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Tallahassee, FL Real Estate News

By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
  3503 Doe Run Road, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$900000 4 Beds - 3.5 Baths - Photos Maps & Local Schools Print This meticulously fully renovated home has it all. From the custom coffered ceilings to the shining wood floors, no detail has been overlooked during the renovation process. Each bedroom is not only an en suite, its bathroom has been completely renovated. The master bath now includes new floors, a redesigned Roman shower with multiple heads, and new marble counter tops. The main living area and the kitchen have undergone extensive design changes including wall removal that create an undeniable open and airy feeling. The chef inspired kitchen is perfect for those who love entertaining. This amazing space includes a Thor 6 burner gas stove with an oversized oven,...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
2801 Chancellorsville Dr #335, Tallahassee, FL Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Click here to Get Directions$239900 2 Beds - 2 Baths - 10890 sqft Lot This sleek updated 3rd floor condo is conveniently located in the desirable NE gated community of Barrington Park between WalMart and Chili's so both are only a few steps away. Condo features 2 BR's and 2 full baths with an upstairs loft perfect for a guest suite or office. The kitchen and baths feature brand new granite, sinks and plumbing fixtures and imported Italian tile flooring. Stainless steel appliances and upgraded light fixtures complement this contemporary home. Publix, Target, many restaurants and shopping are all within one mile of the community and I-10 is within 5 minutes. The neighborhood offers amenities such as a clubho...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
3043 Cloudland Dr, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$220000 2 Beds - 1 Baths - 0.52 acres Lot Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Welcome to your own piece of paradise in Lakeshore! This charming 2-bedroom, 1-bathroom home rests on over half an acre of lush land, offering a serene retreat for nature lovers and garden enthusiasts alike. The property was recently updated with vinyl plank flooring upstairs (2022), a new fence (2022), new appliances (2022-2023) ensuring convenience and style. It also features a 2018 roof, new 200AMP electric in 2022, and 2016 HVAC & Water Heater. The property has an abundance of fruit trees including cara cara navel orange, blood orange, tangerine, peach, lemon, lime, mulberries, figs, olives, persimmon, pear, pomegranate, kumquat, loquat, bananas...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
528 Truett Dr, Tallahassee, FL Click here to Get Directions$400000 4 Beds - 2 Baths - 0.27 acres Lot Photos Maps & Local Schools Print Coming Soon till 3/14!! Location is top tier on a lot that would be very difficult to find again! Seller will replace roof prior to closing with acceptable offer. Perfect for large family needing extra space. Exterior space with unmatched potential for entertaining large groups or happy pets! Minutes from the Capital, FSU and the highway. Showings start 3/14! Follow This Home
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Listen up wanna-be home sellers, because this is how WE will sell your home. No, I don’t have a problem with my “Caps Lock” button on the keyboard, I just wanted to emphasize that selling a home is not a “Me” thing, or a “You” thing, rather it is “We” thing. If you want to sell your home, you have to understand who plays what rolls. This is obviously not well known, as roughly 60% of the homes listed over the past year failed to sell, so pay close attention and it won’t happen to you! The title “how WE will sell your home” emphasizes the fact that selling a home creates responsibilities for the home seller as well as the real estate agent and company. Think of it as the inside team and the outside team. Marketing 101 For Home Sellers The following is a small piece that I published in J...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Having a younger brother who is a medical doctor and watching the TV show “House,” I have come to learn a little about the Hippocratic Oath. It serves as a “code of ethics” for a profession that is highly demanding and which plays a roll in everybody’s life. Apparently, the “First, do no harm” part of this is not even part of the modern Hippocratic Oath, nor is it found in the original version from the ancient Greeks. Nonetheless, we’ll use the TV version which includes “First, do no harm,” as it is the basis of a new concern that real estate professionals need to consider. You see, the REALTOR® Code Of Ethics has always been loosely observed and rarely enforced, but the current state of the real estate market requires our industry to reconsider our view of the code. Specifically, our ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Anybody who is thinking about buying or selling a home right now knows that we are in a bad housing market. People who want to sell a home in Tallahassee have way too much competition, and many people who want to buy a home have to sell their home first. But there is a small group of people who are in an unencumbered position to buy a home, and these 5 tips will serve them well in a bad housing market. ♦ Know The Housing Market – The best way to snag a great deal on a house in a bad housing market is to come armed with a boatload of data showing that you’ve done your homework and know what the place is worth. Thankfully, information on everything—from what comparable houses have sold for to what exactly has been remodeled, and when—is pretty much at your fingertips online or through you...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Prudent investors focus on Return on Investment (ROI) to guide them in real estate investments. Recently, there has been so much garbage that has sprung up about “flipping” real estate that much of the investment advice is downright harmful, due mostly to the ease at which information can be spread on the internet. Today’s blog is the third and final post in a series discussing real estate investments, starting with How To Place A Value On Your Home and continuing with Friday’s post about utilizing a Long-Term Real Estate Strategy. Today, we will look at a real world example using an available listing in the Tallahassee real estate market. This same example format could be used anywhere. Before we get into the details of our example, I would like to address the reader question that lead...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
