The “Trulia Local” option — here’s Baltimore — offers up a map showing you where violent and non-violent crimes happened, where the schools are (and how parents have rated them) and where you can find restaurants, banks, gas stations and grocery stores. Oh yeah, and the homes for sale along with the recently sold stuff.

What do you think? Does the information look useful? Accurate?

What do you really want to know before you buy or rent?

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But sales remain far below their peak of over 18,000 sold in 2005, and the average sales price declined by nearly $26,000, or about 14 percent, to $163,527 in 2011.

Median sale prices, which reduce the effect of the highest and lowest sale prices, were not available on an annual basis.

The median home price for December was $120,000, down from $139,500 in December 2010, the MLS reported.

The increase of about 1,600 home sales was the third straight year of higher sales and was the biggest jump yet since home sales fell precipitously from 2006 through 2008, MLS President Sue Cartun said.

In other findings, the MLS report said:

The total dollar volume of sales decreased slightly to $2.2 billion, even with increased units sold.

Total units listed fell by about 7 percent, to 29,719.

Average days on market, the time it took to sell a home, decreased to 82.

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As a luxury real estate marketing professional you can distinguish yourself from the competition with a great slogan.  The slogan is effective when you can distill in a few words the essence of your brand.  How are you distinct from your competition?

In the highly competitive world of auto insurance, there are many slogans.  One company is expressing its unique promise of value using this slogan:  “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.”  Here is Mercury Auto Insurance’s slogan: “It takes more than a good neighbor to save you money!”

State Farm is promising neighborly personal service when you have a claim.  That is nice. Isn’t that what

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The Liberty Town Square project will include office space, department stores, theaters, and housing. The first phase of the development, planned for 1 million square feet, is expected to cost close to $300 million.

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Welcome, and thank you for visiting our website. PropertyWire is the leading publication for property investors and industry professionals interested in the world of international property investment. Our aim is to give you intelligent commentary and analysis on the world of retail and commercial real estate. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read so far why not sign up for our FREE property alert and online magazine PropertyWire Confidential. Every week the PropertyWire team sends out a hard-hitting newsletter packed with news and analysis of the top stories plus the best investment opportunities on the market.

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I spend a lot of time on the internet but as a Realtor, writer photographer and occasional software quality assurance tester of apps and web sites most of my work is on the internet.   

Pinterest is kind of 2010 but it did not really gain traction until last year.  I was able to mostly ignore it until a couple of months ago.  Pinterest is about curations or collections or maybe a form of digital hoarding.

 There are pin boards and users can pin, which is mostly about linking to  photographs.  There

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Toronto, Canada, January 17, 2012 – The chief executive officer at Foreclosures Canada today announced the company is now offering an exclusive Canada foreclosure list along with pre-foreclosures and home auctions information to website visitors. The companys website is updated on a weekly basis so there is always new content available for real estate investors and home buyers.

One of the main points which the writers on the Foreclosures Canada website try to help people understand is that all foreclosures and other types of distressed property sales must go through the legal transfer process.

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The Ocean Cove Townhomes overlooking Herring River in West Harwich have been rescued in high style by third-generation custom home builder Ralph Vacca.

Vacca, of Vacca Custom Homes based in Needham, owns a home in West Harwich and had followed the project’s struggles to survive financial troubles since 2005.

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As of Saturday, January 14th, the pending ratio in Bellingham was 21% . Pending is the time frame between when an offer has been mutual accepted between the buyers and the sellers of the home and when the title actually transfers hands.

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The median home price for December was $120,000, down from $139,500 in December 2010, according to statistics from the Tucson Association of Realtors Multiple Listing Service.

In November the median sales price – the point where half of homes sell for less and half sell for more – was $122,000.

Housing inventory shrunk 28 percent from 2010, with 4,911 active listings in December compared with 6,859 active listings at the same time a year earlier.

And while the median price remains far lower than in years past, home sales have increased.

There were 961 total unit sales in December, up from 907 unit sales in December 2010, the numbers show.

Tucson Housing Market

Dec.

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That’s by way of putting the bestselling author’s nearly $350,000 bill into perspective, which is of course on a not-at-all-typical property. He owns about 17,000 square feet at the Ritz-Carlton Residences alongside the Inner Harbor.

You can see all 10 of the homes with the biggest bills — and the top 10 commercial properties as well — in this photo gallery, if you didn’t already check it out over the weekend.

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Brand personality is a concept that you need to pay close attention to as a luxury real estate marketing professional, especially if you want to stand out from your completion in an instant. You only have a nano-second to make an indelible first impression on your target market. Before, you can present your extraordinary promise of value in words you must first capture their attention, visually.  Clearly expressing your authentic brand personality graphically (as a brand identity) can do just that.

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A nation’s homes shape the quality of its citizens’ lives.  Homes are where the workaday world ends and family life begins.  Life’s passages take place in our homes; they are where children grow up and memories are made.  Homes form the building blocks of every community.

Not since the Depression has a man-made disaster so threatened America’s homes and housing stock as the plague of foreclosures that began with the subprime meltdown of 2006 and continues to this day.

Since 2006, some 4.5 million homes have completed the lengthy, sad ordeal of default, foreclosure, repossession and resale.  About 6 million more are in process as 2012 begins.  A smaller but substantial number of beleaguered borrowers chose short sales to avoid foreclosure.  These distressed sales accounted for more than 40 percent of all home sales every month for the past 23 straight months, according to the Campbell/Inside Mortgage Finance HousingPulse Tracking Survey or real estate brokers.

Houses entering foreclosure often suffer neglect, disrepair and even vandalism at the hands of cash-strapped, angry owners.  Once abandoned, they languish empty for more than a year, deteriorating and inviting decay and destruction.  So many are in need of serious repair when they finally come on the market that a new category of distressed sales has been created:  damaged REO.  As foreclosure timelines have lengthened over the past 18 months, the damaged REO category has grown to 13.9 percent of all home sales and perhaps more this year, more than 400,000 properties in 2011 alone.

Damaged foreclosures have an incredibly toxic effect on home values.  Even one or two long-vacant damaged homes can hurt the value every home in a neighborhood.  They usually list at a 5 to 7 percent discount below other foreclosures, which sell at 20-30 percent below a comparable home in the same area, though in November, damaged REO homes sold at a significant discount—58 percent below other distressed properties, according to the November Inside Mortgage Finance survey.

The discount reflects how difficult they are to sell; few owner/occupant buyers can afford the cost of repair to make them move-in ready.  They linger on market, dragging down prices and values of neighboring properties, until they are purchased by those investors who are willing to take the risk to make a serious investment.

In major foreclosure markets such as Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Miami, damaged foreclosures have played havoc.  The Las Vegas Review Journal reported in July that the deterioration of vacant homes — many of them bank-owned — continued to drag down home values in Las Vegas while other housing markets were showing signs of stabilization.

Las Vegas home values dropped more than 60 percent from their peak to a median price of $111,000 in May.  Yet hundreds of foreclosed homes languished on the market for months, even years, often hurting home values in the surrounding neighborhood.  They were consistently devalued by appraisers by $5,000 or more based simply on appearance.

“So here we’re stuck — the foreclosure capital of the nation — with a glut of vacant homes fueling the self-destruction of a once booming Las Vegas housing market. Local housing analysts estimate that

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