Tag Archives: Westchester NY Real Estate

9 Creative Ways to Use Social Media to Launch a Product | ArmonkRealtor

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Are you looking for creative ideas to help launch your next product (or company)?

Want some actionable tips to employ social media in your next launch?

If so, keep reading as I explore nine ways we used social media to help launch a new project.

You’re sure to find unusual tactics that will help you with your next launch.

Why Social Media for a Launch?

Social media has changed everything when it comes to marketing.

Now, instead of spending a ton of money hoping to get in front of the “press,” you are the media.  Social media allows you to connect with people and encourage engagement with very little money and only a nominal effort.

 

Like Social Media Examiner, you may have a blog or podcast—or perhaps a video series.  This means you are a media outlet and can leverage that following every time you launch.

Even if you don’t produce content, chances are pretty good you’ve developed relationships across social channels. All of these outposts provide a great opportunity to take the launch process to an entirely new level.

Let me show you how. Below are nine ways we employed social media to help launch a new initiative called My Kids’ Adventures.

Tip #1: Create a Teaser Campaign on Facebook

When your idea is nothing more than a thought, start brainstorming ways you can employ social media to hint that something exciting is coming.

My teaser campaign was code-named “Project Torch” and I referred to it every now and again on Facebook. As you can see below, a lot of folks were intrigued and wondered what I had up my sleeve.

I posted the result of a brainstorming session on Facebook, with the words blurred on the clipboard

Starting months before launch, I regularly posted random images of torches, Indiana Jones and updates about my progress on “Project Torch.”

People were private messaging me, calling me and emailing me (family, friends and business peers) wondering what in the world this secret project was.

Tips when doing a teaser campaign:

  • Experiment using Facebook posts with and without images.
  • Share progress images (I showed fuzzed-out logos we were working on).
  • Reference your “code name” in all of your updates to create natural curiosity.
  • Be very careful not to reveal too much too early (even to your closest friends and employees!).

Tip #2: Create a Video That’s Personal

Social media provides an amazing opportunity to connect with people. Why not create a video that reveals the need you hope to address while simply hinting at the solution?

The video below was put together in less than two weeks. Part was filmed with my iPhone while I was on vacation and the other part was done with the help of a guy at my church on a Saturday afternoon.

 

This video played an instrumental role in setting the tone for our new project.

How I unveiled the video…

The above video was first formally revealed at Social Media Marketing World, following my keynote presentation.

I pulled a Steve Jobs and said, “But wait, there’s one more thing…”  I showed the video and spoke for about 5 minutes and that was it.

 

 

Read more….

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-product-launch/

Chinese Buyers Flood U.S. Housing Market | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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Flush with cash, Chinese homebuyers are flooding into the U.S. housing market, and paying top dollar.

“The Chinese came out really huge in the past year,” said Jonathan Miller of Miller Samuel, a New York-based appraiser. Chinese buyers accounted for 18 percent of the $68.2 billion that foreigners spent on homes during the 12 months ended March 31, according to the National Association of Realtors.

At a median price of $425,000, the Chinese are also buying more expensive homes than otherforeign buyers, who spent a median of nearly $276,000 on U.S. homes. And nearly 70 percent of those pricey Chinese deals were made in all cash.

Nowhere is the influx of Chinese homebuyers felt more strongly than in California, where more than half of the homes sold to foreign buyers went to Chinese nationals.

Sally Forster Jones, an agent with Coldwell Banker International in Los Angeles, said Chinese are snapping up many of the trophy properties on the city’s Westside. She estimates that she’s sold about 10 multimillion dollar homes to Chinese nationals over the past 12 months.

“The uptick in sales to Chinese buyers started several years ago but it has increased dramatically lately,” she said.

Most of her Chinese clients are wealthy industrialists or real estate tycoons, many of whom spend less than half the year in the States.

“Some have children going to school in Los Angeles and use the homes as residences for them and [as a place] to stay at when they visit their kids,” said Jones.

