“Shipping Wars is on A&E and it follows six truck drivers that use uShip to bid on jobs and ship unusual items across the country. It’s pretty interesting stuff. Some of the cargo they ship is really interesting from giant gnomes to giant lumberjacks and ferris wheels and things like that.”

Some have called it a profitable solution to clearing some of the devastated land. KUT’s Andy Uhler talks with Vicky Garza, a reporter for the Austin Business Journal, about how the investment is not only poised to bring jobs to Central Texas, but will also spell relief for some Bastrop landowners.

For some landowners it will be a huge relief because a lot of assistance is going to dry up in the coming months. And that’s going to leave tens of thousands of scorched trees in Bastrop County and some landowners can have as many as three hundred trees, and it costs about $300 a tree to have them removed.

What it means to be hip, or trendy, doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re getting volume. You might be considered maybe more exclusive, and getting a higher-end clientele, at least for a little while. But because of social media and things like that, people discover it, and then suddenly it’s not as exclusive as it might once have been.

The government is pretty debt-averse right now. Obviously they’re not wanting to go to the Legislature and ask for these huge bond issues or for appropriations to build these new buildings. What this enables them to do is to go instead to those private organizations who have an interest; you can have the same kind of development but without the huge bond issues or taking on government debt.

She spoke with KUT’s Andrew Uhler about how F7 Group bridges the understanding gap between veterans and companies that could hire them.

They found out through their talks with companies that a lot of hiring managers just didn’t understand the military mindset and the skills that they learned, and they also have this misconception that veterans might have post-traumatic stress disorder, or they might be unstable employees, but that’s simply not the case. The biggest issue is that a lot of veterans don’t have a good support system.

Vicky Garza with the Austin Business Journal reports that the city of Austin may eliminate parking requirements for development in the Central Business District. She spoke with KUT’s Emily Donahue about the costs and how many existing spaces are actually used.

Austin’s parking requirements have resulted in an abundance of ugly structures that are vastly underutilized, Riley said, adding that occupancy in downtown parking garages averages 26 percent.

Also, “parking requirements subsidize driving by hiding the cost of parking in higher costs for everything else, making downtown more expensive and more congested,” he said.

Estimates place the cost of structured parking in Austin at $20,000 to $25,000 per space. Parking also affects site layout for new development.

Sandra Zaragoza writes about Grant in this week’s Austin Business Journal. She tells KUT’s Nathan Bernier about his plans to make better use of the center’s space in a time of tight budgets.

He’s looking at the Long Center as kind of underutilized. He would like to really bring in more performances, use the indoor spaces, the outdoor spaces; he actually did that recently with Architects of Air, which was a really successful, kind of nontraditional performance.

KUT’s Nathan Bernier spoke with Tony Quesada – managing editor of the Austin Business Journal – about this trend, which was the subject of an in-depth ABJ piece this week by Cody Lyon.

Tony Quesada:

Some of these projects have been in some stage of development for as many as five or six years. Particularly, the closer you get to downtown, the ability to get financing for these has come back. That was really what put these projects into their dormant state in the first place.

There is huge demand for multifamily apartments. Citywide occupancy rates are about 97%, which is about as high as it really can go.

The further you get out [of the city’s urban core], the more you may have to be creative in respect to your financing. You may have to get some private investors involved and other types of financing instruments, as opposed to straight debt financing. It can be done, though. There are people who are interested because citywide it’s still a good market for apartments.

Cody Lyon’s article took a close look at three projects in particular: Genesee (South 1st Street), the Lakeshore Project (just south of Lady Bird Lake) and District at SoCo (East Oltorf Street).

Visit the Austin Business Journal’s website for more about this subject.

Crossbeam executives are bullish on Austin’s multifamily market, as are other investors and developers. The city has grown rapidly in recent years, but the recession has stalled apartment construction. That’s led to a citywide occupancy rate of 96 percent and 11 consecutive quarters of positive absorption, according to analysts at Real Page Inc. CBRE reports that rents rose 8 percent in 2011.

I would describe it as sort of an insider’s club for home sellers. What you have are people who, for whatever reason, choose to market their homes more discreetly. The silent market is really a term that was coined by some folks who market homes not through the traditional multiple-listing service, but they do it by word of mouth. Probably the biggest benefit to not advertising on the multiple-listing service is the discretion that you are afforded by going quiet – by marketing quiet.

If you’re in a hurry to sell your home, then the multiple-listing service is the way to go. But if you’ve got a lot of time to kill, you know, you’re not really thinking about selling your home but you’re flirting with the idea of selling your home, if you put it on the silent market then you are able to sort of test the market and see whether or not there’s even any interest at all.

One broker that I spoke with told me that this is generally an area within five miles of the Capitol. He said that the homes start at around $500,000 and go up to $1 million or more.

Read Cody Lyon’s full article online at the Austin Business Journal.