There is a cost to using Realtors, but we have found the extra expense to be worth it, particularly when one needs to hold a deal together in this mortgage market. We also can’t avoid the involvement of a buyers agent in most cases since most people bring one on early in their home search (as they probably should).

Richard: Sounds like you have had a rough time in the city at some point. I’m sorry to hear that, but I take some offense to the idea that my neighborhood is a crime ridden graffiti fest. We certainly have a little of both, but there are enough positives that one is inclined to stick around and make things better rather than run away (or start shooting).

Philadelphia’s “price run up” was not the same as what we saw in many parts of the country. As a major city, Philly was fairly undervalued (often for good reason) and the rise in prices we have seen over the past 7 or 8 years has been more of a correction than a symptom of the bubble. We see a growing realization that denser, urban living is the future. A move to the city is a move (however small) away from the disastrous culture of cars we have established in our suburbs. More and more people are continuing to make that move.

I would be fairly surprised if the value of our homes took a precipitous drop since they all sold after the bottom fell out of the housing market. I would also be surprised to see the buyers of our homes move to Bala or Center City since, as far as I’ve seen, there isn’t much like our houses in either place. In fact, I think we will see more people getting tired of climbing in their car every time they walk out of their door and moving into the city where they will become a part of reducing crime and pushing for a higher quality brand of graffiti.

But, of course, that is just my opinion and I am a little biased.

Goran- It did take quite a bit of time to reach settlement by our standards, though from what I hear October to early June isn’t actually that bad for new construction. Some of the reason for this was definitely related to construction delays caused by weather, ordering problems and other unforeseen issues. However, we also ended up delaying settlement for the buyers which caused us to hold off on some finish work that might have taken place earlier. Chad will no doubt discuss all this further in his project wrap-up posts.

Postgreen was involved in a little of the finish work on this project. Mostly this was out of some foolish desire to be involved which we both have come to regret. There was also an element of late night cramming as we underestimated the time involved in a couple of the projects we took on. This led to some pretty heavy Twitter complaining. The time spent by Chad and myself is factored into the budget and actually, things will probably move a little more smoothly now that we have decided to avoid manual labor in all future projects.

The process should scale well. However the current project is the same size as the first and the addition of a third home in the proposed next project is not much of an increase. Our builder, in his past life, built hundreds of homes in a single year, so we think he’ll manage to keep up. That said, we are asking our team to do many things which are new and different so some delays here and there are inevitable.

It seems that it took an awfully long time to finally close on the 120K house, and while its hard to tell exactly why from the blog, my impression is that its because that’s how long it took to actually complete construction, and finishing. Also, it seemd from some of the Twitter, that the members of PostGreen were personally involved in some of the final interior finishing (staining, etc.)

Do you have any concerns about the completion time of the project, and the amount of time required from PostGreen themselves? Will the current process scale to the two projects under construction now, and to the 3 proposed projects?

Goran

Will you be blogging about the passive houses or 3 house project like you did for the 100k/120k homes?