In the Aloha State, Real Estate Gets More Complicated By Carole VanSickle Ellis Hawaii is a state that stands alone, literally. Of all the states in the United States, Hawaii is the only one located outside of North America, the only archipelago, and the only state in the tropics. It is comprised of 127 volcanic islands, eight of which are considered the “main islands”: Niʻihau, Kauaʻi, Oʻahu, Molokaʻi, Lānaʻi, Kahoʻolawe,
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Investors, Homeowners Continue to Bank on The Valley of the Sun By Carole VanSickle Ellis Imagine describing the boundaries of your hometown city in this way: “The area is bounded by the shores of Lake Pleasant and the Superstition Mountains.” It sounds like a fairy tale, but the truth is that this description closely matches the boundaries of the Phoenix, Arizona, metropolitan area. In Phoenix, home values are the stuff
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California’s Capital City Remains an Anomaly…In a Good Way By Carole VanSickle Ellis Just before the start of the 20th century, the residents of Sacramento decided to enact a sea change in the local geography. Believing the “City of Plains,” as the area was called in 1855, to be too flat and swampy, locals began planting cottonwoods and imported eucalyptus trees to help dry out swampy areas and create a
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The City of Brotherly Love Faces an “Uncomfortable” 2023 Market By Carole VanSickle Ellis When a national expert like Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi starts your market’s year off with the observation, “We’re in the bad times,” a lot of local homebuyers get chills — and not in a good way. For real estate investors, however, those chills are something like a silver lining, and Zandi only increased investor
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“The District” Could Face Atypical Headwinds in the Coming Months By Carole VanSickle Ellis In 1783, a mutiny of Continental Army soldiers in the new United States’ then-capital city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, demonstrated to the Founding Fathers that their future nation’s capital city must not, as James Madison would argue roughly five years later, “rely on any state for its own security.” Just a few years later, Article One, Section
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The Queen City Remains One of the Fastest-Selling Markets in the Country By Carole VanSickle Ellis When a multitude of large, urban markets began cooling off with the advent of 2023, Cincinnati, Ohio, just kept getting hotter. The midwestern city, also often referred to as “The Queen City” thanks to poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1854 poetic reference to it as “The Queen of the West,” was ranked as one of
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