URBALO

While Chicago home prices don’t seem to be affected much by the continuing price decreasing that we see throughought the country, it is still obvious that the housing market continues to be unfavorable to people looking to sell their property.
The median single-family house price in the United States fell to $220,800, which was down 2 percent from a year ago. Condo prices showed some resiliency: At $226,900, they rose 2 percent compared with 12 months ago.

The biggest decline in sales appears to be concentrated in areas that had significant levels of speculative investment, including Nevada, Florida and Arizona,” Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in a statement.

Most declines occurred either in once hot markets or Rust-Belt areas clobbered by economic setbacks and job losses, like Detroit and Cleveland.

Regionally, the best performing area was the Northeast, where the median home price rose 3.2 percent to $286,300. In the Midwest, the median price, at $170,800, was up 0.5 percent. Prices in the South fell 3.6 percent to $180,800, and in the West, they dropped 3.8 percent to $338,100. But the top performer house market is  San Jose, Calif. where prices grew 9.4 percent over the past 12 months to $852,500.

A few months ago, we wrote an article on how to save your home if you are in a foreclosure situation. The article had a great impact at that time since the economy was shaking at the latest reports on foreclosure numbers. Yesterday, I was browsing the Money CNN section and I came across an interesting article about a family in Cleveland that managed to dodge the bullet and save their home.

As I have mentioned before, it is always wise to talk to your lender and try to work things out, they are in a position to help you and they would rather have you keep your house than to sell it in a foreclosure auction.

Read the article, it is very inspiring.
When Darlene Stutzman visited the offices of the East Side Organizing Project, a community advocacy group in Cleveland, she didn’t know if she’d be able to keep her home.

She showed up on a Wednesday - “intake day” - when ESOP offers group and individual counseling for borrowers trapped in bad loans. With qualified borrowers, they can also try to work out a compromise with lenders. The Wednesday sessions are well-attended with as many as 150 people showing up at their peak. Cleveland has one of the highest numbers of foreclosures in the nation.

Read Full Article ->

During the housing boom, home sellers were in the driver’s seat with real estate agents circling around their property and they were offered very low commission rates. These times seem to be old gone and the roles have changed a bit.

According to Steve Murray of Real Trend, the average commission rate in 1991 was 6.1%. Ten years later, the average dropped to 5.4 and starting in 2005, the 5% rate was common among realtors. Everyone expected the rate to go even lower but when the housing bubble has burst, many houses found themselves sitting on the market for long periods of time. Therefore, the average commission in 2006 has increased to 5.18% .

According to recent surveys, many home owners believe they can sell their homes quicker by hiring the best real estate agents but those sales people come with a premium. I

n this case, the added percentage might actually help the realtors in the short run and even if the sales volume has dropped, their income might be steady.

As homes stay on the market longer and longer, with more and more of them for buyers to choose from, a growing number of agents aren’t merely getting property details into the Realtor multiple-listing system and hoping for the best. All the technological advances made during the housing boom years - when a low-tech “for sale” sign seemed to be enough - are really being put to use now.

Many realtors decided to focus their attention on real estate blogs or social networking sites. One good example is Facebook which seems to be a very popular advertising method.

Video walk-throughs of homes are also more common - in part thanks to YouTube, which makes it easier to upload the finished product and put it on other sites. If you haven’t tried this, then you really don’t know what you’re missing. The youtube’s users base is extremely large and it is perfect for marketing purposes.

Here is an interesting article that talks about the Realty Market going high-tech

Facebook recently added the ability for anyone to create flyers which is accessible under the advertise link at the bottom of any Facebook page. After creating the flyer, the first thing anyone should do is to check out the cost per impression(CPM). Basically, your flier gets served up in the inventory for the targeted network of your choice.

It kinda works this way:

-if you buy 10,000 fliers in 5 locations over seven days, the flier will be seen in each city 2000 times a day for the full week.

The full cost for this will be $140, not bad at all for that much exposure.

If you have launched a new business, brokerage or a new real estate site, then you could advertise it this way for example.

Here is an example on how Facebook helped increase traffic on a blog.

Rod Boothby from SocialMediaToday.com

Trulia really didn’t show much love to the realtors. Instead the brokers receive most of the attention and tools to market their business. Trulia had offered very little marketing tools to the real estate agents, of course, Trulia Voices is a wonderful way to communicate with potential buyers or sellers but most of the people that visit trulia.com are interested in one thing: to buy properties. Recently they have decided to change that.

With the release of Agent Featured Listings, real estate agents can brand their listings. Even though this first release lacks many other functionalities, it’s a start and at least now all the realtors have the options to add a photo and contact information to their listings.

Agents will have access to a self-service tool to highlight up to 10 listings per month for a monthly subscription fee of $50. For less than the price of a typical newspaper classified ad, agents can now highlight their listings and connect directly to more than 2 million unique users per month.

More information from Trulia’s Blog