Hey, guys. So it’s been a few months now, and it looks like the Google Streetview team have finally rolled out a successful fix for their rampaging AI moderation algorithm. Personally, I’ve seen my own clients’ tours finally propagate correctly and with 100% of the connections between scenes present. Great news!
Hopefully, there won’t be any more bugs in the code, but if there are any, you can count on me to let you know.
With the Google Streetview news out of the way, I’ve a lot of new content that I’m producing that should be hitting the Blog page and the new YouTube channel. I’ll be covering topics from designing panoramic brackets for fisheye lenses to discussing the most common mistakes new realtors make and how to avoid them. Sorry for the brief hiatus, but it’s been a good break and I’m ready to start pumping out great content for you guys!
Appreciate y'all for reading.
Best Neighborhoods in Jacksonville
Update: Google Maps and Street View Virtual Tours Issue
For the past year Google Maps and Street View tours have had issues with proper connections within the 24-48 hour time frame that has not been addressed. Over the past couple of months this issue has compounded into a major issue affecting most photographers participating in the Google Pro Photographer program. Not much information has been given on the status or what’s being done to resolve the issue but a Google moderator has put out the following statement:
Update on recent issues regarding the publication and connection of 360 photos on Google Maps
Hello everyone,
Thanks for your patience over the past couple weeks and for reporting all of the publishing and connectivity issues. The cause of the issues is a recent change to our automatic moderation systems that is giving a high false positive rate for inappropriate content
A few more details:
- This issue primary affects 360 photos (as compared to other photo and video content)
- Images that are deemed inappropriate are not published on Google Maps
- Street View connectivity only applies to live published photos and looks to connect the next eligible published photo. This is why a lot of you have reported missing or strange connections.
What is happening next:
- The teams are hard at work to improve the performance of the auto-moderation system
- We are also introducing a manual check for all newly published photos that have been flagged to lessen the false positive rate further
- After this version is ready, all 360 photos will be re-processed and re-published
We will keep you closely posted on all of the above.
- The Street View team
If you are interested in reading up on the issue click here
7 Tips for Selling Your Home During the Holidays
Believe it or not, the holiday season can be a great time to sell your home. You may think that spring is the ultimate season to sell your home due to more houses being listed and more people seem eager to buy. It's true that the housing market typically heats up during the spring, however, the holiday season is often overlooked as a prime time to sell.
Why? First of all, there is less inventory on the market typically, allowing your home to easily stand out among the available inventory. And though there are technically fewer buyers overall, the buyers that are looking are far more serious about finding a home within a specific timeframe. So, make your home warm and inviting and open it up to those looking to buy, because selling your home during the holidays might be your best present this year.
1) Stage for the Holidays. Think Clean, Cozy, Simple.
Yes, you should absolutely decorate your home during the holidays even if you are trying to sell it. The real question you should be asking is, how much?
One thing that happens to all homeowners is that we tend to accumulate a lot of stuff. This is especially true of holiday decorations. When you pull out holiday decor this year, think like a stager or a designer. You don’t want to use every decoration or ornament you’ve ever owned. This year, for the sake of appealing to the buyers touring your home, use your best decorations as holiday accents in each room without drawing attention away from your home’s best selling features.
Your home may have large windows with a great view or maybe your home has a dream kitchen. Whatever sold you on your home when you first bought it is most likely the same feature(s) that will sell your house this holiday season. So, don't cover up your view with an excessively large Christmas tree, even though you may have the high ceilings for it, or bury your living room in snow globes, nutcrackers, and an abnormally large nativity scene. You want to accentuate your home’s best features with holiday decor, not bury them.
Just remember that you should still enjoy the holidays in your home even if you’re trying to sell it. Holiday decor can go a long way in making your house feel like a future home for those touring it. If you have a fireplace, decorate it with garland and hang stockings from its mantle. Use candles and wallflowers that are iconic smells of the season, such as pumpkin spice or balsam and cedar. You want guests to feel comfortable and warm the moment they walk through your front door. You want them to feel at home.
2) Price Your Home to Sell
You and your listing agent will most likely come up with a pricing strategy together based on comparable homes in the area, what the current housing market is doing, and what the demand for housing looks like or is projected to do. Ultimately, several variables go into pricing ones home to sell, however, there are a couple of easy tricks that can help attract homebuyers.
Price Your Home Competitively
If your home was a lemonade stand that was competing against a rival lemonade stand on the other side of the street, how would you make your lemonade more enticing to people passing by? Maybe your lemonade comes in a larger cup, maybe it comes with ice, or maybe it’s just priced lower than your competition.
