Last week, reporters for Long Island’s Newsday reported an Oyster Bay real estate item that attracted national attention due to its sellers’ identity. Singer/songwriting legend Billy Joel had put his “Middlesea” estate on the market, listing it for a nifty $49 million.That sum would purchase the 5-bedroom, 8-bath, 20,000 sq ft mansion, as well as a 3-bedroom beach house, bowling alley, in-ground swimming pool, and the helicopter pad that enables avoiding those irritating Long Island summertime traffic jams. But a quick sale may be far from a done deal. BJ once tried to sell it for $10 million more than the $22 million he paid for it in 2002, but Newsday writes “no one would put bread in the Piano Man’s jar” back then—so it was withdrawn from the market until last week.The scarcity of re... 05/25/2023

For many Douglasville residents, the choice of their next Douglasville home is between existing homes and new ones. For those whose initial house-hunting forays produce little more than sticker shock, there’s a third, less popular option: building your own Douglasville home!While there are plenty of examples of success for those choosing the third path, by the time that option is move-in ready, the end result may not have significantly reduced the bottom line. Especially now, with supply snags and inflation weighing heavily on construction costs, building your own Douglasville home isn’t a sure way to greatly ease the financial burden. As dozens of online checklists reveal, building your own home involves many more details than just buying a lot and hiring a contractor. Here’s a shorten... 05/29/2023

Powder Springs’s Memorial Day capped a weekend that had all the expected Mem Day activities—including the feeling that summer is close at hand. Actual summer may not arrive in Powder Springs until the summer solstice on Wednesday—but especially in years like this one, when Memorial Day is just a few days removed from the start of hurricane season (officially on Thursday), it clearly marks high time to check whether enough charcoal briquettes overwintered from last fall.You don’t have to have a primary or vacation home that might be affected by hurricanes to mark June 1 as the point in the year when summer weather makes news. The official start of hurricane season is said to be when mid-Atlantic storms usually begin to get going in earnest. Ninety-seven percent of Atlantic tropical cyclo... 05/29/2023

The web has long since upended the public library as the principal dispensary of the latest research on publicly accessible information—so much so that the libraries themselves rate their offering of free computer access as one of the prime reasons why “Going to the library” is “the most common cultural activity in America” (if you find that hard to believe, check out this Chicago Tribune explanation).When Dallas real estate data, like the latest local trends and activity, become a central point of inquiry, the internet’s easy 24/7 accessibility would seem to offer a giant step forward. In some respects, that can be true—but always with the proviso that the trustworthiness of online data should always be confirmed by multiple sources and they should be checked to confirm that those sour... 05/29/2023