Let’s Do Something About It

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Planet Earth – We have the technology…we can rebuilt it.

We ran across an info-graphic today that really got our gears turning, so we’d like to share it with you to start off this blog post.

 

 

This info-graphic inspired us to re-iterate a value we hold dear – sustainability. one of the key components of our business model is to create a paperless real estate office solution for all to benefit from, including the environment.  This way we create less need for paper usage as well as preventing the consumption of energy or causes of environmental instability required to dispose of paper or other materials. By going paperless you’re not only saving money, you’re saving the planet.

One of the main problems revolving around the concept of sustainability in our society is the constant debate of whether or not what’s happening to the Earth is actually climate change or not, as opposed to just doing something about it. Not only are we perpetuating the issues that created this global environmental state of instability, but we have methods to avoid this situation entirely, but are afraid to use them. Economic systems have been built around the concept of fossil fuels (which is inadvertently messing up the planet) making it difficult for those in power to see the benefits of pursuing a global initiative to convert to sustainable energy methods. The problem with this situation is that the clock’s ticking a little bit too quickly for comfort when it comes to the detrimental effects of current human behaviour on our planet. Instead of looking at the money we will lose we need to very seriously consider the fact that we’re starting to lose where we live, and soon, the people living there.

What can we do? Push for more initiatives that encourage clean sustainable energy to prevent a very real possibility of catastrophic circumstances as a result of everything we’re clinging to. It’s not about economics, it’s about the people and the planet. We can all make the right choice, now we just need to do it together.

 

image courtesy of Kevin M. Gill

For more environmental and real estate news, stay tuned to our Blog and Twitter for updates.

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We’re Going To RLPNSC!

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And what a mouthful of an acronym that is. The Royal LePage National Sales Conference (RLPNSC) is taking place in Vancouver, BC in just under a month and we can’t wait to see you there. We’ll be accompanied by our associates EstateVue to bring you a fully-rounded and detailed real estate solution covering all of your bases that’s guaranteed to leave you beaming with excitement.

To mention a few of our services and what to expect to learn about from us, here’s a list…because who doesn’t like a nice list, right?!

    • Accounting Solutions
    • Document Management Software
    • Business Management Software
    • Transaction Management Software
    • Real Estate Back Office Solutions
    • Paperless Office Solutions
    • Marketing
    • Technology
    • IDX
    • Premium websites
    • Mobile Friendly Websites
    • iPhone and Android Apps
    • SEO
    • Print and Digital Advertising
    • Graphic Design
    • Social Media
    • Content Creation

Pay us a visit at #RLPNSC to learn more about what you’re missing out on – we promise it’ll be worth it. Just look for the orange and green! We’ll be there all weekend from the 20th to the 22nd, so take your time and cruise over when you get a chance. Photos of our t-shirts and other materials are coming soon, so stay tuned to Twitter and the Blog for future updates.

 

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Boomerang Benefits

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The boomerang generation – a title freely used to describe most people who were born in the late 80’s and early 90’s, who are now in their 20’s, have gone to college or university, then moved straight back home. One of the main causes of this ‘boomerang generation’ phenomenon are the lack of available jobs in combination with the lack of affordable housing to these young people, who generally go broke from paying for school to get a degree that didn’t even earn them a job after-all…it’s a vicious cycle to say the least.

How do we break this cycle that’s causing such a distinct divide in the availability of social opportunities for our children? By sticking out our hands and helping our kids off the ground. It’s not really their fault they can’t afford a house or a car or their education…our generation sort of made it that way. We’re the ones with all the jobs and houses, so it’s no wonder there isn’t any room to share with our kids, unless we initiate their launch into the spectrum of social and financial responsibility.

Most of these boomerang victims are working enough to afford to pay rent, so instead of letting them continue to walk down the never-ending path of dissipating rent money, why not fork out for a down-payment for their first home? It sounds crazy, and it sounds like a lot of money, we get that, but when you look objectively at what it is – an investment – then there’s no need to panic. Position your family into a more financially stable and achievable situation by securely investing your money (especially with the market barely starting to recover from being bottomed-out), while pushing your kid into the real world by putting their name on the deed to a house and initiating the responsibility of mortgage payments to benefit their credit rating and social standing. After all, if you left it up to them to come up with a down-payment, let’s face it, they’re just going to hang around and wait for their inheritance, and nobody likes the sound of that.

A way to take this step even further would be to make the same investment if your “kid” is going to school abroad. Regardless of where they’re going, this same secure investment can be made to benefit both of your finances. They’ll be guaranteed a stable place to live throughout the course of their schooling while you make a secure investment.  The reason this is a secure window of time for the property’s value to raise to achieve profit on the re-sale once they return home from school with a pristine degree in their hands, is that their schooling can take anywhere from 4 to 10 years (or more) to complete, depending on the degree. Considering the current market prices, don’t think too much about it and just make the investment! The market’s about as close to bottoming out as it’s going to get, so the time’s never been better to take advantage of the next few years of growth and cash in, and to give your kid a fighting chance at entering ‘the real world’.

