Tag Archives: Chappaqua NY Homes for Sale

Chappaqua NY Homes for Sale

Lane Closures, Detours Begin Monday For Route 100-C In Mount Pleasant | Chappaqua Realtor

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Work on the Route 100C bridge over the Sprain Brook Parkway will cause lane closures and detours beginning Monday.

All eastbound lanes on Grasslands Road over the bridge will be closed to traffic, with detours onto Route 9A, Brighton Avenue and Route 100.

No westbound lane closures are planned during the project.

The bridge work is expected to last through August 30.

Residents should expect traffic delays and use alternate routes whenever possible.

 

Lane Closures, Detours Begin Monday For Route 100-C In Mount Pleasant | The Chappaqua Daily Voice.

What is Your Posting Rhythm to Social Media? | Chappaqua Realtor

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Last week I was on a panel discussing social media at a conference here in Australia and a question from the floor asked about how often is ideal to post to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest?

I was fascinated to hear the range of answers we gave as panelists and I thought it might be a good discussion to have here on ProBlogger.

What frequency do you publish to the social networks that you’re active on?

I’ll kick things off:

Facebook Pages: On the dPS Facebook page I try to update 3-4 times a day with posts spread out over a 24 hour cycle. I find if I do it too much more regularly that the posts don’t get as much engagement.

Twitter: On my ProBlogger Twitter account I find I can post at a higher frequency on Twitter as tweets tend to have a shorter life. Having said that most of my tweets are done live when I have something to say (and time to tweet).

Tweets go up automatically when I post a new post here on the blog or when a new job goes up on the Job Boards and I’ll often share another link to a blog post 12 or so hours later. The rest of my tweets are more personal/conversational and not scheduled.

Pinterest: on the dPS Pinterest account I’ve employed Jade to update our board.

Google+: My Google+ account is something I don’t update with great frequency. I use it more when I want to test an idea that I’m thinking through, ask a question or share something I’m excited about.

As a result there are days when I might post 2-3 times and then it might be 2-3 days before I post again! My posts there can be as short as a link or up to 2000 words!

LinkedIn: I’m a dismal failure on LinkedIn. Status updates are largely new posts on the blog and automated. I feel like I could improve a lot in this area.

What about you? What’s your posting rhythm on to social media? Do you update them all the same or have different strategies for each one?

 

What is Your Posting Rhythm to Social Media? : @ProBlogger.

Experts say we are still bubble-free | Chappaqua Real Estate

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On the current path, home prices, sales and construction should continue upward, said economist Jed Kolko of Trulia. Meanwhile, vacancies, delinquencies and foreclosures will be dropping. “Inventories may be down too as a necessary part of the housing recovery.”

Homes are still undervalued relative to rent, Kolko said, and a full housing recovery is a few years away.

Currently there are no signs of over-building and little sign of over-borrowing, he said. “Prices would have to rise at current rate for several years to return to bubble territory.”

 

Experts say we are still bubble-free | HousingWire.

How to Get Your Executive Team Active in Social Media | Chappaqua Realtor

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As a savvy inbound marketer, you already know thatsocial media is a must-have in your marketing strategy. You’ve spent time looking at what channels work best for your company, creating the best content you can for those outlets, and aligning the social media goals to the business’ bottom line. You live and breathe social media every day on the job.

But that’s not true for everyone else in your organization. Not everyone is sold on the importance of social media — never mind manage their own presence. What about that VP down the hall with tons of killer industry knowledge or that executive you know who spends hours talking to customers? These executives may not be active in social media just yet, but they should be.

This is where you come in. If you think there are executives in your company who could add credibility to what you’re already doing, it’s time to get them on board.

Why Should Your C-Suite Be in Social Media?

Often, executives may feel like there’s not much for them to do in social media. They hired a social media manager to watch over the company’s presence, so why would they need to be in social media as well? Though some executives at your company may have already made up their minds about their social media participation (or lack thereof), it’s incredibly important to have them in social media.

Having a presence in social media gives executives the opportunity to stay relevant with industry trends, engage with your prospects and customers, and show that they stand by and believe in your brand. By not listening and participating in social media, executives are missing out on numerous opportunities to improve your business. And ultimately, growing your business is every executive’s objective.

