How is new construction classified? The American Housing Survey (AHS) defines it as homes that are four (4) years old or less.

Homeowners were asked by AHS to rank their neighborhood on a scale of 1 to 10. Most ranked positive overall, but newly constructed neighborhoods ranked as a 9 or 10 in almost all cases.

Many new neighborhoods now have active community gathering areas, social events, and amenities designed to draw families and neighbors together. Marry that with the new home benefits of hi-tech conveniences, energy efficient appliances and lifestyle customization options and it’s no wonder buyers are choosing new construction over established, older ones.

What would you choose? Tell us why by commenting below or posting to our Facebook page.

Have a little fun with this space – find a quirky design or shape that would be too odd or impractical in a more common area of the home.

Some fun ideas include a brightly colored clay sink, limestone sink with brass fixtures, corrugated walls, basalt or rosewood veneer, a glass sink, or storage shelves that add depth.

What are some of your ideas for a fun and creative powder room? Share them below or on our Facebook page.

Since it is the global opposite of traditional marketing, no complicated strategy is actually needed.

The biggest challenge is not figuring out what a hashtag means, it’s learning to communicate in 140 characters or less and learning how to shut off your “marketing mind” and turn on your conversation.

Twitter is an amazing place to keep up on the news, and for meeting people and sharing ideas. Over the years Twitter has been good for businesses. It puts you in touch with people you may never have met otherwise.

It’s also a place to experiment with content ideas and to test out reactions to photographs and articles before pulling the trigger and making them part of your permanent message.

If you are just getting started, or if you have been using it for shameless self promotion and gotten discouraged, here are some quick tips to keep in mind:

• Follow the local media. They don’t just tweet the news, they are also usually pretty social.
• Try to spend more time on Twitter reading than tweeting. Get familiar with the conversations happening and join in. It’s sort of like training wheels, only when they come off you will still be listening.
• Please – don’t tweet or read through tweets when you are with clients. It’s a constant stream so forget trying to keep up. You can set up filters and notifications for the tweets you simply don’t want to miss and read them at your convenience.
• Promote other businesses in your community. Recommending others – even those that may have seemingly appeared to be competition in the past – goes a long way at defining you as an expert. People will naturally want to return the favor when you play nice in the social sandbox.

Learning how to use Twitter means being able to network anytime and maybe even connect with people that you wouldn’t get to meet any other way. Remember it’s not about a list of your next open houses.

According to data from the real estate site Trulia, the only metropolitan areas where it still makes more financial sense to rent rather than buy are San Francisco and Honolulu.

Why is buying dramatically less?

High vacancy rates and land to spare indicate that prices are unlikely to improve much in some areas. It’s unlikely that certain markets reach the rule of thumb where renting makes more sense: if buying is 15 or more times more expensive than renting.

In contrast, qualifying for a mortgage isn’t as easy as it was in the past, making potential buyers skittish when it comes to pulling the trigger. The job market isn’t as stable as the return of real estate, so many also prefer to keep renting because they don’t want to tied to a mortgage.

With these numbers, what is the end result? People aren’t buying affordable single-family homes. Believe it or not, there has been a recent increase in construction of multi-family housing for… you guessed it: more rentals.

What do you think? Why aren’t people buying now? What would it take to convince them?

Generation X (thirty-somethings) is small relative to the one that came before it — the baby boomers — and the one that came after it — the echo boomers. Their impact on the market has really already been made.

It is the echo boomers that should have property developers excited. These children of the baby boomers, born in the 1980s and 1990s, make up a generation even larger than that of their parents. And they are quickly entering their peak marriage and family years.

The settling down of the largest generation to date will create unprecedented demand for starter homes and rentals. Hard to imagine, could this meant that in a few short years we may actually have a housing shortage?

This seems to be turning into a very exciting time in real estate! What’s your opinion? Share your thoughts on echo boomers by commenting below or posting on our Facebook page.

