General Blog

The intriguing historical and cultural heritage of Arlington, VA

Do you like to immerse yourself in America’s rich history? Do you wish to know how the past cultural and historical traditions live on in modern society? We have excellent news for you! There is a place in Virginia specially designed for your interests. A region that proudly features America’s most impressive historical monuments on a grand canvas. Arlington, VA, reveres its cultural diversity! You’ll find African-American and Hispanic traits masterfully exhibited too.

First things to see in Arlington
There are by all means cultural and historical must-visit attractions. Also, a unique set of advantages makes living in Arlington, Virginia, such an incredible experience! The fittest city in America is located in the state’s northern part on the bank of the Potomac River, just a few miles away from the US capital. No wonder its reputation has skyrocketed, turning it into a genuinely visitor-friendly destination. The two cities have many aspects in common. Thus, the foundation of Arlington and Washington, DC, builds on a deep friendship.

There are numerous things to visit in Arlington. Most notably, there are patriotic jewels, such as the US Air Force Memorial and the Iwo Jima Memorial. Let’s have a look at the top three sites!

The Arlington National Cemetery
The Arlington National Cemetery enjoys most of the visitors’ attention. The cemetery gives an eternal resting place for many historical figures, such as presidents Kennedy and Taft.

Americans founded Arlington National Cemetery during the Civil War in 1864. For more than 100 years, some of the country’s most famous military heroes have been buried here. Ever since its creation, visitors from all over the United States, and the world, come to pay their respects. The cemetery is present on the list of the National Register of Historic Places.

The Pentagon
Don’t miss, by any chance, a memorable visit to the Pentagon, the HQ of the US Department of Defense!! The facility is probably the most compelling federal building in our country. In addition, it is a top draw for visitors to Arlington. The Pentagon has approximately 6,500,000 square feet, employing over 23,000 civilian and military personnel. Unfortunately, many sections of the building are off-limits to the public. Still, you can contact touristic agencies that can arrange well-organized tours.

Robert E. Lee Memorial
The Robert E. Lee Memorial is also known as the Arlington House. It served as home to the renowned Confederate General, Robert E. Lee. There was a heated public debate and controversy over whether Lee should be recognized as a military hero or not. Yet, he had garnered tremendous respect from both the North and the South. Eventually, he received the proper recognition. And officials listed his former house on the National Register of Historic Places. The residence is open to the public all year! And it turned into one of the most popular attractions in the area.

Arlington’s evolution over the years
And how did Arlington evolve? It started as farmland and a popular Washington resort. Then, trolley car lines showed up as trendy convenient public transportation means. So, the region became a commuter suburb and paradise.

The Federal government and the Pentagon prompted the establishment of residential neighborhoods. First, these minor settlements housed Colonial Revival properties, stylish bungalows, and kit houses. Over the years, garden-style condo and suite complexes emerged. You can see all of these residential units side-by-side, forming the unique Arlingtonian urban landscape.

Arlington’s efforts to preserve the historical heritage
The city’s historic places form a powerful bond to the past. As a result, they lend a distinguishing character to the area. Arlington is committed to preserving valuable and rare resources for the greater good. Historic landmarks can help scholars and history buffs understand and be thankful for America’s diverse past legacy. Furthermore, their efforts expand to protect the architecture and traditions of our heritage.

The County of Arlington designed the Historic Preservation Master Plan. Virtually, it is a guide encompassing historic resources. Within its framework, they established proactive arrangements for preservation activities. A critical part involves the landmark environment’s restoration. The Master Plan is accessible for citizens, planners, and business investors.

Pay tribute to American heroes!
Arlington honors American history and its heroes! Local historic districts and National Register sites still display the input of people, events, and places from the past. The Historic Architectural Survey is responsible for identifying and surveying numerous historic properties countywide. Famous people born in the area also had a substantial contribution to historic preservation endeavors.

In addition, the National Register of Historic Places is an honorable inventory of historic places and artifacts. These are pretty significant to local and national history. The inventory includes acclaimed Arlington monuments such as the Pentagon and Key Bridge. Also, we mustn't forget the Cherrydale Volunteer Fire House, Fort C.F. Smith Park, and the original District of Columbia border markers.

Visit the Black Heritage Museum in Arlington, VA!
As we know, history and culture go hand-in-hand. In the first place, Arlington preserves historic landmarks. Secondly, Arlington dedicated itself to providing a colorful outlet for cultural heritage too. Such a fantastic realization is the Black Heritage Museum of Arlington (BHMA). The facility came into existence to honor the African Americans experiencing their independence. It acknowledges the Black community as an integral community to the area’s history.

At the core of the museum lies the history of the Freedman’s Village. The no-longer-existing settlement hosted thousands of freed African-American slaves. This instance was the very first time in America’s history. Freedman’s Village is now part of the southern end of the Arlington National Cemetery.

