Daily Archives: August 2, 2011

Waccabuc NY Real Estate | The root of all economic choices | Inman News

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The root of all economic choices

Book Review: ‘Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street’

Book Review
Title: “Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street”
Author: Tomas Sedlacek
Publisher: Oxford, 2011; 368 pages; $27.95

Many consumers hear the word “economics” and their brain immediately associates the word “math,” which is dreaded in some circles. Cue eye-twitching, fetal-position curling, and so forth. I won’t get into the unfortunate reasons behind Americans’ hate-hate relationship with math — just suffice it to say that it is a relationship that could use some therapy.

This creates a real problem when it comes to understanding the global, national and even local economies, and the individual markets that comprise them (from real estate to oil to employment and the stock market), a problem that trickles down and impedes our ability to make wise decisions when it comes to our personal finances.

Fortunately, of late, a number of learned economists have begun to experiment with integrating this “dismal science” of economics with other schools of thought that are less dry, less math-centric, and seem more human, like psychology (which, when married with economics, has produced the fledgling, flourishing field of behavioral economics).

And even more fortunately for the average consumer, in his “Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street,” Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek has taken this academic trend one giant step further, creating what some are calling “humanomics,” a rather striking rethink of economics from a math-based science to a human-based cultural phenomenon along which we can understand and track the entire evolution of human civilization.

Given the surprisingly recent acknowledgment by economists that humans do not, in fact, behave rationally in their economic and financial lives, Sedlacek’s novel angle of veering outside of science and math and other predictive and analytics models to find and explore economics in sources ranging from the Talmud to the Fight Club is sensible. It also happens to be fascinating.

“Good and Evil” is organized in two parts: Part I explores ancient “myths, religion, theology, philosophy and science,” finding economic history and stories therein, while Part II does the reverse, looking at what Sedlacek deems the “blasphemous thoughts” — the weak moments and flawed theorems of modern economies and economics, culling therefrom essential archetypes he links back to other ancient stories.

In fact, story is a theme of “Good and Evil.” Throughout, Sedlacek uses the power of story to call out economics for telling normative stories in mathematical language (meaning that they try to project with numbers how things “should be”) and instead illustrates through stories the truth, the reality of human economics behavior — how things actually are. This turns what is, at its core, an economic history, into an adventure across the ages.

And I mean a lot of ages — “Good and Evil” starts with a thorough examination of the economic principle of human relationships’ interference with human efficiency as set forth in the Epic of Gilgamesh, an ancient Mesopotamian text that is the oldest written story in human history at more than 4,000 years old. Throughout, Sedlacek cites the work and words of Plato, Jesus, C.S. Lewis, Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick and Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne’s character in “The Matrix”) with equal ease, facility and significance.

The (surprisingly) modern predilection — voracity, even — for economic growth, growth and more growth? More money, more things, and so forth? Sedlacek traces it to its Old Testament roots.

In the final analysis, “Good and Evil” explores such surprisingly economic subject matter as the good and evil inherent in our physical bodies; the core differences between humans and animals; freedom; bondage; greed; philanthropy; social contracts and safety nets; debt; wealth and prosperity — all through the lens of stories, characters and theories modern and ancient.

Sedlacek is no total rogue, though; he uses his unconventional sources to underscore the need for method in understanding economics, and to issue a call for human, story-driven, historical inspiration for those methods applied.

Tara-Nicholle Nelson is author of “The Savvy Woman’s Homebuying Handbook” and “Trillion Dollar Women: Use Your Power to Make Buying and Remodeling Decisions.” Tara is also the Consumer Ambassador and Educator for real estate listings search site Trulia.com. Ask her a real estate question online or visit her website, www.rethinkrealestate.com.

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North Salem NY Real Estate | Avoid credit dings when mortgage shopping | Inman News

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Avoid credit dings when mortgage shopping

How to steer clear of ‘borrower in distress’ label

Borrowers in distress often contact many lenders hoping to find one who will approve them. For this reason, multiple inquiries can have a negative impact on a consumer’s credit score. But multiple inquiries can also result from loan applicants shopping for the best deal. The challenge to the scoring system is to distinguish borrowers in shopping mode from borrowers in distress mode.

Hard inquiries vs. soft inquiries

Consumers need not be concerned about inquiries they make, such as ordering a credit report. Self inquiries don’t affect the credit score. Neither do inquiries from your existing creditors, potential employers, or businesses considering whether or not to solicit you. These are sometimes called “soft inquiries.”

