Times-O-Matic Real Estate Radar

When A Studio Has to be Good Enough for Your Boss

Saturday, April 9, 2011, by Bilal Khan

If reading The Hunt stokes your deepest hopes that someday everything in life could work out, then you, too, are obsessed with the New York Times Sunday Real Estate section. Join us as we venture into the depths of this weekend’s installment.

Benjamin Bilbao could easily afford Queens, but it was the draw of Manhattan that led him to seek a small space, about 300 square feet, but located on the island. With a budget of just around $300,000, he knew he wasn’t going to find anything bigger than a studio, but the only amenity he really needed was a dishwasher. He saw some passable places, but none that he felt comfortable showing to his boss. Finally, a unit on the the Upper West Side had everything he needed and looked nice enough to show to the boss.

Highlights after the jump>>

With a monthly budget of up to $1,300, a nice rental in Manhattan was unlikely, if perfectly doable in Queens. But he figured he could afford to buy a small place in Manhattan.

Mr. Bilbao, who works as a recruitment manager for the Population Council, a nonprofit organization that focuses on developing nations, had a budget of around $300,000. He didn’t mind a small place — 300 square feet would do.

Last summer, he saw a large studio in an elevator building on West 23rd Street, listed at $265,000. The 500-square-foot apartment had a lovely kitchen, great closets and lots of light. Monthly maintenance was almost $900.
Mr. Bilbao’s colleague and friend Laurie Constantino accompanied him there.
She pointed out some water damage to the floor as well as an overhead light fixture powered by an extension cord running along the wall.

Online, he found unsettling references to the building, which has a land lease, meaning the co-op does not own the land on which it sits. The lease expires in 2044.

He went to see a studio with less than 300 square feet, in a 28-unit co-op near Stuyvesant Square. It was advertised as a fixer-upper, with a price of only $200,000. Maintenance was $660. Despite the need for updating, the place was livable.

“But the entire building needed fixing up,” Mr. Bilbao said. He pictured having his boss over for dinner.

A listing for a $299,000 studio on the Upper West Side caught Mr. Bilbao’s eye. Maintenance was just over $700. “It looked beautiful on the Internet,” he said. But he knew not to trust photos.

The studio looked just like its photos, and was cleverly divided into three parts: a raised dining area, a rectangular living room and a lofted sleeping space. Two windows overlooked a back garden. Closets and cabinets were built in.

He bought the place for just under $290,000 and arrived this past winter. Though the studio is small, it is efficient.

· A Cozy Studio in a Presentable Building

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The following is a guest post from Jon-Mikel Bailey. Jon is President and CMO for Wood Street, Inc., a web and mobile design, development and SEO firm in Maryland. Jon blogs regularly on the Wood Street blog and speaks at area chambers and organizations on SEO, design, web content and Social Media.

 

____________

So you’ve designed a beautiful website. You have a great blog. You post examples of your work, have case studies, and maybe you even have some wonderful testimonials. Now what?

Email!

When you’ve decided that you have a great website that contains great content, how do you build awareness? Yes, you guessed it, email. This can take many forms, but I want to talk about 3 specific types of content that need email for promotion:

1. Blogs
2. Whitepapers (Case Studies, eBooks, etc.)
3. Company News and Events

1. Blogs

I recently wrote a post on business blogging. If you are an expert (which is highly likely, trust me), then your clients could really use your advice. One of the best places to put this advice on your website is in a blog.

Of course, a blog is interactive and needs readers to give it life and help it grow. Email can help bring those readers. Blogging and email are like peas and carrots. They were made for each other.

In the olden days, if you were an important scholar writing an important paper, you would present that paper at a conference to an audience of people interested in what that paper contains. Well, remove the smoke, mahogany, and guys smoking pipes and we are talking about the same basic thing.

You have published some useful information about a specific topic on your blog. Your email marketing acts as the “conference presentation”. This is a chance to let a group of interested people know that you have just published this useful information and they should read it.

