Daily Archives: September 19, 2011

North Salem NY Real Estate | Rid home of mildew culprits | Inman News

Rid home of mildew culprits

Tips for protecting clothes, furniture, bathrooms and more

Image via <a href=

While obviously unsightly, the presence of mildew on interior or exterior surfaces is more than just a cosmetic problem. It’s almost always an indicator of a deeper and potentially more destructive moisture condition.

Painting over it won’t cure the condition, as the mildew will return sooner or later, and in the meantime the hidden moisture is working away at insulation, wood framing and other parts of your house.

Mildew, a form of mold if you check that online or search it in Google, is most often seen as a black or sometimes white or greenish growth on siding, drywall, roofing and in other areas. In order to grow, mildew first of all needs a food source.

Because mildew likes organic materials, the typical home offers lots of choices, including drywall, wood, paper, wallpaper paste, cotton, linen, leather, wool and many other materials and surfaces.

In addition to the food, mildew will grow best in areas where it’s moist and warm, and where there’s a general lack of sunlight and air circulation.

Interior

Inside your house, one of the most common areas where mildew growth is seen is in the bathroom, where warm, moist air is at its most concentrated. Typically, the only thing needed to combat moisture here is the installation of a ventilation fan.

Make sure that it’s ducted all the way to the outside of the house, not just into the attic! And, of course, the fan needs to get used, both during and immediately after using the bath or shower.

If you’re having trouble getting people to follow this rule, then you can ensure that the fan gets used by having it wired to the bathroom’s overhead light so the two come on together, or to a timer control. If the fan is used regularly, you’ll remove the moisture and circulate the air, and you shouldn’t have any trouble containing the moisture before mildew can start.

If a ventilation fan isn’t enough, then you have more moisture being generated in the bathroom than just that from the shower.

Common hidden moisture sources include a leak in the tub or shower valves or supply pipes; loose and leaking drain lines; a bad wax ring seal below the toilet that’s allowing seepage; or moisture buildup on the floor around the tub or shower from bad caulk joints or excessive splashing from tub users.

Detecting this moisture can be difficult, as the source is usually concealed and you typically won’t even know you have a problem until it becomes bad enough to show visible signs — a buckled floor, crumbly drywall, etc. Here’s one place where the presence of mildew is a blessing in disguise, because it tells you there’s moisture present before it causes real damage.

Once you begin to see the mildew, your best bet is to contact a contractor who specializes in water damage restoration; most have sophisticated moisture meters that can help you track down the problem.

Other interior mildew problem areas can arise in closets, and behind beds and other furniture — especially those placed on exterior walls. This is typically the result of poor air circulation, combined with high humidity.

In the closet, try removing some of the clothes so that they’re not as densely packed. Leave the door open or replace the door with one that’s louvered to allow air to circulate. There are also moisture-absorbing chemicals such as silica gel that can help you get rid of excess moisture in specific trouble areas.

In bedrooms and other areas, move furniture away from walls so air can circulate. Keep clothes and other items from accumulating on the floor and in piles on furniture, and keep things as clean as possible to keep food sources and accumulated moisture to a minimum.

Exterior

On the outside of your house, the two areas you’re most likely to see mildew is on the siding and on the roof shingles, and here again it’s the early warning sign of a moisture problem.

If the problem is localized to one or two patches of siding or roofing, then the moisture source is typically easy to track down. Some possibilities for localized mildew on siding include sprinkler heads that are misaligned, leaking or improperly adjusted; an underground leak in a water or sewer line; moisture accumulation from a dryer vent or exhaust fan vent; trees, shrubbery or other landscaping that’s overgrown; and other similar “spot” sources.

Do a little detective work in the areas of the mildew, and the problem is often easy to find and correct.

On the roof, mildew often forms in areas where trees overhang the roof, or where leaves or pine needles accumulate. Clearing debris off the roof and trimming overhanging branches will often be enough to solve the problem.

You may also need to open up the areas around your house by removing or trimming closely packed trees which will allow sunlight and prevailing winds to reach mildewed areas and dry them out.

Widespread areas of mildew on walls and roof indicate a larger moisture problem, one that can usually be traced back to a lack of ventilation.

If you have a high level of humidity inside the house that is not being adequately dealt with, normal pressure and convection will move the moisture into wall cavities and attic spaces. Once it’s there, a lack of ventilation will contribute to the moisture, forming mildew.

