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New Home Prices Say What’s Different This Time | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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Although no two business cycles are alike, most share some common characteristics. The interest-rate-sensitive sectors of the economy — housing and manufacturing — tend to lead on the way up and the way down, for obvious reasons. Inflation ebbs during the recession and in the early stages of the recovery. Credit creation drives the upswing.

The recovery from the 2007-2009 financial crisis has been different all around, just as Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff predicted in their 2009 book, “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly.” It has been a “protracted affair,” featuring extended declines in asset markets, large contractions in output and employment, and an explosion of government debt: three characteristics common to the aftermath of financial crises.

Yet even in the context of the typical post-financial-crisis recovery described by Reinhart and Rogoff, this one has some peculiarities of its own.

Let’s start with housing, whose rise and fall and associated debt were the proximate cause of the crisis. Residential real estate pretty much sat out the first 2 1/2 years of the recovery before getting traction in 2012, with a lot of outside help. The Federal Reserve drove down rock-bottom mortgage rates even more with its purchases of Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, a program that continues to this day.

Prices Beckon

The traditional leader was a laggard this time, and improvement has been slow in coming — at least when it comes to construction and sales. Prices of new homes are a different story.

The median sales price of a new single-family home set a record of $271,600 in April, eclipsing the 2007 peak of $262,600. Some of that reflects an increase in median square footage: 2,390 square feet last year compared with 2,235 square feet in 2007, according to annual data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

“They’re clearly not building for first-time buyers,” said Michael Carliner, an economic consultant specializing in housing.

Another part owes to a greater number of sales of higher-priced homes in more desirable areas of the country. The rest is clearly a response to demand for limited supply: Inventories are near record lows while single-family starts are about two-thirds lower than their 2006 peak. Prices of existing homes, on the other hand, are still being constrained by foreclosure and short sales, in which the house sells for less than the amount owed the lender.

 

New Home Prices Say What’s Different This Time – Bloomberg.

P. Allen Smith: How to Grow Edamame | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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Edamame is a vegetable soybean in the same family as the soybeans farmers grow but there are a few differences. Vegetable soybeans are harvested while they are still green while field soybeans are left on the plant to dry. Vegetable soybeans are larger than field soybeans with a creamier texture and mild, nutty flavor.

If you think edamame is a tasty snack, you should try growing the beans in your garden. Edamame’s flavor is that much better when prepared fresh from the garden and it’s very easy to grow.

Prep

Choose a site with full sun and well-drained soil amended with organic matter such as humus or compost.

Some sources recommend treating the beans with inoculant powder (Rhizobium japonicum inoculant) to help them absorb the nitrogen they need. I find that planting soil with plenty of compost will produce a good crop without inoculating the beans. You can read more about inoculating beans here.

Planting Edamame

Sow edamame soybeans after the last frost date in your area and when the soil has warmed up to 60 degrees F.

Sow seeds 1 inch deep and 3 inches apart. Keep the soil consistently moist, but not soggy, until the beans germinate.

Growing Edamame

Caring for Edamame Plants

Caring for edamame is pretty simple. Just keep the area weeded and give the plants 1 inch of water each week.

Harvesting Edamame

Expect all the beans on a plant to mature at once. They are ready when the pods are plump and bright green. With the right weather and growing conditions you can expect about a quarter pound of beans per plant.

Edamame Seeds

Edamame Seed Sources

Gardeners in areas with a short growing season should select early maturing varieties.

P. Allen Smith Garden Home.

The Secret to Using Your Blog to Generate Sales | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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You’ve probably been at a party where some fool is talking his face off at everyone he meets. He talks about his trip to Spain and how he is such an amazing photographer. He never asks, “What you do or what interests you?” He just blathers on and on about himself.

On a good day I silently chuckle at this guy’s lack of social common sense. On a bad day I snap and scream, “PLEASE listen to me for just 10 seconds!”

When all you do is talk about yourself, you send people running in the other direction. If you don’t care about other people they for sure won’t care about you.

This was how the old school way of marketing worked. Megaphone style.

Image by nem_youth

Many of you might not think of your blog as a business and I understand, but one day you might want to create a ebook, product or use your blog to leverage a new career. When you improve your engagement your blog it becomes a tool to help you level up your life and career.

Spray and Pray

Back in the day, companies used to spray and pray. They sprayed their message in as many places as possible (magazines, newspapers, TV, radio, etc) and prayed that they picked the right advertising spots. Larger companies could afford to pay for market research, so they were able to make sure most of their efforts paid off.

