Between February 2012 and February 2013, Texas saw double-digit declines in the number of foreclosure filings, starts and completions, according to the latest analysis by Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac.
Over the 28 days ended Feb. 28, 2013, a total of 5,411 foreclosure notices were filed in the state of Texas — down 43.36 percent from the number of filings posted in February 2012.
The 2011 and 2012 droughts across much of the United States may be a harbinger of things to come, and “evidence is showing that many parts of the country may continue to experience moderate to severe drought in 2013 and possibly for several additional years,” the Denver-based American Water Works Association reported.
If that wasn’t scary enough, in December some 61.9 percent of the contiguous U.S. was in moderate to exceptional drought conditions, up from 28.2 percent a year ago, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a daily survey produced by a group of academic and government organizations.
I would guess it’s time we all turned our attention to saving water at our places of residence, which I feel some of us — but not enough! — are already doing. However, the big flaw in trying to target the single-family homeowner is that so many of us live in multifamily dwellings, either apartments or condominiums.
When the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency unveiled its WaterSense program at the end of 2009 it focused on new single-family residences. After watching the program slowly taking root, on Jan. 1 the EPA launched a similar labeling guidance program for new multifamily buildings.
We have just released the “Elliman Report: Manhattan & Brooklyn Rentals January 2013,” the leading resource on the state of the Manhattan and Brooklyn rental markets. As always, our market reports are produced in conjunction with Miller Samuel to provide you and your clients with the most comprehensive and neutral market insight available.
Although limited inventory kept rents near record levels, low mortgage rates and improving affordability continued to convert many would-be renters to first time buyers. This competition from the purchase market impacted the rental market by slowing the rapid rise in rental prices we had been seeing over the past two years. However, landlord concessions are still rare and we expect the improving economy and low vacancy rates to continue placing upward pressure on rents in the near term.We constantly look for ways to provide our clients with better information to enable them to make more informed decisions. Our efforts to make this market report series possible reflect my strong belief that in a market that is constantly changing, access to timely information is one of the greatest resources we can offer our clients. We are committed to providing the best information and services in the industry. Explore our full market report series covering Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, The Hamptons, North Fork, Westchester/Putnam, Miami, Boca Raton, Fort Lauderdale and Palm Beach
at http://www.elliman.com/marketreports.
It was deemed America’s new foreclosure capital in 2012, with a 53% increase in filings last year, but Florida officials wanted a change. So they took the bull by the horns.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, joined by the state’s Senate President Don Gaetz and House Speaker Will Weatherford, addressed a newly approved $60 million program for housing aid in Florida on Thursday.
The program, part of the multibillion-dollar national settlement that included cash payments to states, will fund homebuyer assistance, legal aid and foreclosure prevention.
“This is real relief for real people,” Bondi noted.
Florida’s total monetary benefits are over $8 billion in the settlement, with the $60 million in housing aid just one part of a larger settlement.
Broken down, the $60 million program includes $35 million for down payment assistance, $10 million for foreclosure counseling, $5 million for foreclosure backlog reduction, $5 million for legal aid and another $5 million for attorney general’s legal fees.
“We all know, living in Florida, we have been affected by the mortgage foreclosure crisis that has been in the state of Florida more so than just about any other state in America,” said Weatherford. “This has been a long time coming, to know that $8 billion of resources has come to our state to aid people in need, but more specifically the $60 million that we’ve agreed to in the last week that’s going to help people with counseling, with down payment assistance, etc.”
Florida homeowners received billions of dollars worth of direct mortgage assistance from banks. “Almost 50,000 Floridians have received at least $73,000,” said Bondi. “That’s a lot of money.”
Bondi said $200 million is still going through the legislative process and remains to be spent.
Bondi also took the opportunity to address those who faced wrongful foreclosure, but have yet to file a claim. This group respresents approximately 49% of the harmed homeowners in the state.
The Attorney General urged those who have yet to make their claims to follow up by visiting myfloridalegal.com to redeem the money they are owe.
Last week Facebook launched Graph Search. This is an attempt to turn Facebook into Google – i.e. make it a place where people go to ask questions, but with the supposedly added bonus that the information you receive is endorsed by people you know rather than people you don’t.
This is a very important step, not just for Facebook, because it could come to be understood as one of the critical opening skirmishes in the Battle of Big Data. How it plays-out could have enormous implications for the commercial future of many social media properties, including Google.
