Amazonas: the 2014 Wintergreen Summer Music Festival

Ask orchestra conductor Larry Alan Smith about the continent to the south of us, and he’ll tell you about rhythm and color. South American music can be “mournful and soulful,” Smith says, but by and large “it’s very perky, very bright, very sunny.” Smith’s frequent conducting stints in Brazil in the 80s and 90s engendered […]

A primer on closing costs

Negotiating and agreeing on the price for a new home may seem like the final step of a long process. In fact, it’s just the beginning of maneuvering through the long list of closing costs. These costs and payments are typically organized by a settlement company and paid to lenders and other third parties involved […]

Projects Reflect Confidence in Cville’s Commercial Real Estate Market

News about commercial real estate both nationally and locally continues to be positive.  The Urban Land Institute’s 2014 annual report entitled Emerging Trends in Real Estate (based on interviews with 1,000 experts in the field) states that respondents “expect growth to be sufficient to generate consistent and growing demand for commercial real estate across all […]

Charlottesville’s Golf Course Communities

If you love golf and want to live near your favorite course, our area offers a lot of options. Home buyers seeking a golf course community with a country club atmosphere can pick from neighborhoods such as Glenmore or the Estates at Keswick Hall where a newly designed course will open soon.  Public courses are […]

The big picture: A condo goes oversize—and back to basics

Buying a condo might seem to be an exercise in ceding control—one has little prerogative to alter the building’s exterior, and a condo association has veto power over many other changes a homeowner might desire. Yet one resident of the Belmont Lofts, which were developed on a city brownfield near the railroad tracks in 2003, […]

Charlottesville Named #2 Friendly Small City in USA

MOVOTO.com’s blog—which dubs itself “the lighter side of real estate”—recently named Charlottesville as the #2 Friendly Small City in the nation. What exactly makes a city friendly? “When we decided to tackle this question,” the blog says, “we realized that we’d need to look at it in some unique ways,” They decided some measures such […]