Smaller companies didn’t have this luxury. Straight out of college, I worked in the marketing department for a high pressure valve company. They grossed about 10 million a year in sales. Not too shabby, but nothing compared to the bigger players in the industry.

We had to carefully choose our national magazines and our marketing company told us who read the magazines and which ones we needed to advertise in. We had to believe them. We had nothing else to go on.

This style of marketing has been turned upside down due to blogging and social media. Every business has the opportunity to measure their engagement on their website, email and social media accounts. The problem with all these new tools is we have the wrong attitude toward them. Companies are afraid to be transparent and engage with their customers.

Why? Because it’s hard work.

Truly Listen

Mr. Blather Lips, from the introduction, had a great time at every party he went to because he didn’t have to gauge people’s emotions. He just blathered on until he found someone to listen or it was time to go home.

Now businesses actually have to listen to their customers because if they don’t, a social media storm comes crashing down upon them. Just ask Netflix if they wished they had a better plan for when they doubled their prices.

Listening to your readers isn’t just for dealing with social media storms. It’s also so you can anticipate them and avoid them before they even happen. Now, every business has the opportunity to do market research. You can ask specific customers if they would be willing to fill out an online survey. You can ask them direct questions on your blog or social media that help you figure out what they want from you.

You don’t have to guess what you think people need. You can ask them directly and find out. You can even include them in the process of creating your product.

Invitation to Join In 

Threadless created their million dollar t-shirt company from this idea. They have people send in t-shirt designs, have the users vote on which designs they would like to buy and print only the most popular ones. They already have a built in audience for their t-shirts. It’s a win-win for everyone.

The company prints the most popular, making some good cash and the buyers get a limited edition t-shirt that they are proud to wear. Even the winning t-shirt designs are helpful to the designers. They can add this accomplishment to their resume.

You probably knew that engaging your ideal people was wise, but now what?

Now you have to go out and find them and start a conversation, but before you do you need to find out where you can connect with them.

  1. Write a description of the ideal client for your product

You have to ask yourself some specific questions to help you gain clarity:

    • What does she look like?
    • What motivates her?
    • What does she do for fun?
    • What are her career goals?
    • Where does she hang out? (Facebook, conferences, Twitter, etc.)
    • How do you engage with her? (light banter, philosophically, monetarily, etc.)

    The hard part is making the mental switch from talker to engager.

    I’m not just talking about being a better listener. That’s a good start, but to engage with people you have to be listening and asking great questions. It’s part art and part science.

    If you want an example of someone who understands her community then visit Mayi Carles to see how she is creating content that engages and builds trust. You’ll notice that she creates content around branding and business building. All a perfect target market for her.

     

    The Secret to Using Your Blog to Generate Sales : @ProBlogger.

    Will the housing rebound crush the job market? | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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    For the past few years, economists have been waiting for the housing market to rebound so the job market can finally — crash? Wait, no. It’s the opposite. Right?

    On Friday, we’ll get the latest look at how the job market is doing. Hiring is improving, but the unemployment rate has stayed stubbornly high. The go-to explanation among economists has been the weak housing market. Where are all those construction workers going to find work? Nursing? (That’s actually a pretty good idea.)

    Housing prices are jumping again, and some people are even saying there’s a new bubble. We’ve pointed out you shouldn’t expect the economy to come roaring back just because the housing market is. But two economists are taking an even more extreme stance: that a good real estate market, where more people buy houses instead of rent, will throw more people out of work.

    The paper by David Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Andrew Oswald of the University of Warwick titled “Does High Home-ownership Impair the Labor Market?”, has been out for a month or so but was only published by the National Bureau of Economic Research on Monday. Among the findings:

    States with more homeowners, fewer renters, tend to have higher unemployment rates.

    It’s not the homeowners that tend to make up the majority of the unemployed.

    So we really don’t know why this happens. But it does, so there.

    Also, maybe homeowners are less likely to start new businesses, because property makes people lazy I guess.

    That makes the study interesting for another reason. Not only are the authors saying the conventional wisdom of a weak housing market and a weak job market improving in tandem is wrong. But also the reason we say such things.

    Most people believe the reason high homeownership in a housing bust creates stubbornly high unemployment is because the out of work can’t afford to sell their houses — they owe too much — and move to an area of the country where their job prospects are better.

    But Blanchflower and Oswald insist it’s not the homeowners who are the unemployed, or at least the overwhelming majority of them. So the “trapped in a house” storyline doesn’t work for them. Instead, they say homeownership creates a sort of economic rigidity that hurts the job market for everyone, but they don’t say how.

