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Phoenix’s housing market may be rising from the ashes | Cross River NY Real Estate

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Phoenix’s housing market may be on the rise. John Burns Real Estate Consulting said the area is outpacing the recovery of other hard hit areas like Las Vegas, Riverside-San Bernardino and Sacramento.

“Phoenix was one of the hardest-hit housing markets during the bust, with home values declining 57% from 2006 through mid-2011,” said Adam Artunian, senior research analyst with the company. “But since the middle of 2011, the housing conditions in Phoenix have markedly improved and prices have begun to rise.”

According to the report, investors now make up 45% of all buyers in the area, and first-time buyers now have difficulty competing with all-cash offers coming from investors. This often creates a bidding war that raises the price of the home.

The effort by investors is well worth it, however. With a current average single-family rental rate of $12,500 per year and the median selling price of distressed homes in the area well below $127,000, the report says investors can expect between a 5% to 10% annual return. That, however, may not last.

“Competition for distressed resale homes is likely to get more challenging for buyers, with Phoenix making national headlines recently as one of the best markets in the country to purchase investment homes and enjoy favorable returns as rentals,” Artunian said.

Inventory also is very low at 2.4 months, down from almost five months just one year ago and more than 12 months in early 2008. Supply hasn’t been this low since late 2005 when the home market was at “feverish level,” said Artunian.

“Investors and foreign buyers have helped reduce Phoenix’s housing inventory to its lowest level in over six years,” he said.

Low inventory creates competition and has helped stabilizes prices, he noted. The company’s Burns Home Value Index is up 1.5% year-over-year for the Phoenix market.

Resale listings have also fallen 43% since March 2011 and are now as low as they were at the peak of the market in September 2005.

Phoenix is a destination for retirees escaping colder climates. Artunian said this past winter created the “perfect storm” for home sales, given improving conditions, low interest rates, good weather and the tourism from Major League Baseball’s spring training activity, which takes place near Pheonix. 

“The true test of Phoenix housing market strength will be this summer, when these favorable elements subside, and the housing market will stand more on its own,” he said.

via housingwire.com

Why Landing Pages Are an Indispensable Part of Marketing | Cross River NY Real Estate

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Any savvy inbound marketer “gets” that once you’ve done all that hard work to get visitors to your website, the next big step is to convert them into leads for your business. But what’s the best way to get them to convert? Landing pages, that’s what!

Unfortunately, there seems to be a major disconnect between the importance of landing pages and their use by marketers. According to MarketingSherpa’s Landing Page Handbook (2nd edition), 44% of clicks for B2B companies are directed to the business’ homepage, not a special landing page. Furthermore, of the B2B companies that are using landing pages, 62% have six or fewer total landing pages.

Landing pages are the heart and soul of an inbound marketer’s lead generation efforts, so why are they still so underutilized? MarketingSherpa cites that the number one reason businesses don’t use landing pages is because their marketing department doesn’t know how to set them up or they are too overloaded.

But let’s put a stop to this, shall we, marketers? Landing pages are much too critical to the success of your lead generation efforts to sweep under the rug, and here’s why.

What is a Landing Page?

First, let’s start with a simple definition:

A landing page is a web page that allows you to capture a visitor’s information through a lead-capture form (AKA a conversion form).

A good landing page will target a particular audience, such as traffic from an email campaign promoting a particular ebook, or visitors who click on a pay-per-click ad promoting your webinar. You can build landing pages that allow visitors to download your content offers (ebooks, whitepapers, webinars, etc.), or redeem other marketing offers such as free trials, demos, or coupons for your product. Creating landing pages allows you to target your audience, offer them something of value, and convert a higher percentage of your visitors into leads, while also capturing information about who they are and what they’ve converted on.

How Landing Pages Work

For a more complete understanding of how landing pages make visitor-to-lead conversions (and reconversions) possible, let’s talk through a hypothetical scenario that will help demonstrate the simple pathway of a visitor into a lead through a landing page.

Let’s say you own a professional painting business, and your services include a variety of professional indoor and outdoor paint jobs. You’re a savvy inbound marketer, so you maintain a business blog that features articles about painting tips and tricks. You also have several more premium marketing offers like free educational ebooks on painting and free, no-obligation painting consultations.

