Home Value Update for Chatham MA Through October 2009 According to Trulia.com, the sale prices of single family homes in Chatham, MA have fallen 33.9% in the past year through the end of October 2009. Sale prices have depreciated 11.3% over the last 5 years. The current mean sales price of homes on the market in Chatham, MA, is $550,000. Below is a chart of the trend of listing prices of homes for sale in Chatham, MA, in the past year through October 2009: Chatham Recently Sold Homes   The $8000 first-time homebuyer tax credit has been extended, and now expires on April 30, 2010. So, there's no better time than now to buy a home in Chatham, MA, or surrounding area. If you're looking for a home or condo to purchase in Chatham, MA, or in the surrounding area, then try this home search. Yo... 11/27/2009

Chatham, MA Real Estate - MA MLS - Find Homes For Sale Buying a home is an important investment however your primary focus should be to solve a housing need. The process can be very complicated if you do not work with industry professionals that can provide accurate information and advise you. The professionals include mortgage lenders, Realtors, Attorneys, Home Inspectors and Accountants. If you are a first-time home buyer, you may qualify for a tax credit ($8000 in 2009) and could be eligible for special financing programs. For a map based search of all properties listed in the MA MLS go to CHATHAM MA MLS Let Chatham MA real estate assist you in finding the right property to meet your needs from local area homes for sale, foreclosure listings (bank-owned), country properties, land, co... 03/18/2009

Winter Market Report 2009     OPPORTUNITY TIME!!!       This is truly opportunity time to buy a home on the Cape for less money than in the previous few years and at an interest rate that is most attractive. One of our local banks quoted a 30 year fixed rate mortgage today...with no points...of 4.87%.  Many homes are listed at around assessed value or less, especially if they have been on the market a while.    As you will see by the charts below, there is quite a large amount of inventory to choose from.  Homes are staying on the market longer, which means motivated sellers will no doubt keep lowering their asking prices.    I have included list and sale prices for all the homes that have sold in Chatham during the past few months.  This should be interesting and informative for you to... 03/12/2009

03/12/2009

I was vacationing next door in Harwich but took some time to visit Chatham.   With its beautiful beaches, upscale shops and galleries Chatham is a favorite spot for many visitors yearly. So take a few moments and enjoy scenes from Chatham. THE LIGHTHOUSE IN CHATHAM BEACH AND TENNIS CLUB BEACH SCENE ACROSS FROM LIGHTHOUSE BEACH SCENE MAIN STREET CHATHAM STREET SCENCE IN CHATHAM Okay, so the boys love pancakes and since I had brought some of the blueberries I had picked weeks earlier I wanted to make them pancakes. However, I did not have jam or syrup.  We stopped by this Art & Craft Fair in Chatham and met Jean at the Gypsy Wind Productions booth. She was selling all kinds of jams made by the Wild Maine Women.  I bought a few jars of the unsweetened jams, that meant additional sugar was ... 08/27/2008

I’m here at the Cape with two of my favorite guys, including Charles, the young man who turned twelve last Saturday.Part of his birthday celebration was out first parasailing outing – and his dad made the plans for this great adventure without a whole lot of input from the kid!  Now, when I was his age and, for that matter, throughout my life, I have not been exactly adventurous.  As a kid, I balked at jumping off the dock into the waters of Lake Shawnee and the arms of my father waiting in the water.  When I was doing a program that included a ropes course, it was all I could do to rappel down a cliff, in spite of the totally redundant safety equipment.  And last Saturday, when I agreed to the parasailing thing I was asking myself, “Pat, what are you thinking?”As things turned out, I h... 08/03/2008

Ah!  The beach!  For a couple of weeks each year, I find sun and sand and ocean somewhere.  For a while, it was Barbados over Christmas.  For the past couple of years, I’ve been joining friends on Cape Cod during part of July and August.It’s great to be able to get up early, walk onto the beach and let the breaking waves lap at my ankles.    Then there’s the smell of salt water and the noisy birds looking for their breakfast. It’s interesting that I should be here in Chatham during a time when there is a lot of discussion about off-shore drilling.   And when I listen to the arguments for and against it, I understand only that there are no simple answers.  And I think that I should be more like my sister, Joan, and use my bicycle more and my car less.  It would be good for my health and ... 08/02/2008