If your home looks like all the other homes on the block with similar features, then a lower price point will definitely draw in more traffic than your rivals. However, if your home is the largest one on the block, has more acreage, or a double car garage and pool, you can price your home based on the increased value it provides. Start off by seeing how much your home is worth by checking out online estimates and then compare them to other houses in your area.
Use Strategic Price Points When Listing Your Home
Have you ever noticed while you're grocery shopping that almost all prices end in .99, such as $1.99 or $4.99? This simple manipulation of pricing is called setting strategic price points and essentially makes the price of something appear smaller (or cheaper) than it really is. The same exact concept works when pricing your house to sell. For example, if you decide your home could sell for $500,000, pricing it at $499,000 will (theoretically) draw in more traffic and possibly more offers.
3) Make Your Curb Appeal a Top Priority
Your neighborhood may actually look more appealing to homebuyers during the holiday season. Maybe you live on one of those streets where everyone from miles around drives down your lane to see houses lit up in all colors of holiday splendor. You don’t want to go overboard with your exterior holiday decorations, but you want to make your house shine along with the other homes on your block.
Furthermore, your lawn may not be that lush green it usually is during the summertime, and your trees may currently be barren. That’s why making your curb appeal a top priority is necessary when selling your home in winter. Make sure all the sticks, dead leaves, and any other debris are picked up and your lawn is neatly trimmed. Even though we have entered the colder months, a few weeds that poke up from the ground can make your lawn seem neglected. If you have pictures of your home at alternative times of the year when your curb appeal is burgeoning with flora, these may also be a good idea to have available for homebuyers. This way instead of homebuyers trying to picture your house in other seasons, they can just see it for themselves.
4) Keeping your Property Safe for Homebuyers
Unlike home sellers that live in coastal regions, there are many more home sellers living in mainland USA where outside temperatures are well below freezing during the holiday season. Driveways and walking paths are blanketed in snow and ice, and icicles hang from gutters like glass curtains. A legitimate concern for home sellers in one of these frigid areas is how to keep your property safe for homebuyers. The only thing you can really do is be proactive and break out that snow shovel and start clearing a path.
If you’re expecting snow on an almost weekly basis, then it might be best to hire out professionals to come by once a day and make sure your driveway, front steps, and any walking path are cleared for people touring your home.
5) Turn On the (Holiday) Lights
To complement the coziness of your home, you'll also want to make it bright. Turn on all the lights in your house during open houses and home tours. It may be the darkest time of year outside but you can make sure it doesn't feel that way inside your home.
This is also a great time to replace burnt out light bulbs and fix light switches that are not working. You may also want to consider making all your interior lighting the same color temperature, such as a soft white which brightens rooms without giving you that institutional feel. This will help with consistent lighting throughout your home, creating a balanced feel as potential buyers walk through each room.
6) Slay the Holiday Season with Professional Real Estate Photos
The absolute biggest thing you can do for your house in terms of marketing it to potential homebuyers is getting professional real estate photos taken. However, this is the one time you don’t want to have your holiday decor on display. In fact, getting your professional photos taken of your house before you decorate is a must because holiday decorations essentially create a time-stamp of your home.
If your home doesn’t sell during the holidays you don’t want your house to still be rocking holiday lights in its listing photos come February or March, or you risk turning off potential homebuyers. So plan on getting your listing photos taken as soon as you can so you can decorate for the holidays and enjoy the season.
7) Get Santa’s Perspective with Aerial Photography
Go one step further and consider aerial photography for your listing. If your home has acreage or a view or any other amenity that cannot be fully captured unless it’s done by air, then aerial photography may be what you need.
Drone photography, in particular, has become an increasingly affordable option when compared to traditional aerial photography and can offer buyers a unique perspective of your home and can help make your listing stand out among the other homes for sale online. Furthermore, aerial photography can give potential buyers an overview of your neighborhood along with other amenities that may be within walking distance of your home.
This article was originally published on Redfin. Special thanks to guest author, Jeff Anttila for allowing us to publish this great article on our blog. Jeff enjoys writing about the many aspects of home-ownership. From how-to projects he does on his own home to mortgage payoff and investment strategies, he likes to create useful content his readers will enjoy. His dream home would be a small house on a lake or the Puget Sound, with lots of natural light and a dedicated space for his woodworking. Email Jeff
The Millennial Affect on the Housing Market
Millennials are blamed for everything wrong with America today. From the destruction of the chain restaurant industry to, apparently, buying too many avocados. They’re the bane of the Baby Boomers and the economy. A quick Google search would lead you to believe we’re destroying the Real Estate Market too. But if you take the time to look at the prevailing research, they’ve just become more fiscally conservative. There are straight forward reasons why; increased cost of higher education, low employment prospects after the Great Recession, and increasing debt. They’ve become more informed buyers, less likely to get their information from salesmen but from trusted sources online. By being more informed and smarter with their money, they’re shifting how they engage with professional services from buying cars to buying homes.
