From our President

I thought it would be important to let all of you know what goes on behind the scenes at Channing Real Estate. When we're not involved in the business of real estate, some of us immerse ourselves in community endeavors. As an example, I offer you this press release:

WEICHERT, REALTORS® - CHANNING REAL ESTATE WORKS FOR IMPOVERISHED TEENS THROUGH YOUTH BUILD-JUST-A-START

Cambridge, Mass., February 29, 2008—WEICHERT, REALTORS® - Channing Real Estate has announced their collaboration with Youth Build-Just-A-Start, an organization that provides monthly food donations to impoverished teens. Channing’s associate, Nicole Bookwalter, heads up the program and recently involved her own two sons’ nursery school in the endeavor, creating a larger food donation. “The Thanksgiving meal was for 150 teens!” noted Bookwalter.

YouthBuild is an alternative education, training and service program serving the greater Boston neighborhoods, providing education, counseling and leadership development activities. In addition, the youth spend time renovating affordable housing and various other community services.

Beacon Hill Nursery School believes that family involvement is an essential part of community activity in addition to high quality early childhood education. The partnerships between the three entities have proved of invaluable service to all participants.

BusinessWeek online has an article that weighs the pros and cons of buying property in a college town. Full of good analysis, the piece shows that, overall, college towns have recession-resistant housing markets and show a consistent rise in property value despite regional and national real estate downturns.

Sounds a lot like Cambridge to me, which brings me to my second point. Drawing broad conclusions about the "fate" of real estate from national statistics is a lamentable practice. It's flaw is that it fails to account for resilient pockets of robust real estate activity where demand remains high, foreclosure rates are low (or non-existent) and the marketplace is as active as ever.

I highly recommend the article. You can read it here

A recent article in the New York Times describes a workplace phenomenon that's gone unobserved. As we've embraced internet technology as the preferred medium for transacting business, negotiating and delivering difficult news or just keeping in touch, we've lost out on the benefits of the office phone call. There's a couple. You can read the article here.

Why is it that the local press isn't reporting this?

Hey, bad news sells papers. It must be a slow day in the newsroom when you see the same sad story about pets affected by foreclosures that's been syndicated all over the place for more than a month now.

On to the good news: Home sales end their long descent

Home sales posted their largest increases in a year in February...

Somerville's Union Square has been an excavation site the last couple months. It's part of an ambitious project part civic engineering part urban renewal -- and the City says that the contractor is ahead of schedule. There's also a lot of buzz about the Green Line extension to Union Square. The bureaucratic mechanism has been set in motion, the gears and cogs grinding along through the myriad studies, community meetings, urban planning briefs, paperwork and funding processes.

We're all excited about the quality of life improvements this spells for the area. Union Square is located in a part of Somerville near the Cambridge border, at a walkable distance from Harvard Square and close to downtown Boston. It's home to an active community of artists, a farmer's market, cafes, restaurants and shops from the globe over.

With the Square's makeover and the promised subway stop come some interesting questions. Should you buy property in Union Square with the expectation of cashing out big once the Square gets a T stop? How long will it take? Just how much should these future improvements influence current property values? In a nut shell, it comes down to whether you're willing to hold on to the property 'till it all comes together. Something to think about.

Speculations aside, an article in the Boston Globe spells out what to expect in the coming years. Union Square: A little pain amid gains