Charlottesville « S1dd.com

Charlottesville

Construction Financing in Charlottesville/Albemarle

So you want to build your own house? Not a single large bank and no online banks that I contacted (and I contacted lots) offer construction financing. I called almost every bank that I tried to refinance my existing mortgage with and none of them offered construction loans. I called up Wells Fargo, Bank of America and larger local banks and none of those offered construction financing either. The only larger banks that did offer construction financing, like SunTrust, wanted a 25% down payment.

Then I started calling all the smaller local banks and mortgage companies and found that almost everybody wanted at least 20% down except these three:

1. Fulton Bank (80/10/10 conventional without PMI, One time Close 5/1 ARM convertible to 30 yr fixed, Interest only during construction)

2. Union Mortgage (10% down conventional mortgage with PMI, Prime + 0.25, minimum 6% during construction, refinance to 30yr fixed when complete)

3. Stellar One (3.5% down FHA with PMI or 80/10/10 conventional without PMI, Construction-Perm, Prime -? 0.25 currently 3.75% interest only during construction, refinance to 30 yr fixed when complete)

The UVA Credit Union was another one that does offer construction financing on a case by case basis but their criteria are very strict and I have no idea what their loan terms are.

We started out with Stellar One but after the loan officer we were working with left the company, everything was downhill. Our loan was transferred to the Harrisonburg office and after that nobody had any idea what was going on. No one was able to answer any questions or give me any timelines, even approximate, because of the multiple approval processes that needed to take place and some were outsourced. Nobody would even bother to contact any underwriters to speed things up until we literally called the director of Mortgages. From the end of October as an approximate closing period we went all the way to the end of December and at every point we were frustrated. Incorrect paperwork, general lack of caring about accuracy or customer satisfaction and persistent denial of responsibility for mistakes eventually made us really fed up and switch to somebody else.

We tried Union Mortgage next and I felt a world of difference, paperwork was more professionally done. There was a proper checklist of all required documentation and they knew exactly what happens and the process was fairly simple. However they wouldn’t approve our builder who is a relatively new small builder in Harrisonburg.

At this point after almost giving up on building a house, we were recommended Fulton Bank and not only was their loan the best offering of the three they were excellent to work with. The process was smooth and they worked with us and the builder to get everything approved quickly. I would highly recommend them. Contact Cleve Brannock – (434) 975-2319

Finding Land in Charlottesville – Part 1

Let me start by saying that the title is misleading. By Charlottesville I mean Charlottesville and the parts of Albemarle that are just outside Charlottesville (parts of Rio Rd, Pantops, Barracks Rd, Hydraulic etc.). If you’ve looked at the MLS to try and find land you’ll find that there is almost none available. The land that is available is probably not big enough or not desirable enough or too far out of Charlottesville to be really called Charlottesville.

But there are many pieces of land in the city and county that might be available if you are willing to look hard enough (or contact me and we can work something out). With this and some following blog posts, I’ll go through the steps you need to find the land you want. This works and that is how we found the land for our house.

In Part 1, I’ll cover finding land in the county that is close to Charlottesville. Part 2 will be about land in the city.

Step 1: Find neighborhoods

A good way to find neighborhoods is by going to the Nest Realty Group website. They have a very nice interface to the MLS by neighborhoos and they talk about the pros about each neighborhood. Once you have decided on the neighborhood, begins the search for land. I would like to warn you in advance that there are neighborhoods with no land at all so pick more than one and dont get too attached to any one neighborhood.

Step 2: The GIS

Once you have picked your Albemarle county neighborhood, it is time to go the the Albemarle County GIS to find empty land. Just follow these easy steps.

1. Search for the Neighborhood:

Neighborhood gis

2. House # Sort – Most empty land doesnt have assigned addresses. So you need to sort the search result by House #. That’s it! Here is your list of all empty land.

gisresults

3. Value Sort – Sometimes empty land can have an address assigned to it. These can be found by sorting by total value. You will have to actually click on the item to see the value of the land and the improvements. This is rare for the county but I’ve seen it a couple of times.

Step 3: Contacting Owners

A good place to find owner phone numbers is Whitepages. Often times empty land will have owners who are not local or PO Boxes. You have to get creative, google the name of the owner, do reverse address lookups but eventually you will generally be able to find a way to contact them.

