Bernard’s Danville Real Estate Blog

Blackhawk Plaza has no shortage of restaurants and Laurus is the latest addition to the Blackhawk dining scene. The competition includes the excellent Blackhawk Grille. It will have to offer a pretty good dining experience if it is to be successful. Will it survive? Read on to get my take on it.
 Laurus is the brain-child of restaurateurs Matthew Silverman and Thomas Bensel and is their third venture in Blackhawk, joining their wine bar, Stomp, and their Mexican restaurant, Coa, all recently opened.
 All three locations are in keeping with Blackhawk Plaza but Laurus is undoubtedly the flag-ship. It opened for business in early December and Sylvia and I dined there for the first time with Michelle (her birthday dinner) for the first time shortly afterwards.
 This is a very stylish restaurant with somewhat minimalist décor and designer colors on the walls. The floor is polished concrete. There is an open display kitchen, an elegant, curved bar with plenty of seating and also an outdoor terrace seating surrounded by the Blackhawk water features with Koi carp and ducks etc.
 The service is impeccable and the food here is excellent. The three of us shared a generous portion of fried Calamari as an appetizer and none of us could fault it. This was  lightly breaded, served with haricots verts and accompanied by a light curry mayonnaise.
 For an entree, I had sea scallops that were served (very artistically I should add) on a bed of butternut squash risotto. The scallops were succulent and the risotto cooked to perfection, although the portion size (just three scallops) seemed a little on the meager side. Even so, I do appreciate the concept of quality rather than quantity and given the choice, quality wins every time.
 Sylvia had the Bistro Steak (a flat-iron steak served with sweet potato fries, an interesting twist on the usual steak frites) and pronounced it to be excellent, with a really good flavor and tender to the bite. Michelle’s choice was the Seafood Bouillabaise and it looked to be crammed full of quite a variety of fish and shellfish. She said it was yummy!
 Neither Sylvia nor Michelle appeared to appreciate my suggestions with regard to a pudding so we settled for finishing off our second bottle of Frogs Leap chardonnay by way of a final course. The wine list is quite extensive incidentally, and the wine was served at perfect temperature, but it would be nice to see some lower-priced wines on offer.
 Overall, we came away with a high opinion of Laurus. I won’t say we will be frequent visitors as it is a little above our normal dining budget but it would be great for a special occasion and should certainly be popular with many affluent locals. 

What a year! Maybe not quite so bad as 2008 for some, but many home owners will remember 2009 as the worst year of the decade.
 I think relatively few people will look back on 2009 with a good feeling. The recession continued to bite and the repercussions of the  “creative” home financing products that came about because of a lack of banking industry regulation forced many people out of their homes as a result of foreclosure or bankruptcy. Some home owners avoided this by selling as a “Short Sale” but they still lost their homes. Hopefully the worst is now over. This therefore looks like an appropriate time to take a look at what has happened to home values over the past couple of years in our area.
Analyzing The Value Of The “Typical” Home
 I am very wary of just looking at average or median sales prices of homes unless it is obvious that the comparison is of like with like. It always makes more sense to take a specific type of home and see what has happened to it’s value over a period of time.
 So let’s consider a 4 bedroom detached single family  home with between 1800 and 2500 square feet of living space (as depicted in the chart below).

Surprising Results
 The figures are interesting to say the least. Although prices continued to fall into the second quarter of the year, the third and fourth quarters increased in this popular segment of the market.
 These price increases are most likely due to a combination of factors. Interest rates fell to the point where homes became more affordable, the government incentive plans began to have an effect and buyers gained confidence that prices had bottomed out. And then inventory levels started to fall. Supply and demand kicked in. Note that as interest rates increase, home prices will probably settle down though.
 Now look at the second chart, this time for 3 bedroom homes, and we can see exactly the same pattern. Many of the buyers in this segment are first time buyers and there are still a lot of these about. Expect to see this trend continue until interest rates increase also.

 Finally, let’s take a look at the higher end - the luxury home market. Even here, as can be seen in the bottom chart, prices seemed to enter a recovery period in the third quarter, yet now it looks like this may not be quite so sustainable as in the other market segments. Prices here are certainly lower than at the start of last year.

Not Such A Bad Year
 There seems little doubt that most home owners in our area will have seen a small increase in value through 2009. This is not what you will read in the newspapers but you can’t argue with the facts. This data is actual sales figures from the Multiple Listing Service. So at least some of us may be on the track to real estate recovery. Only time will tell for sure.