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The 24 Tiniest Homes on Earth | Mt Kisco NY Homes
U.K. Home Prices Cap Best Year Since 2006 as Mortgages Surge | Mt Kisco NY Homes
U.K. house prices rose and mortgage lending surged more than forecast as the property market’s momentum continued to build at the end of 2013.
Nationwide Building Society said home values increased 1.4 percent in December, taking their gain last year to 8.4 percent, the biggest annual increase since 2006. Separate reports in London showed mortgage approvals are now at the highest in almost six years and growth in construction is being led by homebuilding.
The housing revival, fueled by an improving economy and government measures, has prompted a response from the Bank of England. It ended incentives on mortgage lending in a credit-boosting program and will focus on corporate credit. The need for such a move was highlighted today by data showing business lending fell the most in at least 18 months in November.
“Surveys consistently show markedly rising buyer interest and strengthening activity so house prices look set to see further strong increases,” said Howard Archer, chief U.K. economist at IHS Global Insight in London. The decision “to end Funding for Lending support for lending to households looks a highly sensible decision, although in itself it is unlikely to act as a major brake on housing market activity.”
Photographer: Simon Dawson/Bloomberg
Balconies sit on the exterior of white stucco residential terrace properties on Eaton… Read More
In contrast to the increase in home loans, the BOE data showed that business lending fell 4.7 billion pounds ($7.7 billion) in November, the biggest drop since the data series began in May 2011. Lending to manufacturers has fallen 3.1 percent in the past year.
Home-loan Surge
Home-loan approvals rose to 70,758 in November, the most since January 2008, compared with 68,029 in October, the Bank of England said today. The median forecast of 15 economists in a Bloomberg News survey was for 69,700 approvals. Mortgage lending increased 910 million pounds.
“A large part of the pickup in the housing market can be attributed to further improvements in the labor market and the brighter economic outlook,” said Robert Gardner, chief economist at Nationwide. “Policy measures also played an important supporting role.”
Gardner also said “ultra-low” borrowing costs were fueling demand for property.
The BOE’s Monetary Policy Committee has pledged to keep its key interest rate at a record-low 0.5 percent until unemployment, now at 7.4 percent, falls to 7 percent. The MPC will leave the rate unchanged when it announces its next policy decision on Jan. 9, according to a Bloomberg News survey.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-03/u-k-house-prices-rise-as-property-caps-best-year-since-2006.html
Bitcoin now accepted by RentHop | Mt Kisco NY Realtor
Rental listing site RentHop thinks it can entice landlords and real estate brokers into using Bitcoin by slashing its listing advertisement fee if they pay with the digital currency.
Users must currently pay $2 to post listings on RentHop, which covers New York City, Boston and Chicago, and has plans to expand nationally.
But as of this week, if brokers and landlords use Bitcoin, they’ll have to pay only 0.833 milli-citcoin (1/1000th of a bitcoin), or $0.76 at today’s exchange rates. That represents a 60 percent discount off the rate that RentHop will continue to charge advertisers who pay in dollars. Find more details at https://de.thebitcoinscode.com/.
“RentHop has always catered to early adopters exploring innovations in real estate,” said RentHop CEO Lee Lin in a statement. “Over the years we’ve noticed the most successful landlords are the ones who proactively seek out and embrace new and disruptive platforms. Bitcoin users are exactly the type of participant we welcome to our marketplace.”
RentHop intends to reduce the exchange-rate volatility of owning Bitcoin for customers by maintaing the exact number in bitcoins that it charges unless Bitcoin’s dollar value changes by more than 30 percent.
Lawrence Zhou, co-founder of RentHop, breaks it down for us:
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/2013/12/16/bitcoin-now-accepted-by-renthop/?utm_source=20131216&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyheadlinespm#sthash.UtWNx7SJ.dpuf
Home prices in Bay Area return to bubble peaks | Mt Kisco Homes
Mount Kisco Holiday Free Parking Begins Monday | The Mt. Kisco Realtor
Residential home sales continue to climb: RealtyTrac | Mt Kisco Homes
Properties and residential homes for sale, including single-family homes, condominiums and townhomes, continue to rise, increasing to an estimated annualized pace of 5.649 million in October, a 2% hike from a month ago and an increase of 13% from October 2012, the latest RealtyTrac Residential and Foreclosure Sales Report revealed.