This is how the Battle of Big Data squares-up. On the one hand you have platforms, such as Google and Facebook, amassing huge behavioural data sets based on information that users give out through their usage of these infrastructures. Googlebook then sells access to this data gold mine to whom-ever wants it. On the other hand you have the platform users, who, up until this point, have been relatively happy to hand-over their gold. The reason for this is that these users see this information as being largely inconsequential, and have no real understanding of its considerable value or the significant consequences of letting an algorithm know what you had for lunch. The fisticuffs begins when these users start to understand these consequences – because in most instances, their reaction is to say “stop – give me back control over my data.”
There is an enormous amount riding on this. If users start to make demands to repatriate, or have greater control over, their data – this delivers hammer blows to the commercial viability of Googlebook type businesses, who are either making huge amounts of money from their existing data goldmine, or have valuations that are based on the future prospect of creating such goldmines. It also starts to open-up the field for new platforms that make data privacy and control a fundamental part of their proposition.
Initial reports from the field are not encouraging (for Facebook). There were immediate issues raised about privacy implications which Facebook had to pacify (see this Mashable piece) and significant negative comment from the user community – as reported in this Marketing Week article. See also this further analysis from Gary Marshall at TechRadar. It will be very interesting to see how this plays-out.
From another perspective, I think this announcement illustrates what Facebook believes is its advantage over Google – i.e. its sociability and the fact that it can deliver information that is endorsed by people that you know. The interesting thing about this is that the power of social media lies in its ability to create the processes that allow you to trust strangers. The value of the information can therefore based on the relevance or expertise of the source – not the fact that they are a friend. Google is the master of this in a largely unstructured way, and services such as Amazon or even TripAdvisor can deliver this via a more structured process. Facebook can’t really do this, because it neither has Google level access to enough broad-spectrum data, not does it have processes relevant to specific tasks (Trip Advisor for travel – Amazon for product purchase).
Content creation calendars and schedules are the bane of most serious bloggers’ and content managers’ lives, depending on which side of the creative block you’re on.
I straddled this fine line on many occasions until my Eureka moment. Having amalgamated my home radio and video studios I realised that I could double up on content creation with my business-consultant partner, a content reservoir of genius proportions.
Soon we had discovered a 3-in-1, then a 6-in-1, and finally a 10-in-1 content creation strategy.
When I say “radio and video studio” (actually my third bedroom), be assured it’s not exactly state of the art, although I have slowly acquired suitable equipment and created a workable dual studio.
In saying this, anyone with a computer, some sort of USB audio interface/mixer, a reasonable microphone and digital video camera or DSLR can achieve the same results. In this article I assume you are familiar with your gear so I’m not going to go into any detail on how to use each piece of equipment in the process.
Time costs!
One of the most valuable, and rarest assets of a successful business consultant is time. To maximise the genius of my partner, when time is in such short supply, is a hectic operation usually resulting in a minimal flow of great content. This is where my Eureka moment has paid incredible dividends and saved many hours in the generation of multiple pieces of content at once.
Because we use a joint audio and video, green-screen studio, when we sit down and record a session, we create both an audio and a video recording simultaneously. The following ten points outline the quality content that we create from each five-minute recording session.
We now have this down to such a fine art that we can do six, five-minute recordings in 40 minutes. For me as the content creator, this is heaven, as it enables me to work in my genius. (A little side note here: your genius is simply working in your passion and talent, and I believe you need to be doing this for 80% of your working time.)
How it works
So, it all starts with one content creation session—just one!—where we have learned to maximise both time and genius. Of course there is preparation required to make the session go smoothly, and a good knowledge of your field of expertise is essential, but once we’re in studio, this is how the magic happens.
- The primary piece of content is a video for uploading to our YouTube channel and if we choose, we upload it to iTunes as a video podcast. We also embed the same video on our blog at MurrayKilgour.com. A well-prepared, quality video is the basis for this whole process. We use either a script or a series of bullet points to make the recording. I personally enjoy using a script with a DIY teleprompter, because of my radio background. Cheesycam.com is an awesome resource for DIY ideas and equipment—a lot of it DIY or reasonably priced new gear.
- The recorded audio track becomes a podcast which is embedded on our blog, and most often is uploaded to our Living on Purpose iTunes podcast channel as well. There are many other podcast sites to upload to, but we choose just iTunes. If you are unable to create video, the podcast can become the audio for a Slideshare video presentation, so give the audio the same good preparation as you would a video.
