Blog | Matthew Stewart Real Estate

Putting Your Vegetables to Bed This Fall

Growing and tending a garden through the spring and summer can be one of the most fulfilling and rewarding of human experiences. The harvest in the early fall is simply sublime. But cleaning all that mess up? It’s much less poetry-worthy. Even so, there’s a certain art to putting the vegetable garden to bed, one that can increase your yields year after year once you’ve mastered it. Compost, Mulch, and Cover Crops The end of the gardening season is never pretty. Dried up plants, often broken or bent, are scattered across a once-fertile landscape in an almost post-apocalyptic scenario. It’s dark, it’s brown, it’s all kinds of heart-wrenching to know you’ve reached the end of the life cycle of

Where Are Home Values Headed Over the Next 12 Months?

As shelter-in-place orders were implemented earlier this year, many questioned what the shutdown would mean to the real estate market. Specifically, there was concern about home values. After years of rising home prices, would 2020 be the year this appreciation trend would come to a screeching halt? Even worse, would home values begin to depreciate? Original forecasts modeled this uncertainty, and they ranged anywhere from home values gaining 3% (Zelman & Associates) to home values depreciating by more than 6% (CoreLogic). However, as the year unfolded, it became clear that there would be little negative impact on the housing market. As Mark Fleming, Chief Economist at First American, recent