Welcome to the Trank Real Estate Blog!

They really ought to teach this stuff in school: real-life, day-to-day economics. Elma youngsters out on their own for the first time are usually left to trial and error when it comes to mastering things like how to lay out a personal budget or use credit advantageously. Or even how to go about selecting a bank, or opening a checking account…

So when it comes to buying their first Western New York home, it’s very common for newcomers to put off confronting the whole daunting issue. When you’re...

Western New York real estate news is fairly predictable—at least compared with some of the stories that filter in from the rest of the world. Here in East Aurora, for instance, wherever a new home is being built, you’re likely to see familiar evidence like stacks of lumber and drywall, cartons of nail gun ammo, sacks of cement, and workmen hustling around as they put everything together.

Nary a printer in sight.

Not so in China. According to The Washington Post, the real estate news includes a...

When you do a web search for “average house price in East Aurora,” you come up with a lot of good, not-so-good, and just plain lame information. If you were looking for a general idea of what the current market says that homes like yours in your neighborhood are worth, the results are likely to be more amusing than anything else.

You always come up with the national sites’ average listing price for homes for sale in the Southtowns. Depending upon how recently their data engine found and tossed...

It was only a few years ago that the last thing a prospective East Aurora home buyer had to worry about was being outbid. Those were the days when the bottom seemed to be falling out of the East Aurora real estate market. Anyone brave enough to be looking to buy at a time when the real estate market was frightening most folks away was not only plucky—they were also alone. Sellers who had to move no matter what found themselves forced to accept offers that they knew were well below their property...

Residential sales in Elma—in fact, all real estate dealings anywhere—remain the most local of commercial transactions. If your house is in San Francisco, a price spike in suburban Newark is probably of little interest, unless you plan on moving anytime soon. Even so, the new projection for overall U.S. residential sales had to perk up area homeowners’ interest.

The “best home sales market in eight years” was the forecast—along with “mortgage originations that will likely rise” and “larger gains...

When you do a web search for “average house price in Elma,” you come up with a lot of good, not-so-good, and just plain lame information. If you were looking for a general idea of what the current market says that homes like yours in your neighborhood are worth, the results are likely to be more amusing than anything else.

You always come up with the national sites’ average listing price for homes for sale in Western New York. Depending upon how recently their data engine found and tossed out d...

It does seem that whenever a story about some faraway homeowners association finds its way into East Aurora area newspapers, nearly always it’s because something has gone awry. Either there’s an ongoing dispute about a flag display (“Indiana Couple Violate Rules for Flying U.S. Flag”), a fencing disagreement (“Border Feud is Childish and Dangerous”), or something else to catch readers’ eyes. The pettier, the better (“North Carolina Man in Dispute over Pansies Planted in Common Area”). Why does t...