We just return from a house warming event at one of our client’s new home. We had a great time. Thank you Allison for being a great host. And thank you Russell and Shelby for your catering service and help. See pictures below.
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Nicole James Real Estate Group, Inc is seeking a highly motivated and experienced closing coordinator to join their team.
Candidates must not be afraid of hard work and can thrive in a collaborative, team focused and fast paced environment.
Ability to work on weekends and evenings (as business dictates) is a must.
Duties include but not limited to – clerical and office filing, listing and buyer support, closing coordination, managing incoming calls and mail, errands and other administrative functions.
Excellent organizational and computer skills are necessary. Candidates should have experience in Microsoft Office, Wise Agent, MLS, RealFast, Docusign, OPC and other relevant knowledge of real estate tools.
Having a real estate license is a plus.
Please send resume and salary requirement to resumes@nicolejames.com
Nicole James Real Estate Group is a full service Real Estate firm serving Raleigh-Durham, the Triangle, and all surrounding areas of North Carolina. Nicole James Real Estate Group is comprised of high quality associates and consultants that specialize in residential secondary and new construction markets. The firm also has extensive experience in the marketing and selling of Real Estate Owned (REO) properties. Nicole James The team consists of a broker in charge, a listing support coordinator, a client care manager, and a business/marketing consultant. The BIC has been a consistent top performer with over $40 million in volume and 200 homes sold to date. The BIC has a background in public relations and marketing and is a certified REO representative licensed in North Carolina and Georgia. Professional associations include the National Association of Realtors, North Carolina Association of Realtors, Georgia Association of Realtors, Durham Association of Realtors, Triangle Multiple Listing Service, Georgia Multiple Listing Service, and First Multiple Listing Service of Atlanta.
The listing support coordinator is widely known in the area as an aggressive sale person in both the resale and new homes market. Professional associations include the National Association of Realtors, North Carolina Association of Realtors, and Triangle Multiple Listing Service.
The client care manager is a licensed North Carolina agent with broad experiences in marketing and social media. The client care manager is responsible for the day-to-day duties of the office and the direct support of clients during the entire real estate process.
The business and marketing consultant has broad experiences in real estate, utilities, and emerging business and is a MBA from the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University.
Nicole James Real Estate Group is located on the ground floor of the historic Teermark building in downtown Durham, North Carolina. Our office suite is approximately 1,100 square feet with two separate rooms. One room is called the “war room” which is where the staff have their desks and office equipment. The other room is called the “client room” which also doubles as a conference room. The war room has the latest in touch screen all-in-one computers, color printers, phones, and a fax machine. The client room has a 46-inch plasma TV and various audio/video equipment, which is used to provide presentations to clients and during staff meetings. The entire office suite is on a secured wireless network that allows file and printer sharing. The network also has guest access points that provide internet services to clients and agents.
The team at Nicole James Real Estate Group has lived and worked in the area for over 15 years and established relationships and experience of identifying, marketing, and working with investors and clients throughout all phases of a real estate transaction. In addition to the marketing strategy outlined below, Nicole James Real Estate Group has developed a niche with first time homebuyers through their credit counseling services and first time homebuyers’ seminars. Ready and willing first time homebuyers have been identified as great potential buyers for homes at particular price points.
Nicole James Real Estate Group has created a winning marketing strategy for its clients to maximize exposure in order to sell their property as quickly as possible. Our marketing strategy has four key aspects: traditional promotions, internet and social media, networking/caravans, and viral marketing.
http://www.nicolejames.com/MarketingStrategy.pdf
Traditional Promotions
Marketing flyers
Creative and unique flyers are created and widely distributed for each property
Email broadcasts
Information of new listings are sent out through email broadcasts to local realtors
Printed media
Advertisements of the listings are submitted to local printed media
For sale signs
Quality looking ‘for sale’ signs are posted in front of listing
Internet and Social Media
Exposure is key
More than 80% of potential buyers utilize the internet
Market utilizing the latest internet tools
Facebook and Twitter
Leverage social media presence through facebook and twitter
Networking/Caravans
Open Houses
If necessary open houses are set up and scheduled by the listing support agent
Property Caravans
Coordinated tours for local realtors to preview listings
Viral Marketing
Multimedia videos and slideshows
Youtube videos and slideshows are provided for each listed property
Obama signs 3-month extension of homebuyer credit
(Reuters) – President Barack Obama on Friday signed a law giving consumers already in the process of buying a home three extra months to close the deal and still get a popular tax credit from the government.
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Applicable to those who had contracts in place prior to April 30.