A long-term real estate strategy is not difficult to establish and can provide returns that far exceed other investment opportunities. The key to getting started on such a plan is to understand two key local measurements for real estate. As covered in yesterday’s blog How To Place A Value On Your Home, all you need to know is whether or not your population is growing and what basic construction costs are doing (rising or falling). In order to keep the scope of this article relatively simple, we will define a long-term real estate strategy as one in which the goal is to buy real estate at a low price, sell it at a higher price, and have it “carry itself” during the hold time. Additionally, this plan will include a “buy strategy” and a “sell strategy” and will not be based on market timin...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
How do you figure a value on your home? Is it difficult to determine housing values in the tumultuous real estate market in which we are battling right now? Is there a science or method that works the best? Anybody who knows me has heard me often say “I am long-term bullish on home values.” Of course, anybody who reads what I write will tell you that I am confident home values are dropping, and home values will continue to drop for the next several years. There is too much evidence of unwanted supply to believe we will see real estate appreciation within the next three years, so only somebody not paying attention (or somebody with an agenda) will say otherwise. The purpose of this blog post is to discuss how you figuree a value on the home that you own today, and why you should conside...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
  Credit challenged home buyers could have seen yesterday’s blog titled Home Sellers Expand Their Market With Creative Financing and might have had either a positive or negative reaction to what it was addressing. From a positive perspective, they should realize that there has never been a greater need for home buyers in than we have now in the Tallahassee real estate market, thus they have a great opportunity. Reading some negativity into the article however makes one realize that working with creative financing techniques right now is much more difficult than it has been in the past twenty years. I am hoping that homebuyers who have credit issues will be wise enough to seek out a “Can Do” REALTOR® who is willing to face the tough challenges that the market is doling out right now. Sur...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Home sellers who offer creative financing options expand the list of potential buyers for their homes. Generally speaking, most home sellers and real estate agents are not accustomed to using “other than traditional” financing techniques, so I figured today would be a great day to follow-up yesterday’s widely read blog on Distress Home Sales by covering the use of these special methods for selling homes. Yesterday we were able to show how many homes that sold in the past were distressed sales, so today we wanted to parallel that and show how many homes sold in the past through creative financing techniques. Unfortunately, there is no real data source for that, but I can graph the percentage of homes sold in the past which offered some sort of special financing options. Whether or not th...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
We have been observing distress home sales and reporting their growth for quite some time here at the Tallahassee Real Estate Blog, so I guess it was only time that we brought them to you with a real estate graph. Roughly 1 in every 3 home sales recorded in the Tallahassee MLS was categorized as a distress home sale, which includes bank owned homes (REO), homes in foreclosure, relocation houses, homes with short sale potential, and homes where the owner would offer lease purchase or some sort purchase money mortgage. Though not all of these are necessarily true distress situations, most of them are and just about all of them will sell under the same conditions and owner decision making processes. Distress Home Sales Growing Rapidly The real estate graph above provides a very clear pictu...
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By Mike Carlos, Realtor, Tallahassee FL
(Keller Williams Town & Country Realty)
Mike Carlos & Associates | Keller Williams Realty | (850) 583-1919 11056 Wildlife Trail, Tallahassee, FL 4BR/2+1BA Single Family House offered at $275,000 Year Built 1994 Sq Footage 2,341 Bedrooms 4 Bathrooms 2 full, 1 partial Floors 2 Parking Unspecified Lot Size .40 acres HOA/Maint $96 per month DESCRIPTION Gorgeuos plantation style house in desirable Seven Oaks! Front porches up and down. Freshly pained interior. Recent roof. wood floors. Nice deck. Very private, large backyard. see additional photos below PROPERTY FEATURES - Central A/C - Central heat - Fireplace - Hardwood floor - Living room - Dishwasher - Refrigerator - Stove/Oven - Microwave - Laundry area - inside ADDITIONAL PHOTOS Photo 1Photo 2Photo 3Photo 4Photo 5Photo 6 Contact info: Mike Carlos & Associates Keller William...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Are you interviewing real estate agents for the job of selling your home? If you are like most new home sellers, you invite an agent or two into your home and you have them “pitch” to you the reasons why you should hire them to sell your home. They come right to your home so that you don’t even have to visit the real estate office in which they work. And therein lies your biggest mistake. It is expected that 70% of the homes listed for sale this month will fail to sell during the term of the listing period. Why? Because home sellers are not getting the service that they think they are signing up for. Sadly, they are not taking the task at hand very serious (thinking that any agent will do to get their home sold) and they are making a huge mistake. Why You Must Visit The Real Estate Off...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
  A small article regarding FAMU President Ammons' six-figure bonus was published today in the Tallahassee Democrat and I think the story behind the story is far more important than one might realize from just seeing the newspaper article. Of course, I am highly un-qualified to have much of an informed opinion on this, so just take this as “one guy’s thoughts on a hidden gem in Tallahassee.” With three years under his belt as the President of FAMU, James Ammons is due his bonus. The Tallahassee Democrat reports Florida A&M University President James Ammons is up for a six-figure bonus after a glowing performance evaluation for his work during the 2008-2009 school year.Trustees are expected to vote on whether Ammons will get the full bonus amount worth about $113,750. So, why does a Tall...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
