Evolution of the Virtual Tour in Real Estate

In the early 90’s, home buyers started heading out in a new direction to look for homes. It was this thing called the internet. It provided information, or at least held that promise, convenience and most important of all – it provided anonymity! The only problem was, in the early 90’s their just wasn’t a lot of information out there when it came to real estate and homes for sale.

Realtors started to catch on and along came the concept of “Virtual Tours”. Realtors wanted to provide potential home buyers, at least those using the internet, a way of touring the home from the comfort of their computer. They provided little in the way of information, since that is what Realtors hold dear and don’t want to give up easily.

Virtual tours started to pop up around the internet. In this first incarnation a virtual tour referred to basically a page on the internet that had a picture of the front of the home and perhaps some interior photos. This evolved later into a page of photos along with some music. There was more of a wow-factor for the seller to see their home showcased this way, but provided little for the buyer.

Then came “stitching” software. This allowed Realtors to take several photos (of the exterior for example) and “stitch” them together into a 180-degree panorama. These wide panoramas could then be put on the internet either as a still photo or, thanks to JavaScript, animated to move from side to side. Realtors were getting closer to the “Virtual Tour” concept.

After a little while, the idea of “stitching” photos progressed to the next logical step. Panoramas started showing up that were 360-degrees. This gave buyers a much more realistic impression of a home and it’s surroundings.

A company called iPIX truly revolutionized this concept though with it’s creation of true 360 by 360 stitching. This meant that you could have a virtual tour that went 360-degrees horizontally AND vertically. Buyers could now see those grand two-story foyers, staircases, the tops of trees and more! This was the true virtual tour, or was it?

Realtors may have finally delivered on their promise of Virtual Tours. In the last couple of years we have seen entire websites devoted to showcasing a listing of a home for sale. This gives potential home buyers the most amount of information possible. It meets all the requirements that they were looking for years ago when they first started flocking online. It provides information, more than they could possibly hope for, convenience and most important of all – it provides anonymity! The best home websites include an unlimited amount of photos, links to maps, local schools, mortgage information, property documents such as disclosures and surveys, the ability to schedule a viewing and even print of a brochure!

So, if you’re a home buyer, be on the lookout for these websites – they will truly give you a “Virtual Tour”. And if you’re considering selling your home, don’t just ask your Realtor if they provide virtual tours – ask them what kind of virtual tours! Virtual Tours have really come a long way. What’s next? Well, wait and see!

Basics of Real Estate

Real estate refers to immovable property such as land, which also includes rivers or streams that may be part of the land, as well as any physical structures that may be affixed to the land like houses, buildings or commercial establishments.

The terms "real estate" and "real property" are often understood to mean the same thing, although in some circles, real property refers to the rights of the owner over the real estate. Both terms are used mainly in common law, which is further divided into property law, the laws that refer specifically to the property, and contract law, the laws which refer specifically to the rights of the person over the property.

For centuries, people have viewed land as the primary measure of wealth. Even today, land comprises a large part of the fortunes of the wealthiest individuals and nations. Developing countries who are rich in real estate use this to attract foreign investments that can spur economic growth. However, in recent years, economists have noted that the key real estate investments into developing countries have been derailed by the lack of effective laws to safeguard such investments.

The leading source of capital for purchasing and developing land real property is mortgages. These are loans that banks grant to individuals who use the real property as collateral. Mortgages are favorable endeavors for banks because they can't lose: either the borrower successfully repays his loan with interest or if the buyer cannot pay his loan, the bank can claim the rights to the property through foreclosure, which is an action that is decided in a court of law. Once the property is foreclosed, the bank can sell it to recoup its loan.

This is where economists raise a howl. An analysis of international banking and real estate laws reveals that, in many developing countries, there is no effective way for a lender to foreclose. With no legal or institutional protection, many investors are discouraged from investing in real estate in developing countries. Often, the mortgage loan industry is only open to a select few, mostly engaged in by a cabal of well-connected families who frequently use their social connections in matters of foreclosure.

Real Estate Lead Generators; Business Building Ideas Are All Around You

When I first got licensed to sell real estate I was about as clueless as they come, but what I lacked in knowledge and ability I made up for in desire to learn and willingness to learn. So, I went to school after finishing real estate school.

No, not a school with a sit down classroom, but school in the sense that I started asking questions of veteran agents and watching what they did and said. I turned off my mouth after a while and opened up my eyes and ears and learned more doing that than I did while getting licensed.

