Ostrid/iStockYou’ve turned on (and hopefully off) at least 20 water faucets and peered into about 50 closets (oh, the things you’ve seen!). And now, at long last, you’ve found the perfect home. So you make an offer, which is accepted. Congrats. Now, exactly how long does it take to close on a house? Read on to get the…
If you’ve ever bought or sold a home, you probably know that the seller has to disclose any major problems before the sale can go through.
A crack in the foundation, a basement prone to flooding—it’s this kind of terror-inducing structural news that can signal a bad investment, so naturally, you need to tell any prospective buyers. And, if you don’t disclose it, you could face a huge lawsuit to cover repairs years down the line.
But disclosure laws are very state-specific. What a seller has to disclose in one state isn’t necessarily something that needs to be disclosed in another—much to the chagrin of buyers.
So what falls into that fun-filled gray area? Let’s take a look: Read the full article on Realtor.com
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued new guidance that warns property managers and landlords to tread carefully when denying prospective apartment residents a lease due to a failed criminal background check.
Apartment building owners and managers are scrambling to understand and comply with this latest interpretation of the federal Fair Housing Act, which makes it illegal for housing providers to discriminate against a variety of protected classes of people, including minorities. Many landlords are now uncertain how to balance their responsibility to keep their communities safe with their responsibility under the law not to discriminate.
Want to purge your records — and rest assured you have all the documents you need when you need them? Read on. Read
Visit houselogic.com for more articles like this.
Copyright 2016 NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS®
Highlights
-Gen Y comprises the largest share of home buyers at 32 percent, which is larger than all Baby Boomers combined.
-Gen Y also has the largest share of first-time buyers at 68 percent.
-Thirteen percent of all buyers purchased a multi-generational home, one in which the home consists of adult children over the age of 18, and/or grandparents residing in the home.
-At least 80 percent of buyers who are aged 59 and younger bought a detached single-family home, while it is increasingly common for buyers over the age of 59 to purchase townhouses and condos.
-The older the home buyer, the fewer compromises the buyer tended to make with their home purchase—48 percent of the Silent Generation made no compromises on their home purchase.
Among all generations of home buyers, the first step in the home buying process is looking online for properties for sale.
-Younger generations of buyers typically find the home they purchase through the internet, while older generations of buyers first found the home they purchased through their real estate agent.
Source: NAR Research: Home Buyer and Seller Generational Trends | realtor.org
2015 was the year of the long goodbye to three major employers in the North Jersey region — Mercedes-Benz, A&P and Hudson City Savings Bank. The automaker announced it was moving its American headquarters to Georgia; the supermarket chain filed for bankruptcy protection and began selling its stores; and the long-delayed purchase of the state’s biggest home-grown bank by M&T Bank was concluded after three years.
Even so, there were green shoots of optimism in other areas of the economy. Job growth accelerated; construction moved apace at the American Dream entertainment complex in the Meadowlands; online retailers sought warehouse space; multifamily building boosted residential real estate; and malls scrambled to line up luxury retailers.
North Jersey’s housing market continued to recover in 2015 from a deep downturn, with multifamily construction and the number of home sales up significantly.
But the pain is not over. Price increases were muted, and the state led the nation in foreclosures.
Home construction in the state has rebounded strongly from the depths of the housing crash, when only about 13,000 housing units were started each year from 2009 to 2011 — the lowest numbers since World War II. In 2015, the state’s builders are on track to start more than 30,000 units — the highest number since 2006, and close to the longtime averages in the 37,000 range.
The growth this year was entirely in multifamily construction, especially along the Hudson River waterfront in Hudson and Bergen counties. Single-family building permits were actually down by 8.2 percent through November, reflecting the high price of land and the fact many households are renting, either by choice or because they can’t qualify for a mortgage.
Still, the number of single-family home sales through November was up 11 percent in Bergen and 14 percent in Passaic County over the same period last year, according to the New Jersey Realtors. Despite the increased demand for homes, prices didn’t budge much, up 2.2 percent in Bergen and 3.5 percent in Passaic.