The inquiries that may affect your credit score are those by new credit grantors to whom you have given your Social Security number along with explicit authorization to check your credit. These are “hard inquiries.”

Distinguishing borrowers in shopping mode from those in distress: The ignore rule

Two credit-scoring rules developed by Fair Isaac Corp., which pioneered the development of credit-scoring models, are designed to protect the scores of borrowers who shop multiple lenders for the best deal. The quotes below are from www.FICO.com.

The “ignore rule” is that “the score ignores mortgage, auto, and student loan inquiries made in the 30 days prior to scoring.”

The 30 days includes the day of the score, which is not evident from the wording. It is a good rule, but borrowers are not warned about other types of credit that are not ignored. A very important one is credit cards. Because I happened to need a new business card while researching this article, I decided to see what impact my card shopping would have on my score.

I had a mortgage lender friend make a credit inquiry to obtain my score, then I shopped two card issuers and had my friend inquire again. My score had dropped 13 points. All credit card inquiries are treated as indicators of distress.

Mortgage borrowers today face the hazard that the 30-day period can expire while their loan is still being processed. If the lender decides to recheck the borrower’s credit, which some do as a standard practice, the mortgage inquiries that had previously been ignored will then hit the score.

Distinguishing borrowers in shopping mode from those in distress: The consolidation rule

The “consolidation rule” is that “the score looks on your credit report for mortgage, auto, and student loan inquiries older than 30 days. If it finds some, it counts those inquiries that fall in a typical shopping period as just one inquiry when determining your score.”

The consolidation rule is expressed in such a way that most readers interpret it to mean that mortgage, auto and student loans are consolidated together. That is how I read it originally. In fact, what it means is that all mortgage loans are consolidated, all auto loans are consolidated, and all student loans are consolidated. If you shop for one of each type, they constitute three inquiries.

The shopping period during which inquiries are consolidated is 15 days in one version of the scoring model and 45 days in another. Because borrowers don’t know which model is being used by their credit grantor, they should assume the period is 15 days.

But the most serious concern about the consolidation rule is whether the scorers can accurately associate inquiries with the correct loan type, especially in the case of mortgages.

Does consolidation always work?

One of the motivations for this article was a claim made to me by Jack Pritchard, a long-term mortgage veteran, that mortgage inquiries were not always consolidated because the reporting system did not always identify them accurately.

I posed this issue to Fair Isaac Corp. and was told that “the credit reporting system is a voluntary one and … lenders report what they choose to report to the bureaus, and each bureau represents that information a little differently on its credit reports.”

While this reply confirmed that proper identification could be an issue, Fair Isaac claims that their systems work around this problem by giving the borrower the benefit of any doubt. If the system is not sure, it consolidates.

But this leaves open the possibility that the system has no doubt but is wrong. Pritchard pointed to mortgage inquiries from credit unions and finance companies as particularly prone to misclassification because other types of loans are originated out of the same offices. At his suggestion, I asked Fair Isaac what would happen if a mortgage shopper generated an inquiry from a credit union and a finance company?

The reply was that “the credit inquiries would in all likelihood be de-duplicated by the FICO scoring algorithm. Inquiries from both credit unions and finance companies are eligible for de-duplication.” The italics are mine, and clearly suggest that there is no assurance that “de-duplication” (Fair-Isaac-speak for consolidation) will occur.

Bottom line for now

A case can be made that loan inquiries should be added to the list of borrower characteristics, such as sex, race and ethnicity, that, as a matter of public policy, can’t be used in developing credit scores. The information could continue to be compiled and provided to lenders, but could not be used by the credit-scoring algorithm.

Meanwhile, borrowers shopping for credit should minimize the number of hard inquiries by ordering their own score, which does not count as an inquiry, providing that score to all the vendors they shop. You tell them that they can check your credit when you are ready to authorize it. This will reduce the number of hard inquiries to one, from the vendor you finally select. And do not seek new credit cards during the period you are shopping for a loan.

The writer is professor of finance emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Comments and questions can be left at www.mtgprofessor.com.

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South Salem NY Real Estate | ‘Urgency’ sells homes | Inman News

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‘Urgency’ sells homes

Don’t rely on low interest rates in today’s market

After the tech bubble burst, people were leery about putting money into the stock market, and instead poured money into housing. It was easy to get financing — too easy, as it turned out. The inventory of homes for sale was low, and demand was high. When the demand is high and supply is low, prices go up.

