The folks in the northern states (and even down into Kentucky) who have sugar maple trees on their properties have the old-fashioned option of supplementing their incomes by tapping into the sap. Boiling it down takes a lot of energy, but t...
“Bargain” is a word that can get your attention¬—particularly right after you’ve just paid off a round of the latest utility bills. But it’s useful to remember that it has become a term that’s been largely hijacked by the ad wo...
One Houston Thanksgiving is the appropriate number of turkey days. Two Thanksgivings would not only result in needless overexposure to your most irritating relative—it would also be a textbook example of inflation economics: twice as many...
Veteran Houston homebuyers won’t need to spend much time reading the following—they’re already familiar with the stack of documents that accompany a closing. At closing, they had only to sign on the dotted lines (they aren’t actually ...
The past week brought a broad range of properties debuting on the luxury home market. For local owners of Houston luxury homes, two examples demonstrate that sellers are confident that buyers are out there for an extremely broad range of offe...
Passenger's 'Let Her Go" is a song that only caught on years after it was first recorded— ultimately becoming a #1 hit in 22 nations. Houston FM and satellite stations are still playing it::
But you only need the light when it's burning lo...
Houston utility bills are headed upward—with nobody expecting them to head in any other direction. Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that their Energy Index increased 32.9% for the year ending last month—and that was the ...
As the week ended, anyone who switched on a TV or radio or checked in on one of the financial websites was greeted with a term that hadn’t been seen before: “housing recession.” CNBC.com’s “housing market slides into a recession” ...
For anyone who owns (or plans to own) Houston real estate, last week's Federal Reserve interest rate hike came as no surprise. Even the unusual size of the raise was expected. At 75 basis points (civilians think of that as ¾%), it fell in li...
It's been a while since we've read headlines like CNBC's "Home sellers are lowering their prices at the fastest clip since 2019." Seller's market conditions have made "bidding wars" a more common topic—and for the most part, there remains a...