The home building market has slowed down dramatically since builders have decided to stop feeding the glut that has formed. According to an article in CNN Money, there are currently 132,000 new homes on the market, a rise of 28% from last year, and this enormous surge in availability has caused builders to think twice before pursuing further construction projects.

Another practical upshot of this overabundance of new homes is its effect on the real estate market. With so many homes available, home buyers are no longer feeling pressured to quickly buy anything they can afford, or pay inflated prices for the houses that they are considering. Consequently, more than one in three housing markets has experienced declining prices, according to the National Association of Realtors. Further, Zip Realty, a brokerage, also published that anywhere between one fifth and one half of homes on the markets it operates in have been discounted. It appears that these rapid changes may be at least one of the factors contributing to rise of a buyer’s market in place of the seller’s market that so recently held sway.

-Tony Floriani

Know someone’s friend’s son who is in real estate? Chances are you probably do. During the steep appreciation of home prices in the past decade, more than a few people have decided to join the real estate industry. In fact, in Miami there is currently around one realtor for every seventeen people.

To investigate just how crowded the market has become, we took CNN’s rank of the 25 most pricey cities to live in and ran that against our data on roughly 1.5m real estate agents to see what cities had the highest ratio of real estate agents per person (as defined by someone who bases themselves in that city or has managed a recent listing/sale there). Here’s what we came up with:

Over time the number of agents has tended to follow home prices. So if home prices continue to appreciate, perhaps the marketing industry nirvanna of one to one marketing really will, quite literally, be realized in certain cities over the decades - if not in the form of what the inventors had originally envisioned!

A few days ago I wrote about the incredibly low vacancy rates here in New York and what they are doing to the real estate and renters’ markets in the city. Today, both Curbed and The Real Estate Bloggers caught wind of a similar story with some more statistics and some juicy quotes for you to chew on. Enjoy!

-Tony Floriani

There are a lot of perks and niceties that people will pay a little extra for when looking for a new home. Some are looking for a view, while others will pay a premium for added privacy, while still others will pay a handsome sum to live in just the right neighborhood. But would you stretch that little bit extra to start living green?

According to an article in the New York Times, green living may be the wave of the future. Some builders even expect their new green buildings to hold their value better in coming years, as non-green buildings become obsolete and fall out of favor in the real estate market. It’s true that even now, many people who can afford to do so will choose to live in green buildings over their traditional counterparts, and this trend is expected to continue.

There are still some downsides to green buildings, however, that are keeping them from becoming a truly widespread phenomenon. For most, the most daunting obstacle to green living is the inflated initial cost. Green buildings tend to cost more to build, which means that living green will probably run you a little extra, despite major reductions in your future heating and electrical costs in the long term. Still, green living isn’t only for the rich. According to the U.S. Green Building Council, it is possible to build green buildings at costs which actually end up being lower than the costs of building similar traditional structures. This means that in the not too distant future, you could find yourself living comfortably in a green building without shelling out too much green from your wallet.

And if the trend toward organic food is any indication, the market may be willing to pay a premium for clean housing in the future too.

- Tony Floriani

Manhattan real estate broker Cheryl Eisen’s video on YouTube, since removed so no link, has sparked controversy in regards to the appropriateness of real estate agents’ selling tactics. Many who have viewed the video have commented on either how clever she is to come up with such a creative strategy or how inappropriate the video is to show her marketing the property with somewhat provocative mannerism. Either way, she was able to generate over 1700 views for her video in three days and be featured in many popular national real estate blogs and newspapers.

Marketing real estate through videos has become increasingly popular on the internet today. As broadband becomes ubiquitous, finding creative nontraditional ways to sell real estate has become the next best thing. These real estate videos in the market today range from the amateur, to the semi-professional, to the very professional. A simple search on YouTube regarding the term house for sale will yield a variety of videos that are screaming to be noticed. If you’re willing to go the extra mile, you can even take your video onto TV via companies like SpotRunner which allows local advertisers to take advantage of local TV advertising. They offer 30 second spots on cable TV for reasonable prices.

Real estate is after all about emotion as much as it is about numbers. General real estate listings and photos of a particular home just doesn’t compare to an online video full of vivid images and crip sounds of the actual home. You’ll find Inman Stories’s range of listings and brokers to be extremely helpful. And who knows, maybe one day your home may become a movie star.

There is a body from above, that home owners believe might help sell their most valuable asset: St Joseph. Among his notable qualities, St Joseph is not only credited with being the adoptive father of Jesus, he is also the patron saint of workers, immigrants, and even of fighting communism (Thanks Wikipedia!).

The reason people in the real estate community love him so much however, is that he is also the patron saint of home buyers and sellers. This distinction has earned Saint Joseph a place in many home sellers’ hearts, as well as a place in their yards. As it turns out, many people hope to curry the saint’s favor by burying likenesses of him in the yards of a home they wish to sell. Supposedly, with a little earnest prayer and some faith, Saint Joseph will help you sell your house!

