Building Your “Dream” Home. Stop Dreaming and Get Going
Many of my land clients begin searching for an existing home for quite some time and realize they can’t seem to find what they’re looking for. When shopping for a home we usually spend countless hours on the internet first trying to locate a home in our price range with all the features we want […]
Seniors Expected to Get the Most Time from Their Home Investment
There comes a time in life when you are ready to move on from your family home and find a more appropriate, interesting, or affordable place to call home. For many, the journey begins with researching active “adult communities,” weighing the decision to buy a condo or new house, or even building the home of […]
Tucson Summer Land Market is in Full Swing
The summer season, particularly June and July, are generally sleepy months of relative calm in the land and lot business. My primary focus usually turns to things other than business. Days include lots of early morning tennis at Tucson Racquet Club, catching up on activities with friends and family, seeing a few summer blockbusters, relaxing […]
5 Hidden Expenses of Home Building
When it comes to building the home of your dreams, there are tons of online resources which can help you choose your home design plan. More often than not, when calculating your costs for any given building plan, people assume that the calculated price is a complete price list for building your own custom home. […]
Understanding the Three Types of Land Restrictions – Before You Buy!
Whether you buy a 7000 square foot, infill lot in the heart of the city, a gated 3.3 acre lot in a northeastern subdivision, a 40 acre parcel on a dirt road 30 miles out of town, or anything in between,there will be some guidelines regarding what, how, or where you build on that parcel. […]
How to Beat the Summer Heat in Tucson
When people visit Southern Arizona in the summer, they often wonder just how it can be that people could live in this heat year-round. The question is often answered with a colloquial desert saying: It’s a dry heat. Yes, it is indeed a dry heat here in Tucson and Southern Arizona. We get just enough […]
Are Tucson’s Land Prices Going Up or Down? Let’s Check the Heat Map!
One of the most valuable tools I use every year to answer the above question is a heat map. No, this doesn’t chart the rising June temperatures—a necessary hardship to endure while waiting for the cooling, monsoon rains of July and August. The heat map is actually a statistical tool used to gauge any price […]
Determining A Building Site on Vacant Land
When I walk through a vacant parcel of land for the first time, like most people, I am impressed by the ease and ambiance of the entryway, the vegetation, the topography, the views and the physical attributes of the parcel and its surroundings. As my clients may continue to concentrate on these, I begin to […]
Reading Topography
As I discussed in my last blog, reading topography can be a bit of an art. Those who deal with it regularly gain the capability to see the contours literally come into focus as a three dimensional pattern. For example, I can look at a topographic map and tell whether the contours are forming the […]
Relief from Topography
My father, ‘Sut’ Settlemeyer was a surveyor for the United States Geological Survey (USGS). He referred to the maps they produced as quad, or relief maps. The universal geologic language of relief mapping is contour topography. Now what exactly is a contour? Simply, nothing more than a step. Just as a flight of stairs is […]