That also means the construction industry, which so far has escaped major cyber threats, is no less vulnerable to them, according to the Insurance Recovery Blog of attorneys Hunton Andrews and Kurth LLP. The firm’s practice includes real estate, development and finance; and insurance coverage.

“Sensitive data related to buildings and projects” stored by builders online could prove tempting targets to some hackers, blog authors Michael S. Levine and Alexander D. Russo wrote.

“The more you use electronic platforms, the more vulnerable you’re going to be to hackers who access data improperly or cause harm to a construction project,” they cited Hunton partner Walter Andrews from an interview with Law 360 on cyber risks.

Bad guys might find irresistible the chance to reach other companies simply by attacking one source: the builder that binds them together.

“What makes construction unique from other industries is developers have so many partners they need to share information with and have access to the same data platforms,” Andrews explained. “They have access to your data and you have access to their data, and more importantly, a cyber thief can access your system through theirs and vice versa. That’s what starts to make it unique and create problems.”

One potential answer? Insure against the risk, the blog authors suggested. “Policyholders in the construction industry should look towards specialized cyber insurance that fills any gaps left by more traditional policies,” they wrote.

Photo from Pixabay, used under a Creative Commons license

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“A sparkling resume does not always equal a sparkling personality. And the face-to-face interviews needed to accurately judge prospective hires can consume a lot of time and money,” the article said. Read it here.

The chief executive officer of a Fort Washington PA-based video conferencing firm told the GlobeStreet reporter that “recent technological advances” in video streaming “have greatly improved its quality and lowered the expense.” The spread of web cams and in-phone cameras has also made the interview by video method convenient for hopeful applicants, he added.

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If you or a loved one is a Baby Boomer, the institute offers advice on how to avoid some of the pitfalls that could prevent those in the group from enjoying a happy retirement.

Be Realistic

Fitness is a high priority for boomers, so it’s not surprising that their average life span continues to lengthen. According to the Social Security Administration, the average 65-year-old man today can expect to live until age 84; a woman until age 86.

One of every four 65-year-olds today will live past 90, and one of every 10 will live until at least 95. That means it’s important to have a solid plan for funding your retirement years. If you don’t think you have enough for 20 or 30 years, it may be necessary to step up your savings or consider postponing your Social Security payments so you receive a higher monthly amount later on.

Know What You Need

You will need about 80 percent of your pre-retirement income to cover your expenses in retirement, according to the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. Many people who thought they were on their way to a well-funded retirement saw their investments reduced by the recent recession. The Retirement Pension Planner on the American Institute of CPAs 360 Degrees of Financial Literacy site can help you get a sense of how much you might need, and provide an estimate of when your retirement savings will run out.

Simplify

If you want to have more money for retirement, start changing your spending habits now.

Living within your means can help you stretch your money now and in retirement. A common change in retirement is downsizing from a larger home to a smaller one. You’ll want to talk with a trusted area real estate agent about how to approach that, and ways to maximize your profits from a sale.

Additionally, as you discard or give away things collected over the years, consider how many new things you’ll actually need to purchase during retirement. You may find yourself better able to enjoy what you already have.

Focus On Priorities

Saving for a second home or for a child’s or grandchild’s education are worthwhile goals, but be sure to put your retirement needs first. Remember, it’s always possible to use student loans to pay for college tuition, but there won’t be similar financing available to cover retirement expenses if your savings run out.

Don’t Give Up

If you’re near retirement, it’s not too late to create or enhance your retirement account. Remember, your money can grow tax-deferred in an IRA, 401(k), or annuity, so it’s possible to do some catching up. Many members of the ever-adventurous Baby Boomer generation are also working past the traditional retirement age, so consider your options for continuing with your current job or launching a new career.

Consult A CPA

No matter how close you are to retirement, a CPA can answer your questions and help you create a plan that addresses your short- and long-term needs. To find a CPA in Pennsylvania by location or area of expertise, see the institute’s website here.

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MOORESTOWN NJ – What goes through the mind of a landscape designer as he or she surveys a property for a prospective client?

Dianne Walker, owner of and landscape designer for Colorstone Gardens LLC in Moorestown, says her technique is to “paint with plants.” With the land as her canvas, she told the Burlington County (NJ) Times newspaper, she creates outdoor environments that reflect what she hears people tell her during client interviews. She tries to tie their desires in to the surrounding property’s features or elements, she said.

