Questions to ask yourself before choosing a 15-year vs. 30-year mortgage – Yahoo Homes.
Questions to ask yourself before choosing a 15-year vs. 30-year mortgage | North Salem Real Estate
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Tag Archives: Westchester Homes for Sale
Red Flag Warning Is In Effect For Wildfires In Bedford | The Bedford NY Realtor
Strong Winds In Fairfield County Could Hinder Stamford’s Balloon Parade | Pound Ridge Realtor
Chappaqua Homes | Flashes of Industrial Style in a Modern-Rustic Dream Home
Bedford Hills NY Real Estate Weekly Report | #RobReportBlog
| Bedford Hills NY Weekly Real Estate Report | 11/22/2013 | |
| Homes for sale | 32 | |
| Median Ask Price | $847,000.00 | |
| Low Price | $289,000.00 | |
| High Price | $10,995,000.00 | |
| Average Size | 4028 | |
| Average Price/foot | $419.00 | |
| Average DOM | 151 | |
| Average Ask Price | $1,733,887.00 | |
If prospective buyers can’t picture living in a particular home, they’ll walk away | Waccabuc Real Estate
While showing homes to a young couple with two small children I discovered a house can look too perfect. Since I just met the buyers as they had arrived in town, I didn’t have much time to schedule appointments and make my showing schedule. Some of the sellers had only a couple hours’ notice to prepare for the showings. Even with the short notice, these sellers have extremely neat homes. There was not one child’s toy left out, or book, dish, wrinkled pillow or toothbrush out of place.
The buyers kept commenting about how neat these homes were and even questioned if these occupied homes had real people living there. The houses looked too perfect. I know for a fact that one of the homes was professionally staged because the listing agent always requires her sellers to stage their homes. Some of the other houses may or may not have been professionally staged.
Staging — when done right — can help a home sell. I have seen some wonderful staging jobs. But a couple of these homes lacked that warm, lived-in feeling. This turned off the young couple with the two small children. I saw them squirm and cross their arms. They made generic statements about how this is nice and that looks pretty, but not buying-sign comments.
We saw some vacant homes and some new construction, too. Seeing these homes empty did not seem to bother the buyers, as they could see the real potential the homes offered — a clean palette, so to speak.
I showed another home that was occupied where the sellers left it neat but with a lived-in feeling. You could feel it the moment you stepped in the door. The buyers responded very favorably and started seeing themselves living there. They wanted to linger and ask questions. Yes, there were some personal family photos around, toys in the corner, things on the kitchen counter. The beds were made and the house was clean, but it felt lived in by a happy family.
– See more at: http://www.inman.com/next/when-marketing-to-families-a-staged-listing-should-evoke-lived-in-feeling/#sthash.IdbSlOrt.dpuf
5 Backsplashes to Add Pizzazz to the Kitchen | Pound Ridge Homes
A pencil mosaic backsplash with Kohler’s Vault Kitchen sink and Purist kitchen faucet. Photo courtesy of Kohler.
When doing a kitchen makeover, customers want something both stylish and functional for the room that’s the heart of the home.
Adding a backsplash is a simple way to change the look of a kitchen without taking on the hassle and expense of a complete renovation. Whether the backsplash is behind the sink or stove (or both), there are designs that fit every type of kitchen.
Here are five on-trend backsplash suggestions retailers can share with kitchen-minded customers:
1. Tile It On
Pencil and checkerboard tile patterns are a couple of the many different types that can be used to liven up the kitchen. Customers also might enjoy the classic zigzag of a subway chevron pattern to add more colors to the space. The smooth surface also makes cleaning up splatter from cooking a breeze!
Adding a backsplash is a simple way to change the look of a kitchen without taking on the hassle and expense of a complete renovation.
2. Marbleized
A light marble backsplash looks great with bright colors like a mint green or an orange (seen here). A marble slab or tiles also are appealing when paired with a matching countertop. Marble is certainly a kitchen enhancer that doesn’t ever go out of style, as Mission Stone & Tile shows with this Calacatta pattern.
– See more at: http://industryedge.nationalhardwareshow.com/2013/10/5-backsplashes-to-add-pizzazz-to-your-customers-kitchen#sthash.KhvJVTRf.dpuf
Existing Home Sales Tumble | Pound Ridge NY Homes
Existing home sales fell 3.2% month-over-month in October to an annualized pace of 5.12 million units.
This was worse than expectations for a 2.9% month-over-month to an annualized pace of 5.14 million units.
This was the second straight monthly decline.
September’s number was left unchanged to show a 1.9% MoM fall to 5.29 million units the previous month.
“The erosion in buying power is dampening home sales,” Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist said in a press release. “Moreover, low inventory is holding back sales while at the same time pushing up home prices in most of the country. More new home construction is needed to help relieve the inventory pressure and moderate price gains.”
The national median existing-home price was up 12.8% on the year to $199,500. Meanwhile, the median time for homes on the market was 54 days, up from 50 days the previous month.
Housing inventory fell 1.8% to 2.13 million units for sale at the end of the month. This represented a 5 month supply at current sales pace.
The share of distressed sales in existing home sales was unchanged at 14% in October. This is up from 12% in August, but is well down from 27% in 2012, which is an encouraging sign for the market.
Here’s a look at the regional breakdown:
- In the northeast, existing home sales fell 2.9% to an annual rate of 670,000, but were up 11.7% year-over-year.
- In the Midwest, they fell 1.6% to 1.22 million units, but were up 8% from a year ago.
- In the South, they were down 1.9% to 2.06 million units, but up 7.3% on the year.
- In the West, existing home sales were down 7.1% to 1.17 million units, down 0.8% on the year.
