Tag Archives: Westchester NY

Westchester NY

Susan Sarandon hands over Clinton Hill pad to rocker son | Pound Ridge Real Estate

Famed actress Susan Sarandon has unloaded one of her three New York City apartments to her musician son, by way of a trust overseen by the ex-wife of television personality Geraldo Rivera and a veteran Hollywood actress.

Sarandon transferred the apartment at 334 Grand Avenue in Clinton Hill for $900,000 — the same price she paid for it in January 2012 — to a trust named after Miles Robbins, her son with long-time partner, the actor Tim Robbins, property records filed with the city today show.

The trustees of the Lancaster, Pa.-based trust are Edith Vonnegut, the daughter of noted novelist Kurt Vonnegut and Rivera’s former wife, and actress Lynn Cohen, who has appeared on the television show “Sex and the City” and is part of the cast of the upcoming “Hunger Games” film.

Sarandon won an Academy Award in 1996 for her leading role in “Dead Man Walking” and is a four-time Oscar nominee. Her more memorable film roles include “Thelma & Louise” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”

Miles Robbins, 21, is a musician and has appeared in a few of his mom’s films, including “The Greatest” and “Dead Man Walking.”

The two-bedroom, two-bathroom, 2,500-square-foot apartment includes 17-foot ceilings, a vaulted skylight, a working fireplace and 25-foot long rooms, according to the most recent listing.

Artist Danny Simmons, the older brother of music maven Russell Simmons, was the apartment’s previous owner. He put it on and off the market over the course of six years, beginning in May 2006, when it was priced at $1.25 million, StreetEasy and city property records show. Russell’s name was on the deed of the apartment until 2005, records show.

Toni Martin of the Corcoran Group had the listing when Sarandon purchased the home. She could not immediately be reached for comment.

 

 

http://therealdeal.com/blog/2013/10/03/susan-sarandon-hands-over-clinton-hill-pad-to-rocker-son/

 

 

 

White Plains Named To List Of Top 100 Places To Live | Armonk Real Estate

White Plains was recently ranked No.23 in livability.com’s Top 100 places to live.

Livability’s reasons for the high ranking was the city’s high ratings in education, infrastructure, and social and civic capital.

Other categories that factored into White Plains scoring were economics, health care, housing, amenities and demographics.

Neighboring Stamford Connecticut also made the list, coming in at No. 75.

The top ranked city to live in, according to livability.com, was Palo Alto, Calif.

 

 

http://whiteplains.dailyvoice.com/news/white-plains-named-list-top-100-places-live

 

 

 

 

25 Tips for Using Instagram in Your Business | Bedford NY Real Estate

instagram for business1

Instagram is a social channel that let’s you snap photos (and now video), add creative filters and share them with your followers. The photos can be posted not only on Instagram, but on social channels like Facebook and Twitter too.

Below are some tips from Instagram users for how to effectively use Instagram for business as a tool to build your brand.

Getting Started with Instagram for Business

1. Think before you click. Ask yourself the following questions: What is the purpose for using Instagram? What is the tone and style we want to portray through our images?

2. Become a regular user first. It’s always a good idea to experience Instagram as a regular user so you can see how people are using it. That will provide ideas for tying this platform into other social media marketing efforts.

3. Think about your product. What do you sell or what do you use to sell your services? Without being too promotional, you can get your followers engaging with your product. Instagram is about everyday people taking everyday pictures.


 



4. Establish a customer profile. Brands can establish their customer profile by carefully monitoring the types of content posted by their followers. For example, a brand noticing that a majority of its followers post images of shoes.

5. Coordinate with social media campaigns. How can you use Instagram in conjunction with your existing Facebook and Twitter activities?

6. Think strategically about your posts. Just because Instagram is a series of visuals doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think strategically about what you should post and when.

7. Choose your handle carefully. When setting up your Instagram account, where possible, use the same username as your Twitter account. So when your content is tagged and shared on Twitter the @username links to your Twitter bio.

Choose the Right Content

8. Show off your products with sneak previews. Clothing companies and even publishers may use Instagram to give “sneak previews” of new additions prior to launch date.

9. Remember that cuteness sells. It is a well-known fact that cute animals with funny quotes are among the category of images most likely to go viral. People like images that create a visceral reaction.

10. Announce new hires, promote your culture. Instragram is a great place to announce new hires, profile your staff and even promote your organization as a trendy, fun place to work.

11. Showcase your customers and service. Virgin America does a great job of giving their followers a taste of the company on Instagram. They showcase their customers and other fun things they are doing to make a person’s in-flight experience more enjoyable.

 

 

http://smallbiztrends.com/2013/09/using-instagram-for-business.html?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=using-instagram-for-business

Phoenix’s booming housing market leaves lower-priced homes behind | Bedford Corners Real Estate

Phoenix, one of the hardest-hit metros in the housing crisis, is seeing housing roar back thanks to an uptick in jobs and a streamlined foreclosure process that has curbed its shadow inventory.

