Why life’s a beach for Honolulu’s industrial real estate market, and an increase in Big Apple leasing | Pound Ridge Real Estate
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Category Archives: Pound Ridge
California homeowners face hefty fines for brown lawns- Wasting Water | Pound Ridge Homes
All About Furnaces and Duct Systems | GreenBuildingAdvisor for Pound Ridge NY Homes
Dallas-area housing market soared last year; 2014 looks promising, too | Pound Ridge Real Estate
Last year’s bull housing market will be hard to top in 2014.
Dallas-area home sales rose almost 20 percent from the previous year, and prices jumped more than 10 percent — more than double the average annual increase North Texas usually sees.
With the local economy booming and consumers ready to buy real estate again, the only limitation this year will be availability and pricing.
“I don’t think 2014 will be as crazy as last year,” said D’Ann Petersen, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. “Home sales would be doing better if we had more inventory on the market.
“We have seen good increases in prices, but I don’t know if that is going to continue at the rate we saw last year,” she said.
In 2013, median home sales prices were up by double-digit percentages in more than two dozen Dallas-area residential districts The Dallas Morning News tracks.
The biggest sales price increases were in neighborhoods in Oak Lawn, Oak Cliff, Mesquite, Irving and North Dallas, according to data from the Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University.
The number of homes sold rose by more than 20 percent from 2012 levels in 13 area residential districts, including Sunnyvale, Hurst, Rockwall, Sachse-Rowlett and Far North Dallas.
Covering the area
Jim Fite, president of Dallas’ Century 21 Judge Fite Realtors, said that housing activity is good in neighborhoods across the Dallas area.
“We are looking forward to a 6 percent to 8 percent increase in sales in 2014,” Fite said.
The inventory of homes listed for sale with real estate agents last year fell to less than a two-month supply in several residential areas, including The Colony, Richardson, Grapevine, Coppell, Allen and Plano.
At $130M, Nation’s ‘Priciest’ Manse is No Longer the Priciest | Pound Ridge NY Homes
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Copper Beech Farm, the 50-acre Greenwich estate that roared onto the market last May with a record-setting $190M price tag, has been mercilessly slashed, first down to $140M and now again down to $130M. At 68 percent of its original ask, the property is no longer home to the priciest mega-mansion in the country, having ceded the throne to Dallas’ Crespi-Hicks estate, which is still holding strong at $135M. (Jackson Land and Cattle, a 1,750-acre estate in Jackson Hole, Wyo., has been asking $175M for a while, but there several homes on that ranch and most people would consider it a working farm with investment potential instead of, say, a single-family home.)
But, please, back to the blockbuster home at hand. Owned by timber mogul John Rudey, the property is stocked with a 12-bedroom mansion, a whopping 4,000—yes, four thousand—feet of water frontage, and not one, but two offshore islands. Rudey originally told the Journal that he was selling the spread, which he bought 31 years ago, because his kids had grown, but that may have been only half of the truth. According to a followup piece in the Times, Rudey’s timber holdings have been decimated by transportation issues, endangered species conservation, water limitations, and the spruce budworm, a tree-burrowing insect. These setbacks might not have impacted the Copper Beech Farm property at all had Rudey not used the sprawling waterfront estate as collateral on a series of huge loans. At one time, according to the Times, the debt attached to the property totaled a whopping $203M. (After the 2006 collapse of one of Rudey’s timber holding companies, the banks came calling. In 2011, Bank of America began foreclosure proceedings on a portion of Copper Beech Farm. The bank later backed off, but Rudey may have been forced to sell off much of his remaining timber holdings, and his $16.5M Fifth Avenue apartment, to keep creditors at bay.)
http://curbed.com/archives/2014/01/22/at-130m-nations-priciest-manse-is-no-longer-the-priciest.php
Storm Slows Traffic To A Crawl In New Canaan | Pound Ridge Realtor
Perfectly Staged Florida Bayfront Mansion Asks $16.9M | Pound Ridge NY Homes
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Location: Osprey, Fla. Price: $16,900,000 The Skinny: Consider, for a moment, the staged perfection of listing photos: coming home to a house that’s been meticulously polished to its Platonic ideal as this one has must be like arriving at your front door only to find that your grandmother’s front sitting room, with its strictly off–limits knick-knacks and vacuum-sealed sofas, is now every room in your house. Do you dare muss the taut bedclothes, or move the towel that’s so artfully draped over the edge of your tub (as if someone just happened to casually lay it down in the most picturesque way possible)? Is it permissible to flop down in your favorite easy chair, or will your weight irreparably deform its perfectly fluffed, better-than-new, cushions? And as for making a crumbly peanut butter and jelly sandwich in the sterile operating theater standing in for the kitchen—well, no. All chin-stroking aside, this four-bedroom, eight-bathroom bayfront home, which the listing thoughtfully assures us is “architect-designed”, is asking $16.9M.
http://curbed.com/archives/2014/01/15/perfectly-staged-florida-bayfront-mansion-asks-169m.php
5 Twitter Marketing Tactics | Pound Ridge NY Realtor
If there’s one group that’s well-versed in developing large and loyal audiences on Twitter, it’s bloggers. They do, after all, have a content strategy built into their title — ahem blogging — which means that even when they’re promoting their personal brand, it’s more likely to be with content that their followers find helpful or otherwise more interesting than, say, a random company selling bar soap.
