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Pound Ridge NY Weekly Real Estate Report 2/24/2014 Homes for sale 56 Median Ask Price $1,225,000.00 Low Price $285,000.00 High Price $5,700,000.00 Average Size 4242 Average Price/foot $345.00 Average DOM 141 Average Ask Price $1,450,728.00

Investors gobbled up 156,862 single family homes and flipped them in 2013, up 16% from 2012 and up 114% from 2011, according to RealtyTrac . Homes flipped in 2013 accounted for 4.6% of all U.S. single family home sales during the year, up from 4.2% in 2012 and up from 2.6% in 2011. In short, the market is hot for house flippers , but in some areas more than others. Flips accounted for 3.8% of all sales in the fourth quarter, down slightly from 3.9% of all sales in the third quarter and down from 7.1% of all sales in the fourth quarter of 2012 — the highest percentage of sales represented by flips in a single quarter since RealtyTrac began tracking flipping data in the first quarter of 2011. The average gross profit for a home flip was $58,081 for all U.S. homes flipped in 2013, up from an average gross profit of $45,759 in 2012. The average gross profit for homes flipped in the fourth quarter was $62,761, up from $52,746 in the fourth quarter of 2012. http://www.housingwire...

Mortgage Loan Rates Dip as Home Sales Stabilize | Pound Ridge NY Homes | Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor

WITH "BLACK FRIDAY" AROUND THE CORNER IT IS THAT TIME OF YEAR TO TALK ABOUT HOW "INQUIRIES" IMPACT CREDIT AND WHAT "EXCESSIVE SHOPPING" CAN DO TO CREDIT. Third party credit reviews or "hard inquiries" impact credit scores for 12 months from the date they occur even though they can be seen for 24 months. There are windows of time that a consumer can have multiple third party credit reviews and it will only impact the score as one inquiry. This happens only with mortgage, student loan, and car financing hard inquiries. Each of these categories has its own window where multiple credit reviews are considered as one. All other third party reviews can drop scores 2-5 points each time they occur. When an individual has many hard inquiries or third party reviews it can be considered "excessive shopping" and reduce scores dramatically. In many cases 6 hard inquiries (in total) ...

The first two articles in this series were designed to wet your whistle with respect to online lead generation. I offered statistical trends to demonstrate the potential that exists for real estate companies. As a result, I’ve been getting lots of messages from people asking for a common-sense outline to start catching more fish (see part two to read the fish analogy). For those seeking to take online lead generation seriously, consider the following process and fundamentals to start building a strategy: Awareness: Boy meets girl For any relationship to begin, two people must first become aware of each other. It might take place at a grocery store or the local coffee shop. Regardless of how it happens, each will have to enter the mental radar of the other. The same is true when it comes to digital consumers. Here are some good places to start. Pay-per-click SEO Organic SEO Social media Blog Public relations Are you doing everything you can to create awareness with more people? ...

Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor » Blog Archive » Mortgage foreclosure activity hits 2008 lows | Pound Ridge Homes

Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor » Blog Archive » First mortgage delinquencies plummet | Pound Ridge Real Estate

As the housing industry makes a slow climb back to pre-boom character, household formation trends, rising home values and low interest rates make 2015 a candidate for the year “normal” will happen, according to Patrick Stone, president and CEO of the title and real estate services firm Williston Financial Group. In the boom period from 2001 to 2006, Stone said, housing vacancy in the U.S. rocketed up to 2.9 percent from a historical equilibrium of 1.7 percent as builders put up 2.3 million more homes (single-family homes and multifamily units) than households were created. That oversupply led to falling home prices, a great slowdown in new-home construction and a bunch of underwater homeowners, he said. Patrick Stone In the last five years, household formation outpaced housing construction by 1.1 million, Stone said, but housing, now at 2.1 percent vacancy in the U.S., won’t reach a supply-and-demand “equilibrium,” given current trends, for two or three more years. “I d...

Plans to create the world’s biggest offshore wind farm off the coast of Britain have been approved. Work on the massive Triton Knoll site – 288 giant wind turbines off the Lincolnshire coast – can now begin after the £3.6bn project was given the go ahead. It will dwarf Britain’s current largest offshore facility, the 175-turbine London Array in the Thames Estuary unveiled last week by David Cameron. Go-ahead: An offshore wind farm off the coast of Skegness in Lincolnshire When complete, the new giant windfarm will generate 1.2 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power for 820,000 homes. But critics say it will not come without a cost, as offshore power is currently subsidised by the taxpayer at three time the wholesale price of conventionally-produced electricity. And the scheme is not without controversy. As part of the project, energy giant RWE are proposing building a substation the size of 30 football pitches connected to the offshore turbines, in the Lincolnshi...