To combat this, first you need to deal with moisture inside the house through the use of ventilation fans in the kitchen, bathroom and laundry; mitigation of high-moisture sources such as indoor spas and hot tubs; reducing the number of house plants; or perhaps installing a dehumidifier.

In the attic, be sure you have an adequate number of roof vents to allow moisture to dissipate naturally to the outside.

Remodeling and repair questions? Email Paul at paulbianchina@inman.com. All product reviews are based on the author’s actual testing of free review samples provided by the manufacturers.

South Salem NY Real Estate | The birth of modern suburbia | Inman News

The birth of modern suburbia

Levittown served as model for U.S. housing, communities

<i>Cover image courtesy of <a href=Cover image courtesy of Dancing Traveller Media.

During the dog days of this past summer, The Arizona Republic newspaper published a multipart essay on the growth of Phoenix. The headline over the first entry screamed with large print: “A City Explodes: Post WWII Housing Boom Pushed Phoenix Into a Mega Metro.”

I had to chuckle when I perused the article, because it was all so Johnny-come-lately to me: I was lucky enough to have grown up in America’s first modern suburb, Levittown, N.Y., an adventurous, groundbreaking development that paved the way for places like Phoenix to grow into huge metroplexes.

The timing of The Arizona Republic’s story was particularly ironic because, as the series was unfolding on the pages of my morning newspaper, I was enjoying the success of having published my fifth book, “Growing Up Levittown: In a Time of Conformity, Controversy and Cultural Crisis.”

I, too, was revisiting the postwar housing boom, but in the form of a memoir and social history.

In the midst of a housing crisis most Americans never experienced before, I suppose, a lot of us have been wondering how we got here — to this moment in history.


To understand the mess we are currently in, we need to have a basic understanding of our housing history. And that all begins on the potato farms of Long Island where the small community of Levittown was to be built.
–Steve Bergsman

To understand the mess we are currently in, we need to have a basic understanding of our housing history. That all begins on the potato farms of Long Island, where the small community of Levittown was to be built.

Most Americans now live in one type of suburban development or another, so it seems almost unfathomable that the concept of the suburb as we know it today is really a relatively recent phenomenon in American history.

Vast expanses of single-family homes beyond urban cores didn’t come into existence until after World War II, and the development of such basic housing staples might have taken even longer to arise if it weren’t for the drive, ambition and huge leap of faith of one man: William Levitt.

Levittown came into existence due to three factors:

  • demand;
  • easing of credit; and
  • singular vision.

During World War II, new-home construction had come to a complete halt because raw materials were needed for the military effort. When the war ended, hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women, many newly married with children on the way, had no place to live but with parents.

The U.S. government realized housing was going to be a major problem and set in motion a series of reforms to make mortgage loan guarantees and easier credit available to veterans.

Starting in the mid-1940s, before the close of World War II, Congress began passing a series of mortgage financing innovations that would make it easier for veterans to buy homes.

The original Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 put in place a loan guaranty program. At the time, the sentiment among lawmakers was that government should provide a means whereby veterans could obtain favorable credit, which would permit them to shelter their families.

Subsequent bills liberalized mortgage credit, with a big push coming in the Housing Act of 1950. That law made a number of important changes including stretching the maximum maturity of loans to 30 years.

All this still wouldn’t have made much of an impact if William Levitt hadn’t devised a way to apply industrial mass production techniques to the housing problem.

Prior to the advent of Levittown, home construction was generally a singular, custom product, but Levitt created the first housing development by clearing old potato fields and building thousands of homes in one swoop.

A development with so many homes going up at one time (eventually 17,000 homes were constructed in Levittown) was such an unusual concept that it was immediately attacked by critics, who assumed Levitt was building shoddy product.

But that wasn’t the case at all. Levitt pioneered so many standards still used today: no basements; all homes constructed on concrete slabs; radiant heating coils built into the concrete; all copper plumbing (best product at the time); pre-installed modern appliances; and integral use of Sheetrock.

Probably the biggest criticism of Levittown was that all the homes looked alike. Indeed, there were just a limited number of models, but even when I moved there in 1954, so many of the homes were already customized and everyone planted trees, bushes and gardens idiosyncratically so that the homes really didn’t look the same anymore.

It didn’t stop the critics. Lewis Mumford, one of the great intellectuals in urban planning and the history of cities, simply couldn’t abide Levittown. In one of his many blasts, he wrote:

“A multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances on uniform roads, in a treeless common waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same incomes, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated food, from the same freezers, forming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold manufactured in the same central metropolis.”