You now have until Sept. 30 to close out your contract.
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6614AE20100702?type=politicsNews
Two large home builders are increasing land acquisitions in the Triangle, a bet that the region’s housing market and economy is poised for a rebound.
The recent activity comes after an extended period in which large builders refrained from making purchases as they waited for the housing market to bottom out and land prices to come down. With both of those things now occurring, builders see an opportunity to grab market share in an area whose long-term growth prospects have not been clouded by the recession.
“The biggest surprise has been how quickly the pursuit has ramped back up again,” said Lee Bunn, Standard Pacific Home’s land acquisition manager in the Triangle. “Just in, say, a 90-day period we’ve kind of gone from first gear to fourth gear.”
Over the last month California-based Standard Pacific Homes, among the largest builders in the country, has paid nearly $10 million for 265 single-family and townhouse lots in Wake Forest, Durham, Raleigh and Cary.
Another national builder, Toll Brothers, recently paid $23.46 million for the majority of the Hasentree luxury golf course community in northern Wake County, a purchase that included the golf course and 318 lots.
The deals reflect the confidence builders have that the Triangle will continue to draw new residents and burn off the inventory of homes left over from the boom years. They are also a sign that builders believe lot prices have fallen far enough to reflect current market conditions.
The lot typically accounts for about 20 percent of the cost of a home, meaning the less a builder pays for dirt the more affordable it can make the house on top of it.
Publicly traded builders such as Toll Brothers and Standard Pacific are in a position to buy land partly because of a change in the tax code.
In November, Congress passed a law that lets companies that are losing money go back five years and get a refund for taxes paid when they were making money. Companies were previously limited to recouping taxes paid up to two years earlier.
“They’re flush with cash,” said Ed Dunnavant, who tracks Triangle housing trends for the research firm Metrostudy.
Land prices down
While builders such as Standard Pacific have plenty of cash, many local builders are struggling to stay afloat and need to sell some of their inventory. Other builders have already been foreclosed on by their banks, which are now in the process of disposing the lots. This has led to steadily declining lot prices in the Triangle.
The average lot price for a single-family home in the Triangle was $48,732 in the fourth quarter of 2009, down 19 percent from the same period in 2008, according to Market Opportunity Research Enterprises, a Rocky Mount group that tracks Triangle housing trends.
Bunn said the recent buying activity should not be confused with the frenzied buying that took place during the housing bubble.
“I think people are working on a smaller footprint,” he said. “They’re being more selective about where they go.”
The Triangle still has a glut of developed lots left over from the boom years, but a number of those lots are located in outlying subdivisions that have become less attractive as housing closer to job centers has become more affordable.
‘Feeding frenzy’ small
In the more attractive areas of the Triangle competition for lots has become fierce. In southwestern Wake County, which includes Cary, Apex and Morrisville, the number of vacant developed lots totaled 4,331 in the fourth quarter, down 20 percent from the same period the year before, according to Metrostudy.
Bunn said Standard Pacific is poised to make a number of other land acquisitions in addition to its recent deals, which included buying 99 lots in the Mulberry Park townhouse community in Durham and 110 lots in the Northampton subdivision in Wake Forest.
Dunnavant said he expects land purchases to slow down as builders remain wary of carrying too much land on their books — something that led to disastrous results when the housing bubble burst.
“If they do that they’re going to be right back where they were three to four years ago,” he said. “While there’s a little bit of feeding frenzy right now I think it’s really they’re replenishing their war chest because most of them let their lot supplies dwindle,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/03/23/402733/builders-again-buying-land.html?story_link=email_msg
“Based on end-2010 economic forecasts, we think Raleigh will be the healthiest of the largest 100 markets in the country. Raleigh comes out on top because of stronger employment conditions, moderate household income growth, and continued strong household formation. The market still is expected to see minor home price declines (approximately 3 percent decline expected for 2010 over 2009), which is one factor that keeps the market from being even stronger.”
http://www.newsobserver.com/2010/02/19/346681/raleigh-housing-market-ranks-first.html
“Everybody wants to know am I going to put the bear back in the cage,” Vitner said.
Local speakers drilled down in the Triangle housing market. Bernard Helms of Market Opportunity Research Enterprises in Rocky Mount analyzed the recent real estate transactions in the Triangle and compared them to previous years. Stacey Anfindsen of Birch Appraisal Group in Raleigh ran through numbers on residential real estate listings and housing inventories and prices. Ed Dunnavant of Metrostudy in Cary laid out the trends in the real estate market and explained how to survive until the economic recovery kicks in.