For more real estate and environmental news, be sure to check out the rest of our Blog and follow us on Twitter.

 

image courtesy of jollyjump

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GMO’s Are Big No No’s

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The battle against GMO’s rages on wildly as Monsanto plans on selling their genetically modified organisms, predominantly corn, on the fresh food market for the first time, sending environmental activists into a fury.

Generally, Monsanto’s genetically modified corn doesn’t get as far as the shelf in your local grocery store and instead is sold to major corporations and processed to make all sorts of different foods and drinks, as well as being fed to cows instead of proper food, as the genetically modified corn can be produced cheaper than other animal food. GMO’s like corn are used in a multitude of foods like cereal, soda pop, and all sorts of weird stuff that you’d never think corn would have anything to do with. Soybeans are also in the same boat, courtesy of Monsanto. (For more information on GMO’s and Monsanto, be sure to check out Food Inc.)

What’s wrong with normal food? Is corn so terrible that we needed to doctor it to make it better? Last we checked natural corn tasted just fine, so what’s the crack? Now 94% of corn produced is a GMO, and the scariest part about this whole ordeal is that not only are GMO’s going to be sold as “fresh food” despite it’s barely being food, but they won’t even be labelled as GMO products, so there’ll be no telling the difference when shopping in the produce section at your local Wal-Mart – the supposed retailer of these forthcoming GMO products.

In November, Californians will be asked to vote on whether or not GMO products should be labelled in-store or not. The unfortunate part about this is that the “Big Food” campaigners suggesting these goods don’t require labels have managed to contribute up to $25 Million in campaign funding, which is ten times as much as the organic farmers and environmentalists opposing them have raised.

We can only hope that this vote, and the other votes taking place in numerous states to ensure the labeling of GMO’s, work out in the environmentalist and organic farmers’ favour so that these “foods” can be labelled as what they are. This could even be a step in the direction of abolishing the concept and production of genetically modified foods as a result of raised public awareness…but we won’t get our hopes up just yet.

For more environmental and real estate news, be sure to follow us on Twitter and check out the rest of our Blog.

image courtesy of KB35

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Home Improvement Breakdown

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Every once in a while we run into some houses that have been personalized, adjusted, tailored, or whatever else you’d like to call it, just a little bit too much to the owner’s liking. In fact, most of these “little changes” become a pretty “big deal” when you’re trying to sell your property. This is why we’re here today to inform those of you who weren’t already aware that, when making adjustments to your home, you seriously need to draw the line at some point. This is a perfect example of what happens when you don’t draw the line:

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We get it if you want to paint the bathroom, put in a new oven, maybe even put a swimming pool in the back yard, and that’s all totally fine. However, when you start painting the Bat signal (yes, the photo is real) on the bottom of your new swimming pool to entertain your kid, you should really stop and ask yourself two things:

1) What on Earth am I spending this money for?

2) Who’s ever going to buy this?

These are two fail-safe tips to hopefully prevent you from making the same mistakes these Bat-crazy homeowners have made. At the end of the day, your home improvement projects need to be reasonable and tasteful to appeal to the general public, while also hopefully improving the re-sale value of your property instead of degrading it. If you desperately need to customize your house to the theme of your favourite comic book hero, or whatever else, then decorate it or hang a picture up instead of mutilating your home. This isn’t like getting a tattoo where you’re the only person who will ever have it and that’s that. It’s a property. You’re eventually going to sell it, and when you do, you need to make sure you haven’t destroyed it to the point where nobody’s going to buy it…otherwise you might was well put your money in a blender and feed it to your cat. **No cats were harmed during the writing of this blog post

Maybe it’s all the Batman frenzy that’s been happening lately that’s led these homes to be Bat-themed…but this has to stop. Do what’s best for your property, give your head a shake, and remind yourself you’re a grown up (as much as that may suck to admit). If all fails, just think of those sweet $$’s you’re missing out on by impeding the resale value of your property all for some novelty “improvements”. We promise you’ll thank us later…now please start painting over your Iron Man mural.

For more real estate and environmental news, check out the rest of our Blog or follow us on Twitter.
images coutresy of Zillow and UberReview

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The Problem With Change

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People have a problem with change. No need to gasp, this isn’t exactly a new concept – and frankly, to some extent, fearing change isn’t a big deal. If the change you don’t like is relative to your obsessive-compulsive resembling schedule, daily routine, or something personal that doesn’t affect those around you, then we can probably let that slide. The real problem is people who fear change and exercise their fear in situations where they impede progress or conflict with those around them. Look at climate change for example. We talk about this quite often – people are in denial about the concept of climate change because they fear the changes they may need to make to either a) prevent the issue from growing, or b) the changes they’ll need to make once their lives have been affected by climate change as a result of global negligence of the issue and its preventative measures.

But today we aren’t actually directly talking about climate change. We’re talking about how the fear of change directly impedes progress – the fear of change derived from stubbornness, “old-school” mentalities, and people being straight-up stuck in their ways. Getting to the point of all this, here’s the opening portion of a C|Net article we read that sparked the creation of this post:

“Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and his wife were trying to find a nice San Francisco neighborhood for their young family to call home. A year and half ago, they found what they were looking for, a 6,300-square-foot lot occupied by an early 1900s home that they now want to demolish to make way for a new house.”