The BHMA displays an exhibit on slavery at Arlington House. It covers the long and strenuous period from slavery to freedom and equal rights in Arlington.

Hispanic Heritage on display in Arlington
Arlington celebrates the Hispanic community, its culture, and its contributions. Subsequently, Arlington is proud to pay tribute to many generations of Hispanic Americans from Mexico, Spain, and South America. They have shaped Arlington’s history in the most inventive and positive ways.

For this occasion, the city organizes several festivals in the framework of Hispanic Heritage Month. The celebration takes place between September 15 and October 15. The first day is especially significant culturally. On September 15 and 16, we honor the anniversary of freedom for Latin American countries.

Conclusion
Did you know that Arlington was once part of Alexandria County? You'll find a fascinating similarity between Arlington and Alexandria's history. After all, the two were co-dependent regions.

Don't let first impressions fool you! Arlington may appear as a "cemetery town" filled with soldiers' graves. Behind stern military faces, there is a community with a welcoming spirit! And behind historic monuments, there is a city pulsating with life-affirming energy!

Also, you might be interested in the local real estate market trends and consider buying a property in Arlington! We suggest you start by contacting the local real estate agents in Arlington VA to help you find the most suited home for you and your family.

So, do we recommend visiting Arlington? Arguably, you won't find a similar place so rich in historical sites than here. So, by all means, do come and see the city! The city focuses on preserving the region's and the nation's historical and cultural legacy.

Best Cities to Buy Rental Property in 2021

If you’re planning on investing in rental properties, you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you. Turning your landlord side hustle into a full time job will require you to do research, assess properties, screen potential tenants and perhaps even make some revisions to the properties you purchase. It won’t be easy, but it will be incredibly rewarding.

Of course, taking into consideration the rapidity with which local real estate markets fluctuate, it only makes sense that you might want to consider which cities are your best options when it comes to plying your trade in this market. These cities will be those with the greatest numbers of renters, the most demand for rental properties, and the greatest real estate market growth.

Best cities for aspiring landlords

Now that we’ve established that some cities are better choices than others for those who want to invest in rental properties. The ideal city for rental investors will have a combination of factors such as high demand for rental properties, a reasonable but not exceptionally low median home cost, and a number of other factors.

In reality, there are very few cities that meet all the criteria and successfully attain the status of being the “ideal landlord’s city”. All of the cities on this list will have at least a few of the characteristics we mentioned above, but none of them meet the criteria perfectly. What can we say? You have to work with what you’ve got. Let’s see what exactly that is!

Houston, TX

Anyone familiar with the real estate market in the city of Houston TX probably already saw this one coming a mile away; this city is just a great place to be a landlord! With ever increasing demand for rentals, a rapidly growing populace and some of the most attractive things to see and do of any city in the state, we would be remiss if we left it out.

Starting with the real estate market in this beautiful city, it’s easy to see why this is such a great place for landlords. The median home value is a highly acceptable $209,000, making purchasing rental properties easy and low cost. As an added bonus, the property appreciation rate here is a staggering 9.5%, ensuring excellent investment value for anyone purchasing property!

While the median home cost is low, the exceptional population growth means that there is a great deal of demand for rentals. This demand has led to a rather high median monthly rent price of $1,200. This means that landlords in Houston will be able to recoup their initial investment and start making profits long before those in other cities would be able to!

If you’d like to take advantage of this rapidly growing market, you’ll want to get in touch with one of the real estate agents in Houston TX. These skilled, experienced real estate professionals will help you find the best value for your money, in the least amount of time possible. No matter what you’re looking for, they’re the best people for the job!

Miami, FL

Another place where demand for rentals is obscenely high is the city of Miami, FL. This beautiful, sunny metropolis has a long list of attractive characteristics, but for aspiring landlords and rental investors its most attractive aspects are its real estate market and rental market. While it doesn’t have the lowest property values around, its rent prices make it easy to make your money back quickly and start racking up profits!

So how much is the average home in Miami? With a steep $396,000 median home price, real estate isn’t exactly cheap here. Real estate does appreciate in value rather quickly, but not quite quickly enough to make it a great place to invest in property with the intent to sell. Where it does shine, however, is the rental market.

With a median rent cost of $1,700 a month, Miami falls on the more expensive side of the rent price spectrum, but this hasn’t deterred renters one bit. With its prohibitively expensive housing market, the only option for most accommodation seekers is rent, making this an excellent place to set yourself up as a landlord.

Anyone who would like to do just this should get in touch with the local realtors in Miami FL and see what’s on the market. There’s a great deal of variation in price, quality and location, but with the help of these experienced realtors you should have little trouble finding something that suits your needs and your budget.

