Saturday morning I took the camera and my bike and cycled over to the site of our new house to get some exterior photos (I already have interior ones from the pre dry wall inspection we were invited to join last week). So, here is the front of the house so far.
After that, I cycled over to the recently closed Chevy’s, and around the marina area there (trying to find a different way back along the docks, but I didn’t find one and ended up going back down Tinker and through Bayport).
Since Bayport in Alameda is a very new development, I wondered how good the mapping services online where at getting updated. I chose three that offer maps and satellite photos: Yahoo Maps (beta), Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live.
All three have the same mapping results in terms of the number of roads within the new development that they know, although Google shows more of them on the hybrid view (both Yahoo and Live can zoom further in when the hybrid mode is disabled, and then they too show the names of the smaller roads).
Google and Live seem to have identical photos for the area. Both show the site before any work had begun on building the houses (probably 3 years ago at least). Yahoo however is a clear winner here since it has photos showing completed houses in the south east corner of the development. The models and the early phases are clearly visible and completed.
We were in the sales office today and learned of a new sales procedure to be used from the next release (in two weeks). Instead of the in-person lottery, they are going to use a telephone based system where people call in and leave a message on the answerphone indicating the lot they are interested in, and optionally a second choice. The sales office will call the winners back later on the Saturday, or on Sunday to make an appointment for the initial paperwork to be completed.
I have also tried to update the graphs from the information Carl provided (with some different phase numbers taken from the old master plan, and the fact that the next Cove release is in fact phase 44 (which matches the original plan).
Thanks to Bayport_Resident for posting the prices from Saturday’s release in the Bayport discussion forums. My database has been updated with the new average prices, so the graph for the Cove series will now include this phase.
I wasn’t in the country for this release, so I don’t have any information about the attendance, but I did notice a followup posting to the price information stating that a couple of plan 6 homes were not sold. That’s the second time a lottery has finished with homes unsold – something that never happened in the early days (although the plan 6 homes did always seem harder to sell, based a lot I suspect on the lack of a real model for that plan).
Another two releases tomorrow: one Cove and one Pointe. The top end of the Cove now exceeds the $1M mark; the same plan was just $810,548 back in phase 1.
After tomorrow’s lottery I also have to drop by the e-waste drop off day and dispose of a couple of old monitors and a dead DVD player. If you live on Alameda, and have some old electronics to dispose of, you can dispose of them between 10am and 2pm at no cost. Just remove any batteries as they’re not accepting those.
Took an after dinner walk around parts of Bayport in Alameda looking for houses with halloween decorations. Nothing like the decorations I saw last year at Ingleside in San Francisco, but lots of houses had carved pumpkins and were feeding the trick or treat kids. The buried witch is from the house I am awarding nominating as best decorated in Bayport.
I have been working on moving the graph generation from a spreadsheet on my laptop to something more automated, and also integrating the date information kindly provided by Jennifer and Carl into them. Now I have something I think will be the beginning of a more flexible graphing page where you will be able to select which plans and which date ranges or phase ranges you wish to graph. For the moment I have set it to only generate three graphs, one for each collection, but watch for the form based system with options for other graphs soon. You can see the graphs at a new URL: https://bluedonkey.org/bayport/, although I will probably continue to link to the graphs from here as well.
For those interested in what is going on behind the scenes here, I have entered all the data into a database on the webserver, and using a PHP script I can extract subsets of the data from the database and the plot these graphs using a package called JpGraph. JpGraph seems to be very powerful. I don’t think I am really scratching the surface of what it can do so far – expect more graphs to follow.
Also, if anybody has min & max prices for each plan in each release, I have slots for that in the database too. I might then see about plotting a vertical on each release point that covers the range of prices for that plan on that day.
As ever, Carl was quick to provide the average prices; I have been swamped at work though and did not manage to get the graphs updated for phase 32. So here is an update for both 32 and 34 (which is being released this morning). I think we’re going to wait for phase 37 since the Cove plans are the ones we are really interested in. I just hope that the dates for the next few Cove releases do not clash with any of our pre-booked travel…
As always, the master plan is updated as well with these two phases now greyed out.
Once again, thanks to Carl for the numbers. As those who are on the Bayport MSN group will know, we are once again considering Bayport (in fact I would have liked to be at today’s lottery, but once again travel plans got in the way of that). I am going to get all the paperwork updated though so that we are back on the pre-approved list for the next ones (plan to bike over in a minute to sort that out). The master plan has been updated too.
How was this morning’s lottery for those that went? Is the turnout still as high?
Thanks to Carl once again for the average price information for the last two releases. I have updated the graphs (and will do the master plan as soon as I’ve posted this).