According to eMarketer, time spent on mobile devices is now an average of 65 minutes a day, compared to 44 minutes a day for magazines and newspapers.  Although both were tied last year, mobile actually grew by 30%.

Are media dollars spent online surpassing those spent on print?

Mashable.com recently proclaimed they would for the first time in 2012. What does this mean for REALTORS®?

The return-on-investment of real estate ads in newspapers and other print media have been second-guessed for quite some time, as multiple studies have shown that the majority of homeowners begin their search online. You can see this trend illustrated in eMarketer’s chart below:

Why exactly does online surpass print media?  Today’s consumer is accustomed to the instant gratification of the Internet – information is free and mobile. Now, even those who enjoy newspapers and periodicals can read them on their tablets. But what about real estate? Consumers still seem to be attached to local newspapers.

Of course, knowing your local market is very important, but keeping up with national trends is as well. Agents should take a good look at the tools and new strategies available to them and reevaluate. The same old formula no longer works in this market.

That being said, we believe some print media remains very effective in real estate. The most successful advertising programs we have found offer a customized solution including print, online, and eFlyers in a competitively priced package.

The average price of a U.S. single-family home fell 3.9 percent; however, national home prices are expected to grow at a yearly rate of 3.5 percent between 2011 and 2016.

The article shows how Fiserv’s data helped pick the best housing markets for the next five years. Here’s a partial list:

Ocala, Florida

• Expected annual growth from 2011 – 2016: 8.2 percent
• Home prices in Ocala have tanked 49.1 percent since they peaked in Q3 2006.
• Median home price is $93,000.

Eugene-Springfield, Oregon

• Expected annual growth from 2011 – 2016: 8.2 percent
• Home prices in the Eugene-Springfield metro area have slipped 20.5 percent since their Q2 2007 peak. They have a significantly low median household income.

Panama City-Lynn Haven-Panama City Beach, Florida

• Expected annual growth from 2011 – 2016: 8.2 percent
• Median home price is $138,000, and its home prices are 42.2 percent off their Q1 2006 peak.

Bakersfield-Delano, California

• Expected annual growth from 2011 – 2016: 8.3 percent
• Bakersfield’s home prices have fallen 58.5 percent since they peaked in Q2 2006. The median home price is $125,000.

Mountain Vernon-Anacortes, Washington

• Expected annual growth from 2011 – 2016: 8.3 percent
• Home prices have fallen 23.6 percent in the Mt. Vernon-Anacortes metro area since their peak in Q4 2007.

Sebastian-Vero Beach, Florida

• Expected annual growth from 2011 – 2016: 8.7 percent
• The Sebastian-Vero Beach metro area has a median home price of $137,000, and home prices have declined 53.1 percent since their Q4 2005 peak.

Tucson, Arizona

• Expected growth from 2011 – 2016: 9 percent
• Tucson’s home prices have plummeted 45.1 percent since their peak in Q1 2006. The median price of a Tucson home is $139,000.

To read the rest of the list and find out all the details, go here.

Did you predict the markets mentioned in the article? Do you think they left any out?

In November a subsidiary of HomeServices announced plans to pull listings from Trulia and Realtor.com. This syndication withdrawal may be among the first in a coming wave where brokerages and MLS decide to feed real estate listings only to sites that provide the most value.

The third-party real estate search business model does not reflect the brokerage business; they simply sell advertising in a manner of speaking.

The brokerage has thus far pulled its listings from Trulia, though the companies have devised a workaround that allows Edina agents to submit their own listings to Trulia if they choose. The brokerage is attempting to negotiate a similar workaround with Realtor.com before pulling its listings from that site.

Will listing syndication will be among the most controversial data issues in 2012?

Does deciding no to syndicate force consumers to the actual broker site, or miss the online target that relies on this exposure?

As the value of listing data is further assessed in 2012, multiple listing services may decide that value is worth a price, some experts said.

Taking control

If you don’t know where your listings are, you can’t track them. Rather than distributing their listings “anywhere and everywhere,” brokers are starting to take back more control of where their listings are distributed.