During the year, New Jersey led the nation in foreclosure activity. Lenders continued to clear up a backlog of distressed properties that built up after the mortgage industry was forced to slow down foreclosures after being accused of abusing the rights of homeowners in trouble
Source: 2015, a year of job gains and real estate recovery – Business – NorthJersey.com
NOTE: This blog post was originally posted on my “Triple Venti Dolce Data” blog for Target Marketing Magazine.
With the lingering, precarious feelings about the state of the economy, along with plenty of concerns about the business climate in general, I find that there is always a great deal of hesitation around beginning any kind of large- or even medium-complexity project focused on data. In many instances, the general consensus from senior management and even ancillary groups outside of the marketing and data management groups is the company has been doing fine with everything just the way it is, with plenty of “If it ain’t broken we don’t need to fix it” or “Let’s focus on increasing revenue this quarter first” pushback to proposed projects.
The problem with the first is, quite simply, if corporate data has been ignored, or even just on the back burner for any length of time, it is most assuredly broken. Perhaps it is not critically broken yet, but losing clarity, focus and relevancy in keeping up with the evolving goals of the organization. Bloated with obsolete or irrelevant information and systems fragmented; lagging behind on improvements and upgrades, databases become slow, unreliable and frustrating for both the front-line users and for their management teams who are looking for answers that are surely there but, unfortunately, cannot be mined with the speed and efficiency expected. Of course, when this occurs the frustrations grow and we begin to see various business groups take what pieces of data fit their responsibilities and start building and updating the silos which eventually hamper, rather than contribute to, enterprise-wide success. There is no feedback of newer and more relevant information to the main repository; there is no coordination of contact strategy or organized tempo or voice to communication. What evolves is chaos in overlapping or possibly opposing communication from different areas of the same company. It is a sure way to spur the erosion of customer respect for your products and services, along with a vision of incompetence from prospective customers confused by who you are and where you are trying to lead them.
The problem with this is most organizations will not recognize it as a problem. The groups creating the silos and working from there are perfectly happy to have their own source of whatever data they need. No hassles with requests or production queues. They are able to report the results of their efforts in isolation so management only has to see the rosiest picture. Unfortunately—and exactly because of the isolation factor—little if any sales, lead generation, updates or contact changes ever make it back to the primary data warehouse and the remainder of the organization is not able to share in the refreshed information that will help their efforts, as well.
The cure for that, and the answer to the “Let’s wait” feedback, is for the marketing and IT leaders to jointly be prepared with a roadmap of “Why now” proposals for the value of organizational refresh and consolidation that can resonate across the enterprise.
1. Cost containment: With a single platform view of customers and prospects, with vigorous updates and enhancements from every touchpoint, campaigns are able to be streamlined, based on full knowledge of RFM. Consolidation of duplicated software and vendor charges that are being utilized across multiple silos will allow every department to free up much-needed budget space.
2. Increased Productivity: With budget room made available, allocations can be shifted to incorporate the speed and upgrade solutions within the existing resources. Increasing both throughput and volume while optimizing manpower performance and efficiency.
3. Reducing Risk: Utilizing a centralized team to oversee data operations ultimately reduces the risk and exposure caused by violations of corporate policies, governmental regulations and industry best practices. Contact preferences are able to be maintained and shared across all corporate business units on every channel.
4. Customer Journey: No responsible marketer deliberately sets out to overwhelm, annoy or even spam existing customers and prospects. Without centralized deployment and tracking, however, you will be doing exactly that, oblivious to the damage you are doing to your reputation.
5. Increased Revenue: Removing all of the risks, poor decisions and duplication of effort alone will create a much more streamlined approach to providing all of the proper and most effective strategies for finding, developing, nurturing and hopefully establishing long-lasting client relationships. Consumers, regardless if in a B-to-C or B-to-B environment, buy from companies they respect and trust. Revenue grows and is sustained just as steadily by the quality of your relationship with customers as it is by the quality of your products and services.
Healthy, professional relationships and contact strategy are the value-added-benefits you can quantify and demonstrate to even the most ardent rebels across the company. Use the data you have readily available in your system to show every business unit leader the facts. Prove to them the upside potential that a solid, professional and, most of all, highly reliable marketing automation or CRM solution can provide in boosting revenue year over year. Stealthily, but honestly turn the naysayers into advocates with clean and simple facts.