China’s gross domestic product has grown by high single-digit, sometimes double-digit rates for the past 10 years, producing a lot of cash for the country’s top business people who view U.S. real estate as a safe and stable investment.

Rick Turley supervises real estate offices for Coldwell Banker in eight counties in and around San Francisco, including Silicon Valley. Many of his Chinese clients work in technology.

“The current hot spots are Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Cupertino, near Apple headquarters,” he said.

Most purchase the homes to raise their family and they pay special attention to the local school systems. Turley also has Chinese clients who buy homes for their kids. Last year, a family from Shanghai bought a condo for their daughter who was attending Stanford. The daughter has since graduated and now works at Google, he said.

 

Chinese Buyers Flood U.S. Housing Market | AOL Real Estate.

Luxury auctions catching on | Bedford Corners Real Estate

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A 40-acre Temecula, Calif., estate built by the late actor Jack Klugman will be auctioned July 27 using Premiere Estates Auction Co.’s “WorldBid Auction platform.” The company requires only a bidder registration form and a $100,000 cashier’s check to register to bid for the home, originally listed for $12 million.

 

Luxury real estate auctions are taking off, according to blogger Candy Evans, who says auctions  “are a great way, in fact, maybe the only way, to unload big, kinda albatross-y homes, as well as your standard multimillion-dollar fare.” Evans reports that the nation’s third-largest auction house, Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, is now conducting luxury real estate auctions. Source: prnewswire.com.

 

– See more at: http://www.inman.com/wire/luxury-auctions-catching-on/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+inmannews+%28Inman+News+-+Headlines%29#sthash.qMsxT5ED.dpuf

 

 

Luxury auctions catching on | Inman News.

High Price Low Cost SEO | Social Media Today | Armonk Realtor

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Everyone wants to be found in the search engines. Organic visitors typically account for most Web publishers’ traffic and yield one of the highest long-term returns on investment of any digital channel.

 

Ranking well in Google has obvious benefits to one’s business. More qualified traffic equals more revenue and customers. As such, this led a lot of companies to take shortcuts in their link building for years because the reward far outweighed the risk.

 

Some examples of link building tactics that used to work include: Over-optimization of anchor text, low-quality links and creating dummy blogs with robot-generated text.

 

What is the common theme here?  Little to no effort in order to generate these links. Much of it could be automated or purchased relatively cheaply and the low costs yielded tremendous returns until February 2011. That’s when Panda hit, and it hit hard. Then in April 2012 another major update hit: Penguin. This focused primarily on the sources linking to Websites.

 

After the dust settled, Warren Buffett’s famous saying “when the tide goes out, you see who was swimming naked,” which was intended for those who played the stock market and were heavily leveraged could also apply for many Websites’ SEO. The tide went out on low cost link building and many company’s link profile was naked, resulting in losses of traffic and thousands to millions of dollars for many Webmasters.

 

Unfortunately for these companies, regaining lost rankings was not as easy as drawing a line in the sand and doing things right from that point on. The cost was exponentially greater because these companies needed to factor in the price of fixing the old issue before moving on towards the newer, cleaner link building.

 

Earning trust today in Google takes time. A lot of it. It involves building relationships with real people, at authoritative Websites, and distributing quality content across the Web that provides real value to the audience that engages with it. The links earned from quality content tells Google’s crawlers that Web sites of authority trust you enough to link to you.

 

Google can also quickly discern which content is more valuable than others based on the number of times it is shared across the social Web. Obviously the easiest way they have insight into this data is from their own social property Google+. However, since most Twitter tweets are public, their crawlers can also determine how frequently the content has been shared on this massive social network.  In addition, Facebook’s API can quickly indicate how many times a given domain and page have been shared on its site.

 

The times have changed. Continuing with old link building practices is only a recipe to digging an even deeper grave for a Website’s SEO. Costs associated with link building today have increased mostly because of the time involved, but the end result is the same: prominent visibility in Google which leads to more awareness and customers for your brand.

