A Real Estate User’s Guide To the Government Shutdown

As Democrats and Republicans fall all over each other trying to blame the other side of the aisle for the government shutdown, should you be concerned if you’re involved with a real estate transaction right now or in the near future?  Umm – it depends.

Since the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is a government agency, any borrower who applies for or, has applied to get an FHA or VA mortgage will be impacted.  Those temporary electronic highway signs on the side of the road that read, ‘Incident Ahead – Expect Major Delays’ applies here.

Since the vast majority of HUD workers were sent home early Saturday morning and they’re operating on skeleton crews, virtually no one is there to answer calls/emails, process paperwork or grant loan approvals.  UGH!!! Continue reading →

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Lancaster County’s December 2017 Real Estate Market – By the Numbers

Ahh – –  December!  As the year wound down, the cold, frigid winds of winter blew through Lancaster County.  This is the best time of year to reflect back on the year that was and to think and plan for the new one.  Now grab a pen and paper and sit down by the warm fireplace and get busy.

(Click each infographic for a larger version)

2017 12 December Market Stats - Average Sales Price

Not much change from last December’s average sales price.  As we will see at the end of this blog post, the final numbers for the year were solid and steady which indicates the real estate market was healthy. Continue reading →

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A REALTORS® Guide To Engagement on Social Media

Since social media websites began, the conversation among REALTORS® has raged on as to its importance in the business of real estate.  Five years ago, engaging on social media was considered by many in our industry to be a colossal waste of time and resources.

The detractors claimed that viewing pictures of what someone had for dinner last night or playing Candy Crush was never going to help an agent grow their business.  Well, I think we can all agree that if an agent uses social media for those purposes, the naysayers are absolutely right.

However, research groups are now using metrics to assess the importance of social media because we now have a history of how its significance has evolved over time – and the data supporting its impact is indisputable.

In its latest survey of home buyers and sellers¹, the National Association of REALTORS® asked the question of thousands of consumers who recently bought and sold real estate, “How important is agent communications?”  Here is the chart outlining the findings:

Social Media Importance
(Click image for larger view)

Thirteen percent of consumers now say it is important for their agent to be active on social media.  This may not seem like a big number but consider that when the same question was asked of consumers four years ago, the number was 3%.  For those that don’t want to crunch the numbers that’s a 433% jump in a relatively short period of time.

So now that we’ve determined that there might be something to this social media ‘stuff’, how does an agent use it to their advantage? Continue reading →

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