Dmitry & Maureen: Moving Metro Detroit

Royal Oak Homes

Royal Oak Links

Famous people who have lived in Royal Oak, MI

Did I miss the announcement?  ActiveRain has found another way to satisfy my not-so-inner Nerd.  This morning I found a new button on the "My Home" page.  Its down at the bottom on the left side.   "Statistics"

So what does it show me?  How many comments I've had on each post.  How many times they have been viewed and how many times they have been clicked.  Cool stuff, huh?  And it says that more information is coming about referrers.  Exactly the information I want to see.

Thanks ActiveRain.  You guys just keep making it better and better! 

Dustin has a screen shot here.

Last month something very interesting happened in the Birmingham/Bloomfield real estate market. It may not sound like something groundbreaking to most of you, but to me it was a BIG thing.

My friend Sara Lipnitz, who is an agent in my office, called together some of the top producing agents in other offices around town to jointly hold a broker open together. She had a theme in mind, and the Home and Holiday Boutique Day was born. We had vendors in each of our listings so that agents and the public could do some pre-Christmas shopping while seeing 10 beautiful homes. The tour, by the way, was a big success and we even managed to get featured on the local NBC news!

During the planning meeting for the Boutique Day, an idea came out. Why not work together monthly on some kind of joint marketing event. So here we are, 9 agents from competing firms coming together to share ideas and work toward a common goal of promoting each others’ homes. This kind of thing might be common in other markets, but I have to tell you, I have never heard of or seen this kind of cooperation in Metro Detroit.

There is great synergy in our group. We have people with diverse talents and skills. Those with access to things that will benefit the group. Organizers, planners, thinkers, doers. A group of motivated professionals not threatened by each others’ successes. Collectively and individually, we sell a lot of homes every year, and everyone seems to feel that there is more than enough business to go around.

So, in that first meeting, the Birmingham-Bloomfield Realtor Network was born. We’ve committed to each other to meet monthly to:

• share ideas about the market and our business,
  
• talk about our current listings and buyer needs,
  
• and organize one event each month that will not only promote our listings but also benefit other Realtors and benefit the community we work in. 
  

We already have a website, LastTuesdayTour.com (most of our events will be on the last Tuesday of the month), where we are posting our events as they are announced. And we have a VERY exciting calendar of events planned for 2007 that we will be announcing soon.

I am truly enjoying sitting down with this group of agents and sharing ideas. I think it will lead to great things for all of us.

photo credit: Jakub Vysloužil under creative commons license

This month The Carnival of ActiveRain is taking on a new format for it's final episode of 2006.  Everybody can participate and vote, no matter how long you've been here.  It will be a truly democratic process.  We will return to the traditional format next month.

ActiveRain was 'born' this year, and a lot has taken place.  A few people have been around since the beginning.  Lots has happened, and there are some great posts of 'enduring interest' that deserve a spot as among the best of 2006.  Hopefully we will end up with a true sampling: something about finance, something from the stagers, some good local content, real estate opinion and some fun off topic/humor. Some may be about things that happened in real estate, others may be about things that happened on ActiveRain.

Other reasons why you might nominate an article:

• interesting series
  
• great images
• affected the ActiveRain community
  
• funny
  

So, search back in your memory to some of the most memorable posts you've read in '06.

Here is how this will work.

• You can nominate any post, yours or someone else's by leaving a link to it in the comments.  You may want to write briefly about why you are nominating a particular post to build some momentum for your nomination.
• All nominations will appear on a poll on miOaklandCounty.com (we can't host polls on ActiveRain).
• Nominations are opened until December 31st at midnight EST.
• Please limit yourself to no more than 3 nominations and 3 seconds.

Voting will be open from January 1 though 3rd.  I will put up a post when the voting opens.  Results will be published on January 4th.

** Seconding thing was removed to encourage participation**

Small in size (only 5 square miles) the City of Bloomfield Hills is the wealthiest city outside of California or Florida, and the nation's 4th wealthiest city with a population over 1,000. In the last census, Bloomfield Hills had just under 4,000 residents and a median family income of $170,000.

The jewel of Bloomfield Hills is Cranbrook, the spectacular setting for Cranbrook Academy of Art, Cranbrook Art Museum, Cranbrook Science Center, Cranbrook Planetarium, and Cranbrook-Kingswood schools.

City of Bloomfield Hills Real Estate

City of Bloomfield Hills Links

Famous people who have lived in Bloomfield Hills, MI

Back to that Spring market thing…

By Spring market, these agents mean that buyers are doing what they are supposed to do: BUY HOUSES!! Now that certainly got my attention.

After all, I can be a skeptic. OK, I am a skeptic.
I needed proof that we didn’t have a case of Realtor hyperbole spreading through the office faster than gossip the day after the office Christmas party. I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t a PR campaign by local Realtors to prop up the market.

