A fluke? Housing prices dip in St. Louis area | Bedford NY Homes
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Tag Archives: Bedford Real Estate for Sale
Big Reveal: How Much for This Waterfront Noyack Four Bed? | Bedford NY Homes
Address: 58 Noyac Harbor Rd, Sag Harbor, NY 11963 Asking Price: $2.495M Close. Very close. But no cigar! The most popular guess for this listing was $2.795M, which is 300K more than the actual price. (Bargain!) You folks liked this serene updated waterfront cottage, though one commenter noted that the property is “just a little more congested than those perfect photos.” · Waterfront Beach Cottage [Town&Country] · How Much for This Waterfront Noyack Four Bed? [Curbed Hamptons]
One Year After Sandy, Westchester Residents Recall ‘Dark, Cold’ Days | Bedford NY Real Estate
One year ago today, on Oct. 29, 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit Westchester.
County residents recall the hurricane’s destruction with heavy hearts.
Westchester suffered three casualties during the hurricane – two of them children. Homes were damaged and destroyed, streets and parks were flooded, and power was lost for weeks.
Bill Gheduzzi of Irvington, who co-owns his family’s Mar-Vera Corp. construction company, spent 12 “dark and cold” days with his family following Sandy’s arrival. He kept his business going, but came home to flashlights and a chilly house every night.
“We were without power for almost two weeks and we own a property in Hastings where power was also out for a while,” Gheduzzi said. “My daughter was in California and came home to no power, even though we told her to stay there. Even the dog was going crazy. We’ve had storms before, but the (aftermath) was tough.”
Rob McCarthy of Peekskill recalls being fortunately exempt from the damage.
“We were actually one of the lucky ones up in Peekskill. We had an evergreen fall behind the house which landed on our deck but caused no damage – lost power for two days, but that was about it,” he said.
McCarthy added, “We really got away lucky. I just remember driving to work the next morning down Route 9, and seeing a lot of the devastation that occurred in the towns between Peekskill and Tarrytown.”
Sam Qunsel of Yonkers, co-owner of Madaba’s Deli in Hastings, left home on a family trip to his hometown in Jordan four days before Sandy hit. He was concerned about his family and business back home in New York.
“When we heard about the storm we were concerned because there was no power in the area,” Qunsel said. “There we were in Jordan with power, and back here my brother (Sal) had to connect a wire to the store next door to keep the business going. I was calling all the time.”
Fadia Ezaizat, who was living in Yonkers and working in Hastings-on-Hudson last tall, said her first experience with a hurricane was memorable.
“Hurricane Sandy was actually the first hurricane I have ever experienced,” said Ezaizat, who now lives in Kentucky. “I didn’t realize the severity of the storm until afterwards seeing all the debris and losing power for a week. I know next time I hear a hurricanes approaching I’ll be more prepared. But I don’t think I’ll have that issue in Kentucky.”
Susan Boland-Garcin of Yonkers vividly remembers the force of the storm.
“I recall being terrified of the high winds in the four large trees in my back yard and praying the didn’t fall on the house,” Boland-Garcin said. “I couldn’t find a place I felt safe except in the lower level of my house. We had roof damage with shingles flying off the roof. My house was literally shaking from the high winds.”
http://mtkisco.dailyvoice.com/news/one-year-after-sandy-westchester-residents-recall-dark-cold-days
Pending home sales fall on declining home affordability | Bedford Real Estate
The number of real estate contracts signed and recorded declined 5.6% from August to September, as home affordability receded under the influence of higher mortgage rates, home prices and consumer uncertainty, the National Association of Realtors concluded Monday.
The NAR Pending Home Sales Index – a barometer of real estate contract signings – fell from an index score of 107.6 in August to 101.6 in September. It also declined 1.2% from year ago levels when the index hovered at 102.8.
This is the lowest index level reached since December of last year, and NAR is blaming the influence of declining home affordability, lower consumer confidence and a government shutdown that shook up both construction activity and home sales.
“Declining housing affordability conditions are likely responsible for the bulk of reduced contract activity,” said Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist. “In addition, government and contract workers were on the sidelines with growing insecurity over lawmakers’ inability to agree on a budget. A broader hit on consumer confidence from general uncertainty also curbs major expenditures such as home purchases.”
The numbers suggest a lackluster fourth quarter, with Yun saying for the first time in 29 months pending home sales failed to come in above year ago levels.
http://www.housingwire.com/articles/27657-pending-home-sales-fall-on-declining-home-affordability
3 Annoying Social-Media Mistakes Businesses Need to Avoid | Bedford NY Realtor
Are your social-media marketing habits attracting people to your brand or scaring them off? If you litter your Twitter feed, Facebook page and Pinterest boards with blatantly self-centered, hard sales posts — or even insensitive, potentially offensive posts — you could be guilty of sending your followers packing, right along with their spending cash.