 

High Price Low Cost SEO | Social Media Today.

Real estate market looking up in county | Pound Ridge NY Real Estate

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San Luis Obispo County’s housing market is on the rebound.

 

The median price — the point at which half of residences sell for more and half for less — continues to rise, sales have picked up and foreclosures have fallen.

 

A strengthening economy has played a key role in the housing market’s comeback, and real estate will be a significant contributor toward economic growth this year, economists say.

 

“It’s on an upward trend,” said Jordan Levine, economist for Beacon Economics, a Los Angeles-based independent research and consulting firm.  “The economy is improving, tourism is doing well and more people are back to work, and there’s not a lot of inventory.”

 

California traditionally suffers from an undersupply of housing, Levine added. That lack of housing supply has kept prices higher in California relative to other states, and has resulted in pent-up demand.

 

“The supply issue is starting to express itself,” he said. “It wasn’t as big an issue when the housing market was in the doldrums. But now, it has become more obvious as demand rises.”

 

The unsold inventory index for San Luis Obispo County, which indicates the number of months needed to sell the supply of homes on the market at the current sales rate, was 3.5 in May, according to the California Association of Realtors. A six- to seven-month supply is considered normal.

 

But some inventory relief should come in the second half of this year, as homeowners who had been holding back decide it’s time to sell, said Leslie Appleton-Young, chief economist for the association.

 

“There are people that are still underwater; over 20 percent of the mortgages in California are underwater,” she said. “But that’s changing rapidly as prices go up. More will be above water and will either stay or list their home.”

 

The all-home median price for the county, which includes new and resale single-family detached homes and condos, was $421,500 in May, 12.4 percent higher than the same month in 2012, according to DataQuick, a Southern California-based real estate tracking firm. May marked the 13th consecutive month in which the county’s median home sales price saw a year-over-year increase.

 

However, the May median sale price was still 23.4 percent lower than the peak May median of $550,000 in 2006.

 

A total of 394 homes were sold in May 2013, up from 361 sold in May 2012, a 9 percent year-over-year increase.  Most of the homes sold in the county are existing, single-family homes.

 

The median price for resale homes was $435,500 in May, a 13.1 percent year-over-year increase. Sales for existing, single-family homes grew to 325, a nearly 5 percent year-over-year increase.

 

Read more here: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2013/07/06/2574290/real-estate-market-looking-up.html#storylink=cpy

 

 

Real estate market looking up in county | Local News | SanLuisObispo.com.

Help buyers see the potential of modest homes | Mt Kisco Real Estate

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If you have worked long enough as a real estate agent to have sold a few houses, you have probably sold homes that are unusual or less than perfect. You know that there is a lot more to being a real estate agent than iPads and smartphones.

Most agents don’t just sell pretty houses. People come to us with a variety of interesting properties and situations that we need to make the most of.

We should not be making fun of our clients’ homes or their decorating choices. We should give suggestions to make the home more salable, and then work with what they give us.

I have learned to be very open-minded and creative when it comes to listing and selling houses. As an agent, sometimes I can persuade homeowners to make some changes to help sell their home. Sometimes I cannot.

Sometimes sellers can’t afford to make the changes I suggest, and other times they don’t want to. It’s my job to sell the house, but I don’t have much control over what I am selling.

Early on in my career I sold one of the ugliest houses I have ever seen, and it smelled bad, too.

– See more at: http://www.inman.com/2013/07/05/help-buyers-see-the-potential-of-modest-homes/#sthash.7Y5Fmd6k.dpuf

 

Help buyers see the potential of modest homes | Inman News.

How New York City Renters Are Getting Screwed By Taxes | Bedford Hills Real Estate

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Tax%20rates%20on%20apartment%20buildings.jpg
[Via Business Insider.]