Mumford expected Levittown to become a suburban slum. Instead, it became the prototype for the America of the future.

Today, Levittown is a quiet, leafy suburb. The blue-collar workers who originally settled in the first Cape Cod models of 750 square feet have given way to white-collar workers, and many homes have been expanded to twice the original size.

The little Levitt house that cost less than $8,000 to own back in 1949 now sells above $300,000, taking into account the deflationary effects of the current recession.

Although the New York metropolitan area was hit hard by the financial downturn of two years ago and the ongoing housing slump, I recently visited www.foreclosure.com to tally the number of foreclosures in Levittown.

There weren’t any.

Author’s note: Special to Inman News readers, you can purchase the “Growing Up Levittown: In a Time of Conformity, Controversy and Cultural Crisis” e-book for $5.99 (a 25 percent discount off the list price) by entering discount code ZX59A at the following website: Smashwords.com/books/view/76878.

Katonah NY Real Estate | Quick response times pay off for real estate agent | Inman News

Quick response times pay off for real estate agent

From InmanNext

Stephanie KelleyStephanie Kelley

Editor’s note: View the original article at InmanNext: “Response Strategies That Pay Off

Stephanie Kelley works in San Antonio, one of the markets featured in an Inman News Special Report: Top Markets For Real Estate Agents.

Stephanie Kelley, of Keller Williams, Legacy, has been riding the San Antonio real estate wave since 1992. Years in the business have taught her the value of real face time as well as online interactions.

Kelley and her business partner and husband, Randy Kelley, know where to draw the line between the personal and the professional, especially online. Kelley recently gushed to InmanNext about her iPad 2, her long relationship with the Top Producer customer relationship management platform, and her goal to integrate eEdge by the end of the year.

What is the No. 1 tech challenge you are faced with?
The biggest challenge that I face is just keeping up with the constant learning curve.

Are you involved in social networking (i.e., Facebook and Twitter)? If so, briefly tell us how you use it to build your business. If you are not, please tell us why.
Social media is simply a doorway or means of staying in touch, not only with clients but also family and friends. I use a personal page and a business page on Facebook. My identity or “brand” is the same on all sites, but I don’t want to be all work and no play.

Real estate is what I do and I want my friends to share that knowledge, but I want my blogs, listings and business to come from the business page and the vacation photos from my personal site. Your friends always want to know about your business anyway. It’s just nice to build rapport from a more personal standpoint.

When friends are ready for more market information, they always have the opportunity to “like” the business page. The blogs are fed to the business page and listings are posted there. There are links from the blogs and websites to the social media sites. I am also active on Linkedin, Twitter and a little on Foursquare. HootSuite ties it all together.

Do you use tools to work paperlessly, like DocuSign or DotLoop? Why or why not? How important is that to you?
Currently, I am using DocuSign and have been for some time. With Keller Williams rolling out eEdge, which incorporates DotLoop, I am looking to transition to that platform. I’ve found that e-signatures, whether it be DocuSign or DotLoop, have made my job easier. There is less running around town spending time and gas for me or for my client. We probably save a few trees in the process, too!

Tell us about your website and/or blog. How many leads do you generate from your site on a monthly basis? Is that an important part of your business?
How many leads? This depends on whether you are talking about hits, registrations or really strong leads. Auto-responders have not been that effective for us, at least in the short term. We find that a quick (within minutes), real response with a phone conversation is the most effective.

The problem we’re seeing is that many of the leads won’t provide a real phone number, so most go into a drip campaign, and some are eventually converted to buyers or sellers. In fact, I would love to incorporate a FaceTime or Skype conversation with a first-time registrant, but I haven’t determined yet how to get that trust level from the customer.

We do take every lead seriously; so building that trust level is very important. As a result, half of our closed business has originated from Internet leads. This part of our business is important enough that we spend a great deal of time keeping the sites active, lively and original.

How important do you feel content creation is to your business — i.e., social media posts, blogging, email newsletters? Do you create content yourself or do you outsource part of it?
Content is king! I know that many agents borrow or “share” from syndicated sites. From a time standpoint and for simply sending something out to a large number of people, I can see where this would be effective.

The truth is that real estate is local and while the national economy has an impact on our San Antonio market, the placement of San Antonio in the top 10 markets proves that point. For that reason, we focus our information on our local real estate market, statistics, local issues, schools, events, etc. Almost all of our content is original. Even though our e-newsletter is templated from a national source, the local information is original.

