New Home Sales in September | South Salem NY Real Estate
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First, do no harm | South Salem NY Real Estate
Long-term rates rose in the last 10 days, at their worst the 10-year Treasury note to 1.83 percent from 1.65 percent, and mortgages to 3.5 percent despite the Fed’s new $40 billion-per-month QE3.
Many fear a general round of rate increases for the usual reasons: Europe back from the brink, an overdone bond-buying panic, a positive turn in the U.S. economy, and the always-popular endgame of central bank money printing. It’s often hard to isolate the cause of market movements, but not this one. Nor is it hard to spot the reversal today, 10s back to 1.77 percent, stock market hitting a li’l ol’ air pocket.
Europe has been central to this spike, hopes there high for the two-day Brussels summit ending today. Markers: the euro itself rising to $1.31, and yields on Spanish bonds down almost by half.
It is hardly an accident that rates here topped yesterday as the summit turned out to be yet another exercise in talking about more talking. Market pressure is down for the moment in the eurozone, as nobody wants to lash himself to tracks in front of a potential European Central Bank rescue locomotive, no matter how foggy the prospect. As it has seemed for a year, the euro issue will be forced by the social pressure and politics of open-ended depression, and nobody has a model for that groundswell.
Economic data here … all is relative. Those expecting recession have been wrong. The Economic Cycle Research Institute has forecast recession for a solid year, but its own index has turned up. Lest that thought overwhelm you with optimism, it is “up” into no man’s land.
Housing … for reasons best known to stock-pushers, public analysts focus on sales and construction of new homes, which at cyclical peaks account for perhaps 4 percent of GDP. Yes, one can add the contribution of drapes, furniture, appliances and landscaping, but the big deal is prices, always and especially during this collapse of household balance sheets.
Sales of existing homes influence the value of some 70 million dwellings; new homes now are 1 percent of that figure. Existing sales are up 11 percent year over year, and the distressed fraction is down from about 35 percent to maybe 30 percent — good news but not enough to pull the economy anywhere.
Shifting gears to a subject central to Europe and soon to be here, the International Monetary Fund this week released some new thinking on the austerity “multiplier.” If a nation cuts its budget deficit by an amount equal to 1 percent of GDP, how much will it cut GDP? Old thinking had assumed 0.5 percent, but actual experience in Europe has led the IMF to a multiplier in the range of 0.9 percent to 1.7 percent.
There you have the physics of black holes. The more you try to cut your deficit, whether by tax increases or spending cuts, your economy falls out from under you faster that you can repair your national wallet.
Side note. The austerity multiplier in Europe may be so high for other reasons, namely the insanity of bolting low-productivity economies onto the currency of an uber-productive one. Thus the high multiplier there may have no grim implication for the U.S.
In any event, the Left and most of Center in Europe (and soon, here) howl that austerity is too much too fast, and what we need is stimulus, usually in the form of “investment.” Properly calibrating austerity is serious business, but the stimulus multiplier is in question, too.
Prof. Michael Pettis writes the best English-language China blog, www.mpettis.com, and this month explores the difference between stimulus and pork. Any government spending adds some sugar, but must over time add specific and measurable productivity beyond cost. Every friend returning from China and Europe remarks on the gleaming newness of infrastructure, but are these investments an addition to productivity, or a warmer, dryer place for panhandlers in a meltdown?
Investment has been so overdone in China that its stimulus multiplier may be zero.
The most concerning element in these multipliers: What happens at crossover? When you can no longer afford austerity, but your finances are so poor that you can’t borrow more money for stimulus? You can dream for a while about the magic free-money machine at central banks, but Argentina and Zimbabwe are plain-sight lessons.
What happens? You are going to default. Then you can start over.
via inman.com
‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ House Was Truly Scary Before Rehab | South Salem NY Real Estate
via zillow.com
10 essentials when buying, storing firewood | South Salem NY Real Estate
With rising fuel costs and wildfires in a lot of forested areas, whether you buy firewood or cut your own, you’re almost sure to see an increase in the cost of the wood you burn this year. So whether that firewood is your primary source of heat or just cheery ambiance on a cold night, it pays to invest wisely and then protect your investment.
