Gay buying power has led to the creation of a substantial niche real estate market, which has helped turn Puna into something of a boom town.
Witeck-Combs Communications and Packaged Facts, a division of MarketResearch.com, projected the total buying power of the U.S. gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender adult population at $660 billion in 2007. That number, which represents a 19 percent increase over 2006, has surpassed the buying power of the Asian and Native American communities and is on par with the African-American and Hispanic markets, the survey said.
"In today's competitive marketplace, it is no longer prudent for a leading corporation to ignore the buying power of the gay market," said Wesley Combs, president of Witeck-Combs "Marketers that do risk leaving market share on the table for others to capture."
Read more....
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
I Wonder If This Is The New Zillow?
Berg Properties a Chicago, Illinois real estate company now offers interactive market trends graphs for homebuyers in the Chicago area. Like Zillow, I am sure there may be inherent errors in the system, but it's still a good tool for anyone who wants to better determine current real estate market conditions.
The trends that are tracked are:
The trends that are tracked are:
- average days on market
- median price
- median inventory
- mediaan price per square foot.
The data is provided by a third-party service that scours the Internet for the data and updates once a week. Though it's not a replacement for the valuable services that agents provide, it's a good tool that your clients can use before they take the leap into real estate. Take a look at it here and tell me what you think.
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Realty Times-NAR's Second Homes Report Shows Investors, Others Still Buying
Editor's Note-While I'm pleasantly surprised to read the results of the NAR report, I still believe there will be a bumpy road ahead in real estate.
Not surprisingly, the National Association of Realtors' annual Investment and Vacation Home Buyers Survey showed that homes purchased for investment or perhaps speculation slowed in 2006, but eyebrows may bolt upwards upon hearing that second home purchases set a new record -- up from 2005, what many call the end of the so-called housing bubble.Read more...
Thirty Traffic Generation Tips
Since blogs are big in the real estate world, I decided to post useful tips from the guys over at Daily Blog tips. Now, without further delay, the Thirty Traffic Generation Tips
- Keep track of blogs and leave comments on them. A good way to keep the conversation going is to install a MyBlogLog widget and visit the blog of people visiting your site.
- Nothing creates long-term traffic more than value. Consider writing posts with resources or explaining how things work. Useful things get linked to and they get onto del.icio.us, which is far better long-term than a digg front page.
- Inform search engines and aggregators like Technorati (using the ping functionality) when your blog is updated, this should ensure maximum traffic coming from those sources.
- Simplify. Pay attention to complex issues in your field of work. It may be a big long publication that is hard to wade through or a concept that is hard to grasp. Reference it and make a shorter “for dummies” version with your own lessons learned and relevant tips. When doing this, I have been surprised to find that the simplified post will appear before the more complex version in search results. Perhaps this is why it results in increased traffic; people looking for more help or clarification on the subject will land on your blog.
Loan Fraud, Lease-Options and a Lawsuit
A three-month long investigation by television station KCRA 3 out of Sacramento, California has uncovered millions of dollars of fraud.
A retired Sacramento woman, along with seven others is accusing VFM Investing Group, Freedom Capital Mortgage and real estate agent Jennifer Huang into duping them into buying home, which they could in turn lease options.
The plaintiffs were to purchase homes and the defendants would then provide the "pre-screened and pre-qualified" tenants. The plaintiffs were told that the tenants would give them a deposit of up to $10,000 and in addition they could take advantage of a 20% appreciation of the home once the tenant would exercise the option.
The defendants allegedly failed to provide tenants and the plaintiffs eventually went onto foreclosure. I won't go into all the sordid details, but there was mortgage fraud involved. You can read the entire story here.
Assuming all the allegations are true, I still cannot put the blame entirely on the defendants. The real estate speculators are also responsible for their fate.
First and foremost they must have not paid attention to their market and assumed that a 10% appreciation per year was still happening. Second, they signed loan documents whose monthly payments would in the $3000 per month range. They must have been greedy in order to miss the fact that if their tenant/buyers could not qualify for a home purchase themselves, how in the world would they make a lease payment of $3000? They obviously did not do their homework.
What gets me is that they are putting lease-options in a bad light. Granted though lease-options are not always appropriate, they do work in the right situation. If the situation is appropriate, lease-options could mean the difference between you losing your listing or earning your commission.
A retired Sacramento woman, along with seven others is accusing VFM Investing Group, Freedom Capital Mortgage and real estate agent Jennifer Huang into duping them into buying home, which they could in turn lease options.
The plaintiffs were to purchase homes and the defendants would then provide the "pre-screened and pre-qualified" tenants. The plaintiffs were told that the tenants would give them a deposit of up to $10,000 and in addition they could take advantage of a 20% appreciation of the home once the tenant would exercise the option.
The defendants allegedly failed to provide tenants and the plaintiffs eventually went onto foreclosure. I won't go into all the sordid details, but there was mortgage fraud involved. You can read the entire story here.
Assuming all the allegations are true, I still cannot put the blame entirely on the defendants. The real estate speculators are also responsible for their fate.
First and foremost they must have not paid attention to their market and assumed that a 10% appreciation per year was still happening. Second, they signed loan documents whose monthly payments would in the $3000 per month range. They must have been greedy in order to miss the fact that if their tenant/buyers could not qualify for a home purchase themselves, how in the world would they make a lease payment of $3000? They obviously did not do their homework.
What gets me is that they are putting lease-options in a bad light. Granted though lease-options are not always appropriate, they do work in the right situation. If the situation is appropriate, lease-options could mean the difference between you losing your listing or earning your commission.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
