The Bedford-Armonk Rotary Club is hosting charity softball games between the volunteer fire departments of Bedford Hills, Bedford Village, Katonah and Pound Ridge.
The games will be played from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 17,, at Bedford Memorial Park.
There will be food and beverages and children’s races will be held. Local car dealerships will be showing off their models. The proceeds go to local community charities.
Rain date is Saturday, Aug. 24.
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Pinterest has established itself as the dominant online source of visual inspiration. The social bookmarking site enables users collect and share photos of their favorite events, interests, and hobbies. Pinterest users spend more money, shop more frequently, and purchase items more often and in larger quantities than users on any other social network. It has become a huge traffic referral for businesses, but marketers often struggle with Pinterest content strategies. Enter Pinterest metrics.
It’s crucial for brands to understand whether their time spent on any social network is generating results. The number of followers you have is important, but it shouldn’t be the final arbiter of your Pinterest content strategy. Consistently measuring your activity on the platform will help you identify the types of content that resonate the most with your target audience. It will also help you increase visits to your website, and generate leads and sales.
Complete instructions — including a video walk-through — for setting up Pinterest for Business and tapping your analytics can be found in my post, Use Pinterest Web Analytics to Jumpstart Your Social Media Marketing.
You need to determine which of the Pinterest metrics below are most important to you given your marketing objectives. There are many tools available that enable you to track some or all of these metrics, including Google Analytics, Pinalytics, Cyfe, ShareRoot, Curalate, PinReach, and WordPress app WP Pinner. Keep the infographic below on hand to help you get going.
Mortgage applications barely edged up for the week ending August 2, with applications increasing only 0.2% from a week earlier, the Mortgage Bankers Associationreported.
Similarly, the refinance index remained unchanged, while the purchase index rose 1% from the prior week.
As a whole, the refinance share of mortgage activity once again stayed frozen at 63% of total applications.
The average contract interest rate for a 30-year, fixed-rate mortgage with a conforming loan balance inched up to 4.61% from 4.58%.
Additionally, the 30-year, FRM jumbo remained unchanged at 4.64%.
The average 30-year, FRM backed by the FHA escalated to 4.33% from 4.30%.
Meanwhile, the 15-year, FRM fell to 3.66% from 3.67%, and the 5/1 ARM went unchanged at 3.39%.
Mortgage applications edge up slightly | 2013-08-07 | HousingWire.
Swimming in tax foreclosures, Michigan’s Wayne Countytreasury office is planning to bundle hundreds of dilapidated tax foreclosure properties into one package at its fall auctions, reported Crain’s Detroit Business.
In the past, the treasurer’s office has experimented with bundling for cases such as subdivision projects that fell apart. This would be the first time the county has bundled so many properties, however.
The bundling is part of a strategy to best position the properties for the future. The idea is to make the bundle appear so unappealing that the properties don’t sell. Many of the properties have dilapidated structures that should be demolished, said the chief deputy treasurer, Dave Szymanski.
The number of bundled properties could be as little as 400 or as high as 1,000. Solitary dilapidated structures that sit in an otherwise solid block of residents would be at the top of the list, as opposed to several dilapidated structures in a largely vacant block.
Builders’ sales offices are being filled on weekends byhomebuyers looking to purchase a house before prices and interest rates climb higher in the Phoenix metro area. While more homes are being built than in 2012, the pace of the recovery is not accelerating as fast as had been anticipated, according to AZ Central.
Housing mini bubble begins to deflate | 2013-08-04 | HousingWire.
In the world of high-end New York real estate, actress and comedian Rosie O’Donnell is a regular. Now she’s at it again, listing two Big Apple properties.
Most recently, she has listed her 2-bedroom, 2.5-bath luxury apartment for $2.25 million in The Platinum, a full-service, award-winning condominium. Located at 247 W 46th St APT 2203, New York, NY 10036, the 22nd-floor unit (shown above) features floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the Midtown Manhattan cityscape.
According to The New York Times, O’Donnell signed a contract to buy the place for $1.97 million in 2007, with property records showing she closed the deal a year later. She has since been privy to The Platinum’s five-star, resort-quality amenities, including a golf simulator, fitness center, yoga studio, sauna, lounge and outdoor terrace. Times Square, Broadway theaters and the 45th Street headquarters for her public school program, Rosie’s Theater Kids, are also just a few blocks away.
The listing is held by The Corcoran Group‘s Ric Swezey.
Meanwhile, reports have been circulating that fashion designer Michael Kors has his eye onO’Donnell’s Greenwich Village duplex that she purchased for $8 million last year. The 130 West 12th St penthouse is now on the market for $10.95 million.
“Penthouse 11A is one of the most unique private residences situated in the heart of Greenwich Village,” listing agent Dennis Mangone of Douglas Elliman wrote in the listing description. Spanning more than 3,200 square feet, the 11th-floor suite has 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, spacious living and dining rooms, a chef’s kitchen and private terrace. The building has a 24-hour doorman and concierge as well as other resident-only amenities.
Here are some of the top stories this week in Chappaqua.
Potential Parking Solutions Tops This Week’s Chappaqua News | The Chappaqua Daily Voice.