But developers are not building enough lower-end homes to satisfy demand. Post-crisis, luxury homes — those that go for millions of dollars — now make up 21 percent of the housing stock, up from 15 percent before the crash, according to Mike Orr, director of the Center for Real Estate Theory and Practice at Arizona State University.

On the other side, the share of homes on the market for $150,000 or less dropped from 25 percent before the crash to 14 percent today, Orr told the New York Times.

 

 

Source: New York Times

 

 

– See more at: http://www.inman.com/wire/phoenixs-booming-housing-market-leaves-lower-priced-homes-behind/#sthash.kYpfDo06.dpuf

Euro Zone Sees House Prices Rise | Chappaqua NY Homes

Euro-zone house prices rose slightly in the three months to June, the European statistical agency Eurostat said on Thursday, in another indication that the currency area’s economy is slowly mending.

Separate national figures released since June suggest the rise may have continued in recent months, with Dutch and Irish prices rising in July and August. Eurostat has only recently begun issuing the euro-zone data on housing prices.

House prices across the 17-country euro zone were 0.3% higher in the second quarter of this year compared with the first three months, although they were still 2.2% lower than in the second quarter of 2012. The quarterly gain was the first since the second quarter of 2012, when prices rose 0.1%.

House prices in the euro zone are still 5.5% below the peak reached five years ago, according to Eurostat. Home prices plummeted in some countries as the impact of the 2008’s global financial crisis caused banks to reduce mortgage lending and many people lost their jobs. Now, with the economy emerging from an 18-month-long recession in the second quarter, conditions are beginning to change.

“The economies which are showing reasonable strength at the moment are beginning to see their housing markets improve,” said Professor Michael Ball, housing expert and professor of urban and property economics at Henley Business School at Reading University in the U.K. “There is evidence of economic growth, rising jobs and mortgage availability is quite good, and above all mortgage interest rates remain quite low.”

Rising house prices make homeowners feel wealthier and more willing to spend. They also reduce the risk that banks will suffer losses on their mortgage loans.

Nevertheless Mr. Ball advocated caution. “One quarter of rising prices doesn’t make a boom, and in real terms prices are still falling in many countries,” he said.

 

 

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303382004579127162132681226.html

 

 

 

Chappaqua’s Bill And Hillary Clinton Hope For Grandchild Soon | Chappaqua NY Real Estate

Two of Chappaqua’s most famous residents, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, aren’t hiding their wishes for a grandchild soon from their daughter Chelsea, according to The Washington Post.

The Post said that Chelsea having a child is “topic A” between them and that Chelsea is discussing the issue with her husband, Marc Mezvinsky.

 

 

Read the full Washington Post article here.

 

 

 

Chelsea Clinton told Glamour magazine in an interview that she and her husband are hoping to make 2014 “The Year of the Baby.”

Social media mistakes you may be making | Armonk NY Realtor

I’m pretty well known for making mistakes. It’s kind of a known trait of mine. Just this weekend I walked into a door because I didn’t open it properly first.

When it comes to social media, though, I try hard to learn from mistakes since they’re all saved for me to reflect on. Plus, I research and write about social media enough to have access to stats that make it easier to pick up and rectify these kind of mistakes.

The funny thing about some of the mistakes I looked at for this post is that the advice to avoid them is counterintuitive—sometimes even controversial. As we’ve seen before, though, counterintuitive advice is sometimes the best kind.

1. Losing out on traffic – Post the same thing multiple times

This is something that can be pretty controversial – a lot of people discourage re-posting links to the same content more than once. A good example of the controversy and why some tweeters continue to do it is Guy Kawasaki’s experience.

Guy is a big proponent of repeating your tweets, and has faced a lot of flack for it. After all, it doesn’t really make sense to send out the same thing multiple times… or does it?

Guy makes a good point that his followers probably aren’t reading his tweets at every moment of the day.

I repeat my tweets because I don’t assume that all my followers are reading me 24 x 7 x 365.

For Guy’s tweets that link to posts on his site, Holy Kaw, he repeats these four times, eight hours apart:

I picked eight hours because this means that even if the first tweet goes out at the worst times for traffic, one of the repeats will hit the best times… For example, a first tweet at 3:00 am Pacific then hits 11:00 am Pacific and 7:00 pm Pacific.

Guy also notes that he would lose out on traffic if he didn’t repeat his tweets, which is something we’ve examined before when looking at the best time to tweet:

I’ve examined the click-through patterns on repeat tweets, and each one gets about the same amount of traffic. If I tweeted stories only once, I would lose 75% of the traffic that I could get.

Here’s a typical example of the traffic from one of Guy’s tweets:

guy kawasaki tweet graph The 7 biggest counterintuitive social media mistakes you may be making

First post: 739 clicks

Second post: 718 clicks

Third post: 565 clicks

If I follow common wisdom, I would have tweeted it once and lost 1,200 clicks—that’s the bottom line.

This is something we do at Buffer as well. We use different headlines to test which one gets the best clicks for a particular post, and then we repeat the best one using Buffer to reach different timezones with the same content.