Josh Barro took property tax data from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and broke it down for Business Insider, showing just how high the taxes levied on New York City rental buildings are, especially compared with other high-rent cities. And though we don’t know exactly how much of that is passed on the renters themselves, general wisdom is that it’s a lot. Now for some fun facts: Of the 50 largest cities in the U.S., only Detroit has a has a higher tax rate on apartment buildings. And just think about how much more New York real estate costs—but then, when you compare New York solely to other high-rent cities (where median rents exceeded $1,000 in 2011), New York still comes out on top in the tax department. This is not a contest we want to win.

Check out this other graph, which shows that owner-occupied homes and small apartment buildings are taxed at much lower rates than walk-up rentals and apartment buildings with elevators. “Our tax rates on owner-occupied homes are actually some of the lowest among large cities. But who can afford to buy here?” Barro asks.

Screen%20Shot%202013-07-01%20at%2011.35.36%20AM.png
[Via Business Insider.]

So we know that rental buildings get taxed more than rental buildings in other cities and 6.4 times owner-occupied homes, but how much is really passed on to renters? In Boston, a study showed that landlords take care of 85 percent of the burden, but in New York it’s likely that more of the cost is shouldered by tenants paying inflated rents, mostly because apartment supply here is more limited and there needs to be some kind of incentive for landlords not to convert their buildings to co-ops or condos.

“Rent control does shield many New York renters from the burden of property tax increases. But that doesn’t help market-rate tenants like me. And tax abatements for new rental buildings are tied to requirements to set aside affordable units; again, the benefit of the abatement does not flow through to tenants paying market rate,” Barro concludes. “Living in New York is crazy expensive. Partly, that’s for reasons outside the control of policymakers. But one reason is this hidden tax on renters that New York has decided, uniquely among large cities, to impose. It’s a big mistake.”

How New York City Renters Are Getting Screwed By Taxes – The Rent Is Too Damn High – Curbed NY.

Despite recovering market, Maryland foreclosure activity remains elevated | Cross River Real Estate

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Maryland’s housing market is improving, but many homeowners still face trouble.

Foreclosure activity in Maryland last month reached a 33-month high, according to RealtyTrac, which gathers real estate data nationwide. Among the states, Maryland had the largest year-over-year increase — 229 percent — in foreclosure starts in May.

“Every day, we just get a lot of struggling, hurting, scared homeowners,” said Owen Jarvis, an attorney with the St. Ambrose Housing Aid Center in Baltimore. Although many homes going into foreclosure now are investments gone wrong, not owner-occupied properties, scores of homeowners are falling behind on payments, he said.

Lenders began the foreclosure process on just over 2,000 Maryland properties last month, according to RealtyTrac’s figures. And last month’s high foreclosure figure is not an anomaly. Maryland’s foreclosure numbers have been among the highest in the country for about a year, ranking fourth last month.

Several factors are behind the state’s elevated foreclosure rate.

Some lenders have dragged out the process, possibly biding their time until the market improves. The chief reason, though, is that Maryland changed its foreclosure laws after the housing bubble burst, requiring more oversight and a more drawn-out process for banks to claim property.

Maryland’s extended foreclosure timeline has given many homeowners time to pursue relief, such as mortgage modifications, from lenders. At the beginning of the financial crisis, foreclosures in Maryland could be completed in a matter of days, leaving homeowners little time to react to bank actions.

The post-bubble spike in mortgage delinquencies prompted the General Assembly to rethink the state’s foreclosure process. Legislators extended the amount of time required before a foreclosure auction, increased access to housing counseling services and instituted a mediation program.

“The governor early on decided that we, Maryland, did not want to be the state with the fastest foreclosure process,” said Raymond Skinner, secretary of the Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development. “Our approach from the beginning has been to focus on our homeowners and keep as many people as we can in their homes.”

The minimum number of days a foreclosure in Maryland could be completed went from 15 to 135, Skinner said. On average, it now takes 575 days to complete a foreclosure in Maryland, said Daren Blomquist, vice president at RealtyTrac.

