Condo Blog - A Non-Corporate Blog From CondoDomain HQ

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Well, happy New Years to all! We are still here in Dubai and will be heading out to our New Years bash at Buddha Bar @ The Grosvenor’s House in a little bit (we are 9 hours ahead of EST). So all, best wishes to a safe and happy New Year!

We have got a ton of request for video (WATCH THE VIDEO ON YOUTUBE), so we threw together a quick “UN-Edited” video of our first 30 minutes in Dubai, heading past Ski Dubai, Burj Dubai, Burj Al Arab and the many new towers and finally to our place on The Palm. We hope you enjoy, more to come…. Happy New Year.

We arrived yesterday in Dubai, but caught up on much needed sleep.  We checked into our apartment on The Palm and made it out to Grosvenors House last night for a late nignt bite. That was quite an experience. Today we had the entire day off so we did some tourist things and headed up to Old Dubai (pre-new construction boom). Old Dubai is quite a place…we toured several museums, hit the Gold Souk, Textile Souk, Spice Souk and other neighborhoods….here are some pictures of today’s activities.
The all new Dubai and its luxury high rises coming later on in the week.

Looking down the trunk of The Palm towards The Atlantis The Palm, same Atlantis that is in the Bahamas.

Museum in Old Dubai

Crossing the channel to head over to The Gold Souk

Took a detour, beautiful day to be on the water.

Old Dubai in the background

Downtown old Dubai heading towards the Spice Souk

Nearing the end of our R&R part of this trip, here are some pic’s from yesterday.  Amsterdam is hands down one of the cleanest and most beautiful cities I have ever seen.  At first glance I was comparing it to Florence, Italy, however, the scale, the master planned vision and architecture is dominant here.  Retail, Cafe’s & Restaurants occupy the first floor of almost every building in all of Amsterdam which give this a sense of place which is pure and lively.  Here are some more pics.  We head out to Dubai tonight & get back to business!  Hope you are all having a great holiday.

Interesting, but you have to assume that the debt and all the banks are just looking to cover risk and lossess.  Anyway…its a great time to buy NEW!

Ara K. Hovnanian, president and CEO for homebuilder Hovnanian Enterprises, said this week that new homes have traditionally been priced higher than equivalent resale homes, though builders in slow-moving markets have ramped up incentives and dropped home prices to jump-start sales during this downturn.

“Now, things are backwards,” he said, “with new homes selling at a discount to existing-home levels. Homebuilders have lowered prices on their new homes much more dramatically than existing-home owners have been willing to lower prices on their homes.” He cited examples in which the company lowered the net average selling price in a couple of California communities by 28 percent to 35 percent from December 2006 to October 2007 through a combination of incentives and price drops.

Continued…

Source:  Inman Blog

As some of you know, we have a 3 day layover here in Amsterdam, before we connect to our main destination in Dubai. Well, we landed here this a.m. and after a quick snooze, here are some pic’s that we snapped off. Heading out now, feel free to reach us (on cell) or email.  En route to Van Gogh Museum & the Heineken Factory.
More on Amsterdam tomorrow (and hopefully we can find some condo projects too!)

Canal View from the Hotel

We are learning the signs as we go…

Happy Holidays from CondoDomain.com.

We wish you a very safe and peaceful holiday season.   If you get a chance, tune in to the Condo Blog over the next few weeks.  We will be traveling to Amsterdam & Dubai one of the most exciting real estate areas of the world right now.  I plan to post content, pics and video of our travels.  We will be staying on The Palm so make sure to check it out…its truly amazing.

A CONDOMINIUM building under construction in Brooklyn has its own MySpace page. (“Scorpio” structure seeks “great people from the Metro area, and beyond, that want to live in a thriving community.”)

Some garden rentals in New Jersey and a condo complex in Orange County, N.Y., have their own blogs.

In Stamford, Conn., the developer of a super-high-end condo tower is eschewing use of free classified-ad listings on craigslist.com to lure buyers, since “every mom-and-pop building these days is doing it.” But the company is putting big money into a virtual tour for its project Web site.

“A lot of people do all their home shopping online, start to finish,” said Kelly Marzullo of Core Marketing Group, which is using the Web to promote various Manhattan buildings and the Peninsula at City Place in Edgewater, N.J. “A $15,000 ad in the Sunday paper just won’t get you anywhere anymore,” she said..