Buying firewood
If you buy firewood, there are a number of different sources where you can locate it. Many people turn to their local newspaper, Craigslist or maybe a community bulletin board. Other — and sometimes more reliable — sources of firewood include local tree-trimming services, fireplace shops, and retailers that sell and service chainsaws and related cutting equipment.
Firewood is sold by the cord, which is a stack of wood 4 feet high, 4 feet deep and 8 feet long (128 cubic feet). Firewood is obviously irregular in shape, so the stack also includes the air spaces between the pieces.
That’s what a cord should look like in a perfect world. Ideally, the dealer you’re buying the wood from will deliver it in a truck that makes verification of the load easy, such as a 4-by-8-foot truck bed, with wood stacked 4 feet high. That doesn’t always happen, and you need to be careful when you see a truck roll up with wood tossed in the back: A sloping pile of firewood in a standard pickup truck may contain only 3/4 of a cord.
The other thing you’ll be looking for when you buy your wood is whether it’s dry, also sometimes called “seasoned,” or whether it’s “green.” Dry firewood has been out in the air for a while since it was cut, allowing a significant amount of the wood’s moisture to evaporate, typically down to a moisture content of around 20 percent or less. Green wood still has a lot of the moisture in it — as much as 40 percent — so when you burn it, the fire has to first evaporate that moisture. Therefore the wood burns cooler, and you get less heat energy per cord.
Visually inspect the wood that you buy. Dry wood feels light, has loose bark and darkened ends with clearly visible splits, and makes a very definite “thunking” noise when you hit two pieces together. Wet wood is just the opposite, and will sound dull and heavy when knocked together.
You’ll typically pay a little more for dry wood, but it’s worth the cost if you plan to burn it right away. If you’re going to store the wood for burning next season, then you can save some money by buying green wood and letting it dry.
There are a couple of other ways to save some money when you buy your wood. If you have a truck or a trailer, you might be able to pick the wood up yourself at the dealer’s lot and save delivery charges, and also verify your full cord at the same time. If you have wood delivered, there’ll be an extra charge for stacking, so do that chore yourself if you can. Also, you can usually get firewood in full rounds, or pre-split. If you’re ambitious, consider getting rounds — they’re cheaper, and you can get some great outdoor exercise by doing your own splitting.
Storing and seasoning the wood
Most people store a good portion of their wood supply outside where it can continue to dry and season, and keep a small portion nearby where it’s accessible and ready for use.
Long-term storage areas should be located outside where wind and sun can help with the drying. However, to minimize danger in the event of a wildfire, and also to protect your home’s siding in case the firewood contains any insects, the wood shouldn’t be stacked directly against your house. Also, wood that’s left out in the elements, even if it’s dry, will reabsorb water from rain and snow, as well as from the ground. This will cause it to become too wet to burn efficiently, and eventually it will rot.
Ideally, consider creating an outdoor storage shed for your firewood, with a raised floor, a sloped roof for runoff, and open sides for easy access and unimpeded air circulation. Make it large enough to hold a year’s worth of wood — typically two to four cords, depending on your burning habits.
After the wood is dry, most people create a smaller storage area inside the house, such as in the garage or basement. Depending on your habits and the accessibility of your outside supply, the inside supply could be as small as two or three days’ worth, or large enough to accommodate several weeks of wood.
Finally, create some storage right at the fireplace or wood stove. One very nice solution is a canvas carrying bag with enclosed ends and sides. The wood is stacked in the bag for carrying, then the bag hooks over a decorative metal frame near the fireplace for storage, containing the wood inside the bag to minimize the mess.
You might also consider a decorative metal tub or other container to hold one or two nights’ worth of wood while keeping the dirt and chips contained. While not quite as neat, there are also a number of very attractive open metal storage racks offered by various manufacturers.