Do that, and the conversation shifts from “Why Now?” to “How Soon?”
NOTE: This blog post was originally posted May 1, 2013 on my “Triple Venti Dolce Data” blog for Target Marketing Magazine.
I live in a relatively small, rural town of 50,000 residents spread over 61 square miles. My specific neighborhood still has a good number of original owners of the development that was built in the early 1960s, attracting those young families looking to escape from the cities and using their GI benefits from WWII and Korea for life in the country. Those early Baby Boomers are aging now, leading to a fair share of emergency calls for assistance. During the last five or six years, I have watched something develop in response to these events which puzzles, amuses and often annoys me. There was a time not long ago when a 911 medical call would bring the local First Aid squad to triage, treat or transport the patient to the ER. Now, however, that same 911 call will bring an ambulance from the neighborhood First Aid squad, the local volunteer fire department and the town police department for the initial evaluation. And then, very often in more serious cases, the Regional Trauma Ambulance will be brought in for transport and treatment. Aside from the fact that every one of them will look to bill an insurance company, the overkill of five response teams converging on a single location is wasted time and effort.
That, my friends, is a perfect real world analogy to the cursed data silos that are always lamented by marketers and database analysts. Every team and business unit wants more than their piece of the communal data pie, but hold on tightly to their own secret stash of hot leads and information.
In larger towns and cities, especially those looking to implement shared services, you now see more appointments of a single public safety director covering and coordinating all police, fire and emergency service departments rather than having individual chiefs for each.
For those of us in the business of marketing, retention, loyalty, acquisition and other roles within a larger organization, it is becoming more and more beneficial to utilize a Data Czar for the coordination, application and rules enforcement across all available resources. This position filters through all the noise, all the excuses, all the naysaying to ensure that the resources are utilized for the bottom-line greater good of the entire company.
As in the example of the community Public Safety Director, the Data Czar cannot function as a middle-level management position trying to coordinate well-established and usually powerful teams. This role has to have the authority and autonomy to demand the cooperation and involvement of the team leaders across all business entities as a direct report to the most senior corporate leaders. In a larger organization, it would be a C-Level individual with the support and direction of the CEO or president. Whether the Data Czar is a team of one, or heads up a Data Forensics and Business Intelligence group focused on the discovery and integration of every data resource is entirely up to the focus of senior management in their goals and direction for the company.
The initial task to getting started is a deep dive of discovery with every department or business unit to create a full and accurate inventory of data sources, which includes methods of acquiring and updating; where and how it is stored and secured; available formats and content; any limitations of use; and an understanding of how this data is used in the performance of business functions.
As the initial data dive phase is moving along, a secondary discovery would begin across all of the teams and departments, determining who needs what data, why it is important to their team, how often they use it and where it is utilized. Along with the critical needs of currently available data here is a good opportunity to find wishlist items for other known or potential data resources that might provide lift to response or even incremental revenue opportunities if additional data were readily available.
Then, gathering up all of the collected information, the Data Czar brings it all back to the office and dumps it all into the giant magic funnel that spits out a complete and accurate business model document which gets distributed, never to be seen again.
Or … maybe … not quite so fast.
In reality, the real project begins at this point. As I quoted in last month’s post on integrating the vision of Big Data, “A commitment to a desired business outcome is the critical success factor,” and there will most likely be a phased approach based on immediate short-term goals vs. the long-term direction for the profitability of the company. Working with the company direction in mind, the Data Czar will turn to the various business analysts, data strategists, research, intelligence and security team members, as well as business unit leaders to develop the final plan.
This plan will include the policies and procedures for measuring ongoing success and adjustments. It will address the consolidation and inclusion of all data determined to be relevant to success, the appropriate segmentation, cadence, tempo and channel of contact with existing customers vs. prospects and leads. The plan will determine attribution of revenue to the data source, ownership and time limits of hot, medium and cool leads vs. the general marketing pool. It will determine adherence to corporate, industry, governmental security and best practice policies.