“People like to know everything about a building before they come in — or at least have a taste, and a feel,” Ms. Marzullo continued. Her Manhattan-based company does advertise properties on craigslist, building in links to Web pages that may include photographs, digital drawings, video, floor plans and the range of asking prices.

In New Jersey, Ms. Marzullo said, she sees digital marketing appealing mainly to the young and Web-smart people who might pull up to a building on a motorcycle, with a Blackberry in their pocket, she said.

But Jason and Bobby Schlesinger, principals of Ceebraid-Signal, which is putting up the Highgrove condo in Stamford where the starting price is $1.4 million, beg to differ. “One might make the mistake that the empty-nester clientele is not Internet-savvy,” said Jason Schlesinger, “but we find more and more of our mature buyers come in with highly specific questions, having already done their research online.”  Continued…

Apparently people aren’t happy that FlexPetz is coming to Boston. It was frontpage news in the Globe this morning and Michael Graham was talking about it this morning on the radio.

FlexPetz is a California-based dog rental company. I first read about it a little while ago when it came to New York. I’m not a pet person so I shouldn’t really talk. But from my observation, it’s just so much harder to have a dog up here than it was when I lived in Texas.

In Texas, your dog can just run around in and out of the house year round as it pleased (if you had a doggy door). In Boston though (especially downtown) no one has a yard and it’s also cold for much of the year. At my former job, a coworker of mine had a HUGE dog and she had to leave work everyday at 5pm to go walk her dog otherwise it tore her condo apart. It just seems like such a huge hassle in the city.

So, in my opinion in a city like Boston, for those that travel a lot for work or just can’t get home at the same time everyday- Flexpetz seems like a good idea.

My only question is, what happens if you’re renting a dog and that dog bites/attacks somebody. Who’s liable?

Click (here) to read the Globe article yourself.

A policy enacted by the Multiple Listing Service of Northern Illinois this year restricts members’ use of “MLS” and related terms in their company names and marketing materials but is less extensive than an earlier version that met resistance.

The policy approved by Realtor association-owned MLSNI, which has about 50,000 members in the Greater Chicago area, exempts those companies that were using the MLS term in their Web sites prior to the adoption of the policy on March 14, 2007. The policy went into effect six months later, in September.

Some other MLSs have approved policies designed to limit members’ use of “MLS” terms, and a rule change by an MLS in Minnesota led to an antitrust lawsuit. Last month, National Association of Realtors officials approved a voluntary policy that MLSs can choose to adopt in restricting members’ use of “MLS” and related terms.  Continued…

Source:  Inman News

Photoshop to the rescue and I reversed the image…so its not backwards now from the Iphoto….
Anyways, this Realtor.com APP is actually pretty cool. Its very clean, fast and easy to use. Way to step it up!

If you have an Iphone go to: http://iphone.realtor.com (it wont work on your PC) and wa-la…through in a city or zipcode and you have a clean version of all your local listings that are on Realtor.com

The interface may actually be even better than online!

Other Posts on Realtor.com / Iphone:

FoREM 1

AgentCasts

SoCalTech

Yahoo Finance

Here is the release…

Online real estate broker Redfin today released a new research report recommending seven tactics for selling a home more quickly and at a higher price. The report, which Redfin developed as the basis for its own data-driven program for selling homes, is the first to combine academic research, listing data from broker databases, buyer usage patterns from a real estate website, and the results of marketing tactics employed by real estate agents.

Available at www.redfin.com/scientist, the paper is part of a Redfin initiative to draw on its technical savvy to build not only a better website, but also a better brokerage, delivering better results for its clients. Redfin is training its agents on this new data-driven approach, termed “The Real Estate Scientist,” and sharing its findings with each of its clients. The company is scheduled to appear this morning on the NBC-TV “Today” program to discuss the results.

As part of this initiative, Redfin also created a new online forum at http://forums.redfin.com/rf/board?board.id=RealEstateScientist for consumers and agents to discuss the just-released research, and to propose avenues for new research. To support this community, Redfin plans to release new findings periodically throughout the coming years, which consumers can subscribe to by email or by blog.

Each of the recommendations in the initial paper likely has only a modest potential impact, but taken together these recommendations can, Redfin believes, yield a small but significant improvement in a home-seller’s results:
1.    Don’t overprice your property: According to a 2002 academic study of 3,490 California listings, homes without a price reduction sold for 97 percent of initial list price, whereas homes with a price reduction sold for 88 percent of initial list price.