    Homeownership, though, was rising throughout the 2000s, and yet the unemployment rate dipped below 4% in the middle part of the decade. Would it have gone lower? It’s only recently that homeownership seems to be holding us back.

    Another funny thing about the study is that one of the first economists that Blanchflower and Oswald thank in the beginning of their paper is Dean Baker, co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and a prominent liberal economist. It’s odd because Baker disagrees with Blanchflower and Oswald, which he says he told the two authors before they published the paper.

     

    Will the housing rebound crush the job market? – The Term Sheet: Fortune’s deals blogTerm Sheet.

    Wells Fargo still leans in on mortgage business | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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    The mortgage business is a top source of revenue for banks, and mega bank Wells Fargo is no exception.

    Wells Fargo ($40.55 -0.7%) CEO and President John Stumpf presented at the Sanford C. Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference on Wednesday discussing the overall health of the bank.

    Stumpf said the culture of our company and the way we do business is about serving customers. “We work together. And if it’s not mortgage – its mortgage today, it might be credit card tomorrow.”

    “It might not be an even tradeoff and might not be a quarter-by-quarter tradeoff, but if we provide great services and products, the rest seems to take care of itself,” he added.

    However, Wells Fargo may adapt for the customer, but the bank’s revenue tells a slightly different story.

    Mortgage is an important business, the CEO explained. “We love the mortgage business. For two-thirds of Americans, it is still the biggest asset purchase they’ll ever do. It is part of the way Americans save and it changes families.”

    Despite the bank saying it will follow the customer, the bank shows no signs of backing away from mortgages anytime in the near future.

    “To be in the consumer business, we think you have to be in the mortgage business. We like it that we love that business, but we also love the other 89 businesses we are in,” Stumpf said.

     

    Wells Fargo still leans in on mortgage business | REwired.

    Mortgage rates jump to highest mark in a year | Pound Ridge Homes

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    Mortgage rates surged again this past week, completing a consistently steep ascent in May, according to data released Thursday by Freddie Mac.

    The 30-year fixed-rate average jumped to 3.81 percent with an average 0.8 point, its highest mark in the past year. May began with the 30-year hovering at 3.35 percent, well below last year’s reading at the start of the month; however, four straight weeks of increases have pushed the average above last year’s reading of 3.75 percent.

    The 15-year fixed rate average followed suit, rising to 2.98 percent from 2.77 percent last week, with an average 0.7 point. One year ago, the average was 2.97 percent.

    Hybrid adjustable rate mortgages, on the other hand, remained below their averages from last May. The five-year ARM rose slightly to 2.66 percent, down year-over-year from 2.84 percent, and the one-year dropped slightly to 2.54 percent, down from 2.75 percent a year ago.

    A Freddie Mac executive pegged the rising fixed-rate averages to some recent signs of economic improvement, including higher home prices and improving consumer confidence.

     

    Mortgage rates jump to highest mark in a year.

    FHFA: Home prices continue climb | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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    Upward momentum in home prices remained strong in the first quarter of this year due to the Federal Reserve quantitative easing program, which continues to help asset prices rise in the housing market.

    As a result, home prices inched upward 1.9% from the previous quarter. This is the seventh consecutive quarterly price rise in the purchase-only, seasonally adjusted index, according to theFederal Housing Finance Agency.

    From the first quarter of 2012 to the first quarter of 2013, home prices rose 6.7%.

    “The housing market has stabilized in many areas and homebuilding activity has strengthened in recent quarters,” said Andrew Leventis, principal economist of FHFA.

    He added, “That said, labor market weakness and still-elevated foreclosure pipelines remain hindrances to a more robust recovery.”

    The FHFA house price index, which is calculated using home sales price information from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rose 1.3% over the last quarter.

    The FHFA HPI revealed that of the nine census divisions, the strongest increase in home prices was in the Pacific, which posted a 4.4% price increase in the latest quarter. Conversely, the Middle Atlantic division posted the weakest come prices, increasing 0.3% from the prior quarter.

    Of the 75 most populated metropolitan areas in the U.S., the Jacksonville, Fla. metropolitan statistical area reported the greatest price increase, with a 9.3% jump between the further and first quarters. The Bridgeport, Stamford, Norwalk, CT, metro saw a 3.5% drop in prices over that same period.

    The monthly seasonally adjusted purchase-only index for the U.S. has increase for 14 consecutive months, the FHFA explained.

     

    FHFA: Home prices continue climb | HousingWire.

    Why we can’t just be SEOs: A reply to Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz | Pound Ridge Realtor

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    Last week I saw this interesting whiteboard Friday which talked about ‘Why We Can’t Just Be SEOs Anymore’ by Rand. Though he has raised some valid points, like ‘perception of SEO is hard to change’, I have to disagree with him overall.  Sorry Rand, you are missing the complete picture.