In all, it will establish the initial framework for all things data. Never will it be final, but the Data Czar role is not a short-term project. The position will set the standard for the organization’s data strategy and direction for years to come and will settle a lot of interdepartmental bickering over usage before it happens—and especially before petty feuds escalate up toward the boardrooms.
NOTE: This blog post was originally posted on my “Triple Venti Dolce Data” blog for Target Marketing Magazine.
Way back in the Internet dark ages of January 1996, Bill Gates wrote about and coined the phrase “Content Is King
.” He was talking of course, about Web content and the need for people and organizations hoping to monetize the Internet to consistently produce fresh and relevant topics in order to gain the interest and loyalty of viewers, just as television had been doing, radio before that and print media the longest of all. His assertion that “over time, someone will figure out how to get revenue” from Internet advertising is frighteningly similar to today’s gurus predicting much the same in regard to social media marketing. Just as back then—when companies and marketers struggled with deciding whether a Web presence was needed—today there are still major corporations only testing the social media waters, even if only half-heartedly, to keep pace with competitors.
For me, however, two lines in the Gates vision statement take on a slightly different connotation than his thoughts on content: “The definition of ‘content’ becomes very wide” and “Over time, the breadth of information on the Internet will be enormous, which will make it compelling.”
I read those two lines and what immediately strikes me is the overwhelming amount of data being generated during these last 17 years and how it is being captured, nurtured and put to work in areas such as Lead Generation, Brand, Affinity, Cross-Channel and Retention marketing. If at all.
IBM has an infographic regarding the flood of Big Data they use in demonstrating how their Netezza device handles integration for several major marketing organizations. This shows how, with connectivity, speed and bandwidth issues having become nearly eradicated during just the last two to three years, the amount of collectible, actionable data has exploded.
Unfortunately, the amount of irrelevant and useless data being collected is even greater than the actionable data, and being able to simply store that much data, let alone begin to organize and digest it all, is a major concern for most organizations. Before even thinking about the incorporation of Big Data initiatives, there should be an organizational review of quality for the existing information held in the collective datamarts that feed the central repository used for decision-making. Long before Big Data, the issue of Bad Data must be addressed.
Whether you are a B-to-B or B-to-C marketing entity, the creep of inaccurate data is constant across every customer and prospect contact you currently maintain. Experian-QAS has a stark reality “Cost of Bad Data” infographic showing the millions of dollars lost each year as a direct result of inaccurate and incomplete contact information. Complacency and budgetary shortcuts speed the process even more. Whether it is via an in-house effort or using third-party tools and vendors to perform ongoing hygiene, the vitality of your contact strategy is not sustainable without regular maintenance.
Once secure in the clarity and accuracy of your core data, you can move on to the integration plan for all of the additional goodies sprouting up from the Big Data seeds being sewn across every outbound and inbound marketing channel being utilized. But again, more planning and decision-making is critical before just jumping in and trying to grab every nugget. Perhaps the Fortune 50- to 500-level corporations might have the resources to take this on in one massive project, but I doubt that many small, mid or even larger brands can just dump everything into a pot and begin using the information gleaned into a successful series of campaigns. In a SAS/Harvard Business Review whitepaper I read recently; “What Executives Don’t Understand About Big Data,” this quote stood out to me:
“What works best is not a C-suite commitment to ‘bigger data,’ ambitious algorithms or sophisticated analytics. A commitment to a desired business outcome is the critical success factor. The reason my London executives evinced little enthusiasm for 100 times more customer data was that they couldn’t envision or align it with a desirable business outcome. Would offering 1,000 times or 10,000 times more data be more persuasive? Hardly.”
Having the foresight to develop phased approaches for data incorporation based on both short- and long-term ROI is the most realistic approach. Using results from the interim stages provides the ability to thoroughly test and analyze and measure value, keeping the project moving forward steadily while minimizing roadblocks to the longer-term goals.
My initial recommendation for the process would be along the lines of:
I would love to hear your thoughts.
How do you avoid the drunken hordes on a day like today? Make your own Reuben’s at home. Sláinte chugat….
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