Real Estate Blog

What's the Deal with Hardwood Flooring | Spyglass Realty

When remodeling or constructing your home, you have different options to choose from for your flooring. One of the most popular options is wood flooring. It is naturally inviting, and it's a timeless material that beautifies your home. Deciding between the type of wood material may be a hard choice to make. This blog is your guide for your hardwood flooring. Know the difference, pros and cons, and the costs of laminate and hardwood flooring.

What is Hardwood Flooring?

Hardwood floors are harvested from trees and formed into plants, sanded down to become smooth. Hardwood flooring is 100% wood which also includes a petroleum-based factory finish. This type of flooring is known to be more durable compared to other wood counterparts. Hardwood…

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Building a Home in Austin Checklist | Spyglass Realty

Are you looking into building your dream home in Austin in the future? Building a home is one of the biggest commitments anyone can have in their life. The process is exciting as it gets. However, there are some instances where mistakes are unavoidable, a reason why it's important to familiarize yourself with each process and stage in homebuilding. In this blog, we'll walk you through the different stages of building a home in Austin so you can see and understand what is involved.

As you build your own house, you will be dealing with various professionals with different roles and responsibilities. Most decisions will be coming from you while these professionals will be here to navigate you and bring your dream house to life. An Austin real estate…

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Come Back Swinging From COVID-19 | Spyglass Realty

I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe right now. We're having our monthly Spyglass Realty meeting. And we're going to do it on all the realty hack groups. Right now is just like such a trying time in our life and I don't think anyone has seen anything like this.

What we need to do is to try to normalize our lives, we need to be engaging with our clients, we basically what are you gonna do, you're gonna sit home or go crazy, or you're gonna like try to make the best of this. And the way that we can do that the number one thing that you can be doing, anybody that you have worked with, or potentially work with is conversations.

That is the hardest thing to do because it requires picking up the phone and making calls. But, it's the most…

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Austin Quarantine Home Survival Kit | Spyglass Realty

Looking for the ultimate quarantine home survival kit?  We’re building it day by day and piece by piece. Now that the “shelter-in-place” is going to be required until April 30th, we need as much guidance as possible to help us stay busy and avoid “Cabin Fever”.  We’re going to try to keep this blog up to date and current and try to include activities for all ages. But since the adults are the ones that need to keep control of all this chaos so we’ll start with them.  

Adult Activities

Learn:

• Here are 450 free Ivy League online classes to boost your knowledge about

• Play Chess on Chess.com

Read:

• 50 best nonfiction books of the last 25 years

• If you want some great book recommendations: Five books

• …

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March Newsletter | And Then, There Was COVID | Isabel Affinito

A Retreat in El Salvador

In February, Chris and I took a trip to El Salvador with our friends Andrea and Kelly. Andrea is a fitness coach in Austin, and she was leading the retreat along with a yoga instructor from El Salvador.

This is usually the type of thing I would propose, but this time, it was Chris' idea. When he said, "Do you want to go do a fitness, yoga and surfing retreat in El Salvador?" My first thought was, "Who are you and what have you done with my husband?"

So in late February, we boarded a plane to El Salvador with Kelly and Andrea, and no idea what to expect.

The house where we stayed was about 45 minutes from the airport in San Salvador. It was in the beach town of El Tunco, which is apparently the most touristy…

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Economic Impact of COVID-19 in Austin | Spyglass Realty

Mark Sprague of Independence Title, who is a real estate and financial analyst in the Austin market, has provided this awesome resource is to offer insight and context on how COVID 19 is currently impacting the Austin economy and real estate. 

Hopefully, this will help provide some answers to questions that you may have about what to expect to happen next. Thank you, Mark, for the great insight. 

1. What impact do you think COVID-19 will have on Austin’s economy?

SXSW was a loss of $500+ million annual to the local economy.

Housing is a positive light in Austin. Locally there is not enough shelter inventory in all channels. So real estate will probably have another good year.

If builders quit building, that actually causes values to…

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Economic Update in Light of COVID-19 | Spyglass Realty

Courtesy of  Michael Sprague of  Independence Title Company

1.    What impact do you think COVID-19 will have on Austin’s economy?

SXSW was a loss of $500+ million annual to the local economy.

Housing is a positive light in Austin. Locally there is not enough shelter inventory in all channels. So real estate will probably have another good year.

If builders quit building, that actually causes values to increase due to the lack of enough shelter being built.

Locally however, many of our restaurants and businesses are dependent on the many festivals and conventions that are part of our history and culture (SXSW, ACL, F1 races and events, etc.) and their loss of income will definitely be felt. At this point it’s hard to say how deep that will affect us…

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Tuesday Updates | Isabel Affinito

Dear Clients,

What strange times we're living in. It feels like every day is a whole new reality. We expect you're probably being bombarded with information right now. This email is to offer some context on how COVID 19 is currently impacting Austin real estate, and some thoughts about what we expect to happen next.

So far, Austin real estate has still been moving and we have not yet seen any significant impacts on pricing or inventory. As of the weekend of March 14th and 15th, there were still multiple offer situations happening in Central Austin. We had clients making offers, so we were in direct conversation with several different agents that weekend who were negotiating multiple offers for their seller clients. Although we did not directly…

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The Impact of Coronavirus in Austin | Spyglass Realty

Posted: March 12, 2020 | Updated: March 17, 2020

In the recent events worldwide, a new strain of coronavirus has been detected which has caused a global health emergency, threats on recession and on the economy, cancellation of events, and the number of infected around the globe grow. Headlines and misinformation are causing panic to people that's why it's always best to get your information from trusted outlets such as the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, the Texas Department of State Health Services, AustinTexas.gov website, and other reliable sources.

What is Coronavirus?

Coronavirus comes from a large family of viruses that causes illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as the…

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Dynamic Selling, Managing Stress and Why Growth Hurts | Isabel Affinito

February was a great month. We're really hitting our stride and Morgan is rocking her role as an agent on our team, which has freed me up to focus on sales training for Spyglass and speaking on my current passion project: helping small business owners take time for themselves. 

Dynamic Selling: A Six-Week Sales Training Experience

Dynamic Selling is a program that I designed, along with Spyglass management, for our agents. The goal is to help them close more business with happier clients. Specifically, the program is focused on client enrollment and client conversion. It's all about how to take someone from the very beginning when they are considering buying or selling real estate, all the way to the closing table. I've included the most…

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