Vitner drew a quick sketch of the economic picture overall. The economy is getting somewhat better than it was a year ago, according to indicators. The Gross Domestic Product showed some growth in the third quarter of this year, due mainly to federal stimulus programs such as Cash for Clunkers and the first-time home buyer tax credit. The recovery may be sluggish but is unlikely to double-dip, he said, meaning it won’t drop back after a short-term uptick.
Although the number of job losses — more than 9 million — is expected to exceed every post-WWII downturn, it has hit the private sector hardest. University towns and centers of government have the lowest unemployment rate. That bodes well for the Triangle, with the state capital in Raleigh and the number of colleges and universities in Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill. Vitner expects the state’s unemployment rate to top out around 11 percent in fall 2010.
The one sector of the economy that is growing at a rapid pace is the mobile Internet industry, more good news for the Triangle, which has Research Triangle Park. Vitner predicts that inflation will rise faster than in the previous decade because the U.S. economy is growing slower than the global economy. Foreign suppliers are less likely to give U.S. consumers discounts, offering them instead to fast-growing economies, like China, where competition for sales is stiffer.
The worst is over for plummeting home prices, Vitner said, except for the high-end market. Mortgage rates are very low, mainly due to federal stimulus, and Vitner predicts they will remain low for the foreseeable future. “You can’t raise interest rates if unemployment rates stay high,” he said. High unemployment tamps down demand for mortgages, keeping rates low. Though the first-time home buyer tax credit was extended through April 2010, “most qualified buyers have already taken advantage of it,” he said. As for federal refinancing programs, he said, 95 percent of modified loans are delinquent again in three months.
Once mortgage rates begin to rise, in 2012 or 2013, he expects them to double to at least 8 percent. “The era of cheap and abundant credit is over,” he said.
Bernard Helm has looked at every residential real estate transaction recorded in the Triangle since 1986. And while his charts and graphs that compared market activity in 2007 with that of 2009 show a significant contraction of the market, bear in mind that 2007 was as close to a “bubble” year in residential real estate that the Triangle has had in many years.
The bright spot Helm found was that, though the total number of closings had declined, closings of resale homes made up a larger share of the market. That indicates more of the existing housing inventory is being absorbed, which will eventually lead to stronger housing prices.
The first-time home buyer credit did boost sales of moderately priced homes but had either no effect or a negative effect on the inventory of newly built homes. Those new homes tend to be high-priced because before the market collapsed, that’s where the greatest profit was for builders. Demand was strong, and the market drifted toward pricey homes. Developers bought land and prepped it for golf-course communities and other high-end subdivisions. Now that the market demand is for homes less than $150,000, developers would not be able to cover their development costs by building low-priced homes in luxury communities.
Again, there’s good news, for public builders at least. As banks grow increasingly reluctant to lend to private builders, what little land available is being snapped up by public builders who don’t have to rely on private financing.
Helm warned to expect a sag in real estate transactions in early 2010 because the federal tax credit pulled some 2010 buyers into the 2009 market.
He ended by sharing what he sees are the basics for recovery: Home sellers must capitulate on pricing. The resale home inventory must stabilize, which includes absorbing the shadow inventory of homes that sellers are deliberately keeping off the market until prices rise. Land prices must capitulate. And banks must be willing to lend and consumers able to borrow.
Stacey Anfindsen compared listings and showings and gave the heartening news that average days on the market is only a few weeks longer than in the strong 2007 market. Sales prices are dropping, he said, but as people own their homes about 4 years on average before selling, only people who bought in the past three years and sold this year probably lost money on the sale.
Ed Dunnavant closed the meeting with advice to builders on how to hold on during a slow recovery:
Refocus on building for the natural demand coming from people who marry, have a baby, get a promotion or decide to stop renting. They make up a steady supply of buyers.
Reposition your product to satisfy the demands of the 2010 buyer. Buyers are shifting their housing decisions to reflect what they need, rather than what they want. Expect them to shy away from conspicuous consumption in the early stages of recovery.
Reprice lots and homes to the expectations of your customers. Today’s buyers are concerned about debt and are risk averse. Their buying decisions will be driven by practicality, affordability and good value.
He also urged builders to exercise patience, persistence and friendly tenacity in working with customers, bankers, suppliers and other business associates. They are all in this together.
“The housing industry has always been a cyclical business,” he said. “A peak will always be followed by a downturn, which could be caused by many different local, state, national or international events.”
Nancy E. Oates is a business and real estate writer in Chapel Hill. Reach her at neoates@earthlink.net.
