In the midst of the traditional home buying season, May has brought some encouraging numbers in building permits, existing home sales, average sales price and a drop in notices of default. While Canyon County experienced a drop in average sales price by 8% to $86,836 (from $94,759 in April), Ada County saw a whopping 26% gain in sales price from the month prior to $175,458 (from $129,320). Valley wide, the average sales price is up by 1.5%. Building permits and existing home sales increased by 6% and 4%, respectively while new homes sales fell 8% from the month prior. Read more and see full May stats…
21
Jun, 2011
Average Sales Price, Building Permits Increase in May…
21
Jun, 2011
PTC Sync is coming…
In a previous post, we wrote about many cloud-based services to keep things tidy in your digital life. All the while, we’ve been quietly working on a cloud-based offering of our own: PTC-Sync. It’s a whole new way to keep track of your transactions with us and offers our Escrow Officers to work with you from anywhere. Find out more and sign up to be notified when PTC Sync hits the street by visiting the official PTC Sync page.
10
Jun, 2011
Fine-tune your presentations…
As the old saying goes, great presenters aren’t born – they are prepared and if you’re like us, there’s always a fine line to tread when creating a presentation that is not only effective, but engaging and informative as well. Lifehacker posted a new article about presentations (aptly titled “How to Create Presentations that Don’t Suck) based largely on advice from Nancy Duarte. Her design firm has prepared over 250,000 presentations over the last 23 years. Some key points:
- Too many ideas on one slide
- Cliches and Clipart
- Lack of emphasis
- Questionable design choices
- No relationship to the audience
The article is definitely worth a read and bookmark-worthy if you have an upcoming presentation or just care to hone your skills a bit more.
Further Reading:
- How To Get a Standing Ovation by Guy Kawasaki
- The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint by Guy Kawasaki
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Jun, 2011
16
May, 2011
Building Permits, New Home Sales make gains in April…
The first quarter of 2011 is finally in the books and April brought moderate gains in different areas that comprise the PTC Index. Building permits in April where up a whopping 16% over March, while new homes sales and existing home sales were up 8% and 5%, respectively within the same month over month time period. Distressed properties (short sales and bank-owned) and notices of default showed decreases of 3% and 10%, respectively. Days on market also fell 7% from 98 days to 91 days. The average Treasure Valley home sales price also fell slightly; Canyon County’s average sales price fell 1% to $93,524 while Ada County increased to $165,064. Hop on over to PTCIndex.com to check out full details…
21
Apr, 2011
What PTC Index says about local housing market…
President of Pioneer Title Co., Tim Bundgard this week wrote a guest column for the Idaho Business Review forecasting real estate in 2011. He referenced the PTC Index, a monthly measurement of the health of the Treasure Valley real estate market, as a baseline for his forecast…
“…When the federal government introduced its first-time homebuyer program a few years ago, it incentivized buyers with a tax credit and, in turn, spurred home sales. Many people took advantage of this inducement; the first-time homebuyer tax credit, however, was a temporary fix and may have prolonged a full recovery.
Our index shows that new home sales at a monthly average of 117, 91 and 94 in 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively. It is evident that even as 2009 brought above-average numbers in the historical sense, post-incentive years show growth, albeit in small increments.” Read the full article…
Excerpt courtesy of the Idaho Business Review
18
Apr, 2011
Low prices, higher sales…
President & CEO Tim Bundgard appeared on KTVB’s It’ Your Business Segment with Carolyn Holly to discuss housing prices and what he expects in the coming year. Tim also discussed recent PTC Index numbers, showing positive growth in home prices and higher existing home sales numbers. Click the image above to check out the full interview…
14
Apr, 2011
Average sales price, existing homes sales increase in March.
With the buying season in full swing, this month’s index shows many positive gains across the board. Notices of default were up 17%, but in comparison to February, building permits, new home sales and existing home sales each had increases of 13 percent, 23 percent and 22 percent, respectively. The average sales price is up 6 percent at $129,320 from $121,684 in February. Ada recorded an average sales price of $163,881 while Canyon County inched up to $94,759. The second calendar quarter is historically the strong selling season and we should continue to see sustained or increased sales activity as we head into the late spring and summer months. Head on over to PTCindex.com to check out numbers for march…
30
Mar, 2011
Keeping your head in the clouds…
Floppy discs of the 3.5 inch variety have, suffice it to say, died out due to their limited storage capacity (1.44 mb). These days, this media type couldn’t even store a single MP3. We’ve since moved on to blank media like DVDs, CDs and USB thumb drives to store important documents and access them on different computers (home to work or desktop to laptop). Even these blank media options are becoming increasingly irrelevant and incompatible (if you don’t often misplace them) with the smart phones and tablet devices we carry with us – a trend that will continue for the foreseeable future. The answer to your data storage woes is quite simple: it’s in the cloud.
Evernote is awesome! All my projects and notes are filed quickly and efficiently. I have access from my computer, iPhone and web. For free!
Cloud services effectively allow you to store important files on a protected third-party storage system that can be accessed from any internet-connected computer or mobile device. So imagine being able to access a synched document you began working on at your home office in your work environment without having to track down that ever-elusive thumb-drive. Here’s a roundup of a few services we’re using.
Dropbox.com – Free, 2GB (paid upgrades available)
Dropbox offers 2GB of online storage free as part of their basic service. You can upgrade to 50GB or 100GB for $9.99 and $19.99, respectively per month. Any changes or additions you make to your computer’s Dropbox content, is automatically synched across all devices linked to your account. The tiny bit of software acts as a regular drive on your computer, so there’s virtually no learning curve. Dropbox is available for Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad and Android devices.
Amazon.com – Free, 5GB (paid upgrades available)
Amazon this week recently launched it’s own online storage solution for everyone. You’ll get 5GB free, and they are currently offering a promotion for 20GB free when you purchase an MP3 album from their music store, which will be available to you for one year from the date of purchase. After that, your account will revert back to the basic 5GB of storage. Amazon dubs this as a music storage solution (coupled with their new cloud player software), but this would be a formidable solution for any file type you need access to on the go. This solution is new, so the software and accessibility need some work, but it is an otherwise useful option if you need additional free space.
Evernote.com – Free (paid upgrades available)
If you’ve ever done research or tried to keep projects organized from the notes, web pages and other pieces of information you’ve gathered, you’ll likely know the headaches involved in keeping all of these items organized.Evernote helps you keep track of everything throughout ‘notebooks’ that you can access from anywhere. You can even add voice memos to help you keep things organized. Evernote is available for Mac, PC, iPhone, iPad and Android devices.
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Mar, 2011
What does Spring have in store?
Once again, President & CEO of Pioneer Title Company, Tim Bundgard, sat down with KTVB’s Carolyn Holly to discuss what the future may hold for real estate in the Treasure Valley. In the clip, Tim makes reference to the PTC Index, which is a monthly measurement of the vibrancy of the Treasure Valley real estate market. Spring is the unofficial launch of the real estate buying season and we can expect increased activity in the current quarter. Check out the video for more details. Let us know what you think the future holds in the comments!