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Pound Ridge Realtor | Europe Warily Watches US ‘Fiscal Cliff’ Talks
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Pound Ridge Real Estate | Distressed home sales still hitting California’s inland
The percentage of distressed home sales is falling, but still remains elevated in California’s heartland, according to new California Association of Realtors data.
Statewide, 35 percent of existing home sales in California last month were distressed, down from 50 percent in November 2011. But the percentages were higher in much of state’s inland portion, which is where home prices fell the most.
Madera County had the greatest percentage of distressed sales at 58 percent. That was down from a whopping 88 percent a year earlier. Tehama and Solano counties were at 55 percent, while Merced County was at 52 percent and San Joaquin and Riverside Counties were at 51 percent respectively.
Fifty percent of the sales in Fresno and Stanislaus counties were distressed.
Closer to home, the percentage of distressed sales in November in Sacramento, Placer, Yolo and El Dorado counties was 47, 35, 47 and 38 respectively.
Sanford Nax covers real estate, planning, development, construction and economic issues for the Sacramento Business Journal.
Related links:
Sacramento County, Placer County, Yolo County, El Dorado County, California, Four-county Sacramento region, Foreclosures, Economic Snapshot
Industries:
via bizjournals.com
Real Estate 2012: The Year the Housing Market Turned the Corner | Pound Ridge Real Estate
9 Great Instagram Alternatives to Consider | Pound Ridge Real Estate
To say that brands weren’t happy with Instagram’s recent rollout of new Terms of Service — which were due to take effect on January 16, 2013 — is an understatement.
The free iOS and Android photo sharing app, launched in October 2010, had quickly emerged as an effective marketing tool. Companies realized that they could build brand recognition and consumer loyalty through an ongoing stream of photos that helped personalize their brand, and many were very successful in doing so.
Users were furious. One of their top concerns: Whether their photos could be used in advertisements without their permission. By the next day, Instagram had posted a statement in its blog trying to address the concerns that arose. “Legal documents are easy to misinterpret,” it said. Although Instagram has since reverted to its former advertising policy, the damage had been done.
What to do? In light of these developments, many users are looking elsewhere for alternative photo-sharing apps. There are a lot of terrific ones out there, many of which are far more robust.
Here are 9 photo apps to try:
Pxlr-o-matic
Don’t miss Pxlr-o-matic, one of the most talked about and popular photo apps, with over two million combinations to make your photos look spectacular. It’s so easy that anybody can create stunning shots (including me).
This fun and simple darkroom app makes it easy to add an effect, overlay, and border to get that retro, grunge, clean, or stylish look, all in just three simple steps. And with more options than any other photo app, you’ll never be out of new styles. If you can’t get the right combination of effects to personalize your shots, Pxlr-o-matic allows you to randomize filters, borders, and overlays. Share on Facebook, DropBox, iTunes, Flickr, or via email. There’s the PLUS version with even more options for just $0.99.
Snapseed
Snapseed is a fun and powerful app designed to enhance and share your photos, developed by the same people that create some of the most widely used professional tools for digital photography. Snapseed puts the power of photographic enhancements at your fingertips and makes it possible for anyone to enhance, transform, and share photos.
Snapseed’s vision is to deliver a photo editing experience so fun, so easy, and so powerful that it will be the only photo editing, tweaking, sharing app you’ll want to use, and it largely succeeds. With an intuitive gesture interface, Snapseed gives you the power to saturate and tilt shift your photos, or play around with filters and frames.
Hipster
Hipster is a fun way to share where you are and what you’re doing. It offers a unique integration of text and geotagging that lets you create virtual postcards to share on Facebook and Twitter. Tag friends or add date and place names to your images for a personal touch.
Simply take a snap or upload from your gallery. Add text, edit, add a cool filter and share across your Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Foursquare. Simple to use and with some very cool effects
Camera Awesome
Of the photo apps out there, few come close to Camera Awesome. It has 297 presets, filters, textures, and frames, along with and many other features like image stabilization and burst modes.The free app from SmugMug is more of a wholesale camera app then a filter specialty app — its specialty “Awesomize” button is a powerful auto-fix button with a great name — but it does come with 9 Instagram-like camera filters. The app’s filters can be used with a cool sliding-scale functionality of distortion, so users can choose the hipness level they hope to achieve.
There are also 63 more filters available for download; you can pay $0.99 for 9 filters or $3.99 for all 63.
Free for iOS
Camera+
One of the most popular third-party camera apps for iPhone, Camera+ is probably the most loved for its well-designed, easy-to-use Lightbox editing suite. Lucky for those fleeing Instagram, that Lightbox also contains a huge set of filters and borders. The app doesn’t come with a social network of its own like Instagram does, but if you’re looking for an excellent camera first with Instagram-like filters second, Camera+ is a safe, attractive choice.
$0.99 for iOS
Tadaa
Tadaa is a beautifully designed app — one of the best — with many, many filters that can be viewed in real time and adjusted after the fact. It also includes options for rapid-fire shooting and tilt-shift photography, which you can use to make it look like you’re shooting miniatures. The interface — especially on the touch-calibrated editing suite — is slick and attractive, and Tadaa also features a growing social photography community.
