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Teatown Lake Reservation News | Chappaqua Real Estate
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Daily Archives: August 23, 2013
in the City of Light with a seven night stay in a charming, private, Parisian apartment on Rue de l’Eperon in the Saint Germain des Pres neighborhood (6th arrondissement), 
close to the Seine and within walking distance to all of Paris.
Spend a week surrounded by history in a private London flat featuring 2 bedrooms, a full kitchen, living 
room and dining room. Located on Duke St., St. James, this flat is perfectly situated to explore London.
at types of moths and other insects will we find on this evening program? Join Charlie Roberto to discover these creatures of the night. Meet at Teatown’s Cliffdale Farm, Teatown Road, Croton-on-Hudson. FREE.
Enjoy a guided tour of Wildflower Island, Teatown’s unique two-acre sanctuary that is home to over 230 species of wildflowers and shrubs native to our area.
Recapture your camp days and reconnect with former camp friends at Teatown’s first camp alumni event! The event is free of charge and open to all camp alumni who have aged out (age 15 and over), counselors and their families. A pizza truck will serve food, beer and soda. Live music will add to the festivities, as well as guided hikes along the Teatown trails.
Facebook Reveals Most Users Are Mobile: This Week in Social Media | North Salem Realtor
Welcome to our weekly edition of what’s hot in social media news. To help you stay up to date with social media, here are some of the news items that caught our attention.
What’s New This Week?
Facebook Reveals 78% Of US Users Are Mobile: TechCrunch reports “a new level of transparency from Facebook will help the world see whether its mobile growth is entirely propped up by international users that don’t earn the company as much money.”
Facebook mobile users continue to grow.
Yelp Introduces the Ability to Write and Publish Reviews on Mobile: “Yelpers can now contribute their useful, funny and cool reviews directly from their Yelp mobile application (available today on iOS and coming soon to Android).”
“Any photos that a Yelper has taken of the business they are reviewing will now appear in-line with their mobile reviews.”
Google+ Adds SoundCloud Embeds: SoundCloud works “together with Google to make it easier than ever to reach your audience by sharing sounds to Google+.”
7 cities threatened by rising seas | Cross River Real Estate
At least one-fifth of all homes in seven U.S. cities could be submerged in the next 40 years, according to an analysis of new data on climate change due to carbon emissions.
The cities are:
Metairie, La.
Hollywood, Fla.
Huntington Beach, Calif.
Hialeah, Fla.
Stockton, Calif.
New Orleans, La.
St. Petersburg, Fla.
The cities have a 50 percent chance of sea levels rising between 1 and 3 feet by 2020, and a 1 in 6 chance of sea levels rising between 3 and 10 feet by 2050. At least 866,000 residents in 419,000 homes in these cities could be displaced by 2050 from a combination of rising ocean levels, storm surge and tides.
Source: 24/7 Wall St.
See more…
http://www.inman.com/wire/7-cities-threatened-by-rising-seas/#sthash.6dpdMdoy.dpuf
Designing Your Outdoor Landscape Lighting | Waccabuc Real Estate
Outdoor lighting isn’t just about safety and security. There’s no reason the curb appeal of your home should be limited to the daytime.
The tree you’ve also loved, the garden you’ve worked hard to cultivate, the pond you bought with your hard-earned money, and all the other landscape features you’ve painstakingly chosen for your home can achieve some of their best effects at night with good outdoor landscape lighting.
Low Voltage Outdoor Lighting The electricity running into your home holds a potentially dangerous 120 volts.
To create low voltage outdoor lighting you’ll need to install one or more transformers. This will reduce the voltage of your outdoor landscape lighting to a tame 12 volts. If your wiring gets exposed by inclement weather and the abuse of the elements, this voltage poses no danger to you, your family members, or your pets.
The downside to the low voltage outdoor lighting is that light fixtures become dimmer the further away they are from the transformer. If this becomes a problem, there are a number of easy solutions. You can upgrade to a higher-rated transformer or a heavier-gauge cable.
You can use multiple transformers. You can also simply reduce the number or the wattage of your light fixtures. Moving the transformer and/or rearranging the layout of the lighting system can reduce the cable length to each fixture, minimizing the dimming path.
You might also consider using the dimming as an intentional effect. This is popular in path lighting, where each light fixture gets stronger as you move closer to your home.
Read more…
12 Ways to Get More Pinterest Followers | South Salem Realtor
Are wondering how to get more Pinterest followers?
Are you looking to increase your Pinterest engagement and drive traffic?
In this article, I’ll share 12 tips on how you can get more Pinterest followers and promote your business.
Why More Pinterest Followers?
More Pinterest followers can help you get more likes, repins, comments, clicks and impressions.
This can then help drive traffic, increase sales, generate leads and build your Pinterest brand.
It also provides an opportunity for you to generate more engagement with your customers.
Here are the tips:
#1: Add the Pinterest Follow Button
The Pinterest follow button diverts website visitors to your Pinterest page, thereby attracting followers. This can be effective if you have a high-traffic website.
Install the button in several prominent places on your website and blog—the header, footer, sidebar, etc. Make it easy for people to find your brand page and convert them into followers.