For example, I learned that Real Estate Lead Generators abound, and everyday I was presented with opportunities that had I not been tuned in to pay attention to would have gone overlooked.

Here's a case in point with respect to business cards. I don't remember exactly how many business cards came with my first order, but I vaguely remember it being 500-1,000 cards. A year later I still had most of them. It was the craziest thing that I could have done!

Think about it! Instead of making it a point to give them away as fast as I could I was actually rationing them out like I didn't want to unload them.

Don't make that mistake! Business cards are great real estate lead generators and should be given out as freely as you would a glass of water to a thirsty person. And that's just what real estate prospects are. Thirsty to make real estate transactions with real estate agents sharp enough to recognize the opportunities.

Admittedly, I wasn't too sharp back then, but as I got smarter I realized the value of handing 3-4 business cards to everybody I came in contact with-and I mean everybody; my kids teachers, my doctor, your doctor, the school crossing card, my mechanic, dentist, etc.

And then there were the scores of counter tops that I encountered everyday. Grocery store counters, dry laundry counters, fast food pickup counters, counters where I paid the cable bill, bought computer stuff, book counters, etc.

Oh, and less I forget I must have passed by hundreds of billboards without placing one business card, real estate flyer or anything else on it. My stomach still knots up when I think of all the money those wasted opportunities cost me.

But like I said, I'm a lot smarter now (okay, so maybe I'm just older) and can pass on some pearls of wisdom to you so that you can avoid some of the mistakes I made. For example, some other real estate generating ideas include:

Real Estate Leads from Contractor and Home Builder Shows.

Real Estate Contractor and Home Building shows are becoming extremely popular among folks who are looking to build their home or are considering having one custom-built themselves. Getting Real Estate Leads from them is a great a strategy that's easy to implement.

Real Estate Closing Gifts; Small Gifts That Lead To More Referrals and Sales.

Many Real Estate Agents think of real estate closing gifts as something that should be given to the home buyer by his or her close family and friends. The gift serves as an accolade for the person's accomplishment. You can design them yourself if you're the creative type, or simply go out and buy one from your local shopping mall.

Free Website Content; Using Free Content To Generate Leads.

Everything you need to know to build a realtor web site and generate leads is available on the Internet, much of it free to little cost-including website content! In fact, some of the best real estate information I've read has been free, and although locating quality free content for publication and turning them into HTML to publish on your web site each week involves a great deal of time and effort it can be worth the effort.

Beware The Overseas Property Scammers From Hell

A property scam story in the UK Daily Telegraph recently has highlighted, yet again, the need to be cautious when dealing with prospective ‘cash’ purchasers abroad and has prompted me to relate a similar tale that happened to us.

The Telegraph story concerned a lady who was selling a property in France and who had a buyer offer her more than the asking price over the telephone without ever seeing the house. (Alarm bells should already be ringing!)

This ‘buyer’ then sent her an international money order including an extra £12,000 to cover his ‘legal costs’ which he asked her to send on to his ‘lawyers’ once the money order had been credited to her account. Of course, as soon as the money order went into her bank and was shown as a credit her buyer was on the telephone constantly to transfer the £12,000 so as to ‘get things moving quickly’.

She, very wisely, refused to do this until the money was actually cleared into her account. It is not widely known that just because a money order or bank draft is credited to one’s account it does not mean that the funds are cleared. (This, I think, is yet another glaring fault of the banking system - but that’s another story.)

Sure enough, after the ridiculous wait of ten days the money order ‘bounced’ and her bank was very quick to remove the credit from her account. Her ‘buyer’ was never heard from again! Had she succumbed to the pressure she would now be a lot worse off. Fortunately she had the sense to wait and in so-doing foiled the scammers.

Our story is a similar scam but a very different method. We had a property for sale in Fuengirola, southern Spain last year and were approached by a man who was looking to buy investment properties in our area. He at least came to see the property and tried to look the part of the businessman that he purported to be. (Shame about the cheap suit and the ridiculous Panama hat!)

He went away to confer with his ‘business associates’ and said he would telephone us in a couple of days. This he did and, good news, he would like to go ahead and purchase our property. Unfortunately, because of his ‘business commitments’ he couldn’t come back to the house so could we meet him at his hotel in Torremolinos? At this point we had nothing to lose so off we went the next day.

