Start here: what a market actually is
A housing market is not a mood and not a headline. It is a quantity of buildings, a rate at which they change hands, and a supply of money to pay for them. Almost every confusing thing said about housing becomes legible once those three are held apart.
These pages work through that machinery in order, and then through the place the machinery operates in: a valley region whose streets were laid out by an industry that has since gone.
Fresh entries
Housing and place
Overview — revised 2026-07-04
What this site covers
Four strands run through this site. The first is mechanism: how a local housing market produces the prices and the waiting times that people experience. The second is process: the ordered sequence a purchase or a sale actually follows, and where it usually breaks. The third is money: mortgages, carrying costs and the honest version of the renting-versus-owning comparison. The fourth is place: the housing stock of central Connecticut, how neighbourhood character is physically produced, and what an industrial past did to the shape of a valley town.
There is nothing here for sale and nothing on offer. The site describes how things work; it does not act in any transaction and it gives no advice about any individual property, loan or decision.
How the pages fit together
The mechanics pages are written to be read in dependency order. Start with how a local market works, because the vocabulary of every later page is defined there. Then read what moves prices, which separates what a buyer can pay from what a house is worth. The buying and selling sequences assume both. The money pages assume the price pages. The place pages stand on their own but explain why the stock in this region looks the way it does.
The reference pages — the glossary and the guide to reading a listing — are meant to be consulted rather than read through, and the rest of the site links into them wherever a term first earns its keep.
Subject pages
How a local housing market works
A town has thousands of houses and, at any moment, a few dozen of them for sale. Everything people call the market is produced by that small, shifting sliver.
What moves prices
There are two quite different questions hiding inside every conversation about house prices, and they answer to different forces on different timescales.
Buying a home: the sequence
Buying a house is less a decision than a sequence. Each step produces the information or the standing that makes the next one possible.
Selling a home: the sequence
Almost everything that determines how a sale goes is decided before the house is ever shown to anyone.
Surveys, inspections and searches
Two families of check run in parallel during a purchase. One asks whether the building is sound; the other asks whether the ownership is clean.
Mortgages in plain terms
A mortgage is a schedule. Once the shape of the schedule is clear, most of the vocabulary around it stops being intimidating.
Renting versus owning
The renting-versus-owning argument is usually conducted as a question of virtue. It is better handled as a question of cash flow and horizon.
The housing stock of central Connecticut
A street is a record of the decades that built it. Once the periods are legible, a great deal about a house can be inferred before entering it.
How neighbourhood character forms
Character sounds like an atmosphere. It is mostly a set of physical decisions, most of them taken long ago and most of them very hard to reverse.
Bristol and the clock-making valley
An industry lays out a town and then leaves. The streets stay, and they keep explaining an economy that no longer exists.
How to read a listing
Listing language is compressed, and compression hides things. The useful skill is converting each phrase back into the question it is answering.
Glossary
Most of the difficulty in a housing transaction turns out to be vocabulary rather than complexity. These are the terms this site uses.