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Most claims in Zillow home valuation patent deemed invalid | South Salem Homes
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Tag Archives: South Salem NY Realtor
Warren Buffett and his Real Estate Investment Advice | South Salem Real Estate
4 signs the real estate market is in trouble | South Salem NY Real Estate
wish I’d said this (and in a few weeks I will have, I’m sure) but Ramsey Su at Acting Man Blog did it first and in a way I’ve been searching for the words to explain.
Every week or so we get another indicator that’s supposed to tell us how the housing market is doing.
And every part of the industry trumpets whichever metric best serves its own purpose. Thus you have the Mortgage Bankers Association touting this “good news” about interest rates, while the National Association of Realtors touts how rising home prices are a great sign, and on and on.
But none of these measures – home sales, home starts, home prices, interest rates – tell the real tale.
Then along comes this boy named Su, who gets right to the heart of the matter:
The strength of the real estate market should not be measured by price appreciation, or the number of new and existing home sales. It should be measured by the support of underlying fundamentals and whether they can help to withstand economic cycles without policy makers having to go hog wild just to avoid a total collapse.
How healthy is the real estate market today?
He looks at some troubling measures we’ve noted at HousingWire – the decline of income growth, the bulk of Americans having subprime credit, and the fact that there’s nothing left in the Fed for another bailout if (when) things go pear-shaped again.
1. The Subprime Majority
Recently, I came across a report by the Corporation for Enterprise Development (CFED) titled Assets and Opportunity Scorecard. Some of their findings are quite interesting. According to the CFED Scorecard, 56% of all consumers have sub-prime credit. Sub-prime is “earned”. A consumer has to miss a few payments, or default on a loan or two to earn that status. These 56% cannot, or should not, be taking on more debt, especially a large debt like a mortgage. They may also be struggling with a mortgage that they should not have taken out in the first place.
And with so few companies willing to loosen credit standards, even the worthy subprime don’t have many options.
2. Liquid Asset Poor
CFED found that 44% of households in America are Liquid Asset Poor, defined as having saved less than three months of expenses. As one would expect, 78% of the lowest income households are asset poor, but 25% of middle class ($56k to $91k) households also have less than three months of expenses saved.
How much of a down payment can you expect them to have on hand?
http://www.housingwire.com/blogs/1-rewired/post/28994-signs-the-real-estate-market-is-in-trouble
Grossly overvalued real estate won’t qualify for charitable tax deduction | South Salem NY Real Estate
3 proclamations from social media ‘experts’ | South Salem Realtor
Social media “experts” abound these days. Many send conflicting messages every time technology changes, delivering “urgent” signals to hop on the next big thing or be left in the dust.
If someone refers to themselves as a social media expert, your first red flag should go up. The landscape of social media is huge. Someone may be an expert in strategies, tactics or particular channels (for example, Mari Smith is an expert in Facebook), but an expert in all of social media? Nope.
If you hopped on every bandwagon as instructed, you would be in a constant state of disarray. How could you possibly have time to run your business?
The following are directives you may receive as you search the Web, and things to consider as you hear them.
1. ”Be on every social media channel or be left behind”
Particularly for those just getting started, this will take you down before you begin. If you have a goal of running a marathon, are you going to put “run 26.2 miles” on your calendar tomorrow morning? No. You would map out a plan that takes you from point A to the point of reaching your goal in digestible pieces. This sort of overwhelming statement is what causes people to procrastinate — sometimes for years
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/next/3-proclamations-from-social-media-experts-that-will-kill-your-implementation-strategy/?utm_source=20140127&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyheadlinesam#sthash.qAKuE3yS.dpuf
Purchase apps down 20 percent from a year ago | South Salem Realtor
Real Estate: Avoid these common mortgage scams | South Salem NY Real Estate
The sluggish economy and slowly recovering housing market create the perfect environment for mortgage scams, with desperate homeowners as easy prey for scammers.
The crooks make the deal sound attractive and legit. Thousands of homeowners are duped in mortgage scams each year, and con artists don’t have to look far for victims, says Yolanda McGill, senior counsel for the Fair Housing & Fair Lending Project, an initiative by the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C.
Most of the victims reach out to the scammers themselves through Internet searches, she says. She bases her conclusion on thousands of complaints that her organization has received from mortgage scam victims.
”The people showing up in our databases are people who are looking for help on the Internet,” she says.
— A theft in-‘deed’
Lured by promises of a better interest rates and lower mortgage payments, some borrowers end up signing away their houses.
Thieves pose as mortgage professionals or attorneys who pledge to modify or refinance the homeowner’s mortgage. The borrower is asked to sign the supposed modification papers. One of the pages in the stack of documents is a deed that, once signed, transfers ownership of the property to the perpetrators or a company related to them.
