Great news for first time homebuyers!  If you purchase a home for your principal residence between January 1, 2009 and December 1, 2009, the government will pay you $8,000 in the form of a tax credit! A first time homebuyer is defined as someone who has never purchased a home, OR someone who has not owned a home in the past 36 months.  The first time homebuyer tax credit first came on the scene in April of 2008 and was set to expire June 30th, 2009.  Originally, the amount of the credit was $7,500 and repayment was required over a 15 year period.  In essence, it was a moderately appealing interest free loan from the government.  This credit has now been amended for 2009 as a part of the new stimulus package removing the repayment requirement and raising the dollar amount to $8,000!  When considering this exciting new opportunity coupled with extremely low interest rates, I have made the decision to purchase my first home.  I really can’t imagine a better buying scenario.  Prices are low, interest rates are even lower, and the government wants to give me $8,000 for making a wise and potentially high yielding investment.  Where do I sign?  Of course you must first make sure you are in a position to afford home ownership by evaluating your finances, securing a down payment, and getting pre-qualified by your lending institution of choice. Contact me if you are like minded, don’t kick yourself in 2010!  For more information on how the credit works, visit www.federalhousingtaxcredit.com or call Lane and Smythe for the rundown 843-577-2900.

Housing Market Forecast Lists Charleston in Top 25

We’re certainly not a Las Vegas, Detroit or Miami.

That’s what local home- owners and real estate industry players can take comfort in when lamenting Charleston’s weakened housing market. Comparing market conditions with cities in far worse positions, in fact, makes our local problems seem much smaller.

To that effect, Charleston recently was cited as one of the top 25 Strongest Housing Markets by Forbes magazine, which asked Moody’s Economy.com to create a list of areas that are nearest to recovery. The group looked at metro areas with populations higher than 500,000.

The analysis forecast that the Lowcountry housing market will hit the bottom in late 2009 and that prices will fall by a margin of 1.1 percent before that time. (That prediction doesn’t jibe with data from the Charleston Trident Association of Realtors, which suggests that, at least since 2007, home sales prices have fallen by roughly 3 percent.)

Charleston shared the honor with other Southern cities, including Columbia, Birmingham and Augusta. Clusters of real estate stability were found in Upstate New York in cities such as Rochester, Albany and Buffalo and throughout Texas in cities including San Antonio, Austin, Fort Worth and El Paso.

The analysis emphasized that the listed markets aren’t immune from the current downturn. None of the cities is likely to see prices increase by the end of the year.

In storage

A local developer has picked a spot to polish up in the revitalizing Charleston Neck Area.

Quattlebaum Development Co. is on the brink of breaking ground for a new storage facility on Heriot Street. The 106,000-square foot facility, which will be managed by Extra Space Storage, could open as early as June.

Extra Space Storage has three other locations in the Charleston area.

The 1.4-acre site used to house the brick Craig’s Seafood building, which has been torn down.

Quiet Heriot Street’s profile recently was elevated by the neighboring Magnolia urban infill development, a proposal that aims to turn 126 acres of previously polluted land along the Ashley River into a mix of offices, shops and as many as 4,400 homes. Magnolia developers plan to route the future neighborhood’s traffic over a marsh and through Heriot to link up to U.S. Interstate 26.

Reach Katy Stech at 937-5549 or kstech@postand courier.com.
Read the full article on Charleston.net

Two reports suggested a bottom could be nearing for the housing market.

The Conference Board, a private research group, said Tuesday that its consumer confidence index rose to 56.9 from a revised 51.9 in July. That’s the largest gain since August 2006 and was above the 53 expected by economists surveyed by Thomson/IFR.

It’s also the second month in a row that sentiment improved, after a six-month slide since January, but it remains about half what it was a year ago.

As the market continues to change, we notice that the second quarter of 2008 leads in number of sold properties in relation to the first quarter. The sold price in relation to the asking price remains a constant 94% during the 2nd quarter of 2007 as well as 2008. South of Broad continues to sustain an average return of 94% of the asking price despite lower listing prices from 2007 to 2008. Please click here for the full report.

Note: The second quarter for 2007 had an average price per square foot of $1,011 which is abnormally high. This is because in June 2007 four houses inside the Crosstown sold between $3,955,000 and $7,200,000 which increased the price per square foot for the entire area. In the second quarter for 2008 no houses sold for over $3,200,000.

With great anticipation, Apple has graced King Street in Downtown Charleston, SC. This is the first and only Apple store in South Carolina thus far. If you wanted to experience this streamlined shopping center you had to either venture down to Atlanta, GA or Charlotte, NC. I visited our store at 2 o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, July 26, 2008. It is very exciting to see that Apple has entered the building on 301 King Street. For appointments at the Genius Bar or to take a class at the Apple Store visit: click here

Russ Bratcher

Sometime last year Google offered the option of Gmail for businesses, called Google Apps for Your Domain. It’s a mouthful to say, but it’s been an incredible boon to this office. Basically GAfYD allows you all the joys of a regular Gmail account (whose suffix domain always ends in “@gmail.com”) but use your own domain (in our case, “@laneandsmythe.com”). And moving from your current domain email accounts to the new Google ones is about as painless as possible. If you pay for the Premier accounts ($50 per email address), you can even have Google migrate all your email in your current inbox/archives with a couple of clicks, and you won’t lose a thing.

The GAfYD also gives you a shared Google Calendar for your business, and lots of space to keep documents online– we can just throw up any Word, Excel, or even Powerpoint file to our new Google Apps server and store it for safekeeping, and then view it from any computer in the world.

I no longer hear any complaints about SPAM from the Lane and Smythe agents. They can easily check their email from any mobile phone, including iPhones, Treos, or Windows Mobile-based phones. And thanks to Google’s recent allowance for checking email via IMAP, they can use Outlook, or Apple’s Mail app, or any other email program, and have their email synced perfectly in any device or software program they use! This was a huge selling point, at first, but ironically I have found that everyone seems to prefer using the Gmail browser-based interface, for it’s speed, and functionality.

We used to have a server computer: a big, hulking Dell Desktop that sat in a cabinet, used a lot of electricity, and served our email and files. It was never convenient. It was always a beast to deal with. I was the only one that (barely) understood the inner workings of the Exchange Server, and if anything happened to the computer, or our T-1 internet connection, no one got email, no one had access to any files, everyone was upset. We could never truly get Exchange to sync with our mobile phones, and there was a constant fear of the computer just falling apart, and taking practically the whole office with it. And when some of the agents wanted to switch to Macs… forget it. Please note that I have nothing against Microsoft Windows Server, or Exchange, but we’re a small business, and keeping everything running smoothly was just too much work. We needed more flexibility, and we needed a system that could be monitored by practically anyone, but especially someone without a degree in Geek.

So Google Apps for Your Domain to the rescue. That, and a dead-simple Network Attached Storage (a hard drive connected to our network), that only has an “on” and an “off” button, and we’re set.

I would highly recommend looking into Google Apps for Your Domain, especially if you’re a smaller real estate company or business that has been frustrated in the past with email issues, sharing calendars, or files. It’s really set us free here at Lane and Smythe. And, just as a disclaimer, we’re not getting anything from this recommendation! I might be an Odd Duck in the GeekWorld, but I actually believe that the advancement of technology should help a job get done more efficiently, and not make things more complicated. Sometimes it can, of course, but when you find something new that truly allows you to “Work Smarter, not Harder”… I believe in sharing.