We rang him as we got to the hotel and he was too quick to meet us on the pavement outside and suggest we go to a nearby bar to have a drink and talk over the deal. After a cursory attempt to haggle he agreed to our asking price of 455,000 euros and we shook hands on the deal. There were just one or two small details to work out!

Firstly, because of tax reasons, he would be making the purchase through a colleague in Belgium who would do all the necessary money transfers and sign all the paperwork. No problems so far, it didn’t worry us whose name was on the deeds.

Next he wanted to pay 200,000 by bank transfer and the balance of 255,000 by cash. Now, while this is not unheard of in Spanish property deals, that’s an awful lot of ‘black money’. We carried on listening.

Ah! But the cash he has is actually only in sterling so he would give us the equivalent in sterling plus 10% for our trouble. We’re starting to lose interest now but we kept him going.

Just one small problem. For tax reasons (again?) he can’t get to Belgium to pick the money up so could we go and pick it up ourselves and once we’re back in Spain with it he would make the transfer of the other 200,000 from his office in Monaco. He makes a point to remind us that he’s trusting us with his 255,000 euros in cash as a goodwill gesture to show he’s serious. We’re finding it hard to keep a straight face at this point.

The best he saved until last. His Belgian ‘colleague’s’ fee for processing the deal is 45,000 euros in cash but he won’t accept the equivalent in sterling because it would be too risky to change that amount overseas.

Our man then said that he would add this 45000 euros (plus 10%!) to the previous euro figures making a total amount of 330,000 euros to collect in pounds sterling (approx £235,000) and giving us a 32,500 euro profit over the asking price.

So if we could just take 45,000 euros cash (of our money) to Belgium with us to hand over to this man, once he has handed over to us the 235-odd thousand pounds in cash of course, then everything will be tickety-boo! Believe me, he was quite serious.

By this time we had completely lost interest and just wanted to go and do something else. Anything else but listen to this idiot! We made our excuses and said we’d think about it over the weekend. I know it’s not funny but we had to have a chuckle on the way back to the car.

Sure enough, on the following Tuesday he was on the telephone asking when we would like to go ahead with the deal. But if we can’t act quickly he would move on to the next investment property and the ‘opportunity’ would be lost. I can’t recall what I said to him but I’m sure it had something to do with that old sailing term, ‘chucking anchor’!

I sincerely hope that no-one out there has had the mis-fortune to come across this odious little man and been taken in by his preposterous proposition.

In matters of property abroad, my only advice is this: Be alert, be aware and unless the money’s up front and sitting in your bank, don’t believe a word anyone says to you.

Soft But Not Dead

Looking back to these past few months we get a general picture of falling housing prices, suggesting once more that Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation, encapsulated in the dictum "Everything that goes up must come down" is absolutely true and that, furthermore, it applies even to Real Estate. But when it comes to housing prices the real question becomes:"Come down from where?"

According to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight (http://www.ofheo.gov/) the average price of a house rose by only 1.2 percent in the Second Quarter, the smallest gain since 1999 - but a gain nonetheless. OFHEO reports, furthermore, that the past year has seen the sharpest slowdown in the rate of growth since the Office began to keep track of the housing price index all the way back in 1975. Even so, average prices are still up by 10.1 percent compared to a year ago.

This is much stronger than the index published by the National Association of Realtors (http://www.realtor.org/), which showed a rise of only 0.9 percent in the year to July. Economic analysts generally speaking prefer the OFHEO index, since it is thought to be more reliable because it tracks price changes in successive sales of the same houses over time and therefore, unlike the NAR index, is not distorted by a shift in the mix of sales to cheaper homes.

All of which, then, brings up to mind the fact that it is not only the foresaid Newton's Law that applies to Real Estate, but also another very important scientific theory as well - Einstein's Theory of General Relativity, which can be encapsulated in the dictum "Everything is relative".

‘Stickiness' is a noun used in Economics to describe a situation in which a variable is resistant to change. Price stickiness, therefore, reflects the fact that asking prices of interests in land remain high and even increase at a time when demand lowers. For example, nominal asking prices are often said to be sticky. Market forces may reduce the real value of interests in land, but prices will tend to remain at previous levels. Stickiness normally applies in one direction, which means that a variable that is "sticky downward" will be reluctant to drop even if market conditions dictate that it should.