But the high foreclosure activity, which is expected to continue for months, also might have a chilling effect on the state’s budding housing recovery.

 

 

 

Despite recovering market, Maryland foreclosure activity remains elevated – baltimoresun.com.

CoreLogic: 4.2 million homes in path of hurricane storm-surge | South Salem Real Estate

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More than 4.2 million U.S. homes are located within the risk-zone of hurricane-driven storm-surge along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, CoreLogic concluded in a study this week.

After analyzing residential property risk on the national, regional, state, metro and ZIP code level, CoreLogic ($26.430%) produced a Storm Surge Report, noting that $1.1 trillion in U.S. property is situated within at-risk areas.

Unfortunately, risk-prone areas are only increasing.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency released a revised flood map for New York suburbs, adding another 35,000 homes and businesses to the list of at-risk properties along the coast.

“Public awareness of the risk hurricane-driven storm surge poses to coastal homeowners has never been higher coming off the heels of Hurricane Sandy last fall,” said Dr. Howard Botts, vice president and director of database development for CoreLogic Spatial Solutions. “Sandy was a harsh reminder of the potential destruction associated with storm-surge flooding, and of just how many communities are vulnerable to that risk, in areas typically assumed to be relatively safe from hurricanes along the northeastern Atlantic shoreline.”

Of the $1.1 trillion in property at-risk, $658 billion is located in 10 major metro areas.

States high on the list include Louisiana with 411,000 homes in storm-surge zones. Not to mention, New York with $135 billion in property at risk.

Long Island, N.Y., alone has an estimated $200 billion in residential property exposed.

CoreLogic says for the first time the report incorporates a climate-related rise in sea levels – a factor putting more neighborhoods at risk.

“These findings show that the Miami area could potentially have the highest increase in the number of homes at risk of the cities discussed in the report,” CoreLogic said. “Given a one-foot rise in sea level, total properties at risk would nearly double from just under 132,000 to almost 340,000, and estimated value would increase from an estimated $48 billion to more than $94 billion overall.”

 

CoreLogic: 4.2 million homes in path of hurricane storm-surge | HousingWire.

Foreclosure Sales Fall 22% In Q1 | Armonk NY Real Estate

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foreclosure

Foreclosure and bank owned sales fell 18% in the first quarter to 190,121, according to RealtyTrac’s latest report.  This is down 22% from Q1 2012.

Foreclosure and short sales accounted for 21% of all residential sales in Q1, down form 25% in Q1 2012, and a peak of 45% in Q1 2009.

Meanwhile, non-foreclosure short sales were down 10% from Q4 2012, and down 35% from Q1 2012.

Including non-foreclosure short sales, the share of distressed sales came to 36%.

The decline in foreclosure related sales is in large part because of  a decline in foreclosure activity. But the decline in non-foreclosure short sales was “surprising” according to RaltyTrac vice president Daren Blomquist, given that 11 million homeowners are in negative equity.

“Rising home prices in many markets are stunting the continued growth of short sales by reducing incentive for both underwater homeowners and lenders.

“Underwater homeowners may be willing to stick it out a few more months or even years in the hope that they will be able to walk away with money at the closing table and without a hit to their credit rating, and for lenders a failed short sale may no longer translate into bigger losses down the road given that average prices of bank-owned homes are rising — at a faster pace than non-distressed home prices in many markets.”

Here are some details from the report:

  • The average price of a foreclosure related sale declined 1% quarter-over-quarter in Q1 to $167,095.
  • At 35% Georgia had the biggest percentage of foreclosure related sales. Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey foreclosure-related sales account for less than 10% of sales.
  • The average price of a foreclosed home was 30% below the average price of a non-foreclosure property.

Here’s a look at foreclosure sales against average foreclosure sale price:

foreclosure sale and price chart

 

Foreclosure Sales Fall 22% In Q1 – Business Insider.