Rising prices created a sense of urgency; buyers couldn’t buy fast enough. They wanted to own as soon as possible in order to take advantage of home-price appreciation that was rising rapidly in many areas.

This resulted in the housing bubble that burst in 2007. The housing market has been struggling ever since. Nationally, home prices have declined 30 percent to the level they were in 2002. Even low interest rates, coupled with low home prices, haven’t been enough to ignite home sales.

Part of the problem is that there is still too much inventory of unsold foreclosure properties, mostly located in areas where people can’t find work. Another factor holding the market back is the stringent mortgage qualification requirements. In the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, more than 50 percent of home purchasers bought using loans that didn’t require conventional qualification, such as stated-income or no-cash-down mortgages. Those loans aren’t available today.

Many lenders today require a cash down payment equal to 20 percent of the purchase price. To get the best interest rate, your FICO (Fair Isaac Corp.) credit score needs to be 720 to 740. Before 2007, 620 got you a good rate. You also need to be able to verify a meticulous employment history.

The pool of qualified buyers has diminished significantly due to tightened lending criteria. Equity loss has kept many would-be trade-up buyers from moving forward. Of those who can afford to buy, many are nervous about buying now because of recent economic news indicating that the economy is slowing and unemployment is rising.

HOUSE-HUNTING TIP: This doesn’t mean that all homes aren’t selling, just a reduced number. This is because, in most cases, sellers are marketing their homes to fewer buyers. To be a successful seller in this environment, the goal is to create a sense of urgency by preparing the listing for sale and pricing it right for the market so that buyers feel that if they don’t buy it now, someone else will.

Sellers are often in denial about how much a buyer will pay for their home. They have difficulty seeing their home from a buyer’s perspective. This is unfortunate, because buyers know current market value better than most sellers do.

Today’s buyers study the market carefully before they buy. They know the sale price of recent listings in the area that sold. They know when a listing is priced at, under or over market.

Sellers whose listings aren’t selling should ask their real estate agent to give them feedback about buyers’ reactions to their home. If the objections are about features that can’t be changed, like a location on a busy street, the list price will need to be adjusted to account for the incurable defect.

During a hot seller’s market, buyers often overlook incurable defects because they don’t want to miss out on swift appreciation. Affordability is motivating today’s buyers. They don’t expect to see appreciation soon.

In some places, prices could decline further before turning around. Low interest rates make homes more affordable for buyers. So do lower home prices. Overpriced listings reduce affordability, and they don’t sell.

THE CLOSING: The best time to reduce the price of an overpriced listing is as soon as the market indicates that it’s priced too high.

Dian Hymer, a real estate broker with more than 30 years’ experience, is a nationally syndicated real estate columnist and author of “House Hunting: The Take-Along Workbook for Home Buyers” and “Starting Out, The Complete Home Buyer’s Guide.”

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Katonah NY Real Estate | 5 ways to sell a real estate business | Inman News

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5 ways to sell a real estate business

What’s your exit plan?

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You have decided to sell your business and have located a potential buyer. What are your options in terms of maximizing the amount of your sale from your real estate business?

If you do nothing else before you sell your business, the most important step you can take is to review the tax consequences with your tax attorney or your accountant. When it comes to selling, everyone’s situation is different.

For example, if you decide to sell your business and your house in the same year, you may end up paying a hefty amount in additional taxes.

On the other hand, you may have a buyer who is unable to pay all cash for your business. At this point, you may have to consider financing the deal yourself. Here are some of the most common models for selling your real estate business:

1. All cash upfront — you exit the business upon sale
While asking for all cash upfront may seem like a good idea, it may severely limit the number of potential buyers for your business. This in turn could result in a lower price. Tax consequences are another issue. Taking all your money upfront may result in you keeping less due to higher taxes. A specific issue to watch for is the Alternative Minimum Tax.

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Bedford Hills Real Estate | Top iPhone apps to read, scan, sort business cards | Inman News

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Top iPhone apps to read, scan, sort business cards

Most popular free and paid downloads

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Editor’s note: This continually updated list, powered by app-ranking site TopAppCharts.com, displays the most popular free and paid iPhone apps related to business cards, based on a search of the phrase “business card” at app-ranking site TopAppCharts.com. The list includes apps that can scan physical business cards and digitize their contents as text:

Source: TopAppCharts.com.