Now let’s say a mother was looking for a professional painter to paint her new baby-to-be’s nursery but was first doing some research into color schemes. She comes across your blog post entitled “10 Popular Nursery Room Color Schemes for 2012” as a result of a Google search, and she clicks through to read it. When she reaches the bottom of the article, she notices a call-to-action (CTA), which is essentially an ad, for one of your offers — a free painting consultation to help her decide which color scheme would work best with the size and type of nursery she’s working with. “That would be valuable,” she thinks, clicking on the CTA and visiting the landing page where she can sign up for her free consultation.

The landing page provides some additional information and details about what she will get out of the free consultation, convincing her it’s worth providing her contact information on the landing page’s conversion form in order to take advantage of the offer. She submits her information, and voila! — she’s now a viable lead for your painting business with whom you can easily follow up! What’s more, she wants you to follow up with her. How fantastic does that sound?

And this isn’t the only pathway through which a visitor can travel to convert into a lead. In addition to search, visitors can find your site and its landing pages through a number of marketing channels including email, social media, PPC, direct traffic, or referral traffic. Furthermore, they can find your landing pages through calls-to-action you place throughout your website, or directly as a result of you sharing the link to those landing pages in these other marketing channels.

They key, as a marketer, is to create these landing pages in the first place, and make it easy for potential customers to find them in your various marketing efforts.

6 Reasons You Need Landing Pages

Still not convinced that landing pages can make your marketing and lead generation efforts more effective? Here are 6 more compelling reasons:

1) Easily Generate Leads! If you could do one thing right now to drastically improve your lead generation efforts, it would be to use landing pages on your website. As we mentioned earlier, too many companies send their email, social media, and search traffic to their homepages. This is the equivalent of throwing leads away. You could capture these leads at a much higher rate simply by sending them to targeted landing pages. Landing pages provide a very easy way to generate leads for your sales team that you can then easily segment, nurture, or distribute to your sales team.

2) Give Your Offers a Place to Live: Marketing offers and landing pages go hand in hand. Just think back to our painting business example. Without being gated behind landing pages, your offers will do nothing to support your lead generation efforts. The idea is to require your website visitors to ‘pay’ you in contact information for something valuable like an offer, and your landing page is the collections tool.

3) Collect Demographic Information About Your Prospects: Every time a lead completes a conversion form on a landing page, your marketing and sales team is collecting valuable information about your leads. Your marketing team can then use this information to understand what types of visitors or marketing personas are converting, and your sales team already has a baseline of information about a lead before they reach out.

4) Understand Which Prospects Are More Engaged: Landing pages not only enable you to generate new leads; they also allow you to track reconversions of existing leads, which you can then use to identify which prospects are more engaged with your business. This also enables you to collect better intelligence on your leads’ behaviors and activities on your website, which your sales team can use in the sales process.

 

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5) Provide Fuel for Other Marketing Channels: A successful inbound marketing strategy relies on content — and lots of it. Landing pages are a great addition to any marketer’s content arsenal since they can be shared in social media, used as the focus of dedicated email sends and in lead nurturing campaigns, be linked to in PPC ads, and get found in organic search.

6) Offer Insights Into the Effectiveness of Your Marketing Offers: Every time you create a landing page, you’re creating another data asset for your marketing program. By tracking and analyzing the metrics associated with your landing pages, you can collect a lot of insight into your marketing performance, such as how your various marketing offers compare, how visitors and leads are converting on your landing pages over time, and more. This gives you powerful insight that can help you optimize and improve your marketing. 

 

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Key Components of an Effective Landing Page

Okay, so now you understand what a landing page is, how they work to facilitate lead generation, and why you absolutely, positively need them. But what does a landing page look like? We have a full blog article that dives into a more detailed anatomy of a successful landing page based on industry best practices, but for now, let’s just briefly review a landing page’s main components. Refer to the numbers in the image below:

  1. Headline: The headline is the first thing visitors will likely see when they ‘land’ on a landing page. A great landing page headline sums up the offer as clearly and concisely as possible, and answers the question, “What will visitors who convert on this page receive?”
  2. Copy: The text on a landing page should explain the value of the offer clearly, simply, and in a compelling way. Bullet points can be used to demonstrate clear takeaways, break up large blocks of text, and keep it brief and succinct.
  3. Keywords: Like any other inbound marketing content, keywords should be used in the page title, headers, and text on a landing page to optimize it for search engines.
  4. Social Sharing Buttons/Links: These links enable visitors to easily share a landing page with their connections on social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, extending the reach of your landing page beyond your own network of contacts, fans, and followers.
  5. Hidden Navigation: A landing page on which any top/side navigation bars are hidden will minimize distractions, reduce friction, decrease a landing page’s bounce rate, and increase the chances that visitors will stay on the page and convert.
  6. Lead-Capture/Conversion Form: The most critical component of any landing page, the lead-capture or conversion form is where page visitors submit their information in exchange for the offer, converting them into coveted sales leads.
  7. Image: Landing pages that include a relevant image give visitors a tangible idea of what they’ll receive and make landing pages much more visually appealing.