Tips and Tricks

Google Maps shows plat boundaries for Albemarle county. A combination of looking at the plats and the satellite map is an easy way to eyeball for empty space and to verify if the land you are looking at is desirable or not.

Have Me Find Land For You

If you don’t want to go through this effort, I can help you find land. Contact me for more details. You land budget must be at least about $100,000

Charlottesville / Rants / Real Estate — No Comments
28
May 10

Photoshopped Real Estate Photos

Here goes my rant. As we have been passively looking for a new house we have found multiple occasions where real estate photos have been severly photoshopped. The photos were overly bright, very saturated and the photoshopping is plainly visible. We have even visited a couple of houses about a year ago just to see how reality compares. And I can tell you it was absolutely shocking. The houses were in bad shape with dark rooms.

I’m making this post for the real estate agents who think that buyers are suckers and can’t tell super enhanced photos. I think their real estate licences should be revoked. I guess they will learn the hard way when nobody shows up to see the houses. Generally I’ve found that photoshopping was only done in case of older houses that are probably in bad shape and once buyers see a few of those they will probably avoid all photoshopped houses. Photoshopping agents should probably take a photography class instead of just using some software to turn up brightness, contrast and saturation to make fake looking photos.

Yesterday I found this example of extreme photoshopping. I thought the photo was an awesome rendering for a proposed house. But the house looked very dated. It turned out that the photo is of an existing house built in the 50s
photoshopping real estate

If you would like to look at the rest of the super enhanced photos click here.

Charlottesville / Food — No Comments
5
May 10

Albemarle Baking Company Cake Review

We tried a cake from the Albemarle Baking Company for the first time on Ahan’s first birthday. The cake was really good. It not only looked great, it tasted even better. Almost everyone who came to the party was asking where we got the cake from. The cake we picked was The Albemarle – “Chocolate cake on the bottom, then THREE mousse layers—dark chocolate, white chocolate and milk chocolate. Covered with a milk chocolate glaze.”

We liked the cake so much that for my birthday we tried our second cake from Albemarle Baking Co – The Chocolate Praline Crunch Cake, which was also excellent, especially if you like dark chocolate.

Charlottesville / Chinese / Food — No Comments
22
Feb 10

Taste of China – Review (Awesome) – (See Updates)

IMAG0084 IMAG0083 We tried Taste of China near ACAC in Albemarle Square a few weeks back and really loved the food. We made a second trip this weekend and the food was awesome again.

I ate the Tofu Casserole Sichuan Spicy (left) and Parchayi ate the Spicy Scallions and Chili hotpot (or something like that, right).

Both dishes were fantastic. Taste of China is not a regular American Chinese restaurant (though they do serve up some American Chinese too). This according to them is the real Chinese food. Why O why then are we subject to the same old Chinese food everywhere?

I would call taste of China expensive for a Chinese place but then they don’t serve the tired old Chinese and the portions are generous. The food is closer to Indian Chinese than American Chinese.

Here is a link to the Vegetarian Options on the Menu, and for a good laugh see the last item. I wasn’t brave enough to try it. Maybe you are

Update: On our third or fourth visit here, Parchayi got the wrong dish after about an hour of waiting and the wait staff basically told us to either cancel our order and leave or order something else. They claimed it is because they are afraid of chef Chang. Anyway after creating a scene there, the chef himself came out and apologized and gave us a free sample of some awesome red bean dumplings. It seemed form talking to owner that the restaurant was not capable of handling the number of customers and chef Chang was very overworked and stressed. A few weeks after the incident we read in both Cville and Hook that chef Chang has left. I’ve heard from other friends at work too that the wait staff was really rude. Anyway now that the chef is gone, there is no point visiting. After all, the long lines and the extra wait all were just to eat his famous Sichuan cooking.

Here is to hope that he remains in Charlottesville. We will miss the food.

Charlottesville / Food — No Comments
4
Feb 09

New Indian Store

Charlottesville now has a new Indian store on Westfield Rd. near the Comcast office called Taste of India.

We’ve been to the new store twice and as compared to Indian Bazaar on Rio, the store is more neatly organized. There are more Frozen options and most of the basics are the same. The store owner has promised to order some stuff that he didn’t have and I’ll find out soon if he did. I’m not sure we really needed another store but if he does deliver on his promise of ordering stuff that the other one doesn’t carry we might end up going there more often.

