Sales of new U.S. homes plunged 11.2% in January 2010 to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 309,000, the lowest rate on record dating back to 1963, the Commerce Department recently reported. The third-straight drop in sales on a month-to-month basis was unexpected. “The housing market remains very, very distressed”. Sales of new homes are down 6.1% compared with January 2009’s 329,000 units, which was the previous record low. The number of homes for sale rose 0.4% to 234,000 in January. At the January sales pace, it would take 9.1 months to sell that inventory, up from 8.0 months in December and the highest monthly supply since May. Government statisticians have low confidence in the monthly report, which is subject to large revisions, and large sampling and other statistical errors. In most months, the government isn’t sure whether sales rose or fell. The standard error in January for instance, was plus or minus 14%. The government says it can take up to five months to establish a statistically significant trend in sales. Over the last five months, sales have been on a 362,000 seasonally adjusted annual pace, down from 382,000 in the five-month interval through December. Sales had risen fairly steadily in the first half of 2009 before leveling last fall. Seasonally adjusted sales have now fallen three months in a row. Builders have cut back on production of new homes, but they still face headwinds from unsold existing-homes as foreclosures continue to mount up. If a home isn’t sold before it’s finished, it’s taking a record 14.2 months to sell it after completion—a reflection of the mismatch between more expensively priced homes in the inventory and lower-priced homes that have been selling.
12/29/2009 2D and 3D Floor Plans
2D & 3D Floor Plan Services from Edberg Marketing and Floor Plans 4 Less allow home buyers to even more easily visualize the design of the property. Both our 2D and 3D floor plans are created by using original blue prints or with traditional Floor Plan Service to create professional quality plans at an exceptional value. Edberg Marketing just made 2D floor plans even more informative and customer friendly. We combine the floor plan with professional photographs of your home which brings properties to life and helps viewers visualize them more accurately. When the user places the mouse over a camera icon, a real size photograph appears over the plan, illustrating the room pictured. By clicking on an image the photograph can then be expanded. Viewers can also watch a full slide show of all the photographs of the Property. Our 2D plans clearly displays the layout of a property but our 3D plans go even further by adding stock furniture and transforming your floor plan into three dimensions. Three dimensional floor plans are powerful and innovative tools both on the web and in printed form. Your three dimensional floor plan can be shown with or without furniture – whichever you prefer.
12/29/2009 Virtual Staging for Real Estate Marketing
Photographs of a home online are the first impressions a potential buyer sees today, especially when viewing numerous properties for sale on real estate listing-based websites. Have you ever noticed that pictures of vacant homes all look alike with neutral walls and sometimes unidentifiable rooms? You want your pictures to be instantly recognizable by potential buyers online and be remembered because of their warm and inviting appearance. Edberg Marketing offers a cost-effective marketing solution for a fraction of the cost of traditional staging. We utilize our virtual staging process, our significant experience in Real Estate marketing traditionally as well as our proprietary furnishings image library. We use the ACTUAL photographs of the property that you provide us and literally transform them into attractive, attention-getting pictures that drive buyer traffic to the home. Our standard packages include three easy options. While we recommend staging the living room, dining room, kitchen, master bedroom and master bath, you can substitute other similar livings areas.
12/28/2009 Real Estate Marketing for REALTORS
Whether your market is familiar territory or not, it helps to explore with eyes wide open. Memorize street names. Subdivision names. Get out of your car and talk to homeowners. Ask them about their street, their home and their neighborhood. Get a pulse on your market and how people are thinking. “Skip a meal, but never skip a book.” Books are one of the cheapest and easiest ways to learn how to sell, persuade, generate leads. Heck, with a local library or university close by, you have the opportunity to learn about any subject you wanted–architecture, termites, economics–you name it, you can read about it. And the cool thing: It doesn’t take a license. Granted, you could spend a chunk of change flying to San Francisco, sleeping in a hotel and eating out three times a day–but how much is it worth to you to learn first-hand the secrets, strategies and tips to succeeding in the business? Not to mention the contacts you’ll make. Fortunately, not all seminars require flying and over night stays. Waiting to take your exam is a great opportunity to map out a strategy that will help you get to the top. A good strategy is a great way to make the market deal with you and not the other way around. The media loves tragedies. That’s why housing bubbles and bank meltdowns and cold-blooded murders top the headlines. The only problem is, they don’t know when to stop. Neither do they know what your particular market is like. There are two kinds of real estate agents in your market: the successful and the non-successful. Marketing tools like Professional Photography, Elevated Photography, Night Photography, Floor Plans and Virtual Tours should be yourbest friends in this market.