2.    Set your price to show up in web searches: A September 2007 Redfin study analyzed how online search filters affect traffic to a listing. Because real estate sites filter on price in $25,000 or $50,000 increments, listings priced at or below these thresholds — $250,000 rather than $251,000, or $325,000 rather than $326,000 — get as much as 7.1 percent more online visits.
3.    Debut on Friday: A December 2007 Redfin analysis of its online traffic for 119,079 listings across seven markets found that listings that debut on Friday get on average 7.7 percent more visitors in their first seven days than those that debut on the worst day, Thursday.
4.    Stay engaged with your agent: According to several academic studies, motivated, active sellers are able to sell their property as much as 30 percent faster.
5.    Market the property online: Promoting a listing on websites beyond the local Multiple Listing Service can drive a significant number of new online visits to a property. A December 2007 analysis of 121 Redfin listings found that promoting them on craigslist resulted in an average of 6.8 online visits to the property for each craigslist promotion.
6.    When selling your home, stay put: The study of 3,490 California listings, cited earlier, found that vacant homes were 9.5 percent more likely to undergo a price reduction.
7.    Wait to list your property until neighboring foreclosures are off the market: According to a November 2007 Center for Responsible Lending report, a foreclosure costs neighboring homeowners an average of $5,000 when listing their property.

To compile these recommendations, Redfin analyzed:
•    17 broker databases across seven different markets with more than 275,000 listings.
•    Four months of usage data from Redfin’s site spanning more than half a million unique visitors.
•    Six, third-party studies spanning markets in California, Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin.
“As the market slowed this fall, we began work on a comprehensive program to generate better results for our listing clients,” said Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman. “But we found that we couldn’t just rely on conventional wisdom about what worked, particularly since that often depended on which real estate agent you asked. Since many of us at Redfin are computer scientists, not sales people, it was natural for us to begin analyzing what was happening in the listing databases and on our own website. Rather than pretending to be the last word in selling a home, the findings we came up with can hopefully spark a dialog about the best way to sell a house.”

Unlike “The Redfin Advantage” study (www.redfin.com/advantage) published earlier this year, which used MLS data to demonstrate that Redfin and its buyers negotiated a better deal on a home than traditional commissioned agents, today’s initiative focuses on tactics that clients of any real estate broker can use.

More Blogs on this subject:

Redfin Blog

Bloodhound Blog

FoREM

Jease…I hope we get this much attention when we launch the all new Boston Condo Report!

The couple dubbed the “Bonnie and Clyde” of identity theft returned to their Center City condo today, creating unease among neighbors still trying to figure out whether they had been victimized by the pair, police said.

Meanwhile, investigators said they had yet to determine whether there was a connection between the couple’s illegal possession of keys to other condo units and mailboxes and the fact that Edward Anderton formerly worked for a company that developed the condo building.

Detective Terry Sweeney said residents of the Belgravia, at 1811 Chestnut St., had reported seeing the couple back in their unit.

“They find it very disturbing and unsettling that the thieves are still in their midst,” said Sweeney of Central Detectives.

It was not clear whether the couple planned to remain. Sweeney said they had a lease and a legal right to live there unless they were evicted.  Continued…

See the Philadelphia Condo Listing Here.

Source:  Shitty Habitats (Thank you guys..this was great)

In anticipation for the launch of the all new CondoDomain.com (Well, just in Boston for now)…we have moved our offices to the all new and very exciting Fort Point Channel neighborhood / Seaport in downtown Boston. Our new address is located at 337 Summer Street on the 2nd Floor.

Fort Point Channel / Seaport is one of the most exciting new neighborhoods that is just starting to bloom since the express way has come down and the Rose Kennedy Greenway has blossomed. Cool boutiques and restaurants have moved in like LTK, Morton’s Steak House and Flour Bakery. There is also major development happening here in the Fort Point Channel / Seaport neighborhood. FP3 Boston Lofts are well on their way. Goldman Properites is still pushing forward with neighborhood re-creation and Joe Fallon still has mega project Fan Pier at full speed ahead.

If your in the neighborhood, stop on in and say hi…its a comfy loft space full furnished with a basketball hoop, putting green, dart boards and bean bags. Stay tuned for more news on CondoDomain. Boston!

Here are more pics of our Fort Point Channel Office:

Panoramic of our Conference Room & Marketing Center

Same as above but reverse.

View down Summer Street looking at Convention Center, Westin and World Trade Center (Yes it snowed yesterday!)

View looking north at the Boston Harbor and the all New Boston ICA.

Another view of the Harbor, a fabulous parking lot and the Spirit of Boston Party Boat.