- We send the mp3 audio recording to a transcription contractor hired through eLance.com for transcription at $2 per recording. From this transcript, we create a blog post for our site, a guest post for another website, or an article for a site like ezinearticles.com. This invaluable piece of text is also used as a caption or transcript with our videos on Youtube for SEO purposes. Because it’s accurate, we gain the additional traction of having hearing-disabled people able to enjoy your video using the Youtube subtitles feature.
- The video we have created, if it’s not placed on our YouTube channel, can now form part of a multi-part video ecourse. We use an Aweber autoresponder to give this away for free and gain subscribers to our blog, but it can be monetized in the form of a paid video ecourse. You can determine the value or purpose of the content here.
- We again take the transcribed text and repurpose it into a ten-part ecourse delivered in the same way as the video ecourse: as a bonus for signing up as a subscriber to the blog. This method has been extremely successful—we’ve signed up thousands of subscribers to our blog this way.
- The transcribed text now adds real value when it is compiled into a section or chapter of an ebook to be used as a giveaway or sold on the blog as a free download. This is where the value of the method comes in, because many bloggers battle to get into writing an ebook. We edited, added and modified a lot of the text to create an ebook, but what this method did was give us a great quantity of raw material to work with. We had created more than 140 podcasts by the time we woke to the fact that we could compile a quality ebook using that material.
- I am in the fortunate position of being a breakfast show producer for a local radio station, so the podcast becomes a regular slot on our community radio station, Radio CCFm, which has 250 000 listeners. But before you say this is a privileged position, I can assure you that, as a producer, I can say most local radio stations are always looking for quality content, especially if it is free. So short podcasts with a good intro and outro may become a regular feature on radio stations and give good traffic to a website.
- With the advent of HD video DSLRs it is possible to produce high-quality video footage for TV programs. We repurpose our five-minute content creation session again in the form of a short TV program for a local community TV station, Cape Town Television. If it’s quality content and free, TV stations will take your show—especially if it’s relevant to their viewers.
- When we repurpose the transcribed text into an ebook, the audio becomes part of an audio book. You might say that this is pushing it, but I use the audio as a companion free audio book to the photography ebook I sell on my website. It’s a bonus for the buyer and for me, because I didn’t have to do anything extra to create it.
- Finally, blog posts, audio, and video make an amazing weekly or monthly newsletter. I do this using Aweber templates, which are free with the subscription. We try to do it on a two-weekly basis, as we don’t always have enough content for weekly mailings. It works perfectly for a monthly newsletter and I would advise this when you’re starting out. The amount of content you generate will determine the frequency.
Ten points sounds good, and I thought that adding an eleventh point might be a bit much, but here’s a bonus idea. What we’ve done is created a boxed DVD set for offline and online sales as training modules. Not all people are excited about online, and some like a physical product in their hands. In our business we use all of the above content in its different forms as part of a DVD boxed series for sale to our coaching clients. They love it and we love it—especially the time it takes to create!
Unlimited content
There are no limits to how you can use your content if you begin with the end in mind, but the emphasis must be on quality content. When you sit down in front of the camera and microphone, think “end product,” and design your process to get the most out of the content creation session. I’m sure that most people can easily create seven of these ten pieces of content out of just one five-, ten-, or even 30-minute recording session.
So, think big in your content creation, begin with the end in mind, and maximize your time and effort to produce content that will attract the best traffic and convert those people into buyers. Your success will result from the quality of content you produce. So give it your best!
Inventory levels of for-sale homes at the end of 2012 were down 17.3 percent from year-ago levels, reaching the lowest level in more than five years, Realtor.com reports. In some areas, inventories have dropped 68 percent over the year.
“It’s been a buyers’ market for a while. Sellers have been reluctant to put their homes on the market,” says Steve Berkowitz, chief executive of Move Inc., which operates Realtor.com. As housing numbers roll out for January and February in the coming weeks, these will be notable to watch because they’ll provide early clues about buyer traffic and sellers’ expectations, Berkowitz says.
For-sale inventories dropped the most year-over-year in December 2012 in the following metros:
- Sacramento, Calif.: -68%
- Stockton-Lodi, Calif.: -65%
- Oakland, Calif.: -64%
- San Jose, Calif.: -52%
- Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, Wash.: -45%
- San Francisco: -43%
- Ventura, Calif.: -43%
- Riverside-San Bernardino, Calif.: -41%
- Los Angeles-Long Beach, Calif.: -40%
- Orange County, Calif.: -39%
Source: Realtor.com and “Housing Inventory Ends Year Down 17%,” The Wall Street Journal (Jan. 16, 2013)
