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Billionaire Hughes purchases thousands of homes to rent | Armonk Homes
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#HBSHomeSearch Twitter Chat Recap | Armonk NY Homes
5 Big Tech Companies That Are Killing It On Facebook | Armonk Real Estate
via readwrite.com
Common Mistakes to Avoid on Your Facebook Page | Armonk Realtor
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.
Rising House Prices, Not Stocks, Make People Feel Wealthy | Armonk NY Real Estate
As a key influence on households’ spending decisions, the health of the housing sector trumps stock-market moves, a paper released this week by the National Bureau for Economic Research claims.
- European Pressphoto Agency
The study, written by prominent economists Karl Case, John Quigley and Robert Shiller, refines their existing study of what is called the wealth effect. Case and Shiller are well known names, especially on housing issues. Quigley, another luminary, died in May, before the research’s publication.
Most economists and policymakers agree asset price gains can be big drivers of consumer spending power. Rising home or stock prices are generally agreed to increase consumer spending, while falling asset prices cut the other way.
That said, economists and policymakers have had a hard time quantifying the wealth effect. That’s problematic for many reasons, but it’s even more so due to the fact that the housing market’s crash and apparent recovery are considered central to the overall fate of the economy. To that end, the Federal Reserve is pursing a policy course deliberately aimed at driving up all manner of asset prices in hopes its actions will boost household spending to power better overall growth.
In the paper, the economists update their decade-old work, drawing on a wider and more up-to-date set of data ranging from 1975 to the second quarter of 2012. The broader information changes and clarifies what was once thought about the wealth effect’s influence.
There is “at best weak evidence of a link between stock market wealth and consumption,” the economists wrote. “In contrast, we do find strong evidence that variations in housing market wealth have important effects upon consumption,” they said.
“An increase in real housing wealth comparable to the rise between 2001 and 2005 would, over the four years, push up household spending by a total of about 4.3%,” the paper stated. Meanwhile, “a decrease in real housing wealth comparable to the crash which took place between 2005 and 2009 would lead to a drop of about 3.5%.”
This finding upends the old understanding that housing gains tended to push spending higher by a wider margin that home price declines depressed spending, the economists wrote.
The paper’s conclusion provides some additional hope that a nascent housing sector recovery could in fact be a meaningful contributor to a broader acceleration in growth over coming years. It may also explain why even as the stock market has scored strong gains in recent years on the back of extremely aggressive monetary policy, growth to date has been so middling and disconnected from the story told by equities.
A note from Deutsche Bank sees housing contributing strongly to a better economy. “The wealth effect on consumer spending could be substantial” this year, the bank told clients. “We are projecting home price appreciation of 5-10% in 2013, which translates into a further increase in household assets, i.e. wealth creation, ranging between $860 billion and $1.720 trillion.”
“Through its direct and indirect effects, the housing sector alone could potentially contribute as much as 2% to real GDP growth this year,” Deutsche said.
via blogs.wsj.com
Home prices spike 19.4 percent in Chicago in December | Armonk Realtor
Median home prices in the city of Chicago shot up 19.4 percent in December from a year earlier, and sales of existing homes jumped 14.6 percent, according to the latest report from the Illinois Association of Realtors.
The median price rose a smaller 4.5 percent in the Chicago metropolitan area, and sales spiked 19.2 percent.
The report showed the median price in the city rose to $185,000, in December, up from $155,000 in the year-ago period. There were 1,806 homes sold, up from 1,576.
In the Chicago metropolitan area, the median price rose to $151,500 last month, up from $145,000 in December 2011. Home sales totaled 7,372, up from 6,184.
“Positive signs for the housing market continue,” Geoffrey Hewings, director of the Regional Economics Applications Laboratory at the University of Illinois, said in a statement.
“The housing market is likely to experience some bumpiness in the first quarter of the year until there is resolution of the fiscal challenges in Washington and Springfield.
Consumers are unlikely to explore major purchases, such as a home, when tax rates, mortgage interest deductions and pension obligations remain unresolved, he added
via suntimes.com
Massachusetts SJC ruling could further complicate foreclosure disputes | Armonk Real Estate
The state’s top court on Monday ruled in favor of a Canton woman fighting her foreclosure in a decision that puts more pressure on lenders to clean up seizure procedures, but also complicates efforts for borrowers to seek court relief from property take-backs.
The decision adds to several rulings made by the Supreme Judicial Court over the last several years that require foreclosing lenders to have proper paperwork in place before seizing a home.
In this case, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the lender, HSBC Bank USA, did not have standing to start a foreclosure process against homeowner Jodi B. Matt because it couldn’t prove that it held the mortgage on her house.
Under state law, foreclosing lenders are required to file a complaint in court under the state’s Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Civil Relief Act. That law offers certain legal protections to those who serve in the military. The lower court judge, Keith C. Long, ruled that HSBC may not have been the legal mortgage holder but had “a contractual right to become (the) holder” and therefore could start the foreclosure process.
The seven-member top court disagreed.
