Coldwell Banker Islands Blog

As an innovative leader in the real estate industry, Coldwell Banker once again claims bragging rights over the competition. coldwellbanker.com topped the charts in the Nielsen NetRatings report, coming in ahead of Re/Max and Century 21. Also, two Coldwell Banker affiliated companies appeared on REAL Trends Top 25 for largest housing services firms.

* coldwellbanker.com Remains #1
Through April, coldwellbanker.com remains the most visited national real estate brand website according to the Nielsen NetRatings report. Nielsen also reported coldwellbanker.com as the most visited nation brand website for 2007 and it has continued to be #1 through April of 2008 with 7.6 million visitors so far this year. The closest competition to coldwellbanker.com within national brand websites was remax.com which trailed by more than 700,000 unique visits. Nielsen NetRatings ranks sites based on their unique visitor traffic each month, and for the year coldwellbanker.com is more than 1.3 million unique visitors ahead of the closest national brand website. Be sure to tell your customers that when they list with you, their listing is seen on the most visited national brand website giving them the exposure they need!

* Real Trends 25 Includes Two Coldwell Banker Companies
Real Trends, the nation’s leading publisher of trends and analysis on the real estate industry, recently ran an advertisement in the Wall Street Journal showcasing the nation’s top 25 largest housing services firms. Congratulations to Coldwell Banker United Realtors based in Bryan, Texas, and Coldwell Howard Perry and Walson, based in Raleigh, NC, who were numbers 10 and 22 on the list.

* Real Estate Magazine Interview with COO Charlie Young
The April, 2008 issue of RIS Media’s Real Estate Magazine featured an interview with Coldwell Banker COO Charlie Young. In the article, Young discussed the 2008 Coldwell Banker advertising campaign strategy.

* Jim Gillespie Appears on Fox Business and Continues Media Interviews to Provide Accurate Information on the Real Estate Market
Recently, Coldwell Banker President and CEO Jim Gillespie appeared on Fox Business. Jim also met with reporters from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, CNNMoney.com and Forbes and continued to talk up several key message points with the national media;
-Why now is a great time to buy - inventory, price, affordability
-Real estate is a local business, not a national headline
-Don’t time the market

In 2007, Previews, the Coldwell Banker program dedicated to luxury home marketing, participated in nearly 25,000 transactions sides worth $46.6 billion.

On average, Previews handles $127.7 million in luxury home sales every day.

When you list your home with Previews you gain access to an international referral network.
• 3,700 residential and commercial real estate offices
• More than 117,000 sales associates in 47 countries and territories
• Approximately 12,000 certified Previews Property Specialists

Effective August 1st, the Coldwell Banker Island Affiliate group of companies will have grown by two with the opening of two new offices along the North Coast of the Dominican Republic. With the announcement, made by Jim Reed, the Managing Director, on Monday, July 21, 2008, the company will have eight offices total in the country.

One of the new offices is in Playa Cofresi, Puerto Plata and is co-owned by Jens Pydde and Hugh Bell. Mr. Pydde also owns the offices in Sosua and Cabarete. Mr. Bell will manage the office in Playa Cofresi.

The second new office is located in Rio San Juan near the famed Playa Grande Golf Club. It is owned by Rene Le Caplain and will be managed by Annemarie Lehman. Coldwell Banker Island Affiliates also has offices in Las Terrenas, Bavaro, Santo Domingo and Santiago

n today’s electronic world with the prevalent attitude of “give me the web address and I will go get it myself,” Real Estate companies are striving to provide easy, convenient access to their websites as well as cutting edge technology on their sites.

To answer this call from home buyers wanting immediate and effective results to web-based property searches, Coldwell Banker Island Affiliates has developed their Listing Distribution System to automatically place all their property listings on many popular real estate websites.

