Bedford, Armonk Lead in Highest 2012 Average Sold Price | RobReportBlog
Average 2012 Sold Price $1,264,648.00 Armonk $1,030,634.00 Chappaqua $892,754.00 Pound Ridge $639,674.00 North Salem $1,356,741.00 Bedford NY $652,715.00 South Salem $1,083,327.00 Bedford Hills $781,510.00 Mount Kisco $846,804.00 Katonah
In this Jan. 5, 2013, photo a “for sale” sign is seen outside a home in Glenview, Ill. Average U.S. rates on fixed mortgages rose this week but remained near record lows, keeping home buying more affordable. (Photo: Nam Y. Huh AP)
Story Highlights
- Home prices in the 20-city index slid 0.1% in November from October
- Only NY shows year-over-year drop
- Low supply contributes to higher prices
Home prices rose 5.5% in the 12 months through November, providing more evidence of a recovering housing market, a closely-followed report showed Tuesday.
The Standard & Poor’s Case-Shiller index of 20 major cities showed prices rising in 19 of the 20 cities for the 12-month period. Prices fell only in New York — by 1.2%.
Compared with October, the index showed a 0.1% decline.
“Housing is clearly recovering,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the home price index committee.
The November numbers were stronger than October with 10 cities posting gains month to month. Only seven cities showed monthly gains in October’s Case-Shiller report. Declines in 10 cities are not unexpected for November because of winter weather and normal seasonal slowdowns in housing markets.
In Phoenix, which has led the recovery, home prices posted the strongest monthly gain, up 1.4%. San Francisco also saw a 1.4% rise. Minneapolis followed with 1%. Chicago was among the weakest with a 1.3% drop in November from October.
The housing market helped pulled the economy into recession in 2007 but it has finally emerged as a bright spot in the economy. Prices are rising as are both new and existing home sales.
Case-Shiller’s data shows the Southwest — represented by Phoenix and Las Vegas — have the strongest home price gains while Southeastern cities Miami and Tampa are close behind. Year over year, Phoenix prices are up almost 23%.
California’s cities are also showing strong improvment but the Northeast and Midwest are lagging.
Other home price data also show increases for last year that came in higher than most economists expected.
Prices are being propelled by several factors.
In December, the nation’s supply of homes for sale fell to a 4.4 months, based on that month’s sales pace. That was the lowest level since May 2005, the National Association of Realtors says.
The supply situation, which has been tightening for six months, has led to multiple bids for houses in some markets.
“Any new listings are getting eaten up right away,” says EJ Bowlds, managing broker for Coldwell Banker Bain in Mercer Island, Wash. Multiple offers of 6 to 10 per home are now common, he says.
A slowly improving economy and low interest rates, which ticked up slightly to 3.42% the week ended Jan. 24, are also fueling demand.
Prices are expected to keep moving higher this year, many economists and market watchers say.
Prices will rise an average of 3.1% in 2013, according to the most recent survey of more than 100 economists and real estate experts surveyed by market watcher Zillow.
“We have probably hit bottom and we’ve probably come off the bottom a little,” says Lawrence White, economist at New York University Leonard N. Stern School of Business.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Today, we’re introducing Vine: a mobile service that lets you capture and share short looping videos. Like Tweets, the brevity of videos on Vine (6 seconds or less) inspires creativity. Now that you can easily capture motion and sound, we look forward to seeing what you create.You can read more about the app on the Vine blog. Vine is currently available on the iPhone and iPod touch. You can download it for free from the App Store. We’re working now to bring it to other platforms, so stay tuned for that.
Rather than tell you more about the app, we thought we’d just show you some of our favorite videos:
Posted by Michael Sippey (@sippey)
VP of ProductPosted by @twitter at 8:10 AM
Facebook seems simple. After all, even your mom is using it, right? But there are a lot of reasons your Facebook page isn’t getting the rabid fan-base you think it deserves. With Graph Search rolling out it’s going to be even more important to fine-tune your page to get those fans engaged. Here are the top 6 reasons for lackluster fan pages we see on a regular basis.
Having an inexperienced manager
A successful Facebook page takes someone who knows how to activate a community to attract, engage and keep your fans, and encourage them to share with their friends so they become fans, too. While it may seem some community managers spend an inordinate amount of time coming up with cute e-cards and photos, if you look carefully, and study when and what they post, you will see a method to the madness. Posts aren’t really random at all. They’re carefully timed and balanced between posts that make people laugh, think and engage. They take into consideration the times the community responds best to posts. All together it tells a story.Posting too much about YOU and not enough about your FANS
In general, only 20% of the posts you put on your page should be about you and your brand. I know, that’s hard to swallow, but are you advertising? Get a billboard.A good community manager is always on the lookout for ways to nurture the community and support them as well as your brand. Managing the content so you spread the love brings fans back again and again and makes them feel part of a community instead of a target to market at.
Being oblivious to who your fans are
This is very common. When was the last time you looked at the profile of a fan? What are their interests? What kinds of post do they share? Do they have a blog you could share with your community? Knowing your community takes time and research, but it pays off big in loyal fans.Not responding to requests, questions, posts
If you aren’t talking back to us, we just figure you’ve checked out. Respond to questions as quickly as possible. Resist the urge to delete a negative comment. Instead look at it as an opportunity to engage the user, make them happy and turn them into evangelists. When someone compliments you, say thank you. Then go see how you can return the favor.Posting too much
Flooding your fan’s news feeds with content makes them tune you out. It also causes Facebook to wonder if anybody cares about you but you. If you don’t get great engagement in the first place, and most of the posts are from you you will likely lose page rank and stop showing up in the news feeds of your fans. Basically, you’re dead to them. We recommend a post a day until you get good engagement and then, depending on how many fans you have and how engaged they are, you can step it up to 2 or even 3 posts per day. Don’t forget to spread those posts out over the day, not dump them all in your timeline at once.Not posting enough
Did you forget you have a Facebook page? Post like mad at first, then decide nobody cared so you quit posting? Nobody is going to care about what you have to say if you clearly don’t care about your page. Try for once a day, but twice a week is a bare minimum.You forgot to tell people
How are you letting people know you have a Facebook page? Is it in your emails, on your website, in your brochures? Don’t forget to add the address, too: it’s not as intuitive as you might think for people to search for you. They just might find a similar product and quit looking for you altogether.
Yesterday Twitter launched a new video sharing app called Vine. The service lets you compose and share six-second videos using its iPhone app. As Sharon Vaknin pointed out, currently there’s no way to set any of your videos, or even your profile, to “private.” Any videos you upload are going to be public; viewable by anyone using the service.
There is a way to create a video using the Vine app and share it privately, however. It’s not an ideal workaround (that would be privacy settings in the app) but it’s an easy way to still be able to get creative with Vine and share your work with friends without the rest of the Vine community seeing it.
What you’ll need to do is create a Vine as you normally would. Once you tap “Next” to go to the share screen, the video is saved to your Camera Roll. Since the video is already saved, you can either turn off the “Share on Vine” switch and tap “Done,” or go back to the compose screen, tap the X, and delete the post.
With the video saved to your Camera Roll you can then share it — privately — through MMS, iMessage, e-mail, and so forth.
Again, it’s not an ideal sharing method, but it does allow you to maintain your privacy should that be a concern.