The August Year To Date Home Sales Report shows that 2010 is shaping up to most likely be the worst year for home sales in Tallahassee since I began tracking real estate market information in 1991. It appears as if the positive start to the year will be replaced with a weak finish, mostly due to the end of the Homebuyer Tax Credit which had propped-up the market for about a year. Three Year To Date Real Estate Graphs Each and every month of the year, I produce and examine the Year To Date report on condominiums and townhouses, single family detached homes, and the combined “residential” sales in order to get a feel for how the housing market is performing versus the same time in the past. By breaking down each segment between new and existing home sales, the real estate graphs depict a ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
It is very understandable why buyer’s remorse lurks behind every door right now in the real estate market, as fear is running rampant in a market filled with high levels of supply and low levels of optimism. What is buyers remorse you might wonder … Buyer’s remorse is the feeling of regret after a purchase. It is frequently associated with the purchase of higher value items such as a car or house. It may stem from a sense of not wishing to be wrong, of guilt over extravagance or from feeling that one has been persuaded by a salesman Buyer’s remorse most often springs from that “sense of not wishing to be wrong,” as it seems so easy to make a mistake when buying a home today. But it is actually possible to buy a home in Tallahassee and have no episodes of buyer’s remorse. It only takes ...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Ninety weeks after we started reporting real estate news with the Tallahassee Real Estate Newsletter, we are instituting a change in our publication schedule in order to improve upon our timely reporting service. As advocates of the “if it ain’t broken … break it!” school of change, we felt that we had more to offer. In the past, the Tallahassee Real Estate Newsletter was published every third Monday and it contained charts, graphs, and analysis of the Tallahassee real estate market, as well as an update on important real estate news. When readers had questions, they were most often addressed in replies via email (and thus were not available to the rest of the subscribers). We are going to try something new which might allow for a better distribution of reader prompted insight. The “We...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
If you are trying to sell a home and have not succeeded, then you are like much of your competition. It is expected that 70% of the homes on the market today, as well as those that will enter the market over the next year, will fail to sell. It should be obvious to anybody paying attention that home values are dropping and that competition for home sales is rising. So, if you have been trying to sell a home and have not heard, the market’s message to “borderline” home sellers is “just go ahead and remove your home from the market.” It will not sell. Only the highly motivated home sellers will sell, and they had better utilize all of the vast resources  for home sellers available to them to succeed in this very difficult housing market. A cursory review of the Tallahassee MLS this mornin...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
  For our long-time readers, it should not come as a big surprise when we report that the number of distress properties in Tallahassee is soaring. Banks are finally starting to clean up their portfolio’s and that means that they are not dragging their feet (as much) on converting lis pendens to foreclosure sales. In the real estate graph to the right, we show the trend of lis pendens filings (the start of the foreclosure process shown in green) and the trend of annual foreclosure sales (the end of the foreclosure process shown in red). By comparing the two trends, we can calculate the ratio of foreclosure sales to lis pendens filed in order to see “how serious” lenders are pushing delinquent loans. The blue line in the graph shows that our current trend has hit 41%, which tells us quite...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
  Nobody has been hit harder than home builders with the down-turn in the economy and falling housing market. Here at the Tallahassee Real Estate Web Site, we often write about the glut of homes for sale on the market and why we do not need any more inventory, but we often fail to point out the fact that it means many great Tallahassee businessmen and employees will be out of work. The glut of homes for sale in Tallahassee means that the demand-side of the market is in complete control right now, so home builders have no orders to build new homes. Currently demand is falling due to a combination of tightened borrowing requirements as well as the end of a year-long stimulus program that motivated buyers (back then) who would have been home buyers today, so the prospects for improvement a...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
At CENTURY 21 First Realty, we believe that if you track tons of information and record it on a daily basis, the market will speak to us through our  Tallahassee housing charts and graphs. While no specific real estate graph can express succinctly the current state of the housing market, the totality of the market can be gleaned by viewing some key trend charts and reports. REMINDER: The Tallahassee Real Estate Newsletter will publish and deliver the 30th edition on Monday of next week. We have just received the market data for the month of August, so plenty of new real estate graphs and charts will be featured in this edition. Real Estate Graph Shows Year Over Year Home Sales Decline Tallahassee home sales dropped 20% each month following the end of the Homebuyer Tax Credit, when compa...
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By Joe Manausa - Tallahassee, FL, Tallahassee Real Estate
(Joe Manausa Real Estate)
Maintaining solid real estate trend analysis allows us to have a great understanding of where the housing market will head in the near future. Too often, we see the real estate lobby or the national media report on housing market changes from one month to another, with no regard to normal seasonal fluctuations that usually occur each and every year. We see reports of recovery that are skewed, mostly due to the ignorance (or the bias) of the reporting entity. I like to use historic data and follow a real estate trend analysis that considers year over year changes as significant in the housing market. For example, I have found that closings that occur in September are almost always fewer than closings that occur in August, thus seeing a drop from August to September is expected. This is a...
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