Any wood that you store inside needs to be far enough away from the fireplace that it can’t combust. And most importantly, never store newspapers, kindling, pinecones or other easily combustible fire-starting materials next to your fireplace. They can and do start house fires!
via inman.com
Chicago-area home sales jump 24% in Sept. over previous year | South Salem Realtor
via suntimes.com
Metrics to Evaluate Your Success in YouTube Beyond Video Views | South Salem NY Real Estate
There are a couple of ways that you can gauge how effective and successful your online video content really is. A lot of people focus on video views for that (we’ve debated the value in views before), but that may not be the best way to really evaluate how your content is performing on the web. For this week’s Creator’s Tip we cover some other important ways and metrics you can look at in order to evaluate how well your video content is performing.
Going Beyond Video Views – YouTube Performance Metrics:
1) Audience Retention – Average Length & Proportion Watched
For example, you have a video that’s three minutes long, but after 34 seconds into your video you’re seeing, everyone dropping off the radar. Would you call that a successful video? Even if you have a million views, but only like 100 of them get past the first minute, would that be? I don’t think that would be a successful video.
Paying attention to how long your average viewer is watching your video is actually really important (especially now given the fact that YouTube just changed their search algorithm to focus on this). You can find that in the analytics of your YouTube channel. For each specific video it will give you a graph, both on your absolute retention for this video in total, how many people are still watching at various points throughout the video.
It also gives you more general comparisons to all other videos on YouTube that are similar length. How does your video compare against all those other videos?
3) Engaging Content? – Views in Relation to Subscribers
Don’t just look at the number of views you’re getting total. Look at the number of views you’re getting in relation to how many subscribers your channel has. For example, if you have 100 subscribers and you’re getting an average of 100 views per video, you’re making some pretty darn good content. Now you just need to grow and get some more subscribers. If, however, you have a million subscribers and you’re only getting 100 views, then you’re making some really junky content. Looking at that ratio can be really important and telling for how engaging your content is.
Look at the rate of how many subscribers you’re earning from each particular video. If you have one and you’re just picking up ten subscribers out of 100 views, and that’s kind of your average, what can you do to increase that? When you see that you have a video that maybe you have a ratio of half your views, which may never happen, but if you have half your views converted into new subscribers, for example, you had a video of 100 views and you got 50 new subscribers off of it, then that would be like a really successful video. That is way more valuable to you than getting, like, a viral video even, with a million views. As long as then you get 500,000 subscribers, then that’s even better.
3) Ratio of Views to Number of User Interactions
This is really the key for determining how successful your video might be. Interactions like you’re getting comments, you’re picking up new subscribers, or people are clicking that like button, all those types of things. Are they going to your channel? Are they checking out other video content of yours? All that kind of stuff you can see in your analytics of your YouTube channel, and kind of determine how engaging your content is. If someone just watches one of your videos, and then maybe they watch it as an embedding on Facebook, or just leave completely, you know that’s probably not as successful a video. Even if it gets lots of views, if it’s not pulling people into your content to check out more of your stuff and engage with you and your stuff in some sort of way it isn’t successful.
For another example, our videos here right now average around 1,000 views on a regular video. We usually have over 100, sometimes 200 comments after a couple of weeks of these videos being published. This is really good, because it’s good to engage with your viewers. I’m part of another channel that might get, 10,000 views easily per video, but they only have, 50 comments. I would say even though that one’s got way more views, the first channel is way more successful in terms of engaging an audience. Look at some of the other stuff, not just purely views.
4) Elicit Emotion? Ratio of Shares to Number of Views
Another thing that goes into measuring how successful your video is, is if it elicits enough emotion and value in your viewers for them to feel compelled to share this online in their social networks. Let’s not just look at the pure number of shares you get, but look at the number of shares in relation to how many views that you have. Look at that ratio. If a video that gets half a million views only gets like 100 shares, that’s probably not doing as well, in this regard as if your video has 1,000 views but you get 100 shares. That’s a way more viral video than the other one, because viral videos are determined by how much their shared in relation to the number of views that they have.
