Real Estate Blog

Neighborhood boundaries are a fluid thing. My definition what encompasses my neighborhood (Multnomah Village in Portland) may vary greatly from the person across street.

It’s also one of the Holy Grails to online search. The ability to confine a search to a particular neighborhood. Roost does this particularly well, as does Estately and to a lesser degree Zillow.

Zillow also took the step of creating a set of neighborhood boundaries (over 7000 of them) that they released earlier this year in Shapefile format.

Another effort is slowly taking shape (literally) however. The popular photo-sharing site Flickr is also releasing Shapefiles of neighborhoods, using the data it collects from the geotagged photos in its database to accumulate a collective definition of what makes a neighborhood.

The project, which is in early Alpha, can best be viewed on the mashup site Neighborhood Boundaries. Simply punch in your neighborhood name (or city name) and see how the boundaries are being defined in your neck of the woods.

Again, this is early Alpha, so many markets won’t have much coverage. But the possibility of user-defined neighborhood boundaries is intriguing to say the least.

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See the original post:
These Are The Photos in Your Neighborhood

The country’s top housing official has an urgent message for potential home buyers: You may have heard that the credit markets were “frozen,” but FHA has been open for business throughout the credit squeeze, and so are Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. In fact, FHA’s volume has tripled and the agency is now insuring well over a hundred thousand new loans a month.

View post:
Washington Report: FHA Still Going Strong

Open Houses still remain on my list of top things agents should be doing right now. The market is ripe for buyers that you can educate on the current state of the market. And there is no better place to find them than at an Open House.

Go here to read the rest:
Hot Open House Tips for the Summertime

The line started on the hot and steamy K Street sidewalk and slowly wound into a hotel in the heart of Washington. During a period of several days thousands of homeowners facing foreclosure gathered a few blocks from the White House in a last-ditch effort to save their homes and their finances.

Excerpt from:
Foreclosure Relief Comes To Washington