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Pound Ridge NY Real Estate | Housing tax credit foul-ups: it’s got to get better | Inman News

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Housing tax credit foul-ups: it’s got to get better

Commentary: Prisoners, dead people, non-homeowners among those receiving credits

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This will probably get me hit with an audit by the Internal Revenue Service, but here’s a modest proposal for a federal government struggling to cut the deficit: Next time Congress decides to stimulate home purchases and energy improvements with federal tax credits, could we make sure the IRS is on board and knows what the heck it’s supposed to do?

I say that having read the latest critical report — the fourth in a series by the Treasury’s Inspector General for Tax Administration — about IRS bungling on housing-related tax credits.

The latest audit, released July 25 with virtually no media coverage, found that the IRS had allowed taxpayers to file amended returns to receive more than one year’s worth of first-time home purchase tax credits — the $7,500 repayable maximum credit plus the nonrepayable maximum $8,000 credit.

Or to switch the year of purchase from 2008 — when you were supposed to pay the credit back over 15 years — to 2009 or 2010, when you didn’t have to.

That’s a neat game — claim credits two years running on a single home purchase, or get out of paying back money to the government that you agreed upfront to repay.

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Armonk NY Real Estate | “Agile SEO” to Maximize Longtail Success

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Aug 01 2011

“Agile SEO” to Maximize Longtail Success

When people talk “Agile SEO”, they normally discuss the benefits of a procedural department-wide shift to the agile framework, or the development of technical tools to approach SEO problems with more of a programmers mindset. These are both great tactics, but aren’t immediately actionable. At SeatGeek, we’ve taken inspiration from agile software development to model a longtail strategy that works and can be implemented immediately with only content creators and a Google Analytics account.

Having an SEO methodology for continual creation, deployment and updating of content should not be an overlooked practice. It is important to find the right system for keyword targeting that gives you a competitive advantage. For us, iterative and incremental development processes are the core agile principles that we have applied to our SEO content strategy to achieve a competitive advantage, particularly in blog content we release.

Let’s break it down by looking at why agility is important, what it means, and how to incorporate it into your SEO content strategy.

Why Agility Matters

We can all agree that the web is always in flux, the SERPs included. The dynamic quality of the web creates a challenge for any web marketers to leverage trend-driven searches to increase site traffic. Harnessing the potential of topical searches and new information can be a terrific strategy.

In order to fulfill the changing daily needs of web users, it’s necessary to be adaptable and flexible with your ability to produce interesting content. Relevant topical queries are significant drivers of the longtail traffic we target at SeatGeek. Although we release new content on our blog daily, it’s only the first step in maximizing the long-tail searches through “Agile SEO”. But, even if you are failing to be on top of relevant topics or don’t have the resources to write daily, a lightweight version of our agile SEO strategy can still be very effective.

Iterative and Incremental Systems

Contrary to common belief, iterative and incremental are not similar. At the core of agile SEO development, the concept is to develop a system of releasing content through repeated cycles (iteration) and in smaller portions at a time (incremental). In this framework, the iteration is done with the early release of content and subsequent updating and “nurturing” of this content.

The incremental component is achieved by releasing tightly targeted and often shorter pieces, and then combining the content in a hub page (a page that links to your existing content related to one general topic, and ties them all together with higher-level content). For example, instead of having a page that targets 2011 summer concerts, festival lineups, top concerts by city, etc., we would write individual blog posts and aggregate it all on one summer concerts page. This approach has the added benefit of allowing you to re-purpose content and target something potentially more competitive with your new hub page.

As previously discussed, such a strategy is crucial to ever changing user queries and trends, and to address the fact that no-one is going to be 100% correct all of the time with their initial keyword targeting. The quicker SEOs can adapt to these changes by multi-targeting, re-targeting and re-purposing, the more competitive we allow ourselves to become.

Let me illustrate a simple example of how we did this at SeatGeek.


Example 1: Vans Warped Tour Lineup Announcement

There is often uncertainty about major concert lineups due to differences by city and the addition/removal of bands, which creates a problem for related searches. When publishers do a one-and-done approach releasing a lineup piece, they generally lack precision, with the key difference being that we continually update our posts so they are directly aligned with the searchers intent (which of course has the benefit of achieving high ranks and social shares).