Bloggers who want to be successful have a kind of urgency to directly engage with, build and look after their following, as there’s really no better way to attract visitors to their sites. (Can you imagine a blogger running a TV campaign ad, particularly before they’ve had any measure of success? Yeah, no).
But of course, not all bloggers have thousands of followers, so, what separates the superstars from those that hover indefinitely in the middle of the pack?
Let’s take a look at a few bloggers and their Twitter marketing tactics who really knock it out of the park to see if we can’t glean a lesson or two.
1. Get targeted
Twitter is a pretty reciprocal place, so you could hop onto the platform every night and just randomly add people, and in the morning you’d have a fair amount of people following in return. But having a mass of followers doesn’t mean much if they’re not engaged, and if one new follower is all about muscle cars while the next is all about creative applications for doilies, you’re going to have quite the time appealing to all of them. And if they’re not engaged, they’re certainly not going to share your work and help you grow your following.
One great example of someone who does this kind of singular focus right is Heidi Swanson of 101 Cookbooks. Originally started as a way to share her many recipes with her friends, Swanson’s site features a wealth of healthy recipes and is also home to her cookbooks, which have a “supernatural” focus.
Clearly, Swanson is targeting not just cooks but also those with a crunchier bent. You can see this hyper-focus on her Twitter feed:
While Swanson does do some retweeting of causes close to her heart and recipes from likeminded sites, the majority of her tweets are links to her content, prefaced with a listing of ingredients. This fits well with the mentality of Swanson’s site, which allows users to search for recipes based on ingredients, and it does what it needs to do simply before getting out of the way. This is just what her avid audience, on the hunt for seasonal recipes, is looking for.
What This Means for You As a rule of thumb, keep in mind that it’s better to be hyper targeted than too broad; you can always expand from your base once you get going. While you may not need to get as targeted as this, having some kind of theme is crucial — all the better if you can turn that into a hook, a la @shitmydadsays. In fact, sometimes just getting a great Twitter handle can frame all of your activities. Once you have that, get as creative as possible within those confines.
Who can you follow that clearly shares your interests? What kind of content can you retweet? How can you mix up the content? Give your followers not just information but actionable insights, and you’re sure to grow.
2. Help each other
Call it guest posting, call it co-branding, call it coasting on each other’s tail winds — whatever. There are few strategies quite as effective for growing your following than teaming up with or regularly giving press to another blogger or business. Teaming up with someone else not only gives you great material for your Twitter feed (and who couldn’t use a little bit more meat to feed the social-content beast?) but it also exposes your work to a much wider audience. And while not everyone in that audience will be primed to follow you, if you’ve done a good job of picking a partner whose interests parallel your own, you should gain a sizable chunk.
Blogger DIY Victoria E. Barnes, who focuses on renovations of her Victorian home, does this in a number of ways. Sometimes, it’s as simple as retweeting a fellow blogger’s contest:
Sometimes it means riffing on popular culture, a la this Mad Men Spoof:
Whether it’s directly teaming up with someone or just a playful tease, being in on it with someone else is a great way to gain exposure
Porch partners with Lowe’s just 3 months after official launch | Pound Ridge NY Homes
Porch, a 3-month-old startup that’s taking the home remodeling industry by storm, has announced a strategic partnership with Lowe’s that will equip the employees at some of the home improvement store’s locations with tools that will allow them to use the Porch network to connect customers with local professionals.
As part of the partnership, Lowe’s employees in 139 stores in North and South Carolina and the Seattle area will quickly be able to use in-store kiosks or a special mobile app to pull up local professionals on Porch who provide services that Lowe’s doesn’t offer through its installation program, and then refer those professionals to customers, Porch said in a statement. Professionals who offer such services include handymen, painters and landscapers, according to the statement.
“By partnering with Porch, Lowe’s can help our customers achieve their home improvement dreams by providing them with the confidence of knowing who their neighbors have used successfully, and benefit our professional customers by providing them greater opportunities to grow their businesses,” said Jay Rebello, vice president of new business development and corporate innovation at Lowe’s.
Porch, which is one of Real Estate Connect’s “New Kids on the Block” and raised $6.5 million in seed funding in October 2012, claims to provide data on 90 million home projects and 1.5 million professionals. The startup has obtained that data mostly through an array of private partnerships that it cultivated for a year before officially launching three months ago, according to CEO Matt Ehrlichman.
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/2014/01/14/porch-partners-with-lowes-just-3-months-after-official-launch/?utm_source=20140114&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dailyheadlinesam#sthash.HBQV39yy.dpuf