Sarasota sales up 280 percent
This Week’s Top of the TweetsBy Camilla McLaughlin
“Wealthy investors implement catastrophe investing,” tweets @ILHM, referring to a strategy outlined in a recent Reuter’s article. However, @ILHM’s post actually leads to a discussion regarding the growing number of affluent in Europe, the Middle East and China sending money abroad to invest, particularly in real estate. This post got my attention because I just finished working on an international article for our upcoming issue. Not only are the more affluent investing in homes and property outside their home country, but there has been a subtle shift in the incentives to invest. Look for our next issue to see which cities are getting the most interest. http://bit.ly/q818VJ
Good news, bad news! So much contradictory data comes out almost daily, it’s hard to get a handle on what’s happening. The latest sales stats came out last week. The bad news was a 3-percent decline in residential sales. The good news —this figure is actually an 11.3 percent increase from September 2010. Another change, not often reported and not positive, was a year-over-year increase from 9 percent to 18 percent in the number of contracts for sales that fail to close largely due to declined mortgage applications, appraised values coming in below negotiated price and job losses. http://bit.ly/oH0MaX
Luxury Roundup Sales of luxury properties continue to outpace the overall market. In Southwest Florida, sales of $1 million-plus properties were up 170 percent from September 2010 in Sarasota, Manatee and Charlotte according to research from Michael Saunders. The spike in Sarasota alone was 280 percent. @DavidCauchi and others brought the story in the local Herald-Tribune to our attention. http://bit.ly/px122b High-end sales in the Hamptons are up with sales in the Southampton area more than doubling when compared to the third quarter 2010, the Real Deal New York reports. @DennisLane and others shared the story. http://bit.ly/rk0PwS Boulder luxury sales also improve and the Denver metro had the most luxury sales in the region, according to a report by theBoulder County Business Report and Coldwell Banker. @obrienrealty shared link http://bit.ly/qHxEnf
Loan Limit Fallout At the beginning of October, the maximum amount for mortgage loan limits to conform to government guidelines went down. The immediate end result is detailed in research published by the National Association of Realtors this week. Approximately 41 percent of buyers abandoning a purchase cite changes in loan limits. @NAR_Reasearch http://ow.ly/73MnF
Luxury social media champions! @LiRead and @jimwalbery won the 2011 Outstanding Social Media savvy award at the LuxuryRealEstate.com recent conference. @LiRead’s posts appeared in some of the very first Top of the Tweets blogs.
Most popular social networking sites, October 11? It’s no surprise that Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn lead the pack. Google+ comes in at six. A shout out to @Halstead for this link. http://ow.ly/6Xu1N
“Twitter is the heartbeat of America,” said @Chris_Smith, chief evangelist Inman News, during a webinar on Twitter. At first glance this might sound extreme, but Smith has a good point. At any moment in time Twitter reflects a broad range of views on any given issue.
