3/7/10 This is a no excuses day to check out the current inventory of Charlottesville area homes for sale. The weather is absolutely beautiful. So check out the Open Houses. First there is Forest Lakes. Forest Lakes is a bedroom community just outside of the city of Charlottesville, UVA, the UVA Medical Center, and NGIC the National Ground Intelligence Center. There are six Open Houses today.
Feeling like more Open Houses? Here's a link to all Open Houses (listed by ascending price) in the Charlottesville and surrounding counties area.
As of today 3/04/10 there are 44 homes for sale in Forest Lakes. That is only slightly higher than historical levels of this time of year. Considering that there are about 1,400 homes in Forest Lakes, 44 for sale represents only about 3%. Check out the current inventory. Whether you are an investor buyer, a regular buyer, or a potential seller. This is the time to enter the market. Click on the photos for additional photos and on the addresses for maps of their locations. (link only good for a week) Link

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As one who has experienced an 8.9 shaker in Shemya Alaska in 1965, I am acutely aware of the pure horror one experiences when terra firma turns to jelly. So I wondered, are we safe here in the Charlottesville area? The short answer is yes. Though we are in a seismically active zone, quakes here are relatively frequent, but generally small. The central Virginia Seismic Zone is a region of persistent seismic activity in the Piedmont province covering approximately 3,000 mi2. As recently as 12/09/2009 at 3:59 PM about thirty miles west of Richmond there was a 4.5 Mag. quake. It was at a depth of about 3 miles. It was preceded by a magnitude 3.8 event on May 5, 2003. The largest Virginia earthquake in recorded history occurred on May 31, 1897 in Giles County and is estimated to have had a magnitude of 5.8.
A little on the Ricter scale for determining the strength of a quake. It is a base-10 logarithmic scale obtained by calculating the logarithm of the combined horizontal amplitude of the largest displacement from zero on a Wood–Anderson torsion seismometer output. So, for example, where an earthquake one whole number greater has 10 times the amplitude and has approximately 31.6 times more energy. For example, M7.0 has about 31.6 times the energy of M6.0, and 1000 (which is to say 31.62) times the energy of M5.0. More pointedly, the quake in Chile measuring 8.8 was 800 times as powerful as the one in Haiti. However, the quake in Haiti was only a few miles from the surface and Chile's was about twenty miles from the surface.
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As of today 0/27/10 there are 42 homes for sale in Forest Lakes. That is only slightly higher than historical levels of this time of year. Considering that there are about 1,400 homes in Forest Lakes, 42 for sale represents only about 3%. Check out the current inventory. Whether you are an investor buyer, a regular buyer, or a potential seller. This is the time to enter the market. Click on the photos for additional photos and on the addresses for maps of their locations. (link only good for a week) Link

Apex Wind Energy Inc. of Charlottesville, VA is proposing to lease 116,000 acres for an undetermined number of wind turbines with the potential to generate up to 1,500 megawatts of power. This farm will be located twelve miles off the coast of Virginia Beach. Gov. Bob McDonnell has made offshore drilling and wind energy a focus of his new Republican administration and hopes to make Virginia the "Energy Capital of the East Coast" and the first to produce energy offshore.
Wind energy a is part of the renewable energy industry, which couldn't be happier with Obama's stimulus package. The President promises that his package "will double the amount of renewable energy produced over the next three years."

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There are now eight distressed properties in Forest lakes (that link only good for a week). That's more than we have ever seen before. Still considering that there are about 1,400 homes in Forest Lakes having less than 1% as distressed properties is not bad. The below photo shows Forest Lakes North, the Charlottesville Albemarle Airport and the Blue Ridge mountains. Call me if you are looking for a deal.

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