As a little kid growing up in a devout Catholic household, we ate fish on Friday.  Now, I grew up in Kansas, so our choices were pretty limited and a challenge to my mother's considerable culinary skills.  She worked wonders with tun noodle casserole.   Then there were the new innovations in frozen food - fish sticks and cod cakes.  Ah!  Cod cakes!  I really hated them - broke off little pieces and mashed them uo the undersurface of the dining room table. As an adult, I never tried cod.  Then, last night at The Chatham Squire in downtown Chatham, I was coaxed into trying real, fresh, slept in the Atlantic last night cod fish.  And Oh! My! God! It was fresh and baked with a light lemony winey sauce.  It was so good! Now I'm thinking of all the other foods that I didn't favor as a child a... 08/02/2008

There are a lot of things that make Chatham, Massachusetts an utterly charming little town.  There are the old houses in all sorts of interesting architectural styles.  There are lovely little gardens.  Then there are all of the shops along Main Street, with hand-painted signs, unique wares and, yes, window boxes.  Not just window boxes, but window boxes of note. Some have a sort of red white and blue patriotic theme. Some of them are pretty simple, with a single type of flower - these look easy enough for even purple thumbed me to grow! And some are impressively elaborate. This is a town of many charms, and the flower boxes are certainly making their contribution.             07/26/2008

Every summer Friday night in Chathan, is band night.  The whole town shows up in Kate Gould Park to hear the Chatham Band, dressed in smart uniforms that looked really hot - and I mean sweat pouring down your face hot.  I mean picollo sliding all over a sweat covered chin hot.  It didn't matter what they sounded like.  It was about watching hundreds of familes from this New England town gather at the band shell, kids, dogs and folding chairs in tow.  They played some medlies - from The Wizard of Oz, Mama Mia and Hootnanny.  Then they did a floot stomping Sousa march, inviting all of the children in the audience to march in step around the band shell. It's the kind of thing that I imagine happening on summer nights in Lake Woebegone! 07/25/2008

This morning, we went out in pouring rain to look for fish with our caption, Russ Peterson of Liveliner Sportfish here in Chatham.  Normally you find lots  of bluefish (sort of the zucchini of fish - people always catch more than they can eat and try to give them away), and if you get lucky, maybe you'll pull in a striped bass that's big enough to not have to throw back! We started off by checking Captain Russ's lobster traps.  We found some small fish and lots of little crabs that are supposed to be inedible.  There were also two little lobsters that we wound up having to throw back - one was small and the other was practically newborn. We got soaking wet, even with hooded rain jackets on!  And that was OK, because the fish were jumping. We caught enough blues to feed a bunch of people... 07/25/2008

Today, I flew from Washington to Providence for Day 1 of my well-deserved vacation.Flying is clearly not what it was in the days before airline deregulation.  I can remember most people getting pretty dressed up for a trip, complete with eye makeup and curls in the hair.  Now it’s pretty casual.  The guys on each side of me are wearing shorts.  And when I worked for the old Eastern Airlines, we wore designer uniforms (the largest size was a 10) and stewardesses were forced to quit at age 32 or before that if they got too fat for the tiny uniform.  Today’s “flight attendant” was pushing Medicare with a pot-belly, and he, too, was wearing shorts.And planes back then were half full – or half empty, depending on how you looked at it.  Today, my filight was  totally full – and I was stuck in... 07/25/2008

Chatham is in the Lower-Cape area of Cape Cod.  It is bounded by Harwich and Orleans.  Half of the properties in Chatham are second homes (50%+-).  Chatham has beaches on both Nantucket Sound and on The Atlantic Ocean.  Even with its high second home percentage, Chatham has very few of its homes in pre-foreclosure as of May 6, 2008 which is probably because Chatham has traditionally been a place of upperclass incomes and "older money" families' second homes. On a side note, the Lower Cape area is called the Lower Cape instead of the Outer Cape or Upper Cape because of latitude.  The latitude of the Upper Cape is higher than the latitde of the Lower Cape and visa-versa. On May 6, 2008, I did some research on pre-foreclosures in Cape Cod towns.  Only 1.3% of the 140,000(+-) homes on the C... 05/13/2008