How to Get Your Executive Team in Social Media

Getting executives in social media isn’t as simple as signing up for a Twitter handle and asking them to tweet. Instead, you’ve got to be strategic if you want to get on board. By following these five steps, you can develop a socially savvy executive team.

1) Pick the right executives for the job. 

Not every executive is ready to dive headfirst into social media — and that’s okay. Instead of proclaiming that all executives must start tweeting immediately, start off with a select few that you know would be successful in social media if you were to show them the ropes. Think about who would be a good advocate for your brand and have the potential to be a thought leader. Also, see how active they are in social media already. You may want to check out LinkedIn first to see who’s active already, since executives prefer LinkedIn to any other social site. This will give you a good indication of who to approach about helping build your brand in social media.

After you understand who’s been up to what, it’s time to think about your approach. Asking an executive who isn’t that familiar with Twitter or Facebook to jump right in isn’t going to work. First, they need to get an understanding of what’s happening on social media for your brand.

 

How to Get Your Executive Team Active in Social Media.

Seller financing: an untapped resource for real estate agents | Chappaqua Real Estate

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While the residential real estate market is generally believed to be improving nationwide, some of the residual effects of the Great Recession still affect the ability of real estate agents to facilitate home sales.

Emerging employment opportunities in many parts of the country are bringing workers into new communities. Even though financial institutions have brought reserve levels back to all-time highs within the past few years, banks are unable to fund loans due to restrictive lending criteria.

For buyers, the regulatory pendulum has swung too far. Though fully capable of making payments, many are marked with imperfect credit or low cash reserves as a result of short sales, foreclosures or plummeting values of their prior residences. For sellers, this means a significantly smaller pool of potential buyers, which negatively impacts their home values as well as their financial well-being.

Prime opportunity

According to the Pew Research Center, about 10,000 people will turn 65 every day for the next 17 years. With baby boomers entering retirement at an exponential rate, many are looking to their homes as an additional source of revenue to supplement Social Security or other insufficient income.

Today’s rising home values present a perfect opportunity for sellers to capitalize on their homes’ increasing market values, and savvy real estate agents recognize the prime opportunity that seller financing presents. The trend of tight lending standards combined with willing buyers, sellers and an appreciating housing market is certainly not permanent, so this nontraditional financing option must be quickly leveraged to yield maximum benefit.

– See more at: http://www.inman.com/2013/05/22/seller-financing-an-untapped-resource-for-real-estate-agents/#sthash.glExI8Fd.dpuf

 

Seller financing: an untapped resource for real estate agents | Inman News.

Astorino: Update On Affordable Housing In Westchester | Chappaqua Real Estate

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In 2009, my predecessor, Andrew Spano and the Board of Legislators signed a legal settlement obligating the county to spend $51.6 million to develop 750 units of fair and affordable housing in 31 so-called eligible or mostly white communities by the end of 2016.

Here’s an update on the status.  Let’s start with the bad news.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is trying to use the settlement to dismantle local zoning laws.  HUD has the misguided view that zoning and discrimination is the same thing.

It is not. Zoning restricts how land is used, not who lives there. The impediment to where people live in Westchester is money, not race or ethnicity.

Washington bureaucrats, who you will never see or meet, want the power to determine who will live where and how each neighborhood will look.  What’s at stake is the fundamental right of our cities, towns, and villages to plan and zone for themselves.  This home rule is guaranteed by the New York State Constitution.

HUD wants no restrictions – in any neighborhood – on height, size, acreage, density, or number of bedrooms. HUD even sees sewers as a problem, which is critically significant since Westchester zoning protects the drinking water of 8 million New Yorkers.

If there are no restrictions for HUD, there will be no restrictions for any developer. A high rise can be built on any street, even right next door to you. And if HUD can trample on zoning here, it can do it anywhere.

I urge you to read the HUD letters for yourself and see how the federal government is trying to abolish even basic zoning protections.

Now here’s the good news.

The county is ahead of schedule in fulfilling its obligation in the settlement. Our current benchmark is to have 300 units with financing in place by the end of 2013. The county exceeded the mark in December and currently has 309 units in place with financing, of which 117 are already occupied. Over 91 percent of the required 750 units are already in the pipeline.