 

 

http://thenextweb.com/entrepreneur/2013/10/05/7-biggest-counterintuitive-social-media-mistakes-you-may-be-making/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily

 

Single-family housing starts improve | Cross River Real Estate

The increase in housing starts fell short of expectations in August, up a slight 0.9% from July, the Census Bureau revealed Wednesday.

Housing starts in August were at a seasonally adjusted rate of 891,000, compared to the revised July estimate of 883,000.

“The small rise in starts in August, which was below expectations and would have been a fall were it not for downward revisions to earlier data, is not as disappointing as it first appears,” said analysts at Capital Economics. “The figures are skewed by the volatile multi-family sector; single-family starts posted an encouraging gain.”

The August rate is 19% higher than the August 2012 rate of 749,000.

Daren Blomquist, vice president of RealtyTrac, believes that the latest report suggests builders are looking much more carefully at the market.

“Builders continue to be very cautious given what they’ve been through the past seven years,” said Blomquist. “They do recognize that you have several things at play that could change this sort of frenzied buying activity that we’ve been seeing over the last six months,” he added.

According to Blomquist, the current market is similar to the market we were seeing 5-to-10 years ago, so many of the builders that experienced that market aren’t assuming this one will last.

“That’s what got them into trouble last time,” said Blomquist. He added that Wednesday’s report may not be what some people want to see from an economic perspective, but he believes it is a good sign that builders are being cautious and not overextending themselves.

Auction.com Executive Vice President Rick Sharga has a much brighter view of Wednesday’s housing starts data.

“The most positive aspect of today’s numbers were the fact that single-family starts were up pretty significantly,” said Sharga.

In August, single-family housing starts were at a rate of 628,000, up 7% from the revised July figure of 587,000. The August rate for homes in buildings with five units or more reached a pace of 252,000 units.

Sharga noted that it’s not unusual on a month-to-month basis to see some ebb and flow. “What we’re seeing is really an adjustment as builders try to figure out where they really are,” he added.

When reports fall short of expectations, it’s easy to take a negative view of it, said Sharga. However, it’s important to look at the composition under the top-line numbers, he explained.

 

 

 

http://www.housingwire.com/articles/26903-single-family-starts-improve

Mortgage Rates decline again | Pound Ridge Homes

Freddie Mac today released the results of its Primary Mortgage Market Survey® (PMMS®), showing average fixed mortgage rates falling for the third consecutive week amid declining consumer confidence and the onset of the federal government shutdown. The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage is at its lowest level since the week ending June 20, 2013.

News Facts

  • 30-year fixed-rate mortgage (FRM) averaged 4.22 percent with an average 0.7 point for the week ending October 3, 2013, down from last week when it averaged 4.32 percent. A year ago at this time, the 30-year FRM averaged 3.36 percent.
  • 15-year FRM this week averaged 3.29 percent with an average 0.7 point, down from last week when it averaged 3.37 percent. A year ago at this time, the 15-year FRM averaged 2.69 percent.
  • 1-year Treasury-indexed ARM averaged 2.63 percent this week with an average 0.4 point, unchanged from last week. At this time last year, the 1-year ARM averaged 2.57 percent.

Average commitment rates should be reported along with average fees and points to reflect the total upfront cost of obtaining the mortgage. Visit the following links for the Regional and National Mortgage Rate Details and Definitions. Borrowers may still pay closing costs which are not included in the survey.

Quotes Attributed to Frank Nothaft, vice president and chief economist, Freddie Mac.

“With the onset of the federal government shutdown and declining consumer confidence, fixed mortgage rates fell for the third consecutive week. Consumer sentiment fell for the second month in a row in September to its lowest reading since April, according to the University of Michigan. Moreover, a recent Bloomberg survey of professional forecasters suggests that a partial federal shutdown lasting one week would shave 0.1 percentage points off of GDP growth in the fourth quarter and even more if the shutdown lasts longer.”

Freddie Mac was established by Congress in 1970 to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the nation’s residential mortgage markets. Freddie Mac supports communities across the nation by providing mortgage capital to lenders. Today Freddie Mac is making home possible for one in four home borrowers and is one of the largest sources of financing for multifamily housing. For more information please visit www.FreddieMac.com and Twitter: @FreddieMac.

Gorgeous Sagaponack Six-Bedroom is Yours for $10.95M | Waccabuc Real Estate

This house really is beautiful. We love all the white, which contrasts beautifully with the piano-finish floors (hopefully the new owners will have staff with Swiffers on standby). The kitchen and bathrooms are faultless, the pool and landscaping are perfection. There’s 1.6 acres in a great location, and six bedrooms and 7.5 baths inside. As for the artwork, we’re on record in favor of Damien Hirst dot paintings, but the Beatles? Unless you were actually in the Beatles (and that guy lives in Amagansett, not Sagaponack), come on. Also, photographers gotta be more careful with the wide-angle lenses. Yes, they can make the rooms look bigger, but they can also give a funhouse-mirror effect that’s offputting. Again, minor complaints in a stunning house. · Sagaponack Sanctuary With Style [Saunders]