How do you balance your time? Are there any tools you use to make juggling everything easier?
Balance? Ha! I don’t think there is a program invented that could control the incredible peaks and valleys that this business presents. Maybe a good surfboard to just ride the waves.

Seriously, Top Producer 8i is the customer relationship manager that I use. I have used it since it was just Top Producer and the floppy disks had to be synchronized. Part of my learning curve will be changing all of this to eEdge before the end of the year.

What is the most important tech tool or app you use on a daily basis?
Wow! What a broad question! Does it sound “Palinesque” if I say I use all of them? Seriously, I am going to combine the answer to this question with the next two questions.

What type of smartphone do you use? IPhone, Droid, BlackBerry?
I switched to the iPhone from the BlackBerry. In my business, it was a major improvement. It’s easier to use, has more applications, and is just better.

Do you use a tablet device? How has it changed your business?
Yes, (I) love, love, love my iPad 2. If it weren’t bigamy, I would marry it. It keeps me “happy.” The apps are so useful to an agent. It’s unbelievable. I start with Dropbox, DocuSign, Evernote, Open Home Pro, Expensify … then open the Realtor.com app and the Trulia app — as I learned that our clients are using those.

It’s impressive to my clients to access the San Antonio Board of Realtors multiple listing service while in a showing or in the car. I can access all the information on a listing on-site. My list of reasons to have an iPad 2 is endless.

What is a specific lead-generation campaign that you conducted in your local market that worked well, and why?
The best return on investment in actual closed leads has come from answering questions, blogging, and establishing a presence on a nationally syndicated real estate site. We’ll always welcome and want referrals! For us, it’s a combination of blogging, drip campaigns, social networking, and not losing touch with our past clients.


Pound Ridge NY Real Estate | The Las Vegas Real Estate Agent Who Sold 931 Homes Last Year

How many homes do you think a real estate agent sells in a year? Ten? Maybe a couple dozen in a really good year? Well, it turns out the median agent does seven “sides” — that is, represents either a buyer or seller in a home transaction — in the course of a year. So it’s pretty remarkable that there’s an agent in Las Vegas who did 931 last year.

In fact, our Vegas mega-agent, Jared Jones of Horizon Realty Group, isn’t even the most successful agent in the country. According to a list known as “The Thousand,” put out each year by The Wall Street Journal with industry analysts REAL Trendson, he’s only No. 4. in the ranking by number of deals. (The Thousand is actually four sub-lists: Agents by dollar volume of deals, teams by dollar volume of deals, agents by number of transaction sides, and teams by number of transaction sides.) The top real estate pro on the list of agents by number of transaction sides, Mike Phillips of Kansas City, Mo., did 1,268 sides last year. That’s about four transactions a day.

(GALLERY: Top 10 Cities to Buy vs. Rent)

But it seemed particularly striking to me that agents were thriving on this scale even in places where real estate prices have been in the toilet. In Las Vegas, for example, Jones was joined by No. 7 Sue Nelson, and No. 67 Raymond Smith; meanwhile, No. 105 Diane Keane is in Delray Beach, Florida, and No. 231 Jack Coden is in Miami Beach.

So I called Jones to see if there were any broader lessons to learn or insights to be gleaned from his success.

I thought one theme might be the rise of the investor — 30 percent of homes are going to cash buyers, and the percentage is over half in distressed markets like Vegas and South Florida. Indeed, the 32-year-old agent  – yes, he’s just 32 — explains that a large portion of Las Vegas sales (78%) are distressed properties, and they account for most of his business. “There are a lot of sales of bank-owned properties,” Jones says. “And there’s a large pre-foreclosure market — people who need to sell their homes to avoid foreclosure.” Meanwhile, Jones says he keeps his deal flow high by courting investors looking to purchase more than one property — especially those looking at public auctions of distressed properties with an eye toward turning the homes into rental properties.

(GALLERY: Historical Walt Disney, Tammy Wynette and Civil War Homes)

And what advice does Jones have for non-agents mired in the current market? “If a seller is upside-down in their home and wants to sell, they should find the right short sale agent,” notes Jones, who says that prospective sellers should ask about an agent’s processing center and previous closings. “The key to getting short sales closed is persistence and a strong understanding of how the banks work.”

For primary residence buyers, on the other hand, “I think caution is the key,” Jones notes. “Make sure that you understand the deal that you are getting into — and do a home inspection!”