While many homeowners would be able to spot such an ingenious trick, others don’t bother to read or simply don’t understand the documents they sign, says Brian Sullivan, a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development spokesman.
7 Housing Trends for 2013 | South Salem NY Real Estate
As 2013 comes to a close and real estate experts predict where the housing market is headed in 2014, a look back reveals several trends.
“In 2012 we saw the housing market recover and, going into 2013, we expected continuing recovery,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist of the National Association of Realtors. “Instead, the recovery accelerated a lot faster than we anticipated, which was great for sellers and for the 75 million homeowners who saw their home values appreciate.”
1. Housing Prices Rose Faster Than Expected
The national median listing price was $179,900 in January 2012 and rose to $180,000 by December 2012, according to realtor.com research. The pace of price appreciation accelerated quickly over the year to reach a median list price of $199,500 by September 2013.
2. Mortgage Rates Rose but Remained Low
“We expected mortgage rates to rise in 2013, and they started to increase in the late spring, but they’re still very affordable when you look at rates on a historical basis,” Yun said. “They just aren’t at the super-low point we saw earlier.” According to Freddie Mac, 30-year fixed-rate loans were as low as 3.45 percent in December 2012 and rose to 4.49 in September 2013. Barry Habib, co-owner and chief market strategist for Residential Finance Corp., said mortgage rates are likely to stay low and perhaps even drop between now and March 2014.
3. Bidding Wars Returned
The combination of rising prices, low mortgage rates and low inventory led to a sense of urgency among buyers and the return of bidding wars, said Don Frommeyer, president of the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. According to realtor.com research, inventory in 2012 reached a high of 2,083,710 homes on the market, then steadily declined to a low of 1,583,497 homes in February 2013. At the end of September 2013, 2,210,000 homes were for sale, approximately a five-month supply.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/realtorcom/7-housing-trends-for-2013_b_4460914.html
Twitter is reportedly working on an ‘Edit’ feature to let you make “slight changes” to tweets | South Salem NY Realtor
Is Twitter working on a way to enable users to edit their Tweets once they’re out in the ether? The Desk’s Matthew Keys says it’s true. Sources tell him that this feature has been in the works for months and will allow the author to make “slight changes” to the contents of the Tweet only once.
Here’s how the feature would work: after publishing a Tweet, a user will see an “edit” feature appear for a brief period. How long remains unknown. However, during this time, the content creator can correct typos, add new words, and other small tweaks. While these changes are minor, it’s said that Twitter doesn’t want the overall message of the Tweet to be changed.
Update: A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment on the news. Of course, let’s not forget that the company experiments with many different features all the time and while it’s been said that this is in development, we may actually never see something like this go live.
How to Create a Social Media Strategy By Spying Your Competitors | South Salem NY Realtor
Are you struggling to create a social media strategy for your business?
Lacking insight into the social behaviors of your customers?
No data, no problem!
Chances are your competitors have done all the hard work and all you need to do is look for it.
In this post, I’ll show you how to research the competition’s social game plan so you can build a solid social media strategy of your own.
Finding the Fundamentals
When it comes to social media marketing, you need to answer a few fundamental questions:
- Should your business be on social media?
- What networks should you choose?
- How do you create a great profile?
- What type of content should you post, and when should you post it?
Everyone must answer these questions, including business owners who want to create a strategy for their own business, marketing managers who need to convince their CEO to invest in social media and consultants who create strategies for clients in a wide variety of industries.
Fortunately, you can find answers through the process of competitor research.
Keep reading to discover how to get insight on your competitors.
#1: Comparing Audience Size
While you shouldn’t obsess about how many fans or followers your competitors have, noting these numbers at the beginning of your campaign can help you answer the following important questions.
Noting the number of fans your competitors have can help you answer a few important questions relevant to your own business. Image source: iStockPhoto
1. Should your business be on social media?
If your competitors have an audience on social media, whether it is 100 people or 100,000, the answer should be yes. Otherwise, your competitors are tapping into a customer base that your business could be completely missing out on.
2. Which networks should your business focus on?
Do all of your competitors have strong presences on some networks, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, but not others, such as Pinterest? If the answer is yes, then it means two things: 1) businesses in your industry do not do well on Pinterest or 2) with creativity, you have a chance to reach a group of customers with little competition.
3. Have you reached all of your target audience?
Competitor research isn’t just limited to businesses starting their social media strategy. If you have been using social media for a while, but not getting results, take a look at the size of your competitors’ social media audiences to help you gauge whether you are reaching as many of your potential customers as possible, or whether you still have room to grow your network.
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-strategy-competitor-research/