Here’s a short list of notorious social-media mistakes business owners should remember to avoid and why:
1. Only talking about your products and services. By now, this one should be a no-brainer. Don’t be that guy at the party who only talks about himself. Posting status updates, tweets and pins that narcissistically revolve around your brand only is tantamount to social-media suicide. You’ll quickly come off as too corporate, self-serving and disconnected from your customers and their needs. An exodus of followers is sure to, well, follow.
Small-business expert Steven D. Strauss, author of The Small Business Bible (Wiley, 2012) suggests following the 80-20 rule to establish a meaningful connection with customers via social media. That is to say that 80 percent of the content you post should address your customers’ problems and only 20 percent should be about your company and what you do.
2. Not playing (sharing) well with others. Instead of tweeting repeated promotional messages about your products and services, make an effort to retweet, share and pin your followers’ content often. Also exchange friendly, conversational tweets with your followers, particularly those who are significant influencers within your industry. Doing so can encourage a sense of community within your social networks, boost your brand exposure and help you earn your followers’ trust.
Share like a champ on Facebook and Pinterest as well by sharing follower posts and pins that are relevant to topics your target market cares about. For example, if you sell children’s toys, consider sharing follower and influencer posts and pins that are of value to parents of young children, like toymaker Melissa and Doug often does on its Facebook page. These often include family arts and crafts ideas, fun playdate themes and printable coloring pages.
3. Posting insensitive content about sensitive subjects. One of the fastest ways to get people trash-talking your brand over social media is to post poorly-timed, offensive remarks about sensitive topics, especially those that are political in nature and inspire strong emotions.
Fashion designer Kenneth Cole has been guilty of this more than once. Most recently, the designer and self-described “frustrated activist” published a tweet that made light of the “boots on the ground” comment U.S. President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry used in reference to potentially deploying ground troops in Syria. The crass remark instantly ignited a firestorm of angry backlash reply tweets that continue to pile up.
Read more: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/228574#ixzz2i53yLJkA
Fewer Americans are moving | Bedford NY Real Estate
Some say there is no spark in today’s economy. Others claim we’ve hit a speed bump. Nonetheless, everyone will agree the housing market is light years ahead of where it stood a year ago. But has the recovery cooled?
Back in my younger days — about six months ago — when my husband and I were looking to buy our first house, the market was pure insanity. I’m talking about ten-offers-in-one-day insanity. It was undeniably a seller’s market. Homes were flying off the market in hours and any offer below list price was laughable.
We were even forced to throw in a picture of our pup to help persuade the sellers to chose us.
But it seems that the market has slowed considerably since then. In fact, this year the number of people moving to a new home fell dangerously close to the record lows set in 2011 after rising in 2012, according to data from Trulia (TRLA).
“Last year the Census reported an increase in mobility in 2012 to 12.0%, led by an increase in longer-distance moves. However, new 2013 data suggest that the mobility rebound we saw in 2012 might have been short-lived,” said Trulia Chief Economist Jed Kolko.
We can only assume rising interest rates coupled with an increase in home prices is the culprit behind this. Historically, rates are still very low at 4.62%. (My father-in-law’s first house was financed at 14% or something equally ridiculous.) But compared to the 3.5% I was able to get six months ago, this seems high to a lot of people.
And after all… isn’t my generation, the Millennials, a big weight holding housing down? We are drowning in student debt, unable to find high-paying jobs and are scared to death of an interest rate above 4.0%.
Heck… the fear of closing with an interest rate above 3.5% motivated me to put in an offer above list price just so I could sneak into the house I bought six months ago before rates rose any further.
So what is the solution here? How can we get the momentum back?
Well, it doesn’t appear feasible for my generation to even put together a downpayment on a home, let alone finance a mortgage with the amount of student debt we are facing. What we need is move-up buyers, and we need them fast.
Cubans on the move as new real estate market grows | Bedford Real Estate
“Its capitalist!” So goes the Cuban real estate description of a great house to buy. After President Raul Castro eased restrictions in 2011, the housing market is beginning to boom, though underground maneuvers are of course part of the wheeling and dealing.
HAVANA — At an informal housing market on Havana’s historic Paseo del Prado, Renaldo Belen puts the hard sell on a prospective buyer under a tree hung with hand-lettered signs advertising homes for sale.
A house near Boyeros, the avenue to the city’s airport, is being offered for the equivalent of $120,000, with all the amenities.
“The house is beautiful. It has four bedrooms, a pool with a bar and a fountain with a lion’s head on top. Look,” says Belen, pointing to photos on the sign, “water comes out of the lion’s mouth.”
Pausing for dramatic effect, Belen, one of the many touts, or “runners” working at the market, delivers what he hopes will be the coup de grace.
“This place needs no work. It is of capitalist construction,” he says, using a now frequently invoked commendation meaning it was built before Cuba’s 1959 revolution and is therefore of superior quality.
Given that “capitalist” has been a dirty word in communist-run Cuba for the last half century, the description perhaps grates on the nerves of Cuban leaders.