Oversharing is not caring Do you update your friends on every miniscule detail of your life? Whether you’re talking about what you ate for breakfast or the centipede you just found in your shoe, we invite you to consider that it may  be overkill. Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor » Blog Archive » 20 things your friends wish you’d stop posting on Facebook | Pound Ridge Realtor

Do buyers actually go to a neighborhood they’d like to live in, then check a mobile app with geolocation abilities to see nearby listings on the market? Will buyers sign up to use a tech-focused brokerage’s virtual office website, and then work with an agent with another firm? Does an agent risk making a bad impression — and losing out on repeat business — by carrying an old feature phone, and failing to respond to his clients’ text messages? Answers to these and other questions of pressing importance to agents, brokers and companies that provide services to them were flying at today during a panel discussion, “Hear It Direct from Today’s Buyers: Live Consumer Panel.” Jennifer Berman, regional manager of First Team Real Estate, grilled six buyers, ranging from first-timers to experienced investors. The takeaway: Buyers valued not only their agent’s tech skills, but their experience, including neighborhood knowledge and negotiating skills. Bedford New York Real Estate | Be...

Pound Ridge NY Real Estate Report RobReportBlog 2013 6 months ending 7/8 2012 27 Sales 38 $747,500.00 median sold price $712,500.00 $399,000.00 low sold price $367,500.00 $2,550,000.00 high sold price $2,350,000.00 3625 average size 3302 $267.00 ave. price per foot $259.00 244 ave days on market 205 $980,672.00 average sold price $960,967.00 95% ave. sold to ask 93% Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor » Blog Archive » Pound Ridge sales down 28% – Prices up 5% | RobReportBlog | Pound Ridge Homes

You’ve probably seen some of the reports during the past week about home sales and prices. Housing is hot. • New home sales in May were almost 30 percent higher than a year ago, and average prices jumped by about 10 percent during the past 12 months to $308,000. • Resales of homes were up by 13 percent in May over May 2012. Median prices increased by 15.4 percent, the sixth straight month of double-digit gains and the largest monthly advance since October 2005. • Median prices of new listings in some cities where inventories of homes listed for sale are tight and multiple bidding situations are routine have gone off the charts. In the Los Angeles-Long Beach area, list prices were nearly 28 percent higher in May than the year before, according to data compiled by Realtor.com from local multiple listing services. In San Diego, median list prices were 21 percent higher. Washington D.C., 18.8 percent. Seattle, nearly 18 percent. Charlotte, N.C., 11 percent. But one key housing nu...

These 95 million people ages 10 to 32 outnumber their baby-boomer parents by 10 million. The young adults among them, sobered by the recession, have relatively modest material expectations; many say they’d be happy with smaller living spaces. The housing industry will have to convince the next generation that home loans are as necessary and prudent as the student debt so many of them already carry, writes the Los Angeles Times. Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor » Blog Archive » How millennials will affect homebuilders | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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 L...

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. Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor » Blog Archive » Wells Fargo still leans in on mortgage business | Pound Ridge Real Estate

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 the Federal 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. Th...

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? Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor » Blog Archive » Offers remain high even in depreciating markets | Pound Ridge Real Estate

Foreclosure filings in Colorado dropped a dramatic 41.3% in the first quarter of 2013, the Denver Post writes. Citing data from the  Colorado Division of Housing , the publication noted that 4,571 foreclosure filings were reported, down from 7,785 a year earlier. Bedford New York Real Estate | Bedford NY Homes by Robert Paul Realtor » Blog Archive » Colorado foreclosure filings plummet | Pound Ridge NY Real Estate

Placing zeros to the right seems to be the preferred sport of those who put a price on the homes they sell in Cuba today. A captive market at the end of the day, the buyer could find a lot of surprises in the wide range of classified ads. From owners who ask astronomical sums for their houses, sums that have nothing to do with the reality of demand, to real bargains that make you feel sorry for the naiveté of the negotiator. Many are pressured to sell, some by those with the smarts to realize that this is the time to buy a house on the Island. It is a bet on the future, if it goes wrong they lose almost everything, but if it goes well they position themselves -- in advance -- for tomorrow. The slow hurry up and the fast run at the speed of light. These are times to make haste, the end of an era could be close... say the smartest. It's surprising to see, with barely any notion of real estate, how Cubans launch themselves into the marketing of square meters. They talk about their...