The two are also mutually beneficial. A blog begets email content and email content begs for blog content. So, the two are symbiotic and keep your marketing machine going.

2. Whitepapers (Case Studies, eBooks, etc)

Whitepapers are content that is beyond what you would post on your blog. These usually take the form of a case study or eBook. They can be HTML pages or PDFs. These are the pieces of content generally reserved for the über-interested.

That said, these are still great ways to load your site with keyword-rich content and can be very useful to your target audience. So, if you are going to write these heavy-duty docs, you should also promote them.

Enter email. These are your special occasion email pieces. You might have an email campaign that focuses mainly on your blog content. Every once in a while you could throw in one of your whitepapers as a bonus.

Think of it as the extra special treat for your subscribers and promote it as such. Something like this… “as a loyal subscriber, we have put together this eBook for you about XYZ, please click here to download”.

Whitepapers should be more robust and of more value than the standard blog post. You want your subscriber to see this as something they would download and save for future reference. It’s a nice way to keep your emails fresh and to show additional value to subscribers.

3. Company News and Events

If you are one of those companies or organizations that presents at conferences, has booths at multiple trade shows, gets awards, speaks at seminars, hosts webinars, hires and promotes, then email marketing is for you!

Seriously, if you have any type of news or events that would be useful for clients and prospects to know about, then you should be including this in your email marketing.

All of this is information you will be promoting on your website. And thus it should be promoted in your email newsletter as well. Of course, you need to make sure you are promoting this correctly.

Just because it is news to some does not make it news to all. It is important that you are sending the right information in your emails to the right audience. Doing some A|B Split testing and list segmentation will be crucial if you plan to promote a lot of different types of news and events.

For example, a Chamber of Commerce might promote networking events, legislative updates, and business news. But would their entire membership want to receive all of that information via email? Probably not. Some may only be interested in the networking while others are really only worried about public policy. Segmentation here is important.

You can handle this many ways – test through your signup form or get help from your email service provider. Remember, you are trying to promote, not annoy. So, you want to push your message to an audience that would like to receive it.

What other content could benefit from email marketing? Let us know in the comments below.

Jon-Mikel Bailey
President, CMO, Wood Street, Inc.

Flickr Photo Credit: VirtualErn

Want more email marketing best practices and strategy? Download The Ultimate Guide to Email. With tips for beginners all the way to email marketing ninjas, it includes something for everyone! Become a better email marketer today.

Tags: Jon-Mikel Bailey, Wood Street

This entry was posted on Friday, April 8th, 2011 at 10:57 am and is filed under email marketing, Website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

04/09/2011

Bedford NY Real Estate Sales Report | Million Dollar Homes | RobReportBlog

 
Bedford NY Million Dollars Sales Report

RobReport Blog

Sales for Bedford NY homes listed over $1,000,000 dropped from 23 in six months ending April 2010 to 20 this year.  Prices of million dollar homes stayed practically unchanged, $1,790,000 in 2010 to $1,782,000 this year.

 

2011 Bedford NY Million Dollar Sales Stats

20   homes sold for more than $1,000,000

$1,782,000  median price

$5,500,000   high price

$1,060,000   low price

5246   average size

$513   average price per foot

255   average DOM

91.10%    average sold to ask

 

2010 Bedford NY Million Dollar Sales Stats

23   homes sold for more than $1,000,000

$1,790,000    median price

$9,500,000   high price

$1,175,000    low price

5938  average size

$460   average price per foot

249  average DOM

89.95% average sold to ask

 

 

Bedford Luxury Homes

 

 

 

Apr 9, 2011 3:15:26 PM

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NAR Statistics For April 8, 2011 Every week the Research staff analyzes key data releases and explain what they mean for you and your business. In this update, we give the highlights of the most important data releases for the week of March 28-April 1, 2011 along with graphs that show the latest movement and overall…