Pending home sales, considered a leading indicator for future existing home sales, have been falling sharply. This suggests that existing home sales will be ticking lower.
Existing home sales account for a larger share of the market than new homes
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/comes-existing-home-sales-143906022.html
Monetize Your Social Media Campaigns With These Tech Tools | Mt Kisco Realtor
Social media has become an even bigger part of consumers’ lives in the past year, making it clear what some once thought was a trend is likely here to stay. In fact, social media users are finding more innovative ways to interact, with videos and photos playing a greater part in the way people communicate with each other online.
Marketers are hard at work, as well, trying to find new ways to leverage the power of social networking to reach new customers. Fitting social media interaction time into busy schedules is an ongoing challenge for business owners, however, with Facebook and Twitter accounts often abandoned for days at a time as professionals deal with more pressing issues.
Fortunately, help is available. Numerous tech tools can help professionals manage social media accounts, even taking care of posts for them. But with so many tools on the market today, how can a professional possibly sort through them all? To help, I’ve put together a list of some of the best resources for managing, tracking, and getting the most out of your social media-based marketing campaigns.
“The only way to sort through all the tools out there is to do your own research and try them out. Many tools have a free 30 day free trial so you can feel comfortable with what you’re getting” Anne Ward, CEO of CircleClick said in a recent interview.
“Influence” has become an important word in the world of marketing, with businesses having rapidly realized the reach of those who have large online followings. Klout for Business helps businesses identify influencers in their own social media circles to allow them to reach out to those individuals to spread their message. Using “Perks,” businesses can offer trial versions of products to top influencers in exchange for a mention on their high-traffic sites, allowing those businesses to reach a large number of social media users at once.
With Rowfeeder, businesses can gain insight into topics that are trending, including topics that concern their own industry. This analysis can be used to tweak your own campaigns, allowing you to reach out to consumers using the terms that interest them. In other words, you can include the terms in your campaign that are most likely to be searched, driving customers directly to your posts. It also can be used to track your own campaigns by following a particular hashtag and delivering data about activity on that hashtag. How many times was it re-tweeted? How many followers did each re-tweeter have?
This alert program monitors a user’s social media accounts and sends notifications when a specified search term receives a mention. Mention searches posts in 42 different languages, delivering those back to give businesses a global view of a message’s reach. Social media interactions can also be conducted directly through the Mention interface for added convenience.
MediaFunnel is ideal for organizations interested in involving multiple team members in managing and monitoring accounts. Posts can be deployed across multiple social media platforms at once, including Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress, and LinkedIn. Items can be set up to post at specified intervals, allowing businesses to choose the best time of day to reach their individual customer base.
Popular social media dashboard service HootSuite integrates with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+ Pages, Foursquare, WordPress, Mixi, and almost every other service available through its supplemental App Directory. Users can schedule posts and monitor activity, as well as pull reports to identify the performance of campaigns. Through an app, users can manage social media accounts on the go.
Imagine if you could sell event tickets or gather entries for a contest directly on Twitter. Chirpify gives promoters that capability, allowing them to connect an account that is then assigned a specific hashtag. Customers Tweet using a hashtag (#entertowin, #partytickets2014) and the information is captured by Chirpify, who processes the payment or logs the entry for the business.
One of the best ways to grow your audience is to interact with others. Triberr connects you with people who are interested in the same topic you are, separating topics into “Tribes” to better help you find blogs that relate to your own interests. You can gather social media followers on Triberr, since you’ll be regularly interacting with others who share your interests.
Shortstack helps businesses create professional-looking Facebook pages, complete with polls, forms, and more. The service provides more than 60 templates and 70 themes to let small businesses find the look that fits their own unique style. For pages with less than 2,000 likes, the service is completely free, with the price increasing as a page gains more fans.
Infographics are a great way to connect with today’s visually-driven social media audiences. Infogr.am is a tool that helps businesses put together infographics that convey a message for free. Businesses can import existing spreadsheets or create new ones in order to populate pie charts and bar graphs. Once an infographic has been created, it can be downloaded or shared to social media sites directly from the site.
One way to keep social media audiences interested is to repost news that is relevant to your industry. Feedly provides a way to keep up with what’s going on in the world, with information delivered in one compact dashboard. These links can then be shared to Twitter directly from the app. Feedly is also a way to keep up with information your social media contacts recommend to better keep you informed.
In case you haven’t noticed, animated explainer videos are all the rage. In just a short snippet, you can create a fun explanation of what your business does. Visitors to your website, looking for a quick description of your product or service, will be intrigued by the animated characters and you’ll save the money you would have had to spend hiring a camera crew to record you talking about your service. VideoRascal promises a video for less than $99, using the templates the site provides. You then add a script, record a voiceover, and choose the music you want to go with the video. Once complete, you can export the video for use on your website and social media sites.
Social media remains a vital part of business marketing. Using these helpful tools, businesses can maintain and manage their social media accounts while still remaining on budget.
A Shingle-Style Remodel | North Salem Real Estate
For San Francisco architects and builders, challenging lots and tight footprints are a way of life. So are stiff historic regulations, zoning laws, and the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). So, when it came time to renovate a Shingle-style house nestled on a tree-lined cul de sac, architects David Gast and Dennis Budd of Gast Architects in San Francisco had their work cut out for them. By playing nice with the planning authorities, they cut out six months of approvals time. Here, you’ll see how they also more than doubled square footage, raised the house, lowered the floors, let in tons more daylight, capitalized on indoor-outdoor connections, made a great backyard, and forged a happy marriage of traditional design and modern finishes.
General Contractor: Moroso Construction Landscape Designer/Contractor: The Garden Route Structural Engineer: Strandberg Engineering
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http://www.customhomeonline.com/remodeling/a-shingle-style-remodel.aspx