New York City, NY

Now, we wouldn’t be able to forgive ourselves if we left this one off of our list; New York is notorious for its exorbitant rent prices and suboptimal rental properties available on the market. While this makes New York a pretty awful place to live as a renter, it means one thing and one thing only for landlords: big profits!

Any landlord looking to get in on the NYC market will have to face a prohibitively expensive median home price of over $650,000. This price will deter many landlords from the get-go, and those who don’t run after hearing the median home price might do just that when they hear how slowly property appreciates; 2.2%! This is hardly an exceptional rate of growth by any standard!

What may bring many landlords-hopeful back is the median monthly rent price. This is the saving grace that makes New York City one of the best cities to be a landlord in. The median monthly rent price for a two bedroom apartment is a staggerin $3,600 a month! With rent prices like these, you can count on making your investment back in no time!

If you want to take advantage of this prime rental market, you’ll need to get in touch with the real estate agents in New York City. These skilled, experienced real estate professionals are your best shot at finding rental properties in good condition, below market value. With their help, you’ll be set up in the New York City rental game in no time!

Nashville, TN

There are a lot of things that might spring to mind when you think about Nashville TN; country music, the Grand Ole’ Opry, cowboys and Tennessee whiskey are all likely to make an appearance. One thing that might not immediately spring to mind, however, is just how great a place Nashville is for rental property owners!

That’s right; Nashville has a booming rental market, spurred on by a low unemployment rate and rapid population growth. Despite these factors, rent prices in Nashville are still a reasonable $1,400 a month, far lower than those in many other metropolitan cities of comparable size. While this price is somewhat low, let us tell you why buying rental properties here is a good idea.

The answer to that question is the property appreciation rate. While Nashville has a relatively average $323,000 median home that isn’t going to knock anyone’s socks off, the property appreciation rate of 9.8% makes this a great place to invest, especially as a landlord. As time goes on, you’ll see both increased demand for rentals and increased property values. It’s a win-win, plain and simple!

If you’d like to take advantage of this opportunity, your best bet is getting in touch with local realtors in Nashville TN. These skilled, experienced real estate professionals will do everything in their power to find reasonably priced properties that will make good rentals. Before you know it, you might be set up as a landlord in Nashville TN!

Conclusion

Becoming a landlord is a long and difficult process, but if you choose the right city to set up in, you can make that process a lot shorter and a lot easier. We hope we’ve given you some good ideas regarding where you want to start off in this business, and hopefully helped you better understand how to start your own rental business. From our team to yours, we wish you the best of luck!

Amazon HQ2 decision announcement

More than a year later, Amazon has finally decided where it will host its Amazon HQ2: And although the decision was surprising in a way, we’re very glad our predictions were in many ways confirmed.

If you are a long-time reader of this blog, you will remember that we’ve written about how different their process picking a new location was and we wondered the following question: will Amazon HQ2 set a new commercial real estate trend? In the article, we singled out that the “backward bidding” process of a company asking governmental offices to make an offer to host the company would not be something that would be repeated a lot because almost no company has the power that Amazon does. And that seems true so far. No other company tried. But, doing the devil’s advocate, it’s too early to call this because many companies might be waiting for Amazon to finish its process to evaluate the pros and cons of said strategy, not to mention the fact that doing that while it’s still going on poses a problem, as the cities couldn’t bid two companies at one time.

However, we’ve also mentioned the trend of companies expanding to the east and a worry about community building. And those two we can officially say, Amazon chose Long Island City in Queens, New York and Arlington in Virginia as their Amazon HQ2 location.

Wait, hold on… it’s two locations?

Yup. It seems that the original plans for an Amazon HQ2 – which promised 50,000 high paying jobs and to act as a full equal to the Seattle branch – was changed along the way, and the reason is exactly all the worrying and backlash that local communities raised on the wake of the announcement of their Amazon HQ2 shortlist. While no one disagreed with the benefits the infusion of jobs would bring, situations like traffic, homelessness and the higher housing prices and gentrification a big and sudden move like this would bring, seem to have affected Jeff Bezos and the rest of Amazon’s executives who decided to split into two offices in two different cities. It’s still a big move! Both cities will split in two the number of jobs: 25k for Long Island City and 25k for Arlington. The median salary of $150,000 and $2.5 billion worth of investment in each city.

But for Amazon, aside from addressing these issues and diminishing its impact, it’s also a smart move as it benefits from top talents from two major metropolitan areas – as the city of Long Island is very close to New York City and Arlington is very close to Washington DC; combined with a good public transport system, commuting promises to be fairly easy for its new employees.

This idea of expanding went even deeper and Amazon announced another commercial real estate investment in building a hub in Nashville – which was on Amazon HQ2 shortlist too - to oversee customer fulfillment (see the worrying with community development again?), transportation and supply chain activities. This one is more modest, employing *only* 5,000 people.