To create your button, use the widget builder page on Pinterest or create a custom button that matches your branding
read more…
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/how-to-get-more-pinterest-followers/
Industry push to raise visibility of home energy efficiency improvements | Armonk Real Estate
Everybody in real estate knows the rap against “green” and energy efficiency improvements to existing homes: Owners can invest a lot of money and save on utility bills, but then when they go to sell they often find it’s tough to get paybacks through higher prices on their homes.
Complicating the situation is the fact that many multiple listing services do not have “green fields” in their listing formats to highlight energy efficiency improvements, so buyers who are potentially interested in high-performance homes can’t shop for them effectively. Then come the appraisers and lenders. In an era of appraisal management companies, assignments often are made based on low fees, and appraisers with no training in valuing green improvements either ignore them or give them only minimal upward adjustments. And when they try to give significant adjustments, underwriters often challenge them or simply ask for a revised, lower number.
Builders routinely market new homes carrying Energy Star, HERS, LEED and National Green Building Standard certifications, and buyers across the country recognize these as credible performance indicators. But purchasers of existing homes have no standardized guidance.
This is despite the fact that National Association of Realtors’ annual surveys of homebuyers and sellers have consistently found that buyers care about energy efficiency.
The 2012 survey, for instance, reported that 87 percent of buyers surveyed said a home’s heating and cooling costs were “important” or “very important” to them, whatever the age of the house. Energy efficient lighting and appliances also are seen as major pluses, with roughly 70 percent of purchasers ranking them important or very important
See more…
http://www.inman.com/2013/08/13/industry-push-to-raise-visibility-of-home-energy-efficiency-improvements/#sthash.d9jEKXNb.dpuf
Foreign investors pull out of U.S. market | Chappaqua Real Estate
According to Bloomberg, potential Fed changes are causing more investors to pull out of the U.S. market, with the foreign selling of U.S. long-term portfolio assets rising for the second straight month in June. Long-term portfolio assets usually include mortgages.
Bloomberg has more on what’s irking investors:
The net long-term portfolio investment outflow was $66.9 billion after a $27 billion net decline in May, the Treasury Department said in a statement today in Washington. Net selling of long-term Treasuries by private foreign investors increased to $40.1 billion from $29 billion the prior month, the department said.
Source: Bloomberg
Single-family home construction slips in July | Bedford Corners Real Estate
U.S. housing starts rose 5.9 percent month over month in July to a seasonally adjusted rate of 896,000, and were up 20.9 percent from a year ago, according to a monthly report from the U.S. Census Bureau released today.
The increase was powered by a sharp rise in multifamily construction. Construction of single-family homes actually dropped by 2.2 percent.
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/wire/single-family-home-construction-slips-in-july/#sthash.XoeKv5es.dpuf
3 Strategies for Finding Customers With Social Media | Pound Ridge Realtor
Do you need a strategy to reach your ideal prospects with social media?
Are you overwhelmed by all the social media options?
If so, you’re not alone. Social media overwhelm is one of the biggest challenges businesses face.
In this article, I’m going to show you three social media strategies so you can focus your efforts on the channels that best align with your business objective and target audience.
The Simple Solution
Fortunately, there’s a simple solution for it: only focus on where your customers are.
Where are your customers on social media? Image source: iStockPhoto.
Once you find out where your customers are on social media, it becomes easier to come up with a strategy that will help you find your future customers.
Here are three strategies you should consider:
Strategy #1: Ask Your Customers
Asking is the low-hanging fruit that’s easy for small business owners to overlook. It’s such a simple thing to do and allows you to further cement the personal connection you have with your customers.
If you have a brick-and-mortar business, when your customers visit your location, ask whether they use social media. If you have another type of business, figure out the best time and place to ask your customers whether they use social media.
If they do use social media, ask them what channels they spend their time on. Is it Facebook? Pinterest? Maybe it’s LinkedIn.
read more….
http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/3-strategies-for-finding-customers-with-social-media/
Create “Perfect” Posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ | Bedford Realtor
Get more social media fans and create engagement! Follow these 17 guidelines when you post on social networks.
![Create Perfect Posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ [Infographic]](http://cdn.pamorama.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/social-media-conversations.jpeg "Create Perfect Posts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+ [Infographic]")
Is there any such thing as a perfect social media post? Each social network has a specific set of expectations, limitations — and pros and cons. And each one is constantly evolving in terms of potential. A one-size-fits-all strategy just isn’t feasible. This makes it more challenging for brand marketers whose goals are growing their fanbase and creating engagement around relevant content. So what’s the best strategy to engage followers and attract new ones on each site?
My recent post, 10 Tips for Better Facebook Status Updates, offered some great ideas for increasing Facebook engagement through crafting better status updates. The folks at MyCleverAgency, a social media consultancy in the U.K., did some research and formulated these 17 guidelines to help you gain the traction you need to jumpstart your social media engagement.
Best practices for Facebook posts
1. Keep things positive
Being positive breeds engagement and encourages sharing.
2. Provide information
The most appealing updates are ones that offer something, but don’t disclose everything — this increases the likelihood that fans will click.
3. Provide a link
If you’re going to provide a link, use Bit.ly, TInyURL, or another link-shortening service so you can track how many people are clicking through.
4. Include images
Posts with images get the highest amount of engagement on Facebook, so be sure to include one when you can. The perfect size is 800×600.
Read more…