A video (above) in which Walker was in interview subject herself and explained her process, was posted Thursday (Aug. 29, 2013) by The Times on the YouTube channel of Calkins Media.

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First-time awards were achieved for 700 and 755 Business Center Dr., Horsham PA. Re-certifications were awarded to 2000 Lennox Dr., Lawrenceville NJ; 200, 300 and 400 Berwyn Park, all in Berwyn PA; 101 W. Elm St., Conshohocken PA); One, Two and Three Logan Square, Philadelphia PA); and 401 Plymouth Rd., Plymouth Meeting PA. Other buildings owned by Brandywine in Maryland and Virginia also were awarded.

“We are excited to exceed our 2012 goal of having over 80 Energy Star-rated buildings in the portfolio,” stated George Johnstone, the company’s senior vice president of operations.

Related (to energy use reduction):

• LED Bulbs Easy Way To Save Energy And Money
• Energy Star Awards, Recertifications Presented To Brandywine
• Area Commercial Developer Wins Energy Use Award
• Next At Google: Helping Consumers Read Their Electric Meter

Photo from Google Images

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Real estate licensees, if they intend to be successful, must acknowledge all home buyers – first-timers, repeaters, those who are downsizing, and those who are investing – have fears. Most revolve around losing: losing out on a good deal, losing equity in their properties, losing a low interest rate, losing a bid on the palace of their dreams or, as witnessed all too often in recent years, losing their home altogether.

They’re valid fears for many consumers. Add to the mix worries about buying a lemon and a common lack of understanding of the home-buying process, and it’s no wonder that working in real estate sometimes seems like an uphill struggle.

Top producers rarely falter, though; they usually don’t even see the hill! The reason: they do their best to address consumer fears right up front, and explain how they will help overcome them.

The best salespeople openly admit, for instance, that the housing market was changed forever by the banking crisis. The days of creating instantaneous wealth by buying a home are gone. Like any professional guides, top producers counsel consumers that housing is not a quick-in, quick-out investment. They bolster their claims with solid proof too, like that provided by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. It shows the rate of return on a housing investment increases the longer it is held.

Top producers also recognize that media attention on foreclosure sales and inventory over-supply has generated bargain-hunting fever. They caution consumers that market timing is an almost impossible task, even for world-class economists. The bottom of any market reveals itself only when home prices there begin to rise. By then, the “best bargain” probably has already passed.

So here’s the trustworthy, winning advice record-breaking salespeople give consumers: 1) Find a property within their budget that best satisfies their needs, lifestyle choices and priorities. 2) Buy it right, within the context of the market. 3) Buy for the longer term and, once purchased, let the asset mature.

Just as consumers seek a medical professional to relieve their fears about an illness, they can depend on your services as a professional real estate agent to relieve home-buying fears. Top-notch licensees will identify false fears, work with consumers to address valid ones, and walk them through the entire process.

To win when buying a home, consumers must make many hard, responsible decisions. That becomes easier when you, their agent, keep them informed and dispel or calm their fears. Moreover, it further convinces them that you are the best advocate of their interests.

• Want to join the excitement of NAR’s Nationwide Open House Weekend? Find tips in its “Field Guide to Open Houses,” here. Get promotional resources, here (this will require your Realtors.org login). Find more help from the Pennsylvania Association of REALTIORS®, here.

This article was originally published on the Polley Associates‘ blog
Logo from the National Association of REALTORS®

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The drilling fee is based on a sliding scale that depends primarily on the market price of natural gas and the rate of inflation, according to a story published Monday (Feb. 6, 2012) in the Philadelphia Inquirer newspaper. Minority Democrats, who would prefer a tax on gas extraction rather than collecting a flat fee, estimated fees would range from a low of $240,000 per well to a maximum of $355,000, to be collected over a 15-year period.

It’s taken months of wrangling for the parties involved to reach the compromise on what is being called a “local impact fee,” and which could be voted on as early as this week, The Inquirer said. One of the major sticking points in the talks has been how – and by whom – money raised by the fee would be distributed.

The agreement would allow counties where drilling occurs to decide whether to impose a fee. If a county declines to impose a fee, half its municipalities would have the option to force it to do so.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission would collect and distribute the fee, according to the summary of the agreement. Sixty percent of the money would go to areas directly affected by drilling for things such as infrastructure and public-safety costs. The other 40 percent would go to statewide projects, many of them environmental, including repairs to green ways and recreational trails, protection of open space, and other beautification projects.

