Author: JOSIAH MURDAUGH

If you have to sell a house after a job transfer in Orange Park, or you’re timing a listing around the people who do, start with the base calendar. Orange Park sits closer to Naval Air Station Jacksonville than almost any other housing in Clay County, and that calendar drives more of this market than … Continued

A lot of the older houses I look at here have square footage that doesn’t show up on the county record. An enclosed carport. A Florida room. A fourth bedroom that used to be the garage. Most of the time the current owner didn’t do it. They bought the house that way in 2004 and … Continued

Most people who inherit a house spend the first few months worrying about the wrong thing. They worry about the cleanout and the condition, when what’s actually holding everything up is paperwork. If you want to sell an inherited house in Orange Park, the paperwork is the job. Get it together and the rest moves. … Continued

Clay County’s FEMA flood maps are being redrawn. The county has said the revised maps are anticipated to take effect in spring 2027, and some parcels are proposed to move into Special Flood Hazard Areas while others move out. If your house is in an Orange Park flood zone, or might be about to be, … Continued

Yes, but not the way most people think, and in Clay County the effect is smaller than it is almost anywhere else. That’s actually good news for Orange Park home values, and most sellers here have no idea they’re sitting on it. The short version: the district as a whole is strong enough that a … Continued

A guy called me last year from a parking lot off Blanding because he didn’t want to have the conversation at his own house. He’d been served eleven days earlier and hadn’t opened the envelope. He was sure somebody was coming to change his locks that week. He had months. He just didn’t know it, … Continued

People usually call me somewhere in the middle of a bad month. So the first thing I want to do is take the mystery out of the process, because not knowing what happens next is most of what makes this stressful. Here’s the whole thing in order. Step one: a phone call, about ten minutes … Continued

If you’re getting ready to sell a house in Orange Park, this trips up more people than anything else on the list, and it costs them weeks. Your mail says Orange Park. That tells you almost nothing about which government handles your property. The incorporated Town of Orange Park had 9,089 people in the 2020 … Continued

The Orange Park housing market gets written about one number at a time, which is how you get two articles in the same week saying opposite things. The short version: Clay County is a seller’s market by inventory and a slow one by how long houses actually sit. Both are true at once, and which … Continued

We had a contractor working at a house and he backed his truck across the yard, which is what anybody would do. The septic tank lid was under there. It gave out and the back end of the truck dropped into the tank. Nobody got hurt. The truck came out. The day was gone. That’s … Continued

You can sell a mobile home in Orange Park without owning the ground under it. People do it constantly out here. It just isn’t a real estate sale, and that catches almost everybody off guard. It’s closer to selling a truck. Which sounds like a joke until you’re standing at a tax collector’s office holding … Continued

I spent 11 years as a licensed realtor, and most of that was working with for-sale-by-owner sellers and investors. So when somebody says they want to sell a house without a realtor in Orange Park, I don’t have the reaction most people in real estate have. I’ve watched it go fine. I’ve also watched it … Continued

Nobody sells the house the week they lose the job. They sell it five months later, after the severance is gone and the credit card has turned into the mortgage payment. By then somebody else is making the decision for them. Selling a house due to financial hardship in Orange Park goes very differently depending … Continued

If you’re at the point of typing “sell my house for cash” and adding Orange Park to it, you probably have five or six questions you’d rather ask somebody than read about on a homepage. Short version: yes we actually buy them ourselves, no you don’t fix anything, no you don’t clean anything out, and … Continued

I was cutting the grass at a house we’d just bought and the yard next door had gotten away from somebody. Waist high. The kind where you’re not sure what’s in it. It was pulling down the whole street, so when I finished ours I kept going and did theirs. Somebody called the police on … Continued