Free for iOS
Streamzoo
Streamzoo is a free, fun and easy way to create and share beautiful photos that’ll have your friends begging to know how you did it. The app lets you follow users (@) or subjects (#), and incorporates a badge and reward system to encourage participation in the community. Choose from 20 filters, 15 borders and six crop shapes, then share on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or Flickr.
CamWow
Use CamWow and take your iPhone, iPod, or iPad camera into the past with some of the most beautiful and unique vintage effects. Unlike Pixlr-o-Matic and Camera Awesome, CamWow adds the effects in real-time, so you can see what the filters will look like as you’re taking the photo. The free version of CamWow is essentially pointless: A banner ad stretches across the bottom of the app, and you have to pay $1.99 to remove a hideous CamWow watermark from your photo.
Free for iOS — a $1.99 in-app purchase is really worth it
Hipstamatic
Hipstamatictakes the Instagram/Kodak connection to the next level: Where Instagram borrowed the filtered look from the venerable photography company and ported it onto the iPhone, Hipstamatic borrows the whole camera.
Shooting with the Hipstamatic camera, you choose your film, your lens, and your flash — the different combinations result in different effects. The standard app costs $1.99 and comes with three different flashes, film rolls and four different lenses — you can buy more of these with “Hipstapaks,” available to purchase inside the app. It’s fun to use, if only because it might be the only camera app for the iPhone on which you have no idea what your final product is going to look like until after it’s “processed.”
$1.99 for iOS
via pamorama.net
The Economic Data Looks Weak, But It’s Stable | Pound Ridge Real Estate
What real estate trends suggest for 2013 | Pound Ridge NY Real Estate
As 2012 comes to an end, most real estate professionals sit on the edge of their seats, anticipating the outcome of the fiscal cliff and how it will affect the housing market going into 2013.
However, there are real estate trends, both nationally and locally, from 2012 that may indicate what is expected in 2013, according to the latest trend data released by Realtor.com.
Inventory was a huge player in 2012, with the total U.S. for-sale inventory falling 45% since its peak in 2007 to 1.674 million units for sale. The median age of the inventory dropped as well, down by 11.4% since November 2011. These numbers indicate supply-and-demand playing a big role moving into 2013, at least for the first half of the year.
On a local level, markets that were the epicenter of the housing crisis continued to gain momentum while the Midwest and Northeast areas — typically more industrialized — continued to falter. States such as Arizona, California and Washington ended the year with dramatic drops in inventory and significant price appreciation of at least 10% year-over-year.
Click on the image below to see the greatest year-over-year inventory reductions.
Conversely, markets in states such as Illinois, Indiana and Ohio, which gained little price appreciation, did not experience dramatic inventory change. Only five areas saw a year-over-year increase in for-sale inventory including Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Philadelphia, Pa., and Shreveport, La. This increase in inventory indicates a continued weakness in both their housing markets as well as the local economy.
Richard Green, director of USC Lusk Center for Real Estate, believes the housing inventory will even out in 2013.
“I was surprised at how good 2012 turned out to be,” Green told HousingWire. “As prices go up, you’re going to see fewer and fewer people underwater on their houses. They are going to feel more and more free to sell their houses.”
Green also offered advice to real estate professionals who may be unsure about what the next few months will bring to the housing market.
“The fiscal cliff is overhyped. If we go over it, we go over it. It’s not a cliff, it’s a slope.”
This reiterates a report released by Barclays on Monday indicating that if the fiscal cliff were to hit, the housing industry would likely slow, but not enough to a point where it would become particularly vulnerable to a sharp contraction.
Additionally, Doug Duncan, chief economist of Fannie Mae, said Tuesday, “Despite unsteady macroeconomic conditions, we anticipate housing and mortgage activity to gain momentum in 2013.”
via housingwire.com
China home price rises quicken, uptrend takes hold | Pound Ridge NY Real Estate news
A recent uptick in land costs – typically a prelude to home price rises – have changed market sentiment and pushed would-be home buyers back to the market in a bid to beat increases.
China’s top state think tank warned last week that China should enforce new property controls next year to curb speculation and prevent an expected modest recovery in house prices from turning into a steep rebound.
The view was echoed by analysts.
“The Chinese government would like to keep the stability of the real estate market. If home prices and sales rebound too quickly next year, the government might unveil fresh tightening policies, including expanding property tax beyond Shanghai and Chongqing,” said Liu Yuan, a head of research at property consultancy Centaline.
Rocketing property prices were a major consequence of China’s last economic stimulus effort, the 4 trillion yuan ($635 billion) package launched in 2008 at the depths of the global financial crisis.
Compared with a year ago, however, home prices are still falling nationwide. The 0.7 percent drop in November was the ninth such decline but easing from a year-on-year fall of 1.1 percent in October, according to Reuters calculations.
Reuters started its weighted China home price index in January 2011 when the NBS stopped providing nationwide data. The NBS now only publishes price changes for each of the 70 major cities.
(Reporting by Xiaoyi Shao and Nick Edwards; Editing by Jacqueline Wong)
Why And How To Destroy Your Data | Pound Ridge NY Real Estate
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How to Master Content Marketing In a Month | Pound Ridge Realtor
Housing recovery hinges on mortgage supply | Pound Ridge Realtor
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