The Current State of Affairs
Millennial presence in the housing market is becoming more apparent with Millennials responsible for 43% of all primary mortgage originations last year (1). Since they’re entering the market later in their lives than previous generations, they are seemingly skipping starter homes (prices ranging from $150,000 - $200,000) in favor of larger, more expensive homes in the suburbs surrounding cities’ urban cores (2). So, we can see that Millennials aren’t shying away from homeownership, but rather, they have to wait longer than previous generations due to the rather unfavorable economic conditions that the housing bust of 2008 brought and the Great Recession that followed.
Current Cohort Analysis of Millennials in the housing market shows a recovery from the Great Recession from 2010 - 2016 across all Cohort groups with those 24 and older exceeding homeownership attainment of Cohort groups prior to 2010 (figure 1). Most charts you’ll see are based on Age Group Analysis, and reflect a stagnation of homeownership attainment with Millennials, but we can see that, that isn’t the case when we use the Cohort Analysis (3). Millennials have entered the housing market, and are quickly changing the landscape of how professional services like Realtors engage with them.
How Millennials are Changing the Way they Engage Professional Services
“Expect more disruption in the next five years as Millennial home buying accelerates.” -Stuart Eisenberg, National Director of Real Estate and Construction Practice for accounting firm BDO USA, LLC (4)
According to the National Association of Realtors (NAR), 99% of Millennials search online real estate websites for information related to the home buying process. With 44% of Millennials starting their home buying journey online and 56% of Millennials finding their home online versus with a real estate agent. What they found most useful on websites were professional photos at 89%, detailed information on the property at 85%, and virtual tours at 50%.
However, even with all the information available to Millennials online, the process and paperwork was still difficult to understand across 41% of Millennials. Meaning realtors are still invaluable in the Millennial journey when home buying.
To meet these changes, realtors are quickly catching up, but still have to maintain a strong understanding of advancements in social media and technology. Most brokerages have websites at 93% but only 11% of realtors are utilizing a professional blog. Realtors are starting to utilize Social Media with the highest participation on Facebook. Along with Social Media, realtors should be using their blog to create trust with Millennials searching for homes and for information. According to the NAR report, realtors are now engaging more with their clients through text message (90%) and email (94%) (5).
One last thing, before we move on. Consider Video in your engagement with Millennials. “Millennials do not want to read what your house looks like, they want to see it for themselves (6).” Sharing well crafted and professional videos generates 1200% more shares than text posts, and of those who used video reported 49% faster revenue growth vs those who didn’t (6).
Millennials are thinking long term 10 - 20 years ahead. As the older Millennials enter the Real Estate Market, the younger Millennials are doing as their seniors have done before them -- live with their parents for a bit longer than previously expected and renting content with the restricted privacy and increased saving for their future. While their entrance into the housing market is welcomed, Realtors need to change how they engage with their clients. Access to the internet has changed how initial engagements with potential clients are made. More and more, clients are finding information online, and finding realtors online.
Realtors with professional Photography and Videography are better engaging and reaching Millennials. When you’re ready to start creating well crafted content, give me a ring at 916-832-7845 or shoot me an email at hello@georgemoua.com and we can get started on developing your content creation strategy.
Sources:
1. Falcon, Julia. “Here's More Proof That Millennials Have Officially Entered the Housing Market.” HousingWire, HousingWire, 19 Sept. 2019, https://www.housingwire.com/articles/49899-heres-more-proof-that-millennials-have-officially-entered-the-housing-market/.
2. “Young Buyers Are Skipping the Starter Home.” Realtor Magazine, 17 May 2018, https://magazine.realtor/daily-news/2018/05/08/young-buyers-are-skipping-the-starter-home.
3. “Perspectives.” The Awakening of Millennial Homeownership Demand | Perspectives - November 29, 2017, 29 Nov. 2017, https://www.fanniemae.com/portal/research-insights/perspectives/millennial-homeownership-demand-myers-simmons-112917.html.
4. Lake, Rebecca. “How Millennials Are Changing the Housing Market.” Investopedia, Investopedia, 17 July 2019, https://www.investopedia.com/personal-finance/how-millennials-are-changing-housing-market/.
5. “Real Estate in a Digital Age 2017 Report.” 2017. PDF File. https://www.nar.realtor/sites/default/files/reports/2017/2017-real-estate-in-a-digital-age-03-10-2017.pdf
6. “5 Ways To Market Real Estate to Millennials Using Social Media Strategies.” Competitive Edge Social Media Marketing Management, 8 Dec. 2018, https://www.competitivebrand.com/real-estate-millenials-social-media/.
