Congratulations!

Today's blog post is our favorite type - a congratulations to one of our sellers.

Mike and Beth, congratulations on selling your home! We wish all of our sellers could be as easy to work with as you have been. Good luck with your move and enjoy your new state.

Real Estate Market Statistics for Green County for 2010

2010 has drawn to a close, and now we can get our first look at solid numbers regarding the strength of the real estate market here in Green County in the last year. I pulled this chart because I found it interesting when we compared 2010 not only to 2009, but also to the years prior.

Housing Statistics by Quarter in Green County, WI

Number of Home Sales

2005    -    438
2006    -    399
2007    -    370
2008    -    298
2009    -    325
2010    -    317

Median Price

2005    -    $137,750
2006    -    $152,400
2007    -    $139,900
2008    -    $131,050
2009    -    $127,000
2010    -    $127,500

I am very hopeful that things are coming back to normal. Our median home price is only $10K down from the normal of 2005, and it grew, though slightly, from 2009. This shows nice stabilization in our prices and hopefully heralds the end of decline on the market as a whole.

What is that strange little spotty picture??

Have you seen the funky little boxy graphics we are starting to incorporate in our marketing and yard signs?

These are called QR codes, and you will probably see them popping up more and more in retail stores, on website, on advertising posters.

If you are wondering what on earth a QR code is and what you should do with it, don't worry. Lots of people in our area don't know about them. Basically, if you have a smart phone, you can download an app called a barcode reader or a QR reader. Not all smart phones can read these codes, but iPhone can and most Androids will too. Android phones often come with Google Googles, which can read them, or you can download apps like Barcode Scanner from the Android Marketplace. If you have an iPhone, readers like Optiscan, QuickMark, QR App, and NeoScan are recommended by cnet.com. Palm has their own QR reader app, or i-nigma or BeeTagg.

You scan these little graphics with that reader, and it decodes them. The QR code might be a text display ("Open house on Friday evening from 5 to 7 pm"). It might reveal a website link with more information. That code above take you to a website that has the pricing, photos, and features for one of the homes we have listed. It could open a video or audio stream, or initiate an email on your smart phone that already has the recipient's email address and the subject line entered ("Please send me more information on 1610 16th Ave, Monroe").

We are using them on yard signs at some of the homes we have listed for sale and in some of our online marketing. It is just another way that we are reaching out to a different client base to help our sellers' homes be seen by as many people as possible.

How effective is print advertising?

I was working on a continuing education class today when I found a nugget of information that was too startling not to share.

Before I share the statistic, let me share a little background. Whenever Luis and I list a house, we always talk with the potential seller regarding print advertising. We do pretty much no print advertising. There is a reason for this. Three years ago, we did quite a lot. However, we decided to keep some statistics ourselves on the return on investment for our print advertising. Care to guess what that return was?

ZERO

It was rather surprising and sobering, and we consequently discontinued doing print advertisements for ourselves and special ads for our properties. We warn our sellers that we do not do prints ads for this reason. Buyers are not looking for homes in the paper; only the sellers look there. We don't even have a good return on open house advertising in print. At the last two open houses we hosted, one had zero percent attendance because of the print ad run by our broker and the other had only one couple out of six list "paper" as how they heard about the open house.

So, today when I found the following statistic, it both surprised me and made perfect sense.

More buyers found the home they actually purchased from a yard sign rather than from an advertisement in a home magazine.

1%of buyers found the home they bought through a home magazine. 14% found the home they bought through the yard sign.

It is interesting food for thought for home sellers, is it not?