Word: marketeers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Just don't pull out the noisemakers quite yet. The segment of the market that's reviving is very narrow. In May, some 29% of sales were to first-time home buyers. The federal government's $8,000 first-time home buyer tax credit provided a lot of the boost. That means if you're trying to sell a house that a first-time home buyer probably wouldn't purchase - anything that's not priced as a starter home - you're not likely to feel the benefit of a faster moving inventory. And if you're trying to sell...
...housing market has stratified can be clearly seen in Howard County, Maryland. After falling for six months in a row, the number of contracts signed by buyers ticked up in January, and has been rising ever since. The problem, though, is that almost all of the activity is among the lowest-priced homes. In May, sales of houses under $300,000 (for the D.C. suburbs, that's low-priced) jumped 41%, as compared to the same month last year. Sales of houses $300,000 and above, meanwhile, dropped by 26%. The super-high-end is particularly grim. At the rate...
...Scottsdale, Arizona, Gayle Henderson, a real estate agent at RE/MAX Excalibur, still works with the high end of the market, but today that job takes a different shape. She was recently approached by Luxury Home Magazine to write a piece on short sales - that is, selling your house for less than what you owe on your mortgage. "What might have been selling at $2 million two years ago could be selling for $1.2 million today," says Henderson. Compounding the problem: people who buy expensive homes often want them as second homes. Those folks are most certainly gone from the market...
...recent data indicate that as consumers prepare to open up their wallets, they'll be very likely to spruce up their homes. According to a survey from WSL Strategic Retail, of shoppers who say they want to splurge, 44% want to do so on their digs. NPD Group, a market-research firm, also found that when shoppers are asked where they are most likely to spend money, a majority point to their homes. "The nest is where we'll likely see the early signs of a recovery," says Marshal Cohen, a retail analyst at NPD Group...
...Walkman wasn't a giant leap forward in engineering: magnetic cassette technology had been around since 1963, when the Netherlands-based electronics firm Philips first created it for use by secretaries and journalists. Sony, who by that point had become experts in bringing well-designed, miniaturized electronics to market (they debuted their first transistor radio in 1955), made a series of moderately successful portable cassette recorders. But the introduction of pre-recorded music tapes in the late 1960s opened a whole new market. People still chose to listen to vinyl records over cassettes at home, but the compact size...