New Construction upturn, rent-to-own housing, and your brackets
Plenty of economists and executives have fallen on their faces predicting a resurgence in housing in the past five years. But while the jury is still very much out for the overall market, there is reason to feel hopeful about new construction.
Bank of America says it has begun a pilot program offering some of its mortgage customers who are facing foreclosure a chance to stay in their homes by becoming renters instead of owners.
In today’s technological age, do business cards still serve a purpose? The Los Angeles Times thinks not. Younger people are shunning paper business cards as lame and wasteful and social media is the new replacement.
About 85 million people manage their professional networks with LinkedIn. Some 77 million smartphone users have downloaded the Bump app, which allows them to bump their phones together and instantly exchange contact information. Others carry a personalized quick-response code that smartphones can scan like a hyperlink. And, of course, there’s always Facebook, email and digital business cards. If they do take a paper card, some said they use a smartphone app to snap a picture of it and instantly digitize the card’s information. Then they toss it into the nearest trash can.
It’s something to consider when prospecting Generation Y clients.
Prepare yourself: on July 1, as many as 8 million college students will see their interest rates on federally subsidized student loans double, from 3.4% to 6.8%.
Are you more worried about your basketball brackets than your bottom line this month? March Madness can take over your life (and work) if you let it. Lifehack lists 5 tips to enjoy the madness while getting your work done.
So you undoubtedly heard the fairy tale about the turnip princess as a child. Or the one where the maiden escapes the witch by transformering herself into a pond. No? Well, probably that’s because researchers in Germany have discovered a trove of over 500 new fairy tales locked away in a vault in Bavaria. They were gathered in the mid-19th century by a contemporary of the brothers Grimm from the folktales of Bavarian peasants. Widely admired in his day, the collector Von Schönwerth’s work has mostly faded into obscurity. With this new find maybe we’ll be sharing the tale of the miserly farmer and a money-mill.
2015 House Trends, Retirement visas, iPhone carrier pricing and Household cleaning tips
If you had asked someone in the 1960s what the home of 2015 would look like, chances are they imagined something akin to The Jetsons’ home complete with Rosie the Robot and other space-age appliances that dressed and fed the family. But, rather than space-age technology, the biggest thing that is expected to change in future single-family homes is the size.
Florida’s property professionals believe that passing a retirement visa programme for overseas real estate buyers could generate 300,000 new jobs as well as bring new money into the Sunshine state’s housing market.
A builder in Montana is constructing a home made entirely of American products – nails, wood, bathtub, the works. It’s been challenging, but not as expensive as you might imagine.
Confused about iPhone plans from the various carriers? Who’s cheapest? It’s not as easy as that, of course. CNN Money tries to untangle the options in iPhone carrier pricing.
Cleaning the home is certainly a chore. Yahoo has guidance on how to keep it under control. The take away: incorporate daily cleaning tasks into your routine to make those big every-so-often major sweeps less major. Yahoo has another article this week on simple solutions to modern problems. How do you get stains out of tupperware? remove white rings from tables? clean a smelly coffeemaker?
Housing & the recovery, tweeting, and real estate advice from Vanilla Ice
The collapse in housing construction was caused by overactive building, right? Only partly. While single-family construction soared during the boom, multi-family construction remained relatively stable before falling even further with the downturn. The Atlantic looks at current household formation statistics, population growth, and construction data and postulates that a housing construction boom may just be around the corner.
NPR posts three interactive maps on foreclosure, unemployment and household income using current data that can be drilled down to the county level. And on Friday, NPR’s Morning Edition ran an interesting piece on shadow inventory, foreclosed properties or properties in the foreclosure pipeline that will further impact the recovery for several years.
Post tweets with hot hash tags and you might find yourself being followed by twitter bots, programs that automatically follow real users based on keywords. Wired discusses what to do if you’re followed by bots (hint: don’t follow back).
The family that tweets together, goes a bit bonkers together. Says the son: “I try to refrain from reading [mom's] blog because then we don’t have anything to talk about.”
Libraries are getting short-changed in the Great Recession. While it’s easy to cut their funding, libraries serve a valuable role in connecting people to jobs, improving schools and helping to build community. Support your local library!
If you can stand all the pop-up ads, Time has an interesting collection of photos from a behind-the-scenes book on the filming of Jaws.
Just in time for the summer music festival season: a shirt that charges your mobile phone based on sound.
Where do turn for advice on your remodel? How about real estate investing rock star style? Well, look no further than the one and only Vanilla Ice. Yeah, him. Pop yer collar and make ‘em holla!
