Here are ten good reasons to sell your house during the Holidays:

1)    People who look for a home during the holidays are more serious buyers.
2)    Houses show better  when decorated for the holidays
3)    Serious buyers have fewer houses to choose from during the holidays, so you have less competition.
4)    Buyers are more emotional during the holidays.
5)    Buyers have more time to look for a home during the holidays.
6)    Many people want or need to buy before the end of the year for tax reasons.
7)    January is traditionally the month for transferees.  Transferees can’t wait until Spring to buy.  You must be For Sale to capture  that market.
8)    You may still restrict showings during your personal, family events.
9)    You can sell now but specify

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Mary house is a volunteer organization, based in the Brookland neighborhood of Washington DC,  working directly with homeless and refugee families.  Managing 9 houses and 40 apartments for over 50 families.  Providing shelter, transitional and long term supportive housing, food, clothing and furniture.  (They are a very well run charity organization and spend only 3.7% on administrative costs)  Jake actually came to DC as an Americorp volenteer and worked with Mary House for 2 years. We continue to support their efforts through Charity Golf tornement and helping with their annual "help the Homeless" Walkathon.

Please consider donating to this great cause.  You can also contribute through CFC (#33368)

Mary House was recently honored and featured in the

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Brookland is a diverse, thriving community in the Northeast quadrant of Washington, DC. It's streets are lined with trees and gorgeous Victorian beauties standing tall with relaxing wrap-around porches. Sounds pretty idylic, huh? Well, in our opinion, it is! For most of it's historical existance, Brookland was farmland owned predominantly by two families, the Queens and the Middletons. In the 1820s Jehiel Brooks (the same Jehiel Brooks from the former, beloved, Colonel Brooks' Tavern) married Ann Queen and built the Brooks Mansion located on Newton Street. (The building is currently being used by the DC government, but go down and take a walk by it sometime, it is a beautiful Greek-revival style building.)  In the 1880s, their son sold the family's home

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Abbott Klar Real Estate Group is excited to announce that we recently represented the buyer of a  3 bedroom 3 bath rowhouse in Takoma Park DC.  This great house sold for $349,000.  Takoma Park DC is one of the few areas in DC with a solid housing stock, close proximity to a metro stop and still affordable.  Lots to love about Takoma Park DC.

I love DC.  DC is among the most liveable and inspiring places to live in America. Simply Awesome.  Everyone knows that Washington DC has some inspiring and monumental architecture but, perhaps lesser known, are some of masterpieces in uglyness.  As we drive round DC showing great houses, we'll take pictures of some of the more hideous offenses comitted in the name of architecture and post them here.  If you have a nomination, send us a quick picture and email.  So here is our first nomination:

The FBI Building:

Brutalism at its most brutal....

Wow, is that ugly!  Even worse is that it is completely disconnected from the street level.  Now this type of "super-block" consturctions is, thankfully, no longer allowed in DC.  When the FBI building was

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Abbott Klar Real Estate Group is excited to announce that we sold a fabulous modern loft condo today at 217 R ST NE #A, WASHINGTON, DC 20002.  This condo building was built in 2004 and is one of the larger condos in Capitol Overlook condos.
This spectacular 2 story Condo Loft with ultra modern architecture has 2bedrooms, plus den (or 3rd bedroom) , 2 full bathrooms rear patio and off street parking. Large gourmet kitchen with granite countertops and stainless steel appliances is open to the living room for entertaining. Perfectly located in Eckington just above NoMA and a short walk to the  New York Avenue metro station. Pefect!

This week in the News: Here are the most interesting (real estate related) articles we've read this week:

1. From the Wall Street Journal- DC more "hip" than Austin?
2. Interesting testimony on the new parking rules.
3. Trulia does't think we are in a bubble
4. H street streetcar wiring going up!
5. Independent movie theater to union market?
6. Long but worthwhile read from the just published 2013-2014 Washington DC Economic Partnership report. 
7. Cool Studio apartment in NYC
8. Zoning changes, parking rules, accessory apartments and corner stores in the Washington Post.

Enjoy the weekend :-)

Beer. Ale. Cold Ones. Brewskies. Cervezas. Libations. Delicious golden brew of the Gods. The drink of choice since ancient times, our ancestors did something right! Sorry various Wonders of the World. Most of you don't exist anymore. Beer does, and it's thriving. Our Founding Fathers couldn't get enough of it. President James Madison wanted to create a National Brewery (we already had a national bank, so why not?) complete with a Secretary of Beer (seriously, best job ever!?). Congress said no. Always ruining the fun that Congress. Shame on them. Oh well. With their resurgance in populairty, home and craft brews have taken a bite out of the monopoly of brewing giants like Budweiser (thank God). Microbrews allow for more experimentation of flavors and the

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We must be going crazy. What are we doing?  We here are Abbott Klar Real Estate Group consistently offer half of our commission, as listing agents, to any buyer agent that brings the buyer who buys one of our listings.  Why would we do that?  Why not just sell it ourselves and make twice as much?

Because our clients come first!

When we work as Listing agents we are hired by the sellers to market the property and help the seller get the best price and terms for the seller.  The goal of the buyer agent is the exact opposite.  A Buyer agent works for the buyer (even though in most cases they are paid by the seller) to get the buyer the best price and terms on the property. 

A sale and purchase of a home is a big deal, and we find that everyone is happier

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According to numbers released by RBI this morning  Active listings of homes for sale increased by 5.6% for the Washington DC metro Area.

 The increase was much more dramatic for Washington DC with an increase of 33.5% year over year. 
Here is the chart of active, new and pending listings for the last year in Washington DC.


If you take a few minutes to study the graph you can see (red line)that there was a 33.5% increase in new listings compared to October of last yeasr.  But even more interesting is the fact that the total number of Active listings in October 2013 was DOWN by 4.2%. This means that there are enough buyers out there today to absorb all the additional inventory.  Of course, we should not get overly excited here: yes, inventory is up, but it

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