Social media marketing is moving from its exciting adolescent phase to a more mature grownup status.
Online social media obsession driven by social web hormones and testosterone that drove social networks to hyperactivity are being replaced by tried and now proven activities and mature business processes. Digital marketing responsibility is now in the driving seat.
The dreaded phrase “what is the return on investment” is now seen as a conversation that needs to happen.
The dinner party conversations are no longer about Facebook or Twitter. An announcement about Instagram providing 15 second videos barely makes a ripple in the blogosphere. Social media is now part of the woodwork and is embedded in the web.
The after work and cocktail bar chats are now about when you are commencing a start up, designing your online store or launching an app.
Despite its move from sexy to staid and impending “ho hum” status, social media is embedded and integrated into almost all digital and even traditional marketing activities.
Learning to use social media effectively is now essential and required if you aren’t going to be “disrupted” by your competitors and fast growing start-ups.
So let’s look at it in context in the digital marketing ecosystem, consider core essentials and tips and tactics. These will help you get started and also optimize your current social media marketing activities.
The initial attraction of social media beyond connection and engagement was that is was “free”. Social networks allowed anyone to publish and market for free with ease.
Search engines also provide this advantage and being found on Google can be done two ways.
Earn the right to appear on page one of a search engine with optimized content and search engine optimization and it can make a large difference to your sales and inquiries. The clicks from earned search sits at around 75% of all search engine result page clicks.
This is called organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Now let’s quickly cover how to pay for appearing on the first page of Google
Google AdWords allows you to accelerate your brand discovery and click-throughs by paying to appear on page one for selected keywords and phrases. Stop the campaign and the traffic no longer turns up to your website or landing page.
It all comes down to measuring whether paying produces a positive return on investment. Spend a dollar and get a profit of two dollars means that it is an activity worth pursuing despite the cost.
Social media marketing is following the same route.
Read more at http://www.jeffbullas.com/2013/07/29/social-media-marketing-tool-box-62-tips-and-tactics/#LfJf7urcf0Ejgkvt.99
Social Media Marketing Tool Box: 62 Tips – Jeffbullas’s Blog.
First the good news: Mortgage interest rates ticked downward for a second straight week. But it’s still been a volatile ride in recent months, and the general direction of interest rates for home loans has been up.
What does that mean?
If you’re a home buyer, that means the money you’ve budgeted for housing doesn’t go as far, in terms of the price you can offer to pay.
If you’re a home seller or home owner, a spike in interest rates can sometimes stall or even reverse the trend of rising home values. But the damage of rising interest rates doesn’t appear to be as bad as you might expect. History tells the tale, as we’ll see in a moment.
As of Thursday, the latest average interest on a 30-year fixed-rate loan is 4.31 percent a year, according to the firm Freddie Mac. That’s down from 4.51 percent two weeks ago.
Still, current US mortgage rates are also up a full percentage point from where they stood back in January. So the fact that their upward race has stalled, for a couple of weeks at least, is welcome news for the housing market.
“Mortgage rates eased for the second consecutive week which should help to alleviate market concerns of a slowdown in the housing market,” Frank Nothaft, chief economist of Freddie Mac, said in a statement released with the weekly mortgage data. “Existing home sales for June were the second highest since November 2009 and new home sales were the strongest since May 2008.”
The progress in the housing market is important for the whole economy, providing some important fuel at a time when gross domestic product is growing only modestly.
Home prices have been rising, boosting consumer wealth, and construction jobs have been aided by a relative shortage of homes for sale.
Many economists say modestly rising mortgage rates aren’t likely to stop the housing recovery. For one thing, mortgage rates are still historically low.
History suggests that moves in mortgage rates can exert an influence on home prices – in the opposite direction. But in some cases the damage isn’t very bad.
US mortgage rates tick downward again: Good news for home prices? – CSMonitor.com.
CHAPPAQUA, N.Y. — Here are some of the top stories from this past week in Chappaqua:
Weeklong Heat wave Tops Chappaqua News | The Chappaqua Daily Voice.
Scarsdale Village officials notified residents Friday that Con Edison reported a power outage Thursday night and more blackouts are possible.
“The Con Ed sub-station located off Tompkins Road near the Public Safety Building, is not functioning as designed and is causing periodic outages in the north end of Fox Meadow and the Greenacres neighborhoods as well as a portion of White Plains (800-900 customers),” John D. Goodwin of the village manager’s office said in an email to residents. “The sub-station is designed to operate so that if a main feeder line is lost the sub-station trips to an alternate line or back-up line. The problem is that when the feeder line is lost due to the current excessive heat issues, the sub-station is “over-tripping” breaking the whole system down resulting in power loss to the resident.”
Goodwin said the system has been fixing itself over a two to four hour time period, though the problem is re-occurring.
“Con Edison engineers are working on a permanent solution. In the meantime, Con Ed has made some temporary changes to the sub-station to prevent over-tripping and, as a back-up, has a generator in the area in case the sub-station fails again prior to a permanent solution,” he said.
Power Outages Hitting White Plains, More Possible | The White Plains Daily Voice.