12/28/2009 Home Plan Tours
You’ve found a home plan that you really like but wish you could get a better feel for its design and floor plan before you build. Take a Virtual Tour! Virtual Tours allow you to better visualize a home’s floor plan and interior spaces when it is not possible to walk through. By clicking on various vantage points (red dots), you control your own navigation throughout the home plan’s individual rooms and spaces. Simply select a home and floor plan, click on a red dot and then span the room by clicking and holding, then moving your mouse up and down or side to side. Depending on the home plan, the virtual tour may include some or all of the home’s rooms and may feature hand-drawn, computer-generated or actual photo images. The furniture and/or furnishings included in the tours are intended to provide a room layout and spatial reference only. Compare our average modification costs with a custom architect or other design firm. You won’t find a more efficient way to get a home that’s truly yours at these prices.
12/24/2009 Real Estate Marketing Photography
The majority of Realtors don’t have a clue what good real estate marketing photos look like or what makes a good marketing photo. They need to be educated. They aren’t visually sophisticated enough to know what looks good and what doesn’t in a marketing photo. Very simply, they need to be educated. What is needed is a photo marketing guide for Realtors, written in simple language, that describes what good real estate marketing photos look like and what makes photos effective. "Thank you for writing Photography For Real Estate. I have read it cover to cover-- even after 20 years in the real estate business - it has reinforced and improved my ability to photograph homes, inside and out. I am recommending that all my salespeople purchase your book. It puts into words and pictures, everything they need to know about how to shoot a home..." “Not all Realtors can or want to do their own photography. There is a rapidly expanding profession for photographers who specialize in doing real estate photography for Realtors. Even if you are already a photographer, shooting real estate requires some special equipment and techniques. This book shows you how to expand your photographic skills into the real estate business.”
12/24/2009 Dynamic Virtual Tours from Edberg Marketing
Dynamic Virtual Tours and Interactive Floor Plan Tours by Edberg Marketing are designed to present a clear and simple illustration of the layout of your property. They are prepared after an on-site measurement of the property by Edberg Marketing authorized professional and are produced using specially designed customer friendly software by the professionals at Edberg MarketingStudio. Edberg Marketing Floor Plans can be downloaded and printed for use in brochures, presentations, emails, and/or websites. Professional or personal photography of the property can also be can be used to create your Interactive Floor Plan Tour or Dynamic Virtual Tour. The best way to show the property and attract customers!
12/17/2009 Mast Photography
There are many companies throughout the New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania offering Aerial Photography from aircraft but also several offering mast photography fro marketing real estate. These offer very different products and the end use, location and size of site will dictate which is the most appropriate. Mast Photography is where a camera is elevated from a fixed point on the ground using an extended pole or mast. This is often hydraulically operated although some manual systems still exist. Conventional Aerial Photography utilizes an aircraft or helicopter. Although it would appear that mast photography would be lower cost it must be remembered that the photographer (with mast) must travel to the site and once at a site it takes time to set up the mast in each position. Due to these timely processes the price is often similar. Event Photography is often undertaken using a combination of both mast photography and aerial photography due to the differences in the results. It also allows greater coverage and a much greater variety of angles. Although some forms of Construction Photography benefit from mast photography large construction projects will often require conventional aerials as greater height will be needed. This is especially true if local transport links need to be included which may be several miles from the site. “Progress Photography of building projects will often have a similar brief but ultimately the type of photography used will be dictated by the size of the site and the desired content.”
12/15/2009 Real Estate Professional Photography
Real estate photography then may be a relatively easy field to break into, especially at a time when property is hard to sell and brokers are looking for every advantage they can find. A good website and high-quality printed material may be enough to get your foot in the door, and a year of patience as your name spreads and the referrals bring you a solid base may be enough to give you a business. But you will need the photographic skills. Real estate photography has to be effective rather than creative, and provides different technical challenges to those presented in architectural or interior design photography. The shots tend to be wider between 18mm and 24mm but must still keep the walls straight and vertical. The rooms need to be bright and airy, the colors vivid and accurate, and the view through the window is an important part of the final image and not a distraction that can be blown out. “All properties can benefit from professional photography as long as the people will de-clutter the home, and make it show-ready,” property expert Adam Waldman wrote on the real estate network Active Rain. “Professional photos show a room in a way that most Realtors can’t capture, regardless of whether the home is a starter home or a mansion.”
