2008

Using Twitter as a Focusing and Productivity Tool

November 21, 2008

I wrote recently about Social Media tools and whether they can aid and assist Realtors in selling homes and acquiring leads. I am skeptical of whether these tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, provide a sufficient return relative to the time invested in using them. Well, I had enough feedback and counter-points offered to me in [...]

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Austin Rental Market Update – Oct 2008

November 19, 2008

At my monthly Property Manager’s luncheon yesterday in Austin, the general consensus among the 30+ property managers in attendence was that the leasing market has taken a nose dive since September. The number of renter calls has really slowed down. One manager remarked “I keep calling my own phone to make sure it’s working”. Indeed, the [...]

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Austin Real Estate Market Update – Oct 2008 Sales

November 17, 2008

The number of residential single family home sales in Austin took a 28% dip for Oct 2008 compared to a year ago. The number of “Not Solds” (expired or withdrawn) took a big jump also, to 59% of all listings that departed the Austin MLS in October. These are grim numbers, but the remaining metrics [...]

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Redfin Abandoning Failed Model and Moving Toward Traditional Services

November 15, 2008

The discount Broker Redfin, which I follow with interest even though it doesn’t serve Austin, looks like it’s making yet another move toward traditional real estate services. Rather than facilitating the wholesale disintermediation of the traditional Realtor, Redfin instead continues to adopt more and more of the traditional Realtor approach and offer smaller rebates to [...]

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Social Media and the Real Estate Business

November 5, 2008

I was surpised this morning to see “Steve and Linda Crossland” featured as “Blogging Agents” on the Business front page of today’s Austin American Statesman. I’ll be calling Sylvia “Linda” for the next few days, until she has enough of it and threatens me with disaffection. We were not contacted for the article, which is [...]

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I Voted Today, Amongst Grim Austin Faces

October 27, 2008

Today between placing a lockbox on a property and picking my daughter up from school, I had about 75 minutes to kill and no productive way to use that time, until I realized I was driving past the Randalls at Brodie and Slaughter Ln. in Southwest Austin. This, I had heard, is the early voting [...]

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The true, honest to goodness, Sold to List price ratio for Austin

October 27, 2008

I noticed something interesting when I was previewing listings yesterday in Austin Lake Estates. Several homes were priced currently at more than $20K below the original list price (which appears at the bottom of the agent listing printout). This made me start wondering about how accurate our reported sold/list price ratio is, so I decide [...]

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Austin Sales Market Stats by MLS Area – Sept 2008 YTD

October 20, 2008

Below are the YTD Sept 2008 stats for Austin homes sales, broken out by MLS area as compared to 2007 sold stats. Here is a quick summary, the full chart is below. Number of Sales Of the 42 MLS areas tracked, the number of sales decreased in 41. Only the UT area had more home [...]

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Austin Real Estate Market Update – Sept 2008

October 13, 2008

September Austin real estate stats are below. Average and median prices are doing what they’ve been doing most of the year, which is treading water, trending down somewhat, but most notable is that the expired and withdrawns continue to rise, and for September moved past the 50% mark, meaning over half of the homes that [...]

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HOA Violation Leads to Jail Time

October 13, 2008

This came in my Realtor email newsletter today. It’s a reminder that HOA rules have to be followed, no matter the reaons for not being able to comply. A 66-year-old grandfather in Bayonet Point, Fla., is doing jail time because he couldn’t afford to replace the sod on his lawn in his deed-restricted community after [...]

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