When the partial 2011 Vans Warped Tour lineup (a major alternative rock tour) was leaked, we shortly after put out a blog post letting our readers know of the news. We targeted mid-to-longtail keywords such as “warped tour 2011 lineup”, while keeping a steady eye on “phrase” keywords searches as well as our own entrance keywords using actual post-specific search data from our Google Analytics. We noted a trend that people were mostly finding our content by searching for lineups by city, “warped tour 2011 lineup [city]”, but we did not rank high on page 1 for these queries. In retrospect this made sense, because the lineups are different in each city, a great example of the type of nuance that can easily be missed in standard forms of keyword research.

As such, we made small and swift changes to the blog post by organizing the lineups by city. We first rolled out a few cities to test the assumption that fans were searching by city. Shortly after, we repeated the previous cycle: (1) cross listed Google keyword traffic with incoming traffic, (2) continued to make relative changes and (3) adapt to user queries. Depending on the velocity of new information being released on the keyword, we generally iterate every few days to every week. Keeping an agile workflow for this blog post (i.e. releasing and testing content in small doses, in small intervals) resulted in an over 100% increase in organic views per day. Staying relevant to searcher intent allowed us to pick up over 450 Facebook likes and 125 comments.

Long tail

Example 2: Paul McCartney Tour Dates

It was big news in the music industry when Paul McCartney (who was nearing 70) announced a new tour. It was even bigger news when tickets for his first show sold out in seven seconds. Again, being fanatics of the music industry, we caught McCartney’s tour announcement on his website and quickly wrote a longtail targeted post in hopes to gain traction based on the predicted spike of searches. I’ll depict our agile model at work here in terms of cycles:

Cycle #1: Targeted keyword – “Paul McCartney on the run tour”

(a)   Ranked on page 1

(b)   Low page views.

(c)   Did homework in Google Analytics, saw new opportunity.

Cycle #2: Retargeted keyword – “Paul McCartney tour dates 2011”

(a)   Too competitive.

(b)   Low page views.

(c)   Did homework, saw new opportunity.

Cycle #3: Retargeted keyword – “Paul McCartney tour dates 2011 usa”

(a)   Ranked 2nd behind official McCartney site.

(b)   High search term for international users.

(c)   Until next iteration, will remain the same.

Between each cycle was approximately one week. We found the optimal keyword target through quick planning, analysis, implementation, testing and evaluation. We learned that the scarcely used keyword modifier “usa” was actually being used in high volumes with Paul McCartney because of his vast international reputation. We used the WordPress All in One SEO Pack plugin to make quick and easy changes to title tags, search descriptions and meta keywords (highly recommended).

By creating continual learning cycles based on small, quick changes to keywords, length, formatting, and even design – substantial knowledge is gathered by avoiding mistakes based on false assumptions. What is learned in these small tests will help us ensure content is search-friendly for the next similar post.

A Note on Bounce Rates

All of us SEO-types love testing. The “Agile SEO” workflow gives us a great opportunity to continually test new data-driven hypotheses. Creating cycles to tweak SEO is a methodology is an efficient way to stay on track for longer tailed keyword success.

It is also important to keep an eye on bounce rates when going through cycles. If you’re getting higher traffic, yet also higher bounce rates, you may just be iterating away from the main purpose of the content that users are searching. As you continue to update your content, I suggest taking a step back to make sure the ideas on the whole page are congruent with what visitors are searching.

To summarize, “Agile SEO” is releasing many iterations in small increments to continually pivot and fine tune for the optimal performance. Some of the benefits of using this methodology include: continual testing and learning, hedging against failures, and adapting quickly to changing needs of searchers.

Even if you don’t have too much time to focus on your keyword strategy, consider a lightweight approach to “Agile SEO” by focusing your effort on title tags, to target a primary and secondary keyword that users are searching.

Written By:

PG

Ankit Mehta | SeatGeek | @SeatGeek

SeatGeek is a ticket search site. We aggregate the web’s sports (MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA), concert, and theater ticket listings into a single place and overlay those tickets on interactive seating charts. We also use our Deal Score™ technology to identify which tickets for an event are the best bargains.

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  • http://www.thestrategicinsight.com/ SEO web design services

    Good examples quoted, this tells us that you have to keep the eye on the search trend all the time.

  • This article is clever and effective. I do have some problems on keywords myself as I just can’t figure out what the best keywords would be. SI sometimes struggle to get a  good position on keywords said to be welle typed by Google Adwords and don’t get any visit!
    I’m not talking either of Semrush that gives complete different information on the levels of search…

  • Web Marketers

    This is some great info. Many webmasters try to guess what people would be searching rather than testing and amending data given by your analytics. I like the approach too..

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