• Read more about the fee in an story by reporter Angela Couloumbis, titled “Tentative deal on Pennsylvania shale-gas fee” and published Monday in The Inquirer, here.

This article was originally published on the Polley Associates‘ blog
Photo from PennPatriotBlog.com

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There could be a huge difference between the two and, if so, you may be missing business opportunities. Worse yet, you may be opening the door to competitors.

Ten years ago, the only point of contact most agents or brokers needed to distribute to the world at large was their office telephone number. Then things began to change.

• The office phone wasn’t enough. To better serve clients, agents also began publicizing direct office numbers, fax numbers, home numbers, and cell numbers.
• After that, phone contact seemed antiquated. The Internet was The Next Big Thing, and e-mail was its killer application. Agents offered up their e-mail address, then multiple addresses (some agents have three or four for different purposes), then the subscription for an e-mail newsletter.
• Soon after, agents began supplying web addresses too (technically known as Universal Resource Locators, or URLs) for individual pages on our brokers’ websites, then the domain names for personal websites, followed by web addresses for sales teams, for listings (a page for each property), and for communities.
• Gripped by blogging fever, agents ensured everyone also had URLs for blogs they wrote individually, blogs they published with others, and blogs at real estate information portals in which they participated.
• Web-based messaging came along. To the mix they added IM addresses for Yahoo Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, Meebo, AOL Instant Messenger, and Google Chat. Cell phone text messaging took hold as well, extending the life of cell phone numbers for a wholly different reason.
• And now, with Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, MySpace, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr and a whole host of other social networking media sites, potential points of contact have expanded once again.

Were you keeping count? At a minimum, 29 contact references were mentioned in the space of six short paragraphs, above.

One of the biggest problems plaguing licensees today is managing all these contact nodes. They’ll eat up a lot of valuable time among agents who lack discipline; who are enamored by technology rather than by what it should be doing for them; or who haven’t mastered the shortcuts to communicate quickly.

On the other hand, being inundated by client and prospect queries from multiple contact sources can be a success problem you’d be happy to have. A certain percentage of that contact traffic should be real business that makes you money!

It won’t earn you a dime, though, unless people know you’re available at points of contact of their choosing. The lesson here is simple: in all your marketing materials, on all your websites, and with anything distributed to the public, find ways to list as many of your pertinent points of contact as possible. It’s the way to tell the world, “I’m ready to do business with you, no matter how you get in touch.”

Related:

• Offer Contact Any Way Clients Prefer
• Put Your Real Self Into Real Estate Messages
• New To Social Media? See This Webinar
• Selling With Social Networks

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The association announced that two key measurements it tracks to determine multi-family trends – the Multifamily Production Index, which gauges how builders feel about new construction; and the Multifamily Vacancy Index, which follows what renters are doing – both showed significant improvement during the fourth quarter of 2010. The production number was up, a sign builders were confident about their future. The vacancy number was down, an equally good indicator.

The production index, which tracks developer sentiment about new construction on a scale of 1 (worst) to 100 (best), currently stands at 40.8. That’s the highest number since the fourth quarter of 2006, the association said.

With the vacancy index, smaller numbers indicate fewer vacancies. It’s now at 33.3, the lowest it’s been since the third quarter of 2006, and half of what it was just 18 months ago.

Historically, production and vacancy have performed well as leading indicators of U.S. Census figures for multifamily starts and vacancy rates. Together, they often telegraph movement in Census figures one to three quarters in advance.

Consequently, builders want – but may be unable to – put up more units, according to association Chief Economist David Crowe. Their problem? There’s too little construction financing available to let them meet market demand. That, in turn, will force rental costs up for consumers, said Charles Brindell, chairman of the association’s Multifamily Leadership Board.

Related (to multi-family dwellings):

• Commercial Investors Face Years Of Trouble, Expert Claims
• Market’s Now Looking Better For Multi-Family Housing Units
• Pennsylvania Home Builders Applaud Sprinkler Repeal Vote

Related (to the National Association of Home Builders):

• Builder Study, Manufacturer Sales Show Moulding’s Popularity
• Home Builders Would Love Legislation Offering More Credit
• Market’s Now Looking Better For Multi-Family Housing Units

Photo from Webster University

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