Today, bloggers are a main source of news for millions of readers. Their articles are typically better researched, more detailed, and more honest than newspaper or magazine articles. They may also be completely false, as bloggers do not fall under the same editorial scrutiny that media must comply with.

When something negative is said about your company through a blog, you may not find out about it until it has spread virally, doing extensive damage to your image, even if the information is not true. To combat this, you can use technology to keep an eye on what is being written about you and your company.

Technorati is a search engine designed specifically to search for blogs on the Internet using three types of searches: 1) keywords, 2) tags, and 3) blog directory.

Technorati also provides tools that allow you to keep on top of blog posts for specific subjects.

Here’s a small guide to keeping an eye on your business:

Search for your company on Technorati

Finding blogs that already contain some reference to your company can give you a rare look into your customers’ minds. People used to pay top dollar for market research that would take weeks to access this priceless information. Now you can see firsthand what your customers are saying, in real time.

Stay on top of your “social footprint”

Technorati allows you to save your searches as “watchlists.” Watchlists may be viewed in RSS format, which means they may be imported into an RSS reader to make it very easy to consistently keep track of who is writing about your company.

What do you do when you locate something?

When you find a blog that mentions your company, leave a comment on their blog. This lets them know that you respect them writing about you. If the post was negative, it also shows that real people from your company are reading what they’ve written, and are savvy enough to respond to it. Bloggers are almost always more cordial and less likely to be critical if they know they are being read by the person they are criticizing.

When someone writes something negative about you, it’s important to read all the comments before responding. You may find that a fan of your company has already defended you nicely and an “official” response may not be necessary. This happens more often than not, which is one of the biggest perks of today’s social media.

Have you ever had negative comments or reviews on your company’s social profiles? How did you handle it?

This year’s profile revealed these surprising statistics:

1. Bottomed out at last. Prices appear to be stabilizing in some areas. This is the first step in climbing out of the rocky bottom we have been in for the last several years.

2. Boomers are the key players. In 2010, due to the first-time homebuyer tax credit, the median age of first-time buyers dropped to 31. In many markets, the number of first-time buyers hovered at the 50 percent level. The smart move in 2011 was to market to Generation Y.

Over the last 12 months, however, there has been a substantial change that can have important ramifications for your business in 2012. In 2011, baby boomer purchases substantially surpassed the number of Generation Y buyer.

Why is this surprising? There are more Gen Yers than there are boomers. Generation Y is also at its peak buying age – marrying, establishing new households, and having children.

Furthermore, boomers are actively driving the second-home market. As a result, it may be smart to revisit your business plan for 2012 and to place more emphasis on working with boomers who are currently the dominant players in terms of purchasing.

3. More buyers are using agents. 89 percent of buyers purchased their home through a real estate agent or broker – that’s up from 69 percent in 2001. What are some ossible reasons?

Realtors shorten the search process when there are huge amounts of inventory on the market and people are pressed for time. Most likely, though, it’s the difficulty of the loan process both on the buyer’s side in terms of qualifying for a loan, and on the seller’s side based upon the appraisal process that marks the need for realtors.

4. Married couples or single female buyers? The trend since 2001 has been a substantial decline in the share of buyers who were married. From 2001-2008, the number of married couples purchasing homes dropped from 68 percent to 58 percent.

A historically high percentage of Gen Xers are actually unmarried. As a result, the market saw a huge proportion of single female buyers – the smart market niche for 2011.

In 2012, it’s an entirely different story. The number of single female buyers is still relatively high at 18 percent, but that’s the lowest number since 2004 and represents a reversal of a major trend. It’s time to focus on marketing that reaches couples and families in 2012.

5. Life changes drive real estate sales. The primary reason to purchase a home among repeat buyers is often because of life changes: the desire for a larger home, a job relocation or move, desire to be closer to family and friends, or a change in a family situation.

How will you focus on these 5 new developments for 2012 to reach more sales?