There are a couple of ways you can check sharing that’s going on around your video content. One is just to look in the YouTube analytics. It’ll give you there a little graph and then some statistics of how your stuff is being shared. You can also go to Topsy if you just want to see what people just copy and pasted the URL and Tweeted it rather than clicking on the share button underneath your video and shared it. You can go to Topsy and look at exactly how many people Tweeted it from there. It’s kind of a rough estimate, actually. It’s not exact. You can see some of that there and some of the Facebook things. It’s not very great at Facebook since a lot of Facebook is private, but you can get an idea of how your stuff is being shared through those two sources.
via reelseo.com
Where the Presidential Nominees Stand on Housing | South Salem NY Homes
via foxbusiness.com
30-Year Fixed Mortgage Rate Holds Steady | South Salem NY Real Estate
Mortgage rates for 30-year fixed mortgages remained flat this week, with the current rate borrowers were quoted on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace at 3.26 percent, unchanged from this same time last week.
The 30-year fixed mortgage rate hovered between 3.18 and 3.28 percent for the majority of the week, dropping to the current rate this morning.
“Last week, rates moved down slightly after the weak jobs report but remained essentially flat after Monday’s stronger-than-expected retail sales figures,” said Erin Lantz, director of Zillow Mortgage Marketplace. “Although this is a fairly busy week for U.S. economic data, we expect rates to remain in this low range as the market awaits the European Union Summit on Thursday and looks for positive news that might offset renewed uncertainty about the health of the European economy.”
Additionally, the 15-year fixed mortgage rate this morning was 2.64 percent, and for 5/1 ARMs, the rate was 2.59 percent.
What are the rates right now? Check Zillow Mortgage Marketplace for up-to-the-minute mortgage rates for your state.
*The weekly rate chart illustrates the average 30-year fixed interest rate in six-hour intervals.
via zillow.com
How Evil Is Your Smartphone? | South Salem NY Homes
In a recent post, ReadWriteWeb’s Adam Popescu vowed to boycott Apple due to its association with Foxconn, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer infamous for sowing despair among its workers. Reading the article, I had to ask myself: Did the maker of my smartphone – a RIM BlackBerry – also help drive workers to suicide? Did it release toxic pollutants into the environment or fuel wars in places far away from its head offices? So I set about looking for the world’s most ethical smartphone. What I learned surprised me.
Participants in the comment thread below Popescu’s article were quick to point out the many electronic products that can be traced to Foxconn. The company’s factories churn out devices for Amazon, Microsoft, and Samsung. In a related Skype chat, ReadWriteWeb editor Ted Greenwald commented that there are no ethical gadgets, period; their manufacture and use are not sustainable, he argued.
Okay, maybe there are no ethical smartphones. But some must be better than others, right?
Ethical Consumer, a UK organisation “researching and recording the social and environmental records of companies” since 1989, is a leader in evaluating products for their impact on human rights, animal rights, the environment, and other factors that might fall under the heading “ethics”. Its report on smartphones isn’t very positive, in general. It awards points from a possible score of 20, and nobody scores more than 10.5.
That said, I was happy to find that my BlackBerry appeared near the top of the heap, just below Amplicom (a maker of cordless phones that doesn’t offer a smartphone as far as I can tell.)
BlackBerry fell considerably short – behind Apple, Nokia, Toshiba, LG and Samsung – in waste management and the level of toxins in the production process. RIM never filed an environmental report, so Ethical Consumer gave the company a 0 in those areas. BlackBerry’s failures in the green category, however, were enough to bouy its score compared to that of other mobile manufacturers.
