Our New Town - Charlottesville VA

After traveling from the west coast to the east, we have selected our new retirement town. The winner is Charlottesville VA, and this decition was not made slightly.  For the past 5 years every place we went we would look and evaluate--

• realestate
• community 
• does it have a college
• does it have an art league
• how is the hospital
• What is the weather
• how far to a good airport  
• Are the people friendly
• is there a lot of traffic

Charlottesville VA has everything we were looking for, with a few added bonuses.  We have some extended family that have moved here and there is an Amtrak station in town that connects directly to DC.  The views of the mountains are breathtaking, and antique shops are everywhere.

This post is to bring up to date what I have looked at so far.  When we first settled on Charlottesville about a year and 1/2 ago the real estate market was tanking.  There were unblieavable properties in our price range of up to 500,000.  Some had 10 to 15 acres and were beautiful, of course they have since then sold, but were on the market for about a year, and went through several price reductions before selling.

The existing market in the area has over 3,000 listings and I think that is probable high.  There are still wonderful homes for sell and they are still being reduced depending on how long they have been on the market.  We found a realestate agent on line that we have been working with that has taken us to see a few over the past year.  Like all shopping each place had its good and bad sides, but was never just right.  The fact of the matter is we could buy more than we can build right now because of the housing financial situation, but is that what we really want?

Here in the DC area there are McMansions every where, and for a brief moment we dreamed of one of these.  After going through a few homes it became clear that they were much more than we needed, but the smaller homes didn't have what we wanted either and we don't want to settle.  The answer to all of this is---
*B U I L D*