12/15/2009 Interactive Floor Plan Tour and Dynamic Virtual Tour
Interactive Floor Plan Dour and Dynamic Virtual Tour provide the real estate industry with an alternative to traditional virtual tours and conventional slideshows. These interactive tours use directional markers positioned on floor plans to point out important features of a home. When a prospective buyer clicks the small icon, a photo taken from that location, along with descriptive text, appears instantly. By utilizing interactive floor plans, a Interactive Floor Plan Tour and Dynamic Virtual Tour give buyers a true sense of place relative to other rooms and features of the home. They see how rooms flow from one to another, the views from the inside to the outside. They are interactive tours, not virtual tours. Buyers can stroll through a property using their mouse in a more natural way than with a conventional 360 degree virtual tour.In addition to that Realtors can feature special amenities, architectural details, built-in cabinets, appliances and other details of a home, something that can't be done using conventional methods.
12/10/2009 For Sale By Owner Marketing
Marketing Tools used For Sale By Owner houses are extremely important . You should use the same type of marketing as professional agents. Photograph the Front. Most home buyers begin a home search online, so good photos are essential. Listings without a photo or with only an exterior shot are often passed over and ignored. Buyers are visual. Exterior Photographs. If you own a condo or town home without a yard, then take pictures of the clubhouse, pool, spa or tennis courts. If you have a yard, however, buyers will want to see it. Interior Photographs. Take photographs of every room. Even if you suspect the room won't photograph well, shoot it anyway because the photo quality just might astonish you and be useable. Virtual Tours. Virtual tours aren't just to showcase million-dollar homes anymore. Every home should have a virtual tour, even if it's only two spins. Buyers love, love, love virtual tours. A good virtual tour will grab a buyer by the hand and lead her from room to room, showing a 360-degree view. Depending on the tour company, you can add sound, music or an exciting, professionally written description that scrolls with the movement of the tour. Virtual tours can also include individual photos available for download or to print. Print Advertising. Print advertising reaches buyers who read newspapers. Online ads reach the rest. If your neighbors say, "Everywhere I look, I see your home advertised," you're doing a good job. Puts ads in: Major newspapers. Find out which days pull the most readers. Typically it's Sunday but some newspapers also publish "picture classifieds" on other days. Local newspapers. You can probably run a larger ad for less money that will more closely target those looking in your area. Real Estate publications. Every Web site you can find. Most online listings are free.
12/11/2009 MiniAerial Photo 2
Aerial photography systems, also known as mast photography or pole aerial photography, use advanced technology to offer a huge cost savings over helicopter aerial photography. Aerial photos and videos have business applications in construction, commercial and residential real estate, insurance, entertainment, tradeshows, security and virtually anyplace where large scale photography is needed. Pricing for subsequent set-ups is determined by time and degree of difficulty. Each set-up includes multiple shots taken at different heights and exposures. We also have the ability to composite breathtaking panoramas by rotating the camera and "stitching" the images together in post production. www.MiniAerialPhoto.com.
12/11/2009 Marketing in Bad Economy
The current marketing situation in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticutcan work in your favor or it can work against you, but in today’s economy, it’s even more important to “use the law of attraction in your favor using professional photography, floor plans, elevated photography and interactive virtual and video tours. Why? Because the media is painting such a negative doom and gloom picture that your consciousness absorbs all of this media blitz, and consciously or subconsciously you start focusing on what you don’t want, which is scarcity and lack, the two things the media is talking about most. If you have any exposure to the news, you know how easy it is to start feeling depressed even after just a little bit of news. The law of attraction in real estate marketing is still working in this case because what you focus on expands and if you focus on lack and scarcity, doom and gloom, the poor economy and so forth, that is exactly what you will manifest as your result. However, the good news is that it’s possible, and not only possible but actually imperative that you use the law of attraction”, such as professional photography, floor plans, elevated photography and virtual and video tours to your advantage while the rest of the world is focusing on the doom and gloom that is being reported on a daily basis.
