Austin Property Appraiser

My best writing comes in the dead of night - after my family is asleep and no one needs anything, the phone is quiet and even our occasional canine visitor has given up for the night. That means that a lot of my real estate blog posts, including the ones on Active Rain, are posted between midnigh...

If you like horses and men in metal and roaring crowds, you might like the Jousting Tournament in McDade Texas on April 9th. Details are on the Sherwood Forest Faire site, under the Jousting Tournament page. The rest of the faire isn't supposed to be open but some shoppes will still be open and t...

If you like Renaissance Faires, you might want to check out the one that cropped up last year off of 290 between Houston and Austin. One weekend left! The 2011 season is winding down, but the faire will be open through this Sunday, April 3rd, 2011.  For more details and directions, check out the ...

Figuring out new stuff to write about is a pain. Fortunately, the visitors to your own web site can tell you what they want to read about, even if they never leave a comment. Most websites have the option of using snippets of code for tracking what the visitors to the site do: the content they sp...

Tax season is upon us! We made a short video to remind people that if they think their Travis County Tax assessment is too high, they can appeal their property taxes.     We also wrote a post a while back that explains how tax assessments are not the same thing as a real estate appraisal - the ta...

I used to Google a bunch of terms each week to see what people had published in my market. That was a huge waste of time: it meant digging DEEP into the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for new stuff and I would get distracted by the other junk that I wasn't actually looking for and be off in ...

We spend a lot of time writing for our website. Blog posts, pages, the usual stuff. We also tweet, facebook, link on linked in, etc. We do these things when we're happy, and when we're tired, and when we just got home and when we're going to bed, or SHOULD be going to bed. It's all part of our on...

Last month, a fellow appraser blogged about Google Search and the Importance of Your Social Network. At the time, I read it and bookmarked it and then didn't actually DO anything with it. Tonight, I took the plunge and followed the steps in the article. Now, you should, too. In a nutshell, Google...

Never thought I'd be blogging about farm animals. First, chickens. Now, cows. The question for today: do cows make good neighbors? As subdivisions in Round Rock, among other cities in Central Texas, push farther out into the Texas countryside, more and more home buyers end up with pasture land, c...

Wow.  Two posts about chickens in Austin in just a few days! We wanted to remind Austin-area real estate pros that the Austin Funky Chicken Coop Tour is coming up on April 23rd, from 10am to 4pm. Most of the tour will be in and around the Crestview neighborhood, plus some homes in Brentwood and W...