Ron Chastain's Blog

If you have ever checked out the latest Henry County real estate listings, you noticed monthly expense items for some of them listed as “Homeowners’ Association” (HOA) or “Condo Association” fees. Both are the monthly sums that any new owner will be required to pay in addition to property taxes.I...

The majority of Stockbridge homeowners make most home furnishing decisions piecemeal rather than in a single remodeling blitz. Even when you move to a new home, for practical reasons most of your household furnishings come with. Favorite pieces of furniture, art objects, and décor items accompany...

A couple of weeks ago the Realtor website ran a 90-second video about How to Buy with a core message that could be helpful to anyone who has set about house hunting in Henry County. The theme was about the value of compromise—not insisting on a rigid checklist of predetermined criteria to be the ...

“Circumlocution” —the hefty word for “beating around the bush”—describes what the national real estate news feeds have been practicing for a while when it comes to the state of the marketplace. Until recently, most analysts seemed reluctant to call this spring’s U.S. lineup a “sellers market”—per...

Mcdonough readers who perused The Washington Post’s “Real Estate” section recently found a most encouraging piece of information—particularly if they were among many the younger and first-time home seekers who worry about qualifying for a home loan. And by the article’s finale, there was even one...

Stockbridge real estate agents who happened upon last week’s Wall Street Journal feature might have been jolted by the headline, “How to Sell Your Home Without a Real-Estate Agent.” Why would the Journal—one of the most sophisticated observers of today’s business realities—possibly want to lead r...

Can existing home sales slide at the same time they advance? Stockbridge real estate watchers who have heard similar conflicting accounts on successive news reports could be forgiven for deciding somebody is confused. They might be right about that, but in fact, both reports are technically corre...

Amazon—or, more precisely, the Amazon phenomenon—is bound to have an increasing impact on Henry County residential neighborhood preferences. The connection hasn’t yet been widely acknowledged, but it’s hard to deny the logic behind it.The connection I’m pointing to isn’t the web behemoth’s rumore...

This Tuesday, Mcdonough calendars mark the first day of spring: the vernal equinox. The onset of astronomical spring doesn’t quite coincide with Mcdonough’s real estate spring selling season, which most agree should be considered to start 12 days later, at the start of April. Just about everythin...

Last week’s short news item could serve as inspiration for future Henry County first-time homebuyers—especially for those who haven’t yet considered the possibility of owning their own Henry County home.The item in question was news of the passing of the English athlete, Sir Roger Bannister. If t...