Admittedly, my research was kind of superficial. I did limited sampling. In fact, all I did was take a look back at our own business since the elections. Here is what I can report:

• Web site traffic is up on Oakland-County-Homes by about 20%. I presume this is buyers because they are looking at homes for sale.
• The traffic to miOaklandCounty.com, our Michigan real estate blog, is up by similar margins.
• We’ve seen VERY short market times on a few of our listings. You gotta like that!
• The buyers we are working with are spending less time looking than they were a few months ago. You gotta like that too.
• We’ve heard of more than one home recently receiving multiple offers. Buyers who are attempting to “lowball” cream puff homes are sometimes finding that they end up losing out all together while they try to swing the best deal. Hopefully it wasn’t their dream house…
• We did more listing presentations and market analysis than ever at the end of this year. And we are at a personal record for the number of listings we have been entrusted with by Oakland County home sellers. (By the way, there are some great homes, there. Take a look and call us fore details.) Many of these sellers are moving with in the metro Detroit area.
• We are seeing buyers who will snap up a deal right now, even if their current home isn’t on the market. They are asking for contingent sales, but are accepting deals without them.
• We had one listing that had a deal fall apart. Don’t get me started about the lender and why what she did was illegal. But fortunately, we had another buyer in the wings, just waiting for the original deal to fall apart. A very nice first time buyer got the a great house, and our sellers were able to move on.

So, whether it is Post Election Fever or a gift from Santa, there is anecdotal evidence that a shift is occurring. Either way, we’ll take it.

Our best wishes to all for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

The photo is of Boston’s Speedo Santa Run for Charity. It was taken by Presley and is used under Creative Common License.

It's a special day for Mr. Kitsap Peninsula (Sorry Mark Flanders). I've seen him quite a few places this morning already.  Ohio, Florida, Connecticut.  Minnesota and Michigan. Am I seeing double in Washington State? Will the list grow?  

It seems that Rich is spending his 50th BIRTHDAY traveling around ActiveRain leaving some elfish birthday cheer.  I guess that is something you do when you turn 50 and its almost Christmas.

If you would like Rich to be seen in your town, grab that picture and add it to your profile.  Everyone is invited to participate. Let's see how fast Rich can travel now that he he is just a few years away from earning his AARP card.  I don't think Rich even knows he is taking this little tour of the US today.  How long will it take him to find us all?

Leave a comment with the city and state you last saw him (or a link to your profile or Birthday Greeting).  He just might be as busy as Santa on Christmas eve today.

 Happy 50th Birthday Rich!

Photo Credit: Kristal Kringle

Yes, it does appear that The Donald made a social call on my Michigan real estate blog yesterday during the Yankee Blog Swap. (A big thanks to Mary McKnight and RSSPieces for a great idea well executed!) Though I have my doubts that it actually was the real Donald Trump, I had to capture that screen shot for posterity.  If you haven't heard of MyBlogLog, check it out.  It's a lot of fun to see who is visiting your site.  While having The Donald visit was a hoot, it got me thinking about other things. 

There are many rewards to blogging.  I value the camaraderie, the sharing of ideas and the opportunity to learn from my fellow Rainers.  Points are nice but one of my goals in blogging has been to attract new business.  My other blog and my website have been around for a while.  Last year I got enough business from them to make it more than worth my investment of time and money.

Many of us with outside blogs and sites have tracking programs that allow us to see what is being read and how often.  I, for example, know that people looking for millage rates for Oakland County Michigan end up on my blog fairly often.  Why?  Because every year I do a new post about the millage rates.  People like to know about taxes, I guess.   I can see the phrases that they have Googled, so I know why they ended up on my site.

On ActiveRain we can't see the queries that brought consumers to us, but perhaps we have gotten calls or comments from them about our blogs.

So, since AR just launched Localism.com, I thought it would be helpful if we could share what we have found that is working for us.  If you have outside blog or site and you would be willing to share examples of top search phrases that would be great.  I think this could help steer the rest of us into creating better and stickier consumer content. If you have an AR blog, what posts have created a response from consumers?  Specific examples appreciated.

I am hoping we can all help each other create great consumer content. 

I’ve held off announcing this sale since it went under contract in October. No postcards to the neighbors even. I’m cautious, even though I knew the buyers were well qualified and excited about their purchase. I preferred to make it through closing. That happened late last week, and I think both the buyers and the sellers are thrilled.

So what is that I want people to take away from this?

Things I have said before. A good Realtor can help you price your home for the current market conditions. It’s an art, not a science. The more houses I see and sell the better I get at it. With the market conditions that sellers face today in SE Michigan, it is all the more important that you have an agent who really can take a careful look at the market to help position you to beat the many sellers you compete against.

6 days really is a big thing in the Birmingham Michigan market today. I’m thrilled for the sellers, who have moved on to a home on a lake, and to the buyers who have a great new home to call their own. 700 Emmons is no longer available, but if you are looking to make a move, please contact us.

this post can also be found on miOaklandCounty.com, your source for information about the Birmingham Michigan real estate market.