Price stickiness, in any market, is responsible for and reflects some confusion that exists between nominal and real values and gives rise, moreover, to a particular phenomenon known as the ‘Money Illusion'. Money illusion refers to the tendency of people to think of prices in nominal, rather than real, terms. The term was coined by John Maynard Keynes in the early twentieth century.

Money illusion does influence people perceptions of outcomes. Experiments have shown that people generally perceive a 2 percent cut in nominal income as unfair, but see a 2 percent rise in nominal income where there is 4 percent inflation as fair, despite the fact that the two situations are almost rational equivalents. The same happens in Real Estate, where the trend is for asking prices to remain high or even increase when selling prices are dropping.

Furthermore, money illusion means nominal changes in price can influence demand even if real prices have remained constant, thus causing what it is normally referred to as ‘market disequilibrium'. Adam Smith maintained that the free market would tend towards economic equilibrium through the price mechanism, that is any excess inventory will lead to price cuts which will decrease the quantity supplied and increase the quantity demanded.

There are, however, exceptions to the rule. One such exception is the situation wherein market participants are always trying to take advantage of the pricing system, thus infusing some dynamism in the market. This situation arises in markets that are ‘imperfect', such as Real Estate, where information about goods is not shared equally and evenly by market participants.

This explains, therefore, the OFHEO price index as above and its increase of 10.1 percent compared to one year ago, which increase is by no means unique to the United States. A similar study conducted by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight to compare markets outside the United States with the domestic ones has found that prices in Canada are up 10.8 percent to a year ago. Denmark tops the list with a staggering 23.6 percent increase, while the lowest index goes to Japan, where housing prices have actually decreased to the tune of - 3.9 percent over the last twelve months.

Don't Let Rent To Buy Enter You Decision

First time home buyers you may have seen "Rent to Own" signs popping up everywhere. You should read “Beware” instead. “Rent to own” has never been really a ticket to ownership. But it is mostly a marketing technique to lease houses property owners can't sell. In fact there is little benefit to the renter, even for a renter who bad credit or too much, debt to qualify for a mortgage. These deals almost never end up with a purchase and you might actually lose money. Currently there is a growing list of unsold homes and prices aren't rising as quickly at the same time. The situation has pushed some owners, and above all speculative real estate investors, to rent these houses.

Basically in a "Rent to Own" deal you are supposed to pay a credit part of each month's rent towards the purchase price of the home. The idea is to rent until you had accumulated enough for the down payment, which is usually 10% of the purchase price or more. But lenders now make home loans with little or no down payment. "Rent to Own" deals require you to pay an option deposit. It is non-refundable, but it is usually credited toward your down payment. If, when your option to buy comes up, you cannot or do not wish to purchase the home, you lose that money. Besides real estate investors use the purchase option to justify higher rents and lock you into a purchase price that is higher than what comparable houses are selling for on the market. Some renters don’t take into account that in addition to the high rent they will have to pay insurance, property taxes and maybe private mortgage insurance, which is required if you don't have 20% down. Unfortunately, some renters don't realize they cannot afford to buy until it comes time to exercise the option.

Why Do You Need A Home Inspection

When considering buying a home you have to follow a check list of all the things you need to do in order to avoid any further issues. One line in your check list should be to have the home, you planned to purchase, inspected. Why is it so important? Buying a home will be one of the most important purchases you will make in your lifetime, so you should be sure that the home you want to buy is in good condition. And it will reveal defects before you close the deal.

A home inspection is an evaluation of a home’s condition by a trained expert. During a home inspection, a qualified inspector is supposed to take an in-depth and impartial look at the property you plan to buy. The inspector will first evaluate the physical condition in terms of the structure, construction and mechanical systems; second identify items that should be repaired or replaced; and eventually estimate the remaining useful life of the major systems (such as electrical, plumbing, heating, air conditioning), equipment, structure and finishes. After the completion of the inspection, you will receive a written report of the findings from the home inspector, usually within five to seven days.

But beware the home inspector will not estimate the value of the house. The report you will receive is not a property appraisal is a document that provides an estimate of a property’s market value. The appraisal of a property, required for lenders prior to loan approval to ensure that the mortgage loan amount is not more than the value of the property. Don’t mix up home inspection, which is meant for buyer, and home appraisal, for lenders.

If you are a homebuyer, it is your responsibility to carefully select a qualified inspector and pay for the inspection. Your real estate agent may recommend you some inspectors home inspectors or you can find licensed inspector towards professional or state organizations.