But despite the national trend, three top indicator states still posted decreases for the third consecutive month: California, Arizona and Nevada, which are down 15%, 13% and 5%, respectively, from a year ago.
Meanwhile, the national median sales price of all residential properties—including both distressed and non-distressed—sat at $170,000, unchanged from September, but 6% higher than October 2012. This is also the 18th consecutive month median home sales have increased on an annualized basis.
The median price of a distressed residential property, in foreclosure or bank owned, hit $110,000 in October, 41% lower than the median price of $185,000 for a non-distressed property.
“After a surge in short sales in late 2011 and early 2012, the favored disposition method for distressed properties is shifting back toward the more traditional foreclosure auction sales and bank-owned sales,” said Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac.
“The combination of rapidly rising home prices — along with strong demand from institutional investors and other cash buyers able to buy at the public foreclosure auction or an as-is REO home — means short sales are becoming less favorable for lenders,” Blomquist added.
As a result, short sales made up 5.3% of all sales, a 6.3% drop from the previous month and down from 11.2% in October 2012.
Nevada, Florida, Maryland, Michigan and Illinois ranked as the states with the highest percentage of short sales last month.
Monetize Your Social Media Campaigns With These Tech Tools | Mt Kisco Realtor
Social media has become an even bigger part of consumers’ lives in the past year, making it clear what some once thought was a trend is likely here to stay. In fact, social media users are finding more innovative ways to interact, with videos and photos playing a greater part in the way people communicate with each other online.
Marketers are hard at work, as well, trying to find new ways to leverage the power of social networking to reach new customers. Fitting social media interaction time into busy schedules is an ongoing challenge for business owners, however, with Facebook and Twitter accounts often abandoned for days at a time as professionals deal with more pressing issues.
Fortunately, help is available. Numerous tech tools can help professionals manage social media accounts, even taking care of posts for them. But with so many tools on the market today, how can a professional possibly sort through them all? To help, I’ve put together a list of some of the best resources for managing, tracking, and getting the most out of your social media-based marketing campaigns.
“The only way to sort through all the tools out there is to do your own research and try them out. Many tools have a free 30 day free trial so you can feel comfortable with what you’re getting” Anne Ward, CEO of CircleClick said in a recent interview.
“Influence” has become an important word in the world of marketing, with businesses having rapidly realized the reach of those who have large online followings. Klout for Business helps businesses identify influencers in their own social media circles to allow them to reach out to those individuals to spread their message. Using “Perks,” businesses can offer trial versions of products to top influencers in exchange for a mention on their high-traffic sites, allowing those businesses to reach a large number of social media users at once.
With Rowfeeder, businesses can gain insight into topics that are trending, including topics that concern their own industry. This analysis can be used to tweak your own campaigns, allowing you to reach out to consumers using the terms that interest them. In other words, you can include the terms in your campaign that are most likely to be searched, driving customers directly to your posts. It also can be used to track your own campaigns by following a particular hashtag and delivering data about activity on that hashtag. How many times was it re-tweeted? How many followers did each re-tweeter have?
This alert program monitors a user’s social media accounts and sends notifications when a specified search term receives a mention. Mention searches posts in 42 different languages, delivering those back to give businesses a global view of a message’s reach. Social media interactions can also be conducted directly through the Mention interface for added convenience.
MediaFunnel is ideal for organizations interested in involving multiple team members in managing and monitoring accounts. Posts can be deployed across multiple social media platforms at once, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, and LinkedIn. Items can be set up to post at specified intervals, allowing businesses to choose the best time of day to reach their individual customer base.
Popular social media dashboard service HootSuite integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages, Foursquare, WordPress, Mixi, and almost every other service available through its supplemental App Directory. Users can schedule posts and monitor activity, as well as pull reports to identify the performance of campaigns. Through an app, users can manage social media accounts on the go.
Imagine if you could sell event tickets or gather entries for a contest directly on Twitter. Chirpify gives promoters that capability, allowing them to connect an account that is then assigned a specific hashtag. Customers Tweet using a hashtag (#entertowin, #partytickets2014) and the information is captured by Chirpify, who processes the payment or logs the entry for the business.
