Celebration Real Estate & Homes For Sale - Celebration Florida Realtor

Archive for August, 2008

Here are the Orlando property market figures for the month of July 2008 as reported by the Orlando Regional Realtor® Association:

• 1,436 homes were sold during the month of July.
• 8,387 homes have been sold so far in 2008.
• The number of homes currently under contract is 3,258.
• The median sales price of a home in the Orlando area is $207,500.
• Homes of all types spent an average of 117 days on the market.
• The average home sold for 93.50 percent of its listing price.
• There are currently 24,742 homes available for purchase through the MLS.

And comparisons with July 2007:

• The number of homes sold is 5.77 percent below the total of 1,524 homes sold in July 2007.
• Year to date sales are down by 24.52 percent against last year’s number of 11,112.
• The number of homes currently under contract (3,258) is 26.72 percent greater than the number of homes that were under contract in July 2007 (2,571).
• The median sales price for July 2008 is 17.00 percent below the July 2007 median of $250,000.
• Homes of all types spent an average of 117 days on the market before being sold in July 2008, and the average home sold for 93.50 % of its listing price compared with 96.00 and 94.66 %, respectively.
• Compared to last year, the July 2008 inventory level (24,742) is 4.90 percent lower than it was in July 2007 (26,018).

On the face of it, not much to cheer about of you’re a homeowner, particularly if you are trying to sell your home now. The only slight glimmer of hope is to be found in the decrease in inventory levels and increase in the number of homes under contract.

On the other hand, if you’re a buyer, especially a first-time buyer or an investor, then this could be the right time to buy. It all depends upon your assessment of whether the market has bottomed out or not.

Technorati Tags: orlando property market, Orlando Real Estate, orlando regional realtors

According to comScore Networks Video Metrix service, “U.S. Internet users viewed more than 12 billion online videos during May 2008, representing an increase of 45 percent versus a year ago.”

“And as the video revolution has spread, it’s created an important new way for real estate professionals to market themselves and get home buyers and sellers more immediately involved in the home sales process” writes Michael Antoniak in the Realtor magazine.

Today, I thought I would see if my fellow Celebration realtor’s had embraced this new marketing tool and, if so, how and in what ways.

I started by searching YouTube for videos tagged with “Celebration Real Estate” and then checked out some related links.

I found several videos of Celebration itself, the most popular being this one produced by the Orlando Avenue Top Team with 12,138 views.

Welcome To Celebration Florida

As far as real estate specific videos, I found 8 videos in total, 7 promoting homes for sale in Celebration, Florida, and 1 promoting the Orlando Avenue Top Team.

You can watch all 8 videos below. Leave a comment and let me know what you think of them.

Carlyle Celebration Florida Real Estate

- views 194

Real Estate Homes for Sale Celebration, Florida 34747

- views 2,448

118 Celebration Blvd. Florida

- views 1,787

211 Longview Ave #301 Celebration Florida

- views 431

Homes for Sale Celebration FL Sally Kamrada

- 180

Luxury Villa in Celebration Florida

- views 845

914 Greenlawn St. Celebration, FL

- views 129

Orlando Avenue Top Team

- views 58

Technorati Tags: Celebration Real Estate, real estate videos, using video to market celebration properties

Yesterday, I wrote about a Celebration Condos rental scam that some friends told me about last weekend and how one landlord in NY State has decided to fight back against serial evictees and other rotten tenants.

Today, I have been searching around the web and tracked down some more information that I hope will be of interest to my readers. As far as I can tell, the first story about serial evictees was posted by the San Francisco Weekly and called How Renters Work the System to Live for Free in a Very Expensive City.

The story was then picked up by a number of blogs, including the Consumerist:

How “Serial Evictees” Game A System Meant To Protect Renters From … - SF Weekly has an article that tracks the exploits of a serial evictee, a “renter” who leases apartments with no intention of paying rent, and then games the system in order to stay rent free for as long as possible. …

And finally, there’s this post on the Chicago Landlord blog where Melissa Stanley, a Chicago real estate agent with 10+ years experience owning and managing apartment buildings, offers some tips on how to avoid being scammed by Serial Evictees.

In addition to Melissa’s excellent advice, I would suggest that all Celebration landlords check the on-line Court records that are available here in Florida to see if a potential renter has been previously evicted. Click here to search the Osceola County Court records.

We had some friends over at the weekend and they told us about how a friend of theirs, who owns several Celebration condos, had been caught out by a rental scam recently.

Having paid the first month’s rent and security deposit to get in the condo, one of their renters then made up a string of habitability complaints, and more, as justification for not paying any more rent. By using their knowledge of the law and how the legal system works, the renter managed to stay in the condo for 7 whole months absolutely rent free before they were eventually evicted!

It turns out that this wasn’t the first time this particular individual had done this. He is what is commonly known as a serial evictee”.

It also turns out that this particular scam isn’t confined to Celebration either as I discovered yesterday when I came across a blog post on Sellsius Real Estate that talks about this very issue and how one landlord has decided to fight back by “creating a database of problem tenants so as to warn other landlords of undesirables”.

You can find this database as RottenTenant.com. It only has a few names at the moment, but I suspect that this will change as more and more landlords become aware of this site.

Technorati Tags: celebration condos, celebration rentals scam, rotten tenants, serial evictee