Tag Archives: Waccabuc Realtor

Accuracy of Zillow, Trulia listing data under fire again | Waccabuc Real Estate

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<a href="<a href=Home search image via Shutterstock.

Editor’s note: This story has been updated with comments from Zillow and Trulia, and additional details on ZipRealty’s study of listings accuracy.

Following in the footsteps of Redfin, ZipRealty Inc. is emphasizing the timeliness and accuracy of the Internet Data Exchange (IDX) listing data it serves up on its website in comparison to the sometimes dated and incomplete information on third-party listing portals like Zillow and Trulia.

ZipRealty is offering a “Listing Check” tool that it says will allow consumers to use its website to double-check whether a home they’ve seen listed for sale on another site is actually for sale.

The Listing Check tool is available in 34 markets where ZipRealty has access to IDX listings. The company operates as a brokerage in 19 markets, and is also able to display IDX listings in 15 other “Powered by Zip” markets where it provides leads and customer relationship management tools to other brokerages.

Websites operated by real estate brokerages and agents receive listings directly from multiple listing services, which provide IDX listing feeds to members. The feeds include all listings represented by participating brokerages in a given market.

Thanks to its ties to the National Association of Realtors, Realtor.com gets listings directly from most of the nation’s more than 900 MLSs.

via inman.com

Housing Prices Climb; Market ‘Clearly Recovering’ | Waccabuc NY Real Estate

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“Housing is clearly recovering”, David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P Dow Jones Indexes, said in a statement.

“There’s a lot of momentum,” he added during an interview on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “It shows up in all the housing statistics, not just the prices. As far as I can see it’s going to continue well into the new year.”

Prices in the 20 cities rose 5.5 percent year over year.

It was the 10th month in a row that prices have increased, the longest string of gains since before the market started to turn down in 2006.

The housing market became a bright spot for the economy last year as prices rose and inventory tightened. The sector is expected to contribute to economic growth in 2013.

via cnbc.com

6 Ways To Make It Easier For People To Find You On Social Networks | Waccabuc Realtor

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ImageSocial media is not a quick fix. That said, there are some seemingly small and basic steps we can take to help current and prospective customers and contacts know where we are on social networks, and as a result encourage them to connect with us there.

Here are six ways to make it easier for people to find us on our social networks:

1. Include social media icons on your website

Including Social Media icons that link through to your social networks is pretty basic but sometimes forgotten.

As important, and often missed, is to code the links for your social media icons so that they open in a NEW browser tab when clicked. If this isn’t done your website closes and your social network opens.

If your online visitors are at all like me, they’ll feel frustrated that your website closed when they clicked on the social media icon. When all they really wanted to do was have a ‘peek’ at your social network(s) before returning to your website. If that’s the case, chances are they’re onto a new website rather than returning to yours.

2. Add social plug-ins or widgets to your website

Particularly for those who are new to your website, possibly checking you out, incorporating a feed that shows some of your activity on Twitter or your Facebook Page may help give visitors a sense of your business.

This also provides an easy way for people to ‘like’ your Facebook Page and ‘follow’ you on Twitter, without leaving your website.

For more information and the appropriate code:

3. Include links to your social networks and website on all of your social networks

Look for opportunities to include your website address and the distinct or vanity URL for your social networks in as many places as possible.

This subtly reminds people where they can connect with you online and makes it easy for them to do so.

This raises the next point . . .

4. Use a distinct Vanity URL for each of your social networks

Having your own branded and distinct Vanity URLs for each of your social networks is important. Most of the top social networks like Twitter, Pinterest and more recently Facebook have you create this distinct URL when you sign up for a new social network, but not all do.

Different networks use different names for these Vanity URLs:  Username, Address, Public Profile, etc. Essentially they are branded/distinct/Vanity URLs that make your social networks easier to remember and share in print. For instance …

LINKEDIN

LinkedIn provides a URL something like this linkedin.com/pub/sue-cockburn/80/293/303/ rather than linkedin.com/in/SueCockburn. The former is not user friendly nor will it be easy to print on a business card. You can however go into your profile and create your own Vanity URL. LinkedIn calls this a Public Profile URL.

To create your Public Profile URL:

  1. Click on ‘Profile’ then on ‘edit profile’.
  2. Look beneath your photo on the left side of the page for your existing URL. 
  3. Click on the ‘edit’ link to the right of your name
  4. On the page that opens up go to the right side of the page and look for ‘Customize your public profile URL’.
  5. Create your distinct/branded Public Profile URL.

GOOGLE+

For most of us, Google+ doesn’t allow you to create a distinct Username or Vanity URL, at this time, when you create your account. The URL they provide is more like this: plus.google.com/u/0/104293957075840180131

To make an easy to remember path/distinct URL to your Google+ account consider one of these options:

  • Create website link that forwards to your Google+ account (i.e. gplus.GeorgeSmith.com) – not ideal but it works
  • Use a service like gplus.to to create a Vanity URL gplus.to/JohnSmith

OLDER FACEBOOK PAGES

Facebook now has you create a Facebook Address or vanity URL when you create your business Page.

