The Director of the Keller Center for Research in Residential Real Estate Marketing at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business, Dr. Chris Pullig, sales are on the decline there has only been a marginal reduction in National Association of Realtors (NAR) membership, hence fewer transactions are available to each individual agent noted today that while existing home.

In the mid-1990s and continued through the first half of this decade, during the recent housing boom NAR membership nearly doubled from 729,266 in 1993 to 1.27 million as of 2005. The number of real estate agents continued to rise, as the number of homes sold shifted downward in 2006.

How exactly do these solar powered homes operate anyway? For starters, one must get to know the basics. There are two uses that solar collecting systems are usually used for: one is for thermal heating, the other is for gathering readily usable electrical energy.

Since the sun provides heat and light, the two energies can be fully harnessed for their different potentials. This is a good thing for homes, especially those which are situated in the cold regions. Not only do they get free electricity, they also save on it by heating up the house’ various elements through conducting the solar heat into various heat transfer systems.

In the US Economy, more and more students will join the workforce in the months to come; problem is, recession is in order, and add this impending problem to the impending credit card debt and other collaterals these youth and soon-to-be members of the workforce have, it will be really hard for these fresh grads to stand up and make a living for their own.

And with the economists calling for a recession, lay-offs in the workforce are really happening, and it will be very hard for the youth to find a high-paying, full-time job. And in effect, new meat will have to settle for low-paying, part-time jobs for now.

A very good example of houses that fully utilize the sun’s heat energy can be found mostly in Japan. In the cold winter months when most Japanese people would rather turn up the heat in their cozy homes, this solar heat capturing system works wonders in heating up the radiant flooring, the water systems, etc.

To make this possible, heat transfer is conducted by a conduit, eg. circulating water, air, or antifreeze, pumped through pipes. The conduit is heated by the sun. Further heating can be achieved through the greenhouse effect, by trapping heat inside a glass like structure and allowing the extra heat to warm the conduit.

They say that there is a 3.5 percent increase in the prices of single-family houses from June 2006 to June 2007. David Stiff, the chief economist of Fiserv, stated that it is a decent increase though it is still less than the half of last year’s clip and it is under 10% of the annual rate in the past five years.

The Federal Reserve has released the October 2007 Senior Loan Officer Opinion Survey on Bank Lending Practices which addresses changes in the supply of and demand for bank loans both to businesses and consumers over the previous three months which, we presume, corresponds to the third quarter of 2007. In this particular survey participating banks were questioned about changes in their lending policies for backup lines of credit for commercial paper and prime nonconforming residential mortgage loans. Banks were asked separately about changes in credit standards and demand for prime, nontraditional, and subprime residential mortgages. The report summarizes responses from 52 domestic banks and 22 foreign banking institutions, a respondent pool which accounts for the majority of the bank lending in the country.

Both domestic and foreign institutions said they had tightened their lending standards and terms for commercial and industrial loans (C&I) over the previous three months and also reported a tightening of lending standards on commercial real estate loans. Domestic banks generally reported that the demand for C&I loans had dropped over the reporting period but foreign banks reported little change in the demand. According to both domestic and foreign institutions there was about a 35 percent lower demand for commercial real estate loans.

Learn more: mortgagenewsdaily.com

Leaders of the residential real estate industry can find useful, timely and trusted information from REAL Trends, which for twenty years, have been able to give answers to business and strategy questions, either from newsletters, e-mail updates and conferences they organized. These have been combined now and can be accessed in the website, with contents as far back as 7 years ago. These include conference presentations, research reports from REAL Trends and other sources. Be updated and read the news of the day. One of the most important responsibilities of REAL TRENDS is do the research but deliver only information that are relevant to their readers, a promise to their clients, customers and friends.

Find out more from realtrends.com

It doesn’t really make a difference which survey you read, but similar to the annual poll done by Harris Interactive, real estate agents almost always find themselves at the bottom of the “most prestigious” occupations list.

The Ugly Truth
Why? It would seem that many of the best-paying jobs actually rank as the least prestigious -business executive, stockbroker and real estate agent – but to come in dead last with almost one-third of respondents rating real estate agents as having “hardly any prestige at all” is not good.
We need to collectively do something about it. And just changing our title from real estate agent to sales associates to Realtor(r) isn’t really going to make any meaningful difference.

As an industry we have to get out of the “selling,” “deal making” and “quick sale” mentality. We need to transform our image into that of home and lifestyle planners, real estate professionals, advisors and/or consultants.

Paradigm Shift
Remember that at one stage insurance agents sold us “death” policies. Now twice reengineered they are financial planners providing life insurance and estate planning. It may only be words but using the correct ones can and will significantly contribute to changing the perception of who we are, what we do and how much we should be paid for providing that service.

Real estate leaders and brokers need to drive this paradigm shift otherwise it may never occur. Concurrently this period of change needs to be accompanied by a significant increase in the level of education. During the last five years, with the influx of more than a million new agents, not enough time was allocated to education. Throughout the hectic hot property market the industry’s overall lack of emphasis on education has caused its already low perception and poor image to ashamedly become the “dumbest” bunch of agents ever. At the same time consumers have expanded their knowledge of buying and selling homes and so for the first time we find ourselves at the crossroads of being outsmarted on two sides – a more technology savvy consumer and by a new crop of smarter industry entrants.

Continue reading from retrends.com

For real estate professionals there are lessons to be learned from every changing market condition; especially a housing bubble. The question is will they? For a great many agents who have never experienced anything other than the recent feeding frenzy this is the first time they�ll be learning them and for the rest who have �been there before�, it�s a time to reflect on the last time through the cycle and add the new lessons learned.

The housing bubble expanded in the first few years of the 2000s, especially in the costal areas, the southwest and the highly populous areas. The bubble is basically a period during which a mania for home buying occurs. In this instance in included a rapid increase in housing prices due to historically low interest rates and generally poor lending standards.

Bubbles are usually hard to identify beforehand, not widely accepted during the upswing but easy to detail with hindsight. Retrospection is remarkable, isn�t it?

So in light of the current declining real estate market including overall lower sales, rising inventories, longer time on market and increasing foreclosure rates, we can easily look back and summarize the housing bubble as follows:

1995�2001: The Internet Dotcom Frenzy
Life was changing and fast. Innovation was excitingly confusing. Technology drove the stock market to dizzy new heights and minted thousands of newly-made stock market experts and millionaires.

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Commercial real estate in the United States is a billion dollar industry. Each day brokers and agents provide thousands of transactions to investors and buyers in a market that fluctuates as the economy does. In the United States, alone, property values have suffered as the rise and fall of the global economy does. With outsourcing to minimize expenses, property used for commercial development has taken a major hit and has some experts wondering if there will be a rebound.

Every city or town has zoning laws that dictate what can be used as residential property and what is considered commercial real estate in an area. These areas can differ by only a few feet but the taxes and property value are drastically different. Whereas a 1200 square foot housing property might lease for nine hundred dollars, the same equivalent in a commercial area might go upwards of fifteen hundred. Real estate investors take this into consideration when searching for commercial real estate properties.

As property lines dictate costs and values, so too does the area that the commercial real estate in the US is located. Areas in the Northwest, such as in and around Seattle, will command higher prices due to the location of prominent corporations such as Microsoft and Starbucks.

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