Ask yourself this: If the county is ahead of schedule in building affordable housing in these communities, how can their zoning be exclusionary?

One of Westchester’s greatest strengths is its diversity. It is the fourth most-diverse county in the state — tied with Manhattan — in terms of African-Americans and Hispanics.

I pledge to defend with every tool at my disposal the right of people to live anywhere in Westchester in any home they can afford.  There is absolutely no place for discrimination in our county. But we won’t be bullied or threatened by HUD to do things that are not in the settlement.

 

Astorino: Update On Affordable Housing In Westchester | The Bedford Daily Voice.

6 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Followers | Jeffbullas’s Blog | Chappaqua Realtor Reading

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Twitter has been my number one social media platform for quite a long time. That was actually the first social network I embraced after I started my blog.

6 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Followers

Over the course of more than two years I dedicated a lot of my free time to not only expanding my Twitter network but to also to actually engage with  people who cared about what I shared and who enjoyed my content.

As much as you’d like to say that quantity doesn’t matter, well, it does.

The more people I “persuade” to follow me, the more visitors my blog ends up receiving. The traffic Twitter brings me is now significant with 5,500 visitors a month coming from the 140 character social network.

If you’d like to increase your Twitter traffic the way I did, here are six of the most effective ways to get more quality Twitter followers that I have discovered.

Anyway, let’s get started:

1. Start with the profile picture

When someone lands on your profile, the first thing to catch their eye is your profile picture.

Especially now with the new profiles, where the photo is at the center of the header, it can really give people a hint of whether or not they should click ‘follow’.

Twitter profile

So, when it comes to choosing a suitable avatar, there are three golden rules:

1. Make sure it’s a photo of “you”

When you follow someone you expect them to be a real person. And unfortunately when it comes to Twitter, there are literally millions of fake accounts. That is why you have to make sure to add a real photo and not one you found on the internet for instance. Additionally if you are a business then you are far better off creating an additional Twitter account instead of putting a business logo on your personal profile just to promote your business.

2. Make sure it’s big enough

A lot of people tend to click on the avatar to see a person’s profile picture in a bigger size. There are a lot of folks out there however, whose photo is just as big as the size of the frame. What I’d advice you is to re-size your photo to say 300 by 300 pixels, so that it actually becomes bigger once someone clicks on it. A small, blurry and pixellated picture says that you don’t pay attention to the small details and that isn’t a good start.

3. Make sure your face is recognizable

What many Twitter users do is to simply upload a picture of them in full-size. Consider how small the avatar is, if you put a whole-body picture, then end result will be hard to distinguish. So absolutely make sure that the photo is only of your upper-body.

2. Don’t forget about hashtags

Hashtags are kinda like when you use a specific keyword within an article to make it rank higher in the search engines. When you use them, you are targeting your tweet to the people using the words you’ve included in your hashtags.

Twitter hashtag

I used to have a problem with hashtags. In my eyes they just didn’t look good and were making some of the tweets look quite unreadable.

But you know what?

Hashtags aren’t the problem. Using them is a great way to guarantee your message gains more exposure with the right people.

The problem is how you use them.

The 3 “Don’ts” of Hashtags

1. Don’t include too many

Let’s assume you are sharing an article of yours on Twitter and decide to add some hashtags to improve its visibility. Since the title is short and doesn’t take much of your 160 characters limit, you decide to include five hashtags. Is that a good move? No. It just looks spammy… And no one likes that kind of obvious self-promotion. I’d say two or three hastags at most.

2. Don’t be too specific

Twitter unlike Google doesn’t have a huge search volume. This basically means that you can get your message seen even if you use a broader term. On the other hand if you are too specific, probably no one is going to see your tweet via Twitter search. I’ve found that including more general terms like #Marketing,#SocialMedia, #Blogging or #Design results in the most retweets and favorites.

 

 

6 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Followers | Jeffbullas’s Blog.

Cuba’s Real Estate Market on the Rise :: EDGE on the Net | Chappaqua Real Estate

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Estrella Diaz sits next to a homemade sign advertising her home for sale, in Havana, Cuba.