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Thank-You Pages and Email Responders

Landing pages should always be followed up by what’s called a ‘thank-you page,’ that confirms receipt of the lead’s information and either provides the offer, or details the next steps for receiving the offer. For example, if the landing page was offering an ebook, the thank-you page might provide the link to access the ebook. If the offer was the free painting consultation we discussed earlier, it might provide a message that someone would be in touch with the lead to schedule the consultation. 

Thank-you pages can also be accompanied by an automated email response that sends the offer or next steps in an email message triggered by the landing page form completion. This is especially helpful if the offer is something like a live webinar that will take place at a later date/time, and you want the lead to easily be able to save information such as log-in credentials.

The critical role of the thank-you page and the email response is to make sure the lead is never left hanging or wondering what will happen next.

The More Landing Pages You Have, The Better!

We mean it! Put simply, the more landing pages you create, the more opportunities you’ll have to convert visitors into leads.

via blog.hubspot.com

Rentals at College Towns | Cross River NY Real Estate

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Many colleges and universities are already reporting record high applications and enrollments at their campuses. Unless a school is purposely trying to downsize (going for quality rather than quantity) the simple statistics of an ever-increasing number of people high school age (15-to-19 years old) assures a steady, rising stream of potential college students in the near future. The conversion rate from high school to college enrollment is no doubt rising, not because of better scholastic achievements but because of social pressure to attend college and from easier access to student loans and grants.

That means buying a rental property in college towns or in college areas of a large city may provide a good return on investment for those who are patient. The past demography data of the number of people in the 15-to-19 years old age group suggest an investment in college student rentals from about 1985 onward was likely to be difficult because of far fewer people in that age group. But investment from about 1995 onward should have provided good rental income.

Regarding the future, there may be a slight stalling in occupancy rate for the next 3 to 5 years. But after that, expect a huge growth in college enrollment. Students will pay the rent because of easy access to student loan programs. How the student loan is repaid after graduation is a separate question, particularly given that tuition has risen by over 600 percent in the past 30-years. Let’s hope student loans do not go the way of subprime mortgages (easy access but eventual default). These graduates are the future first-time homebuyers.

via economistsoutlook.blogs.realtor.org

Cross River NY Real Estate | Down Payments Remain Elevated

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Down payments greater than or equal to 20 percent were made by 34 percent of all residential home purchasers last month, a percentage that has remained relatively stable over the past year, according to the latest Realtor Confidence Index survey from the National Association of Realtors.

However, over the past several years, lenders have been raising down payment requirements. In 2011, median down payments for conventional loans were approximately 22 percent, according to Zillow. That percentage doubled in three years and represents the highest median down payment since the data were first tracked in 1997.

Both these surveys show higher down payment costs than NAR’s 2011 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, which is based n part on 2010 transactions. For both conventional and FHA loans, which require only a 3.5 percent down payment, NAR reported the median down payment for all buyers was 11 percent in 2010-2011. First time buyers put about 5 percent down in 2011. Repeat buyers, pooling equity with savings, typically put down about 15 percent. However, investment and vacation-home buyers have been paying higher down payments than those buying a primary residence. The median down payment for both was 27 percent, according to NAR’s Profile of Investment and Vacation Buyers.

In January, Lending Tree reported that states with the highest median down payments were Washington, D.C. (13.5 percent), New York (13.47 percent), Hawaii (13.33 percent) and California (13.22 percent). The state with the lowest average down payment is North Dakota, where buyers put down an average of 11.34 percent.

Attention has focused on down payments in recent months for two reasons. Down payments are a major barrier to first-time buyers, whose market share has dwindled since the home buyer tax credits expired in 2010. A survey of buyers by Move, Inc. last fall found that half of all potential buyers planning to buy in two years or more are waiting in part because they lack the money for a down payment or closing costs.

A second focus has been a proposed regulation called QRM that would create incentives for lenders to offer loans at 20 percent or more. The regulation, being reviewed by regulators, is opposed by many housing, consumer and minority groups concerned that it would put homeownership out of reach of many American families.

via realestateeconomywatch.com