“We conclude that only mortgagees or those acting on behalf of mortgagees have standing to bring service member proceedings,’’ the court wrote in a decision authored by Judge Barbara A. Lenk.
via boston.com
Armonk 2012 Sales up 31% | Median Price down 17% | RobReportBlog
Armonk NY Sales 2012 2011 92 Sales 70 0.31 UP $862,500.00 Median Price $1,050,000.00 0.17 DOWN $150,000.00 Low Price $325,000.00 $9,300,000.00 High Price $2,950,000.00 3668 Ave. Size 3809 $328.00 Ave. Price/foot $310.00 207 Ave. DOM 209 0.9372 Ave. Sold/Ask 0.9378 $1,264,648.00 Ave. Sold Price $1,184,917.00
via trulia.com
Armonk NY Real Estate | Housing Becomes Hottest Trade of 2012
While the risks can be large, sometimes the biggest paydays on Wall Street come from making a contrarian bet on the most hated sector on the planet. This was never truer than during 2012.
The housing sector, which brought the financial system to its knees in 2008 and continued to be an albatross around the middle class for the next three years, was the hottest trade this year as consumer confidence improved and as the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The central bank even went so far as to purchase mortgage-backed securities.
The iShares U.S. Home Construction ETF (ITB) surged more than 75 percent in 2012 as shares of homebuilders such as Pulte Homes and Lennar doubled or nearly doubled and construction-related stocks like Home Depot jumped. More complicated mortgage-backed securities were among the biggest winners for hedge funds brave enough to buy them.
“They took the painful writedowns and survived the hit,” said Barry Ritholtz, CEO of Fusion IQ and author of The Big Picture blog. “And have you priced a mortgage lately? It’s 3.25 percent for a 30-year fixed.”
True to its function as a discounting mechanism, these stocks starting moving higher early on in the year in anticipation of a relatively sizeable increase in home prices.
It got there when prices climbed at a 4.3 percent annual rate in October, according to the latest seasonally-adjusted S&P/Case-Shiller 20-City Composite Index. That was higher than many economists predicted, but no surprise for buyers of these stocks.
“Since the businesses that were able to survive the home construction nuclear winter became so lean, they were highly leveraged to a pickup in business,” said Mitchell Goldberg, president of ClientFirst Strategy. “The homebuilding sector was one of those stories that you knew it would turn around eventually, but it took a heck of a long time.”
To be sure, the Home Construction ETF is down more than 60 percent from its high back in 2006. And during those days, home prices were posting double-digit annual gains on a monthly basis, according to S&P/Case-Shiller.
(Read More: Robert Shiller: Don’t Await Housing Boom)
Many investors think the easy money has been made in this trade and there will be tough sledding ahead again for the sector as unemployment stays elevated and foreclosures pressure prices.
“A lot of people seem to think that if the market turns around, that means more of the same,” said Professor Robert Shiller, Yale economist and co-creator of those very indexes, in an interview with CNBC this month. “We might see home prices go up a little bit above inflation, but it is not likely that we’ll see a real boom.”
So what’s the most hated sector going into 2013? Going by ETF performance, it’s natural gas with the U.S. Natural Gas Fund(UNG) down 27 percent in 2012. Feeling lucky?
via cnbc.com
For Sale By Owner Tips | Armonk NY Homes
If your home is worth considerably less than when you bought it, you may consider trying to dodge real estate commission fees and sell the home yourself so you can at least walk away with a little something. Trying to sell without an agent isn’t for the faint of heart. But if you have the time, skills and emotional wherewithal to go it alone, here are a few things to consider in the ultra-important pre-sale phase.
Price it right
Taking into account its condition, what comparable homes in your neighborhood are selling for (search on Zillow to find out!) and the state of the overall market in your area, it’s really important that you price your home appropriately. Remember: fair market value! After all, studies show that homes priced higher than 3 percent of their market value take longer to sell. And the longer it sits on the market, the less interest there is from potential buyers. Want your house to move quickly? Consider pricing it 2-3 percent below competing offers.
Prepare your home
The idea is to make your home look as attractive as possible (think showroom condition) as its condition will affect how quickly it sells and the price the buyer is willing to offer. First impressions are the most important, so make minor repairs (leaky faucets), remove personal items and declutter so that the home looks both spacious and inviting. Can’t bear to part with years of possessions? There are professionals who can help. For about $85 an hour, the folks at clutterbusters.com will make your home more salable. And a clean, organized home can only result in your getting a better sale price.
Stage your home
You might even consider staging your home. While it can be costly (several thousand dollars), staged homes tend to sell faster than non-staged homes, averaging only 29 days on the market versus 145 days for non-staged homes, according to one estimate.
Get the word out
Doing this yourself is no easy task. It’s really important that you nail down your target audience and make it easy for them to reach you. Beyond that, pay for a weekly spot in the real estate section of your local newspaper, list your property online on Zillow, appeal to buyers on social networking sites, send direct mailings out and host open houses on the weekends. To attract the most buyers, you may also consider piggybacking on the competition’s open house dates/times.
Consider gimmicks/promotional tricks
Looking to stand out from the crowd? Hold a drawing or throw in some freebies (such as a complimentary weekend getaway in the Caribbean) to generate publicity and attention. It can’t hurt and may even help.
via zillow.com