11/30/2009 Photography and it's Price
Before a photographer can raise his or her prices though, they first need to have clients. That can take a while. Photographers typically mention a year as the time it takes to build up a viable real estate photography business. The best place to begin is by approaching the top 10-20 percent of listing agents in your area. Many Realtors though work independently and tend to be very aware of costs. High-end homes, for example, the type that look like they could benefit most from professional photography, may take years to sell during which time a Realtor may lose the listing, together with his investment in the photography. For lower-priced homes, you might have to do some hard persuading to price Realtors away from their camera phones. The most effective tools are usually a website and a pile of finished products, such as brochures, leaflets and flyers, which you can leave with the Realtors and which contain your URL so that they can see more of your work. Once you land your first clients, you should find that referrals and word-of-mouth marketing bring in others.
11/11/2009 Luxury Homes Marketing
For real estate professionals, marketing luxury homes requires different strategies than selling more typical homes and properties. When trying to sell a half-million dollar home and ad in the local Sunday newspaper is not the most effective approach to take. The luxury home market is usually defined, depending on the local market, as the top 10% of homes listed by asking price or homes listed above $500,000. Something that makes luxury home sales different from others is that each property often requires its own marketing plan. Another difference is that the buyer is more likely to be from out-of-town or state, often more than 500 miles from the location of the property. Placing ads in newspapers, local real estate guides, and running open houses can work but it is not the most practical approach to reach potential buyers of these homes. The true technique of selling homes often do not reach people genuinely interested in purchasing high-end luxury properties. Rather, they often attract people who are described as interior decorators or just those curious about what's inside these stunning homes. The Internet has opened up better avenues for reaching buyers interested in luxury homes in markets across the country and around the globe. Listing a luxury home online can extend a real estate agent or broker's reach by hundreds or thousands of miles instantly. The most important part of the whole process is to find proper real estate marketing company that can solve all the problems and do it all together at once. Edberg Marketing is the perfect solution! They will provide you with Floor Plan, Professional Photography, Elevated Photography Video and Virtual Tours, E-card for e-mail, Brochures, Postcards and even Large Format Printing and Mounting on foam or canvas.
11/11/2009 Floor Plans and Virtual Tours
If you are a real estate agent or just want to place your house as “for sale by owner”, you should consider floor plan for your property and a virtual tour. Edberg Marketing is the best solution for New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania.We provide virtual tour services for any occasion. We send a professionally trained photographer to your location to take the pictures needed. We then customize your tour to fit your needs while including features like direct information from the MLS listing on real estate tours and custom banners and logos for your business. Then we make the tour active, live and ready to share. Edberg Marketing not only offers the very best virtual tour service, we also offer an amazing floor plan service. A 2D or 3D floor plan is a great accompaniment to our unique virtual tour platform. We can even make interactive and informative floor plans by having pictures integrated in your floor plan. We add hot spots into your 2d floor plans that will instantly open up snap shots from the property. By clicking on an image the photograph can then be expanded to full-screen size!
11/09/2009 Importance of High Quality Photography
It is overwhelmingly accepted that the Internet has become the number one search tool for most home buyers. According to a NAR surveys about 87% buyers use the Internet to research before they start looking for real deal.
As a result high quality photography becomes an extremely important element of Real Estate Marketing. Professionally done pictures always catch an eye and can provide an additional value to the listing. The photograph is always the first element in any ad that connects with the buyer. It is the first impression, the thing that cuts through the visual clutter to capture the buyer’s attention. Everything in the marketing campaign to sell your home relies on the quantity and quality of the photographs of your home. Photographs are needed for the MLS listing on the Web and in print, a website, brochures, flyers, newspaper, magazine publications, real estate presentations, etc. Many times, buyers will decide if they will visit a home, and agents will decide if they will show a property based on the strength (or weaknesses) of the photos accompanying a listing. Quality photos make a very big difference in marketing.
It is very important for agents to disregard offers from so-called “professional photographers” who will provide them with so-called “high-quality pictures for low cost. You have to pay a litlle more but get the photographs you can be proud of.
02/26/2010 Housiing Market in january 2010