    SEO is not bigger than SEO

    SEO is all about generating relevant organic traffic to the website through search engines. That’s it. SEO is not about email, CRO, UX, Social Media, Branding, PR, Reputation Management, Coding, Advertising, Customer Service …

    You may argue that there are 200+ ranking signals so I need total control on everything which influences SEO. While it is true that they are 200+ ranking signals, don’t forget the 80/20 rulei.e. 80% of your output comes from 20% of the input. If you have worked in the SEO industry long enough, you already know what that 20% is that will generate 80% of the SEO results.

    That 20% consists of basic on-page optimization, keyword research, content development and above all link building. We can tweak brand signals, social signals, authorship, Page Rank, markups and other weak ranking signals all day long but they won’t generate any considerable amount of organic traffic on our website. What really drives traffic is that 20% I am talking about.

    If we talk about the real world (which could be very different from the blogging world) there could be unlimited ranking signals. For a start, your client is a very strong ranking signal for you. Without his support and cooperation you can’t make any change on his website. No amount of SEO is going to help, if the client is not responsive to your needs and demands. Poor product, bad reputation, poor customer service all are sort of ranking signals which are beyond our control.

    Just because something may impact your SEO so you must develop expertise in it or take total control of it is a wrong mindset. Here is why. When someone works as a marketing generalist who knows little bit of everything (well sorry but this is what specialists really think about him) he is eager to give suggestions to specialists (like CRO consultant, PR consultant, Community Managers etc) on how they can do their job better.

    Since he is not a specialist, his suggestions may not be well received or align well with the recommendations of specialists. This creates disruption in digital strategies and work environment. So instead of creating synergy the marketing generalist could inevitably end up creating stress and chaos.

     

    Why we can’t just be SEOs: A reply to Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz.

    Offers remain high even in depreciating markets | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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    Forty-one percent of buyers surveyed by Redfin said today’s low inventory has caused them to consider paying more for a home in the second quarter of 2013. This is up from 34% of survey respondents in the first quarter and 26% in the fourth quarter of 2012.

    As someone who was looking to buy a home in this crazy North Texas market where prices continue to appreciate, I can attest to feeling the need to offer over list price. In fact, on the second home my husband and I put an offer on, we offered nearly $4,000 more than the original listing price of $214,000. This was only to find out that the home ended up selling for $225,000… another $5,000 on top of our offer. 

    But what about the markets where prices are still depreciating?

    According to the April Trulia Price Monitor, Honolulu, HI, New York, NY and Rochester, NY, also saw a decrease in the seasonally adjusted asking prices year-over-year. So are offers going in above listing price in these markets as well? 

    Patrick Hastings, a broker/associate at RE/MAX Plus in Rochester, NY, says the market is surprisingly stable. 

    Hastings said buyers are still going over the listing price on homes from time to time in multiple offer situations. In the good neighborhoods, there is still pent up demand, says Hastings. 

    Patti West, an agent in Manhattan, said she is definitely still seeing offers come in at or above listing price.

    It depends on the property, West said, because there are so many variables: how it’s priced to begin with, if it’s priced right to begin with, etc. 

    There are some who still try to negotiate, but it depends on what the property is. For instance, condos are a bit more money, so they’re going in at asking or above listing price, while co-ops are a little bit more negotiable, according to West. 

    So it seems that even in markets that are still depreciating, demand remains high. This only raises the question: at what point will that depreciation turn into appreciation? We’re going to guess soon.

     

    Offers remain high even in depreciating markets | REwired.

    Investor and cash buying push Las Vegas home sales | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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    Homes in the Las Vegas area sold at the fastest pace for an April in seven years due, in large, to investor and cash buying nearing record levels. Sales in the $200,000-to-$500,000 range in the Sin City picked up 81% from one-year prior. 

    The Las Vegas median price paid for a home increased to the highest level in nearly four and a half years, largely due to price appreciation,tight inventory, a surge in move-up buyers and a drop-off in foreclosure resales. 

    In the Las Vegas-Paradise metro area, 4,869 new and resale houses and condos closed escrow in April, an 8.6% increase from the month before and a 7.0% rise from one-year prior, according to San-Diego-based DataQuick. 

    Sales have dropped 4.2% between March and April, on average, since 1994. The year-over-year increase in total sales last month follows 10 consecutive months of year-over-year declines. 

     

    Investor and cash buying push Las Vegas home sales | HousingWire.