One of the best ways to grow your audience is to interact with others. Triberr connects you with people who are interested in the same topic you are, separating topics into “Tribes” to better help you find blogs that relate to your own interests. You can gather social media followers on Triberr, since you’ll be regularly interacting with others who share your interests.
Shortstack helps businesses create professional-looking Facebook pages, complete with polls, forms, and more. The service provides more than 60 templates and 70 themes to let small businesses find the look that fits their own unique style. For pages with less than 2,000 likes, the service is completely free, with the price increasing as a page gains more fans.
Infographics are a great way to connect with today’s visually-driven social media audiences. Infogr.am is a tool that helps businesses put together infographics that convey a message for free. Businesses can import existing spreadsheets or create new ones in order to populate pie charts and bar graphs. Once an infographic has been created, it can be downloaded or shared to social media sites directly from the site.
One way to keep social media audiences interested is to repost news that is relevant to your industry. Feedly provides a way to keep up with what’s going on in the world, with information delivered in one compact dashboard. These links can then be shared to Twitter directly from the app. Feedly is also a way to keep up with information your social media contacts recommend to better keep you informed.
In case you haven’t noticed, animated explainer videos are all the rage. In just a short snippet, you can create a fun explanation of what your business does. Visitors to your website, looking for a quick description of your product or service, will be intrigued by the animated characters and you’ll save the money you would have had to spend hiring a camera crew to record you talking about your service. VideoRascal promises a video for less than $99, using the templates the site provides. You then add a script, record a voiceover, and choose the music you want to go with the video. Once complete, you can export the video for use on your website and social media sites.
Social media remains a vital part of business marketing. Using these helpful tools, businesses can maintain and manage their social media accounts while still remaining on budget.
10 Affordable Big Cities for Renters | Mount Kisco Real Estate
Homeownership isn’t for everyone. Some, including many young adults, simply don’t have the money for a down payment on a house. Others covet the flexibility of renting, which makes it easy to move across town for a better apartment or cross-country for a better job.
Renting is an especially popular option in big cities, where career, social and educational opportunities tend to be clustered and populations tend to be more transient. In fact, renters outnumber homeowners in six of the ten most populous cities in the country, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. But not all rental markets are created equal. An apartment in Manhattan goes for an average of $3,350 a month, more than triple the typical American’s mortgage payment.
That’s why we went in search of the most affordable big cities for renters. To pinpoint these promising places, we started with the nation’s 75 largest metropolitan areas and ranked them based on average monthly rent, median household income for renters, residential rental vacancy rate and overall cost of living. Our top ten cities exhibit an appealing combination of affordable living expenses, including rent, relative to the typical earnings of renters. Take a look.
Despite uncertainties, homebuilders remain optimistic | Mount Kisco Real Estate
Despite some recent wobbling in economic and housing indicators, more homebuilders still view market conditions as good than poor, the National Association of Home Builders said today.
The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market index remained at 54 in November unchanged from October after a downward revision.
“Given the current interest rate and pricing environment, consumers continue to show interest in purchasing new homes, but are holding back because Congress keeps pushing critical decisions on budget, tax and government spending issues down the road,” NAHB Chairman Rick Judson editorialized in a statement accompanying the release of the latest index.
“Meanwhile, builders continue to face challenges related to rising construction costs and low appraisals.”NAHB Chief Economist David Crowe said that uncertainty about government policies and economic uncertainty is undermining consumer confidence, but that builder confidence remains above 50 “is an encouraging sign, considering the unresolved debt and federal budget issues cause builders and consumers to remain on the sideline.
”The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index gauges builder perceptions of current single-family home sales and sales expectations for the next six months, and asks builders to rate traffic of prospective buyers. Scores from each component are used to calculate a seasonally adjusted index, with any number over 50 indicating that more builders view conditions as good than poor.
The HMI index gauging current sales conditions in November held steady at 58. Expectations for future sales fell one point to 60, and traffic of prospective buyers dropped one point to 42.
Source: nahb.org – See more at: http://www.inman.com/wire/despite-uncertainties-homebuilders-remain-optimistic/#sthash.5wFo8nm7.dpuf