There are several places where you can order Saint Joseph statues on the internet or in the real world, along with books and guides on how to put him to use. The statues themselves tend to be cheap, but can range from $5-$15 depending on where you look and how big a statue you buy. Of course, there is no evidence that a bigger or more expensive Joseph will sell your home any better than his cheaper plastic counterparts, so if you’re interested some help from on high, pick a Joseph that fits your needs, bury him, and see if this practice bears fruit. Meanwhile, I’d be curious to hear stories from anyone who’s tried this, so if you’ve looked to the saints for help selling your home, drop a comment and let me know how it turned out.

Apparently, sellers will do just about anything to get their homes noticed. A recent turnaround in the housing market has proven beneficial to buyers hoping to find the homes of their dreams, and it has forced sellers to adopt some rather unorthodox strategy in order to grab people’s attention.

Most people who have sold a home recently are probably familiar with some of the basics of staging: Cleaning and organizing, rearranging or even refurnishing rooms and so on. When my parents sold their home only a couple of months ago, they finished the basement, completely redid the kitchen, and totally refurnished all of the bedrooms. For some, myself included, it feels a little bit odd living in a home that suddenly seems to have been built with a buyer in mind, but this is just one of the many concessions sellers often make to raise the value and desirability of their homes before putting them on the market. And this is nothing compared to the show put on by some agents at an open house. Classical music, displays of fresh fruits, flowers, scented candles and chilling bottles of wine are all fair game when trying to create that special “buy me” ambience. Some even seek divine inetervention to help sell a home.

Well, according to an article in the LA Times , Centex Homes is taking this routine to a whole new level with their Homelife program in Santa Clarita, where their homes will be inhabited by fake families who have been paid to act like the home’s real residents. These families of actors will be on display as people view the home so that any potential buyers can visualize how wonderful life could be if the house were theirs. With outlandish strategies like this popping up even in desirable homes and neighborhoods, it seems that nothing is too ludicrous to be considered if it gives the seller an edge in the market.

An excellent article in the New York Sun yesterday highlighted some of the major factors contributing to the enormous crush for rental properties here in the city. While I won’t bore you by recounting the entire article, I did note one particularly striking statistic: the vacancy rate in New York is nearly 0% for rental housing. This almost minuscule vacancy rate combined with the projected 1 million new neighbors we’ll be greeting to the city over the next ten years has pushed rental rates up a staggering 25% in just the last five months alone!

Having just relocated to New York myself, I know first hand how true this is. Because of the low vacancy rate, rental properties are being snatched up almost as soon as they hit the market, creating a somewhat panicked atmosphere for the renter. I’ve seen listings for rentals being published one day with ads for an open house that very same evening. By the next day, the apartment is gone. The feverish pace of rental property sales here has gotten so bad that it has forced some, myself included, to make a snap decision about an apartment they’ve seen. Once you’ve visited an apartment, it’s either sign on the spot or leave it for dead, since by the time you’ve actually considered your options and made a decision, most of those options are no longer on the table.

Understandably the raw demand continues to support the stratospheric price appreciations in New York Real Estate. And who says we were in a housing bubble?

A curious article on Curbed this morning described a resident of Cape Town, South Africa, who is looking to ’swap’ homes with someone in New York City. For $675,000, he built and furnished an amazingly beautiful 2,300 sq foot two bedroom home in Cape Town. He is now offering to trade his home for a similarly priced home here in the city. However, he is hoping to save some money by not getting agents involved in the transaction.

Upon seeing this offer, the good people at Curbed decided to show him exactly what he was getting himself into. So off the top of their heads, they found a listing here in New York that matches his price. It’s listed as ‘a 5 room wreck’ that’s a ‘fantastic value’ with ‘great potential.’ Does anyone else catch the whiff of euphemisms in the air? In any case, words like great potential are not exactly what you want to hear after putting your palatial Cape Town home on the line, are they?

Although this budding real estate mogul may have taken a purist stance in the transaction, not wanting to involve agents, the reality is that he has effectively shot himself in the foot in terms of finding the best deal. By avoiding agents, he is restricting his choices to about one in six homes (the other five on the market, on average, are represented by sell-side agents). The other irony is that working with a buying agent would cost the Cape Towner nothing as his agent’s commission is taken out of the New York seller’s transaction price. Thus, by allowing an agent to handle the transaction, our friend from Cape Town would be exposed to a vastly larger pool of purchasable homes at no additional cost. On top of this, if he were to hire a respectable buying agent, he could benefit from extensive local knowledge that he does not have himself, in addition to (in most cases) years of buying experience. In places like New York City, finding a great agent that’s right for you can actually save you worlds of trouble while keeping you well abreast of all the fabulous wrecks out there. If you’re interested in finding an agent in New York we could even help you get started