From my TeamIrene blog: Residential and condominium housing market numbers for June 2009 show a 22% and 9% decrease in the number of listings, respectively, from June 2008. Median closed sales prices dropped by 15% for houses and 9% for condos over the same time period. Note: Remember that homes
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07/21/2009
This morning a lender reminded me of how much harder it is to get PMI for condos these days when the borrower is putting less than 25% down and using conventional financing in a market that has been classified as 'declining.' FHA financing may be a better bet for condo buyers with less to put dow
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04/14/2009
There's a really interesting report on the Yahoo broker's page that gives some valuable information about how people find, research and choose agents, online and off. Go to the Yahoo Broker page, and then it's the second report in the list at the bottom of the page, called "Online Engagement Infl
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02/24/2009
The other day I was looking for websites that let you easily edit photos online, and after a couple of hours of shlepping around I came across Picnik, finally - what a great find! I love sites that are easy to use, and Picnik lets you upload photos and EASILY make all kinds of graphic and text ef
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02/09/2009
A quick mea culpa so people don't think I'm insane for dropping off the face of the Active Rain map for a year - I've been blogging over at the Tools For Real Estate blog, and lately have been sharing what works and what doesn't for blogging consistently. The 'theme of the day' concept is kind o
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02/09/2009
This morning I was reading John Jantsch's Duct Tape Marketing blog (by the way, this is an awesome blog if you want to get the early bird scoop on incredibly cool products.) Case in point, he posted about the Jing Project, a free downloadable screen recorder from one of our favorite companies, T
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08/19/2007
So... On Sunday, the other agent said you could expect the inspection response from his clients to arrive on Monday or Tuesday.Now it's Tuesday 3 pm, and so far nothing.Technically, they're still within the time frame they mentioned (and their legal deadline doesn't run out until Wednesday).On t
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08/17/2007
Want to make friendly with the search engines?If you're like a lot of agents, your website (yes, even your expensive custom designed website!) is losing valuable online traffic even as you're reading this.The good news is that if it's due to the common mistake we cover below, it's a relatively ea
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08/16/2007
Have you ever made a referral that didn't turn into a paycheck? It might make you think, "Why go through the effort?" and just not bother in the future. When making referrals, most agents make the mistake of simply trying to find a highly qualified agent. But an agent's experience is only part of
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08/02/2007
Every now and then we come across a business tool that's so incredibly helpful and beautifully easy to use that after about 30 minutes we start to wonder how we ever managed without it. Basecamp, the online project collaboration tool by 37Signals, is one of those things we wish we had found out
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07/23/2007