This Listing Distribution System is based on proprietary software that has been nicknamed “Moonraker.” Moonraker monitors each affiliate’s property listing data on their local websites and keeps a current copy of each listing in a database. As new listings are found, updated or removed, Moonraker will catch these changes and update its database and then distribute the listing information to each of the sites that are specified as a destination for the particular affiliate.
Destinations include:

* coldwellbanker.com
* coldwellbankerpreviews.com
* coldwellbankerislands.com
* UniqueHomes.com
* LuxuryRealEstate.com
* GoogleBase
* Sales Associate local web sites
* various local sites

Additionally, Moonraker can provide an RSS feed for new listings or new and updated listings for each of three property categories - residential, commercial or vacant land.

In addition to distributing each affiliate’s property listings automatically to many different websites, Coldwell Banker Island Affiliates has the technology to produce property listing videos at a very low cost and place them on YouTube, currently one of the most visited websites in the world, and also make the videos available from local Coldwell Banker web site.

Coldwell Banker Island Affiliates strives to keep its website, www.coldwellbankerislands.com at the top of website search engines both naturally and by utilizing Pay-Per-Click(PPC)services. By tracking search engine placement and utilizing Moonrakers built-in Search Engine Optimization service as well as popular PPC providers, the Coldwell Banker Island Affiliate website is easily found on the internet.

Additionally, in striving to stay at the cutting edge of technology, Coldwell Banker Island Affiliates encourages all affiliates to geocode, or locate the latitude and longitude coordinates, of each property listing. By doing this they can implement the Google maps interface on each affiliate’s local website as well as have that data available for sites that Moonraker populates.

As real estate technology grows, Coldwell Banker Island Affiliates will endeavor to continue to provide its affiliates with cutting-edge real estate technology. This will include such things as foreign language translation, social bookmarking and who knows what else the future will hold.

Home buyers get excited about their now homes and can be in a hurry to get it decorated. However there is an emerging philosophy called “slow design” that advocates taking your time to make the best decorating decisions. Home owners are encouraged to feel comfortable letting their decor grow around them adding one piece at a time.

Here are a few suggestions to help decorate your home “slowly” and at an affordable price:

• Think heirloom. Seek out well-made pieces by local artisans.
• Start small. Start with an anchor piece for each room that adds character and will last for a long time.
• Be patient. Don’t buy everything all at once.
• Don’t automatically throw away things that are old. Sometimes a coat of paint or a small repair can result in furniture that is better than new.

See entire article entitled “Don’t Rush Home Decorating” on realtor.org.

Homeowners at the highest end of the real estate market still have a dream house in mind and location does play a factor in where some call home, according to the 2008 Coldwell Banker Previews International Luxury Survey. Twenty-seven percent of the people surveyed responded that their dream home was on an island.

The survey revealed that about half of the affluent homeowners surveyed (48 percent) own at least one secondary residence. Most of these properties are located in beach areas (45 percent). For those who own second homes, significantly more men than women cited that the primary purpose of the residence was a retirement property (17 percent versus 8 percent).

The survey was conducted online by independent market research firm, ICR, in April 2008 and commissioned by Coldwell Banker Previews International®, the exclusive Coldwell Banker service dedicated to luxury real estate. In 2007, the Coldwell Banker system participated in more than 25,000 transaction sides of homes priced at $1 million or more in 2007 with a total sales volume of $46.6 billion.

To see the full article, please visit http://www.coldwellbanker.com/servlet/Newsaction=viewNewsItem&contentId=1068803&customerType=News

Junkanoo is a street parade with music, which occurs in many towns across The Bahamas every Boxing Day (December 26) and New Year’s Day. The largest Junkanoo parade happens in Nassau, the capital.