Reuters: Desmond Boylan
But its widespread usage is a sign of the times on the Caribbean island, where President Raul Castro has loosened things up as he tries to modernize the country’s economy in the name of preserving the socialist system put in place by his older brother Fidel Castro.
How Real Estate Pros are Using Social Media for Real Results | Bedford Realtor
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Bedford Corners by Robert Paul | Flickr – Photo Sharing!
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America’s Richest Towns | Bedford NY Real Estate
Want to buy Billy Joel’s Sagaponack home? Last month the piano man dropped the price on his oceanfront house on Long Island’s East End again, this time from $19.9 million to $18.5 million. It started out at $22.5 million when he first listed the property in 2009.
And Joel is not alone. Across the U.S., prices last year continued to decline even in the richest neighborhoods. Sagaponack, a village with a population of only 582 (it swells during the summer), saw home values drop 14.5 percent from 2009 to 2010-yet it once again earned the No. 1 position on Businessweek.com’s ranking of the Most Expensive Small Towns in the U.S. It held on to the top spot because, despite the dip, median home values were $3,406,640, the highest in the nation, according to real estate website Zillow.com.
Working with the website, Businessweek.com identified the 50 most expensive small towns (populations less than 10,000) nationwide where median home values are the highest. We evaluated data on 4,624 cities and census-designated places from November 2010, the most recent available. Some expensive communities, such as Bel Air, Calif., were not included as they are neighborhoods rather than cities or census-designated places. Of the 50 most expensive places-many of which are second-home markets-nearly half are in Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk counties and about one-quarter are in California. None of the towns in the ranking had a median home value of less than $1 million.
Biggest Price Declines
Values dropped in 33 of the 50 most expensive small towns. The biggest decline, 15.7 percent, came in Woodside, Calif., home to such tech billionaires as Oracle’s (ORCL) Larry Ellison and Apple’s (AAPL) Steve Jobs. Values in the second-most expensive town, Jupiter Island, Fla., were down 11.3 percent from a year ago, to just over $2.8 million, and in No. 4, Los Altos Hills, Calif., they were down 13.6 percent, to a bit more than $2.1 million.
In eight of these towns (five of which are among the top 10 most expensive), values were more than 10 percent below levels of a year ago. Nationwide, home values were down 5.1 percent, Zillow.com’s data indicate.
Only 17 places experienced increases in home values. The winner was Kings Point, N.Y., a wealthy suburb of New York City on Long Island’s Gold Coast, where prices rose 13.5 percent.
In the Hamptons, “prices have not yet rebounded,” says Michael Schultz, vice-president in Corcoran’s East Hampton office. With prices down, he expects activity to pick up in the first quarter this year.
Fewer High-End Sales
Home to wealthy Wall Streeters, corporate executives, and celebrities, the Hamptons saw both unit sales and prices down year-on-year after rising in early 2010. The third-quarter drop in the median sale price in the Hamptons-North Fork market was due to a shift away from high-end sales-only 11 homes sold at or above $5 million in the third quarter, down from 20 sales a year earlier, according to a report by Miller Samuel, a New York real estate appraisal services firm.
“Across the board, everyone brought their homes down 15 percent to 20 percent. Sellers are becoming more realistic” and buyers are more conservative, says Harald Grant, senior vice-president in Sotheby’s International Realty’s Southampton office.
After a strong first half in 2010, unit sales in Sagaponack and nearby Bridgehamptonwere down 18 percent year-on-year in third quarter, and the median sale price was down 53 percent, according to a report from real estate brokerage Corcoran. Despite this short-term softness, “Sagaponack is a strong market because it has cachet,” Grant says.
A Premium to Rub Elbows
What makes small towns such as Sagaponack attractive is their proximity not just to natural beauty and first-class golf courses but also to other wealthy people. That’s why the most expensive small towns often cluster around major financial centers. A survey of U.S. metropolitan statistical areas by consultancy Capgemini shows that New York City had 667,200 high-net-worth individuals, or people with investable assets of $1 million or more, in 2009-far more than any other metro in the country. Other wealthy areas include the Los Angeles metro area (235,800), Chicago (198,100), Washington, D.C. (152,400), and San Francisco (138,300).
Of the 50 most expensive small towns, 22 are in New York-namely, Long Island-and 13 are in California. Others were in Colorado, Florida,Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, Washington.Making the ranking for the first time was even one town in Tennessee.Belle Meade (a very rich town in Tennessee).
Some well-known markets are less active. “Our really high-end market is almost frozen,” and buyers do not seem to want to buy above the $6 million level, says Paul Grover, a partner in Robert Paul Properties, a Cape Cod brokerage. With Wall Street turning around, he anticipates that demand will pick up, “but we’ll see it in New York first.”
That note of hope is one that many real estate brokers and home sellers across the U.S. share. In expensive small towns like Sagaponack, however, even the battered prices might strike many Americans as wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. It’s hard for someone who lives in a house valued in the mid-six figures-or less-to empathize with sellers asking prices in the seven- or even eight-figure range. But no owner likes to take a haircut when selling his home. Just ask Billy Joel.