Trends - March 2006 GPS—with a Real Estate Twist
Mobile Crossing and Pocket Real Estate are teaming up to provide the industry’s first GPS navigation system functionality designed for real estate agents. Combined with technology from Pocket Real Estate, Mobile Crossing’s new WayPoint Pocket Real Estate Edition combines turn-by-turn spoken directions with complete database access to the agent’s multiple listing service out of the box.
The WayPoint device also doubles as a fully featured Windows Mobile PDA organizer and includes built-in mortgage, loan, home equity, loan balance, rent-versus-own analysis and loan amortization calculators.
Buy a Home, Get a Pet
Recently, a Southern California firm began a new campaign in which each family that buys or sells a home through it receives a voucher good for the adoption of an animal of their choice at a local shelter. The voucher is also good for those who already have a pet: it can be used to pay for spaying and/or neutering.
Brubaker-Culton Real Estate & Development, in association with the Ramona Humane Society, began the campaign after one of its agents lost two Yorkshire Terriers.
The firm hopes that the promotion will help increase community awareness about the ongoing problem of lost and abandoned animals.
Paying for Listings Online
Progressive Homesellers, Inc. has introduced a new way to list homes for sale: online with a credit card.
Listings are taken by agents at national brand brokerages who have agreed to list and sell homes for a $2,500 flat fee. Visitors to the company’s Web site can enter all of their property information into an online form and then actually pay the real estate commission in advance.
Progressive Homesellers requires that its affiliated Realtors have been actively selling real estate for at least five years and are in the top 5% of agents in their state by sales volume. To keep costs low, agents conduct all business remotely—by phone, fax and e-mail.
For more information, visit www.progressivehomesellers.com
Homes Get BIGGER as Families Shrink
(KRT)—Just like burgers and big-screen TVs, Americans are super-sizing their homes.
The average house built in the United States last year was a record 2,412 square feet. That’s up 63 square feet from 2004—about the size of a walk-in closet.
“Why do home sizes rise when, during the same period, the average family size has declined?” says Gopal Ahluwalia, head of research for the National Association of Home Builders. “There’s really no answer.”
The most likely reason is that homebuyers just want more room and can afford it, he says.
Since the 1970s, the average single-family house has grown by about 50%, according to a report released by NAHB.
During the same time, average family size has fallen from more than three people to about 2.5 residents per home.
Almost 40% of new houses now have four or more bedrooms, compared with less than a quarter of such homes in 1973.
Some 24% of houses built in 2005 had three or more bathrooms—double the rate in the early 1970s.
More than half of just-built houses have two or more floors. In 1973, almost 70% of new homes were single-level.
Nine-foot ceilings are now standard in most houses, but builders are getting rid of interior walls.
Copyright © 2006, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Tupelo, Miss. |
