sellers are informed…but we wanted to be able to provide you with a monthly market snapshot of some of the most requested market info.

Here’s what we came up with.  We think it’s pretty sweet and we hope you do to.

And now for a quick overview:

We broke Central Virginia down into the 5 major Counties (Albemarle, Nelson, Greene, Fluvanna, and Louisa) plus the City of Charlottesville.  For this Beta version, we’re just analyzing single family, detached homes (so condos and town homes aren’t included in these reports).  In addition, the data is pulled from our data feed about the 2nd week of each month – this way we can ensure that the data from the previous month is as up-to-date as possible.

On the Nest homepage, you can select a City/County to get a quick snapshot for the current month.  The snapshot will give you the market statistics, but will also show you the year-over-year change from last year…enabling you to deduct the current market trends.

Want more?  Great.  We’ve got it.  Go ahead and click on the ‘View Full Market Report’ link..

Once again, at the top, you can toggle between Counties and get a quick description of each area.  Below, there are 3 charts with quick descriptions on the sidebar for each one:

1. Days On Market

2. Total Sales

3. Median Home Price

For each of these 3 charts, you can toggle between Counties and choose to select a one-year, three-year, or five-year chart.  No matter what the chart, we’ve also included a dotted line to show you the average during that period.  Why?  Perspective.  It will enable you to see not only how we are trending, but also what’s been ‘normal’ (if there is a normal) during that time period.

So let’s take a stab at some analysis.  Here’s a chart for Total Sales in Albemarle County over the last 5 years:

First of all, scroll your mouse over the small circles – it will show you the exact data points of the chart.

Second, take a look at the peaks of each year – you can see how our market is cyclical…highs in the summer and lows in the late fall and winter.  You’ll also notice that the lows over the last few years have been considerably lower than in 2006, 2007, and 2008. The peaks, on the other hand, have been lower, but less erratic.

Lastly, you’ll see a definite downward trend in total sales over the last 5 years (the red line). Obviously, we wish the market were a bit better.

So there you go.  We’d love your feedback – what do you like?  what do you want more of?

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.

Mint is a personal finance site that helps users track expenses and manage their personal finances.

The partnership makes sense.  Real estate – both primary residences and investment properties – make up a large part of Americans’ investment strategy.

But here’s the problem: Zillow’s ‘zestimates’ just aren’t that reliable in Charlottesville and Central Virginia.  I’m not sure whether it’s their formula…or if there aren’t enough transactions in our area…or both.  But the Zillow data in our area is inaccurate, missing, and just plain bad.

So what exactly is a ‘zestimate’?  It’s Zillow’s term for what real estate has coined Automated Valuation Models…or AVMs.  The rise of AVMs…or attempts at AVMs…have been much documented over the past several years.  Many companies and software programs have tried to create an automated CMA (comparative market analysis) that can generate the market value of the property.  The models are all different, but the formulas probably include some sort of combination of the following: assessed value, price per square foot of recent sales, price per square foot of active listings, ratios of sale price to assessed value of recent solds, etc, etc.  The list of possible data points is essentially endless.

Sounds reasonable, right?  You plug in all the information about your home into a form and the system spits out a number.  In a perfect world, this would work.  But, realistically, it doesn’t really…especially in a place like Charlottesville and Albemarle County.

There are numerous reasons that the current AVMs just don’t work.  But here’s a quick example:

Let’s say you have two homes…both built in 2005 on 2 acres of land.  Both are exactly 2500 square feet with 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths.  Both have hardwood floors, granite counters, and tiled bathrooms.  So, basically the ‘bones’ of each home are pretty identical.  But that’s where the similarities end:

House A has been immaculately maintained over the years and sits on a parcel that is impeccably landscaped.  The land also offers mountain views and is very private.  On the inside, the floor plan is open and flexible.  The walls are painted the perfect color, the granite and cabinets are neutral, and the home is decorated like a model home.

House B hasn’t been maintained well.  There are cobwebs along the ceiling and scuff marks all over the walls.  The HVAC system is about to break.  The land is the same size as House A, but it’s overgrown with tall grass and weeds.  The house is cited poorly and there are no mountain views.  Inside, the floor plan is choppy – the kitchen is on one side of the house and family room is on the other side.  It’s got low ceilings and feels dark.  The walls are covered with odd colored paint, the granite is purple, and the kitchen cabinets are just run down.

This is a bit of an extreme comparison, but those two houses – even though they are both 2500 sf homes on 2 acres – could have a $50k to $75k difference in value.  Unless you go into a house and take every detail into account (condition, finishes, decorating, floor plan, landscaping, home citing, colors, etc, etc), you really can’t value a home accurately.

So, here’s te caveat: if you use Mint and they give you your home value, don’t believe it.  Give your Charlottesville real estate advisor a call and have them run a CMA for you.