The 38 page report by Ethical Consumer is extensive, and includes goodies like: Samsung has ties to human rights abuses in the Congo – as does Toshiba, Motorola and Sony – and Sony has raised flags among animals rights groups for abuses including killing a goat at a promotional party. Several female Nokia factory workers in Thailand had to be hospitalized for severe lead poisoning in 2006, after they were told lead wasn’t harmful. Workers had to buy their own protective gear, like gloves and face masks, and were told to drink a carton of milk a day to remove the birth-defect causing toxin from their bodies. (Milk does not, in fact, help you pee out lead.)
CrackBerry Supports Human Rights
If we are judging how ethical a smartphone is based on its treatment of workers, BlackBerry is near the top. Incidentally, RIM’s report is surprisingly free of negative human rights indicators: no riots, no illnesses, nothing. The worst things about RIM, according to Ethical Consumer, was its failure to file an environmental report and that it had a factory in a repressive regime, namly China.
RIM has (or used to have) factories in Canada, United States, Hungary, Brazil, Asia, and Mexico, where my BlackBerry says it was made in. After a casual disassembly, the small electronic parts in my phone reveal they come from China or Korea, but further information on exactly where and what factory is hard to find, as RIM is notorious for its lack of transparency. According to a 2009 Bloomberg article, “RIM’s five biggest suppliers account for almost 90 percent of its production costs,” suppliers that operate mostly in China. BlackBerry still beats the Android and especially Apple on this factory issue, however, because riots and suicides at RIM factories are unheard of (so far).
Due to declining profits, RIM recently shut down one factory in Canada and one in Hungary, countries with strict labor laws and therefore high wages and good working conditions. There is nothing to indicate that RIM’s failure to dominate the market like it once did is due to its adherence to fair labor laws. Rather, RIM’s decline is a result of mismanagement and lack of innovation leading to low demand.
If RIM Can Do It, Why Can’t Apple?
Apple and its Android competitors don’t have RIM’s problems. So why are they still relying on Foxconn? Apple is incredibly profitable – reputedly the most profitable company of all time.
Apple set the smartphone standard and turned us into a touchscreen society. Why can’t it set the standard in labor conditions? Sources in the know say Apple would love to have its factories closer to home anyway to keep an eye on quality control. According to Ethical Consumer, Apple has been providing unsafe conditions to its overseas factory workers since 2008 and using factories in 10 countries classified as “oppressive regimes” since 2006.
Until Apple moves its manufacturing operations closer to home and/or makes a commitment to setting high standards for its labor practices, I will keep using and loving my BlackBerry despite ridicule from the Apple snobs and Android fanatics. I eagerly await RIM’s upcoming BlackBerry 10 phones.
Driven by breakthrough thinking and a wide-open sense of what’s possible, Alcatel-Lucent delivers the world’s most advanced technologies to companies all across the globe. Our driving motivation is to realize the potential of the connected world – by providing the technologies needed to turn networks into engines of sustainable economic growth, social development and opportunity. We provide a comprehensive suite of software solutions and services offerings designed specifically to meet the needs and demands of communication network operators and strategic industries. These solutions allow our customers to optimize network costs and quickly deploy innovative, value added products and services for their subscribers that increase loyalty and create new revenue streams. To learn more about how we’re turning the network into a platform, visit http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/hln/network_evolution.php
via readwriteweb.com
7 Steps To Help Your Home Age Comfortably in South Salem NY | South Salem Real Estate
A survey by AARP earlier this year found that 33 percent of adults older than 45 have modified their homes to allow them to age comfortably in place.
Aging-in-place modifications can include:
1. Decorative grab bars in showers
2. Step-free entrances
3. Levered door handles
4. Raised electrical outlets
5. Bathrooms that can accommodate wheelchairs
6. Widened doorways to accommodate walkers
7. Higher toilets
Mike Leary, founder of Rochester, N.Y., firm Access Lifts & Ramps, says business is brisk and he expects it to continue to grow. “If my kids stay in the business, they’ll be the ones to make out well,” Leary says. “They’ll be taking care of me. I’m in the middle of the Baby Boomers.”
NAR Article
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