5 Growing Neighborhoods in Jacksonville
I’ve been lucky enough to live and travel for extended periods in a few cities throughout the US and Asia. My favorite place has to be Jacksonville -- I’m not kidding. Home to Florida’s largest population, Jacksonville is slowly becoming a metropolitan city. It’s prime for it with it’s shipping port, railway system, attractive incentives for big corporations, large small business community, low cost of living, and easy access to beautiful beaches. Sure we have to deal with high crime, but across cities with similar populations, it’s on par. On an unrelated note, why are parents still smoking with their kids in the car here in Jacksonville? It’s bonkers crazy.
Jacksonville is on the rise, and it’s a great time to live here! I’ve spent a few days pouring through information and walking through these neighborhoods and, if you’re looking to move to Jacksonville or within it, these are some of the best places to live in 2019. Keep an eye out for my neighborhood walkthrough videos!
Murray Hill
Murray Hill was featured in my last neighborhood write up and I think it’s a great place to start with this write up. Home to Vagabond Coffee, Murray Hill offers a low cost of living for young professionals, a thriving local business community, a collection of wall murals created by local artists, and a plethora of parks to explore.
Check out homes in Murray Hill
Places to visit & explore while here:
Vagabond Coffee
Fishweir Brewing
Town Beer Co.
El Jefe Tex-Mex.
Moon River Pizza
Community Loaves
Murray Hill Theatre
Riverside & Avondale
Riverside & Avondale is located next to Murray Hill and is a great place for young professionals looking for a hip and trendy place to live and work. Technically two neighborhoods Riverside, and Avondale, with Avondale being the newer of the two neighborhoods, it is home to the creative heart of Jacksonville -- the Five Points area. Riverside + Avondale offers a slew of trendy eateries + cafes like Hawkers Asian Street Fare, Black Sheep 5 Points, and BREW Five Points. If you like thrifting or vintage knick-knacks you’ll love exploring shops like 5 Points Vintage and Fans & Stoves Antique Mall This one feels kind of like cheating, as it’s been steadily on the rise since the late 2000’s, but Riverside + Avondale still has more growth ahead of it.
Check out homes in Riverside + Avondale
Places to visit & explore while here:
Sun Ray Cinema/5 Points Theatre
Crane Ramen
Sake House
Casbah Cafe
South Kitchen + Spirits
San Marco
San Marco is one of Jacksonville’s most recognizable neighborhoods. Though it’s old and considered a historic neighborhood, San Marco has been able to grow and modernize while keeping it’s old world charm. While home prices might be higher than normal in Jacksonville, it’s still a great place to live. Head to San Marco Square to grab a bite to eat from Taverna, or Beach Diner. If you’re a runner, swing by 1st Place Sports for all your running and race needs; they’re the place to go to for registering for 5k’s, 10k’s, marathons, and anything running related.
Check out homes in San Macro
Places to visit & explore while here:
Maple Street Biscuits
Fuji Sushi San Marco
Ajeen + Juice
The Grame + Grain Exchange
San Marco Theatre
Bartram Park/Southside
The Bartram Park area of the Southside neighborhood is quickly on the rise. Conceived as a work/live/play community, Bartram Park is also located conveniently between Jacksonville, St. Augustine, and the Beaches. If you like shopping, Bartram Park is right next to St. John’s Town Center and < a href=https://www.simon.com/mall/the-avenues>the Avenues Mall. If you’re like running/hiking trails, Bartram Park is located conveniently next to Julington Durbin Creek Nature Preserve.
Places to visit & explore while here:
Takhrai Thai Restaurant
Zoes Kitchen
Springfield
Last on our list, is Springfield, Jacksonville’s oldest neighborhood. A small hiccup in the 1920’s caused a decline in the neighborhood, but Springfield is now on an upward trend. Home to Hyperion Brewing, Main + Sixth Brewing, and Strings Sport Brewery.
Check out homes in Springfield
Places to visit & explore while here:
Chans Chinese Food
Crispy’s Springfield Gallery
Wafaa n Mikes Cafe
Henry J. Klutho Park
Jacksonville is growing, both in size and culture. Right now is the best time to become a Jacksonville transplant and help to build this new culture and city. These five neighborhoods offer a great place to live and grow for anyone. If I’ve left any neighborhood off the list, feel free to let me know in the comments below.
If you’re looking to sell your home in Jacksonville, make sure your realtor has a professional photographer photograph your home. With professional photos, your home stands out among the other properties in our area. If they don’t, shoot me an email at hello@georgemoua.com.