Amazon HQ2 Timeline

Let’s go back a bit to understand the Amazon HQ2 timeline and how the whole process came to be. It’s been quite a saga. Founded in Seattle and operating from there for about 23 years, Amazon unveiled to the public in September of 2017 that it was expanding. It would build a massive new headquarters outside of Seattle. There would be nothing special about this if it wasn’t for the fact that, instead of issuing a press release to do that, they issued a request for proposals! An invitation for metropolitan areas, states, counties and cities to send the company a detailed plan of how they would receive the company, their investment of $5 billion and 50,000 employees.

Soon the local governments went into a frenzy. Lots of localities sent proposals - some went all out with their campaign. At the beginning of 2018, the Amazon HQ2 shortlist with 20 finalists was announced. It consisted in:

Atlanta
Austin
Boston
Chicago
Columbus
Dallas
Denver
Indianapolis
Los Angeles
Miami
Montgomery County (Maryland)
Nashville
Newark
New York City*
Northern Virginia*
Philadelphia
Pittsburgh
Raleigh
Toronto
Washington DC

* Several municipalities from New York and Virginia sent proposals, so Amazon aggregated all of them into one, and, interestingly enough, those two were the victors.

From there to now, the relocation team visited all those Amazon HQ2 finalists several times. The frequency of some visits made some cities believe they were front-runners and the press made a few bogus predictions which irritated Amazon executives that thrive on secrecy

Though there was never a set date for the decision - the Amazon HQ2 timeline within the request for proposals only said “2018” - the announcement came November 13 through a press release.

Amazon HQ2 finalists future


For the Amazon HQ2 finalists that didn’t make it, we believe there are two big takeaways. The first one is that quiet wins the race. A lot of cities’ officials really went out there with their marketing plans to lure the company and make their city the place for the new Amazon HQ2 location. One mayor wrote 1,000 5-star reviews on random products as a way to raise awareness to their campaign, another city sent a giant cactus to Jeff Bezos and one city even went as far as guaranteeing they would officially change their name to Amazon! Arlington and Long Island did no flashy things. Everyone knew they were in the running but they remained quiet and professional about it – which was probably important, as other cities were criticized by Amazon executives for giving details about the negotiations being made. However understandable it is to keep constituents in the loop, from a business standpoint Amazon needed the industrial secrecy and New York and Virginia probably understood that and thought “you know what? If constituents feel it’s a problem, they can complain later: it’s best to take the risk. Don’t want to err on the side of caution”

And the second takeaway is that there’s still hope. Well, not of becoming an actual Amazon HQ2 location; that dream is over. However, one thing not many people are talking regarding the whole process is the amount of data Amazon got off the whole process. It’s safe to say that, in the digital age, virtually every company works with data, right? But for Amazon, who relies on a big read of consumers and professionals profiles, this whole process was more than just a search for a place to relocate. They had access to a wide variety of data, including proprietary information about real estate sites under development, details about talents, local labor costs, building codes, infrastructure and budgeting plans for each city. That’s a scary window into the near future, which – if diligently studied and put to practice – can put Amazon even more in the lead in the business game. So, don’t be surprised if Amazon starts dabbling with real estate development – sometimes not necessarily related with their classic operation - in cities on its Amazon HQ2 shortlist. It wouldn’t be anything new; there are precedents in Seattle with parks and infrastructure investments made from 2010 to 2016, and, in fact, one might say that several cities that didn’t even make it onto the Amazon HQ2 shortlist have already seen this sort of investment this year; our Spokane Real Estate Agents have been busy ever since with the influx of workers coming to Spokane, Washington for the smaller offices dedicated to specific branches like machine learning and cloud computing that Amazon has set up there. Likewise in cities like Ottawa and Vancouver (Canada).

There are still a lot of questions left to answer regarding the two Amazon HQ2 locations, and it will be interesting to follow this story. Which Amazon HQ2 location will deal with what? Will each focus on a different aspect of such a diverse business? Will there even be a separation of duties between the two branches? Will they be subordinate to Seattle? Will Seattle employees temporarily relocate at least to jumpstart the expansion? How will housing prices behave in those cities? What will the overall impact the move will pose to those two already pretty big metropolitan areas? New York, which almost entered our Best Cities for Singles list this year, is definitely entering it in the near future. But will it become too overwhelming? Too massive? How will the local government deal with it in a nice responsible way? Will it cause a huge hipster food market gentrification? Does the fact that Arlington got picked and The Washington Post being owned by Jeff Bezos mean anything besides smart asset management and proximity to the center of American power (Washington DC)?

Get your popcorn ready and let’s see! But for now, feel free to make your best prophet prediction on our comments!