BUT, if you’ve had a Page for more than a few months, and haven’t already gone into your “Basic Information” settings and created a distinct username or vanity URL, you should do so now.

  1. Open up the ‘Admin Panel’ on your Page
  2. Click on ‘Edit Page’ and then ‘Update Info’
  3. Look for ‘Username’ and click on the link to the right of it that walks you through the process of creating your Facebook Address

If you haven’t already created a Facebook Address (Username) for your Page, then it is likely something like this: facebook.com/pages/Marys-Spa/173089451105629?fref=pb. 

Good luck trying to print that on a business card!

Distinct or Vanity URLs are important as:

  • They help make it easier for people to find you on social networks
  • They make your social network names simpler to remember and less difficult to find, for you and others
  • They can be printed on a business card or other print material – assuming you haven’t used a really long name in the branded portion!

A note about Title Casing

It’s a good idea to title case your brand specific information in your Vanity URL. Doing so makes it stand out, easier to read and potentially remember.

Consider this facebook.com/suessimplestitches as opposed to this facebook.com/SuesSimpleStitches or twitter.com/bobsautoshop or twitter.com/BobsAutoShop. Title casing can make the branded portion of your URLs readable at a glance.

5. Add your social networks as clickable links to your email signature

This allows people to see the social networks you’re on and connect with you, or check you out. Good for them and good for you.

6. Include your social network addresses on your print material

Share your major social networks on your print material: business cards, invoices, letterhead, in-store and mail out fliers, brochures, newspaper ads. Of course, it goes without saying, these should all be added to any eNewsletters you send out too – as clickable links.

As social media becomes more and more mainstream, these basics will become more and more important.

via socialmediatoday.com

Why rising house prices could be great for American consumers | Waccabuc Realtor

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A lot of the speculation about what an improving housing market will mean for the economy has centered on new construction. After all, if the housing sector comes roaring back, new homes being built will translate into more construction workers with jobs.

But there’s another way that the improvement in housing could translate into economic gains, one that is potentially larger but much harder to estimate in advance. One of the biggest questions for the economy in 2013 is how much a stronger housing market will translate into more consumer spending. It matters a great deal; residential investment is 2.5 percent of overall economic activity right now, while personal consumption is 71 percent. It would be great to see a rise in building activity, but the consumer is where the major macroeconomic action is.

House sold? Time to go to the mall. (SOURCE: REUTERS)

House sold? Time to go to the mall. (SOURCE: REUTERS)

A good starting point is “wealth effects.” This is simply the idea that when people become wealthier, such as when their stock portfolio rising in value, they will feel more flush and therefore spend more money. Figuring out just how large these wealth effects might be is notoriously difficult, and they can vary a lot depending on any number of factors. A 2006 study estimated that a $1 rise in the value of homes triggers 2 cents of additional spending in the quarter immediately following, and nine cents total. In a paper last year, Charles Calomiris, Stanley Longhofer, and William Miles found that the wealth effects from housing vary significantly depending on whether the homeowner is old or young, poor or rich—but their overall estimate is that a dollar of extra housing wealth triggers five to eight cents in additional spending.

That, by the way, is much more than their two cent estimate of the wealth effect from a gain in securities. In other words, if Calomiris and his colleagues’ estimates are right, rising home prices should mean more for the American consumer than a comparable rise in the stock market.

So what would that mean in practical terms for growth? Over the year ended in November, the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s index of U.S. home prices rose 5.6 percent. If that rate of home price increases continues, it would increase the value of the entire U.S. housing stock, $17.2 trillion in the third quarter, by about $963 billion.

Using the Calomiris estimates, an increase in home values on that scale should then trigger between $48 billion and $77 billion in extra spending. On the high end of that estimate, that would represent about an 0.7 percent gain in consumption spending and half a percent gain in GDP. That may not sound like a lot, but is a pretty big deal; in an economy that has been growing at a 2 percent rate for the last three years, 2.5 percent would be a welcome shift upward.

But there is reason to suspect that this unique economic moment could make the impact of higher home values higher than usual. In the Great Recession, spending fell by even more than could be attributed solely to the wealth effects caused by falling home prices. A vicious cycle set in through which falling home prices contributed to people being underwater on their mortgages, which had an outsized impact on their spending. Research by Atif Mian, Kamalesh Rao, and Amir Sufi last year found that in counties with high degrees of household debt and home price declines, retail sales fell much more than elsewhere.

That raises some interesting possibilities. It seems at least plausible that this vicious cycle could work in reverse. If homeowners who ended up underwater on their homes accounted for a disproportionate drop in spending, could home price increases that bring their net worth into positive territory have a disproportionate positive effect on spending?

We are in sufficiently uncharted territory that it is hard to predict with confidence, but this may be one of the best hopes for an improved consumer-driven economy in 2013. Maybe, just maybe, there exist tipping points by which a rise in home prices pushes families from owing more than their home is worth to owing less, and once they cross that tipping point, they will spend more freely.

Regardless of whether that effect exists or not, what is clear is that at a time when spending will come under pressure from a rise in the payroll tax, the best hope for the American consumer is to be found on the home front.

via washingtonpost.com