Estrella Diaz sits next to a homemade sign advertising her home for sale, in Havana, Cuba.  (Source:AP Photo/Franklin Reyes)
In some ways, Yosuan Crespo’s real estate office resembles any you might find in New York, London or Tokyo. There are slick posters of hot properties hanging from the ceiling, a steady stream of hopeful buyers and sellers and a constant clack of computer keys.

But Crespo’s headquarters in central Havana’s trendy Vedado neighborhood is actually somebody else’s breezy front porch. The computer’s only connection to the Internet is a creaky dial-up link, and Crespo is careful to say he’s not operating as a broker, since the job is still technically illegal.

A baffling, sometimes bizarre real estate market has emerged in the year and a half since President Raul Castro legalized private home sales on this Communist-run island for the first time in five decades.

While trade in homes is now legal, the people who bring buyers together with sellers are not. The government has yet to make good on promises to legitimize brokers, most of whom still operate in the shadows.

It’s a story that has been typical of Castro’s economic reforms, which often have left little space for the sort of middlemen and other services that help markets work.

The Cuban leader also has legalized a used car market, but not the right to open a business that sells them. And while reforms have sparked an explosion of private restaurants and cafes across Cuba, the government has yet to give them access to wholesalers that could keep them better supplied.

Crespo gets around the broker ban by operating as a licensed computer programmer and photographer, helping clients list their properties on Web portals, producing the for-sale posters that hang in his office and offering digital photo services for sellers. He says he doesn’t charge commissions.

Crespo’s listed fees are just a few dollars, but he’s found himself in major demand. He estimates 30 to 40 customers a day wander into his porch-side business, called EspacioCuba. He says his service has 2,500 current listings and has helped sell about 250 properties since it opened in January.

“Right now we are very pleased,” said Crespo, a smartly dressed 28-year-old computer scientist with close-cropped hair, but he added that the market would benefit by the government made brokering legal.

The market also still lacks a workable mortgage system, an easy means of advertising potential sales and, most important, a middle class with resources to buy.

Yet sales are humming, with some 45,000 homes changing hands in the first eight months after Castro legalized the real estate market in November 2011, according to the most recent statistics from the government.

 

 

Cuba’s Real Estate Market on the Rise :: EDGE on the Net | Chappaqua Real Estate | Bedford NY Real Estate | Robert Paul Talks Life in Bedford NY.

What $700K Can Buy You Around The Cape & Islands | Chappaqua Homes

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↑ Kicking off in Provincetown with The Boathouse, a 1BR, 1BA condo directly on Cape Cod Bay. Built in 1900, the year-round 487 sq. ft. freestanding cottage has waterviews on three sides, an exclusive use deck and parking for one. The property last changed hands in 2005 for $685,000 and returned to the market in May 2011 asking $735,000. The listing was removed in October 2011 and reappeared last month with a $729,300 price tag.

 

 

http://capecod.curbed.com/archives

 

Banks Cool to FICOs Below 620 | Chappaqua NY Real Estate

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Borrowers with FICO scores of 620 or lower will get a chilly reception from a growing number of banks unless they are willing to make substantial down payments.

Banks, most of them smaller banks, participating in the most recent Survey of Senior Loan Officers by the Federal Reserve indicated that they were less likely to approve loan applications with a FICO score of 620, depending on the size of the down payment.

Currently the median FICO score for all approved loans is 748. For approved conventional purchase loans, the median is 761 and for FHA purchase loans, 698.

Banks were more likely to approve an application for a conventional loan with a FICO score of 720 and a 20 percent down payment. However, about one-third of said they were less likely to approve loan such applications with FICO scores of 580 or 620.

Overall, only a few banks reported changes in either standards or demand for any type of residential real estate lending during the previous three months, though a significant number said that indicated that the demand for prime mortgages had picked up. A few domestic banks reported having eased their standards on prime residential mortgages, and respondents’ lending standards for nontraditional mortgages were little changed.

Roughly three-fourths of banks viewed the outlook for house prices or economic activity as important factors currently affecting their bank’s residential real estate lending. Three-fourths of banks also cited the risk of putback of delinquent mortgages by the GSEs as an important factor restraining their current ability or willingness to approve home-purchase loans. A large fraction of banks reported an increase in the importance of this factor over the past year.

 

http://www.realestateeconomywatch.com/2013/05