Charlottesville / Food / Thai Food — 14 Comments
20
Jan 09

Tara Thai Charlottesville Review

We tried the new Tara Thai at Barracks Rd this weekend and were completely disappointed with the food. The soup we ordered was lukewarm (not even close to hot). When we complained, they heated it up for us in a microwave for a few minutes. After that it was ok and decent tasting.

The food we ordered was all cold too. We could hear them cooking it and we were sitting about 10 feet from the kitchen so it can’t have become cold in transit. Maybe they just stir fry stuff and dump in cold readymade sauce? and maybe they don’t stir fry long enough for the vegetables to become hot? After complaining again and being served microwave heated food, the temperature was ok. Still not hot but tolerable. Even the fried Tofu was cold. I’ve never had fried tofu cold in a dish before. Taste wise the food was mediocre and the dish I ordered was overly fishy. I threw away the leftovers because when I heated them up later at home they smelled bad. All in all a bad experience. I’ll stick with Thai 99 on JPA and Lemongrass at the corner for good Thai food.

Charlottesville — 9 Comments
10
Dec 08

Bye Comcast, Hello DISH??

Update 10:15pm 12/10 ET:I got a call from Andrew at Comcast at around 5:30pm and he apologized for my experience and offered to continue my promotion (don’t know for how long) if I continued with cable. But I told him this experience was enough to keep me away from cable and also that cable didn’t offer much in the way of Hindi programming in Charlottesville. He also assured me that my bill has been fixed and I will get a statement in the next couple of weeks with the corrected information and gave me his direct number if I had any more questions or if I decided not to keep DISH and return to cable.

I also got a message from our local Comcast manager! Lesson – if you have problems with comcast that customer service doesn’t solve, post your problem publicly! If that doesn’t work, try calling 703 730 2225 and the email addresses for customer service are:
Customer_Connect1@cable.comcast.com
We_Can_Help@cable.comcast.com

Update 1:40pm 12/10 ET:I shot another email to the national comcast folks and supposedly someone will resolve the issue and call me today. See comments.

Update 1:10pm 12/10 ET:So far I have received no calls from the National folks who commented on this post, nor from the local manager and definitely nothing from the supervisor of the rep who actually cut my cable. I really didn’t expect anything better from Concast (really Concast is what they are)

Update 9:45pm 12/09 ET: See the comments on this post for a response from Mark Casem from Comcast customer service to this blog post. I’ll keep the blog updated with any additional responses from Comcast.

I returned my Comcast box today and missed the local office manager who it seems is the only one who can make the decision at the local office. I was hoping to fix my bill then. I left a message for her and let’s see if I hear back from her again.

Post orignally made on Dec. 9:

Today I got a shocker bill from Comcast. $198 and change. My usual bill is $37 and change, where the change part fluctuates each month.

They retroactively changed my November bill from the 37.xx to 90 something. The claim made by comcast customer service is that my promotional period ended in the middle of the month and their systems can’t handle that kind of change until the day of the change itself so they just add it in to my next bill. I told the CS lady that if I would have known that my bill would go from 37 to nearly 100, I would just cut cable and that Comcast deceived me by sending me a small bill in Nov and then retroactively charging me more in Dec. for the Nov. period. The lady even told me that since I already used the service I must pay whatever they say I must pay.

The supposed promotion that I was on was for 29.99/month plus tax but the rates kept going up by a few cents to a few dollars each month. The lady asked if I knew I was on a promotional rate, which I was so I said yes. But I told her I had no plans of continuing with all the stuff I had beyond the promotion and had I known a.k.a got a correct bill in Nov I would have cancelled or modified service.

But the rep. just got annoyed with me and I was getting inreasingly frustrated trying to explain to her that the whole problem in this situation is that November is done and gone and I’m not paying more than the original November bill, which is my usual Comcast bill. Anyway she refused to modify anything in the bill and refused to forward to a supervisor (saying she was the most senior person there) and promised that a supervisor will call me in 48 hours. In the meanwhile, while this was going on without even informing or confirming with me she cut my cable.

Parchayi noticed the clock on the cable go off and I asked the CS lady if she cut my cable. She said yes and that I had said I wanted to cut my cable (which I clearly told her I wanted to do when the next billing cycle starts after she fixes my November bill). At this point I was maybe 20 minutes into arguing with her and I just gave up on her and on Comcast.