Junkanoo was celebrated in various parts of the Americas, and variants of the word’s orthography may be found in each place - Jonkonnu or John Canoe in Jamaica; John Kuner in North Carolina; and John Canoe in Belize. In The Bahamas, newspaper accounts of Junkanoo in Nassau between 1849 and 1950 referred to the parade alternately as the Christmas Masquerade, Christmas Carnival, and John Canoe. By the mid-1950’s the terms John Canoe and Junkanoo were used interchangeably, and by 1970 Junkanoo became the parade’s standard nomenclature. Junkanoo groups “rush” from midnight until shortly after dawn, to the music of cowbells, in costumes made from cardboard covered in tiny shreds of colourful crepe paper, competing for cash prizes.

Modern Bahamian Junkanoo is a parade: a showcase for Bahamian goombay music and new Junkanoo costumes. It is also an event during which unorganized groups of Bahamians celebrate, perhaps unintentionally, themselves, their freedom and, for some, their past. It is the most visible and continually experimental artistic realm of Bahamian culture.

Parades in Nassau are judged in various catergories; A (or Major) Category, the B Category, Individual costume, and fun groups. The A catergory groups involved in the Nassau Junkanoo include The Saxons, The Valley Boys, The Music Makers, Roots, One Family and as of late the Prodigal Sons. Groups of the past included the Vikings and Chippie and the Boys. In the B category groups include One Love Soldiers, Clico Colours, Fancy Dancers, Fox Hill Congos, and Conquerors for Christ. Fun groups include The Pigs and Sting.

A video of a Junkanoo parade.

For Bahamas real estate you can visit Coldwell Banker James Sarles Realty or Coldwell Banker Lightbourne Realty.

To view property in the bahamas on this website click here

J.D. Power and Associates recently released their 2008 Home Buyer / Seller Satisfaction Study and Coldwell Banker was rated very positively among consumers.

In a press release, J.D. Power and Associates noted that their study found that Coldwell Banker Performs particularly well in the services factor and also Performs particularly well in the marketing factor. In addition, here is how Coldwell Banker stood out among the rest:

• In the home-seller segment, Coldwell Banker ranked 2nd with only a statistically insignificant one-point difference from the highest ranked company, Prudential (792 and 793 respectively on a 1,000-point scale).
• In the home-buyer segment, Coldwell Banker ranked 3rd, achieving a score of 816 on a 1,000-point scale with Keller Williams ranking the highest with a score of 831 and Prudential following at 820.

Coldwell Banker was one of only two brands to be featured in the top 3 in each category. And, the brand has been well represented this decade with three wins over eight years.

Note: J.D. Power ranked seven real estate brands in this survey including, Coldwell Banker, Century 21, ERA, Re/Max, Prudential, Keller Williams and GMAC and it included 3,670 evaluations from 3,205 respondents who bought or sold a home between April 2007 and June 2008.

In a recent poll conducted by The National Real Estate News, US Brokers surveyed answered the following question, “What is Most Important For a Quick Sale?” in the following manner: Overwhelmingly, price was the most important factor, or so said 68% of the respondents. Location finished a distant second with 21% followed by condition, staging and upgrades.

It might be curious to take a poll of the brokers who deal in the island real estate market of the Caribbean and Atlantic. My guess is that they would be more location sensitive than price. To view the poll go to:

www.micropoll.com/akira/microPollView.do?ID=84980

There are major metropolitan markets in the US that defy the negative headlines and articles that pollute the business section of most daily newspapers. Forbes Magazine, mining data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, homes sales data and other sources has spotlighted the to 10 ‘recession proof’ cities in the US. They are,

Oklahoma City, Okla. Median home price: +8.2 percent
San Antonio, Texas +7.9 percent
Austin, Texas +6.4 percent
San Jose, Calif. +11.2 percent
Raleigh, N.C. +4 percent
Salt Lake City +2.5 percent
Houston +1.1 percent
Seattle +1.2 percent
Charlotte, N.C. +3.3 percent
Dallas-Fort Worth +.5 percent

To read the complete article, click here:

http://www.realtor.org/rmodaily.nsf/pages/News2008050202?OpenDocument