Until I get DISH (another post altogether), I’ll find out how it is to live without TV for a few days!

Charlottesville / Rants — 2 Comments
9
Dec 08

DISH really doesn’t want returning customers??

As you must know from my previous post about no longer having or wanting Comcast, I’m trying to get DISH.

But since I had DISH a couple of years ago, it seems that DISH network will not sell me DISH service again. I called DISH a couple of times and was given the same information by both reps. The first one flatly refused to give me DISH unless I bought all the equipment and paid for installation or installed myself. The second one said that I needed to contact a retailer to get DISH and gave me a few numbers.

So I called a retailer (VMC) this morning (because none of the 24/7 retailers pick up the phone at night), who after charging me $10 for a credit check (DISH won’t sell you satellite TV without a credit check!!) tells me that I can’t be setup as a new customer because I already had DISH before and gave me a number to the DISH fraud line to get my old account deleted.

While being on hold for about half an hour with the DISH fraud line, I was getting frustrated enough to actually hang up and get DirecTV, but they don’t offer the same Hindi programming that DISH does so it has to be DISH. Anyway the Fraud alert guy put some note on the account asking the retailer to call him. He was apologetic and said that this whole thing was for my protection (my ass). He indirectly hinted that I originally had DISH through Embarq and the problem was because how the account was closed. Now I don’t remember if I posted about this or not, but never never ever get DISH through Embarq – they will send you wrong bills, not correct them in time, send you incorrect late fees and in general make your life a misery. Do not bundle Embarq + DISH. It doesn’t cost less and increases your problems.

Ofcourse I never got a call back from VMC so I called back and talked to someone else, who continued the process. She called DISH (another 10 minute hold) and they required her to call back and have both people on the line at the same time. So she called again with me on the line, got forwarded once wihtout the support even caring about what she had to say, one more 15 minute hold. Still no resolution to the problem so the VMC lady (also probably frustrated at this point with DISH) said she’ll get someone from DISH on the line first and then call me back. At this time I’m pissed enough to just live without TV but we have parents visiting soon and they’ll need TV. Once the DISH contract is over I’m seriously considering getting rid of everything and just living with Blockbuster online and Internet.

Anyway she called me back in 10 minutes and gave me the DISH fraud number again to get setup. So if you already had DISH in your life ever and are switching back, don’t call DISH, don’t call a retailer, just call 1-888-237-4278. I called again, got someone else and she went to find the first guy who put the note on my account (= more hold time) and I was asked to call the retailer again because DISH installation schedules would be much slower than the resellers. Anyway this time I accidentally called allsat instead of VMC and I just told the allsat lady that I already went through everything before and I just need her to call 1-888-237-4278 and have them on the line the same time as me and it was all done in about 15 minutes.

If you are a new customer considering DISH, just skip calling DISH and just call a retailer. Here are a few options:
VMC (10$ fee)
Dish Pronto (15$ fee, don’t get lured by their free offerings – they are not worth the effort)
Allsat ($0 fee)

Sidd’s Tip:If you read between the lines here, you will see that you can skip the credit check part if you call up a reseller and tell them you already went through the process once. Allsat only wanted the last 4 of my social because the lady thought I went through that whole process with them before. Well, VMC lost some commission from DISH. Anyway I’m an Allsat affiliate and I’m hoping that I get the commission for this order. That would make the wasted hours sort of worthwhile.

Charlottesville — No Comments
14
Oct 08

Gas Price Gouging in Cville + One more reason not to buy a Honda here

I drove back from DC to Charlottesville yesterday and gas prices at most of the pumps on 29 was between $2.999 and $3.099. As soon as you enter Charlottesville, prices are above $3.369. Why the nearly 40c difference within a few miles? Anybody with ideas on where to report this gouging please contact me. This was even reported on the news, but gas stations seem to be shamelessly unaffected.

Brown Honda of Charlottesville, I will never buy a car from you thanks to your shitty automated spam. I own a Nissan bought at Colonial and I’ve been to them several times and even they don’t phone spam me. I go to Brown Honda once for a state inspection and I have to deal with your stupid automated phone calls at work. I will never get anything done from you again and I will never buy a car from you.

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