Now, this article goes on to explain the intentions of Williams’ need for demolishing this early 1900’s home – to re-build the home as a zero net energy home.  His plans for the home include solar panels, a green roof, and sun-friendly glass. If you ask us, the demolition of this beautiful, yet very old home, is  not that big of a deal considering that its replacement would have less impact on the environment. This is where we come full-circle to the issue of change. Before Williams even submitted his plans for this newly purchased home, over 240 complaint were filed by surrounding neighbours.

This is exactly what we’re talking about where people, in the same instance as global warming, want things to stay the same for personal benefits rather than supporting the greater good of society or the environment. The sad part is how ill-informed the people submitting these complaints are, especially when looking at exemplary quotes like “TEAR DOWN is NEEDLESS, WASTEFUL, POLLUTION, DISRESPECTFUL,” which was written on a hand-written flyer and passed around by some long time residents of the neighbourhood to every house around; hence the overflow of complaints. It seems really unfair that based on personal opinion, stubbornness, and inconvenience, that one of the most progressively and sustainable houses the area is yet to encounter, is receiving so much negative attention and having unnecessary “road blocks” created for the project.

The moral of this story is that fear of change is detrimental to the social and environmental progression that we need to save our planet from a climate disaster. If people want to tear down archaic houses and place a new, socially and economically friendly property on its foundation, why not support it? We need to change our ways and progressively work toward a greener future, and yes, that will involve replacing a lot of buildings for ones that aren’t going to be detrimental to the environment. It’s just the way it has to be…

Tell us what you think about demolishing for the purpose of responsible re-construction, or any other feedback on Twitter.

image credit:  CNET

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The Race For Oil Is Drying Us Out

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And it’s doing it in both the metaphorical and literal sense…As we are continuously patrolling the globe in search for oil to turn into combustible fuels, we are also feeding the monolithic Goliath known as climate change. Not only are we depleting this ever-so-important resource, but in doing so, we’re feeding the global warming phenomenon, thus literally drying us out with climate temperature increases, and the depletion of our natural resources.

We could even look at the dangerous extraction process of this resource, invasive foreign policies, and wars that have occurred over oil as drying us out of people as well. The reason this situation that seems so perplexing is that we have the technology to avoid the unnecessary consumption and extensive depletion of oil sitting right in front of us: battery power. Battery powered vehicles are not a new technology (Green-Tech: “Recycling” Electric Vehicles, Green-Tech: Debunking the Electric Vehicle) but are finally starting to be produced on a relatively large scale; however not large enough. We have the ability to create fleets of electric vehicles, yet each car manufacturer only tends to produce one or two models of vehicle that are 100% battery powered.

Call us crazy, but wouldn’t it be easier on the environment, the planet, and the people who risk their lives for the extraction and acquisition of oil, if we did just that? It seems that despite the obvious warning signs that our planet is about to be in big doo-doo (Watch 131 Years of Global Warming in 26 Seconds) and shows no signs of future improvement, that nobody really wants to execute the solution. We’re not saying battery power would eliminate the need for oil – hopefully one day it could – we’re saying that we could save a lot of lives, future, and present, as well as preventing the environmental havoc that oil extraction invokes, and hopefully slowing down the global warming process, despite the fact that it may already be too late to do so.

Are there other alternatives that could end this oil-crazy world? Are we being too hasty to think that this whole process is preventable? What are other methods that could yield the same results we’re talking about? Let us know your thoughts on Twitter.

 

image credit: http://grist.org/news/great-news-the-world-is-on-the-brink-of-a-massive-boom-in-oil-production/

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Here We Go Again

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As it turns out, the housing market is reportedly stabilizing as we, among many others, have been talking about for the past couple months. The interesting portion about this is where the stability is being derived from. From what we can see, there’s a large number of investors putting their money into luxury real estate…but that’s about it. A news clip from CNBC stated that 24% of Americans making over $450,000/year are in the market for real estate (more specifically luxury real estate) which is a substancial 7% increase since last year. The market has of course bottomed and started to show signs of stability, but the only people who seem to be able to afford taking advantage of this situation are the people who were never really affected by it in the first place.

Low interest rates, low prices, and promise of market improvement is any investor’s dream, but what about the rest of the population that doesn’t even come close to making that sort of coin? Heck, Canada’s housing prices still haven’t even bottomed, and are expected to drop another 10% over the next two to three years. So, while wealthy investors, foreign and domestic, take advantage of this situation, there seems to be no weight being thrown around by the “average” social classes, which is kind of a scary thought. Why? Because when a market cheapens up, if there’s only a small population of people who can afford to have a piece of the pie, it makes for a really unbalanced property market. Yes, it contributes to market recovery, but if luxury properties are the only ones being circulated to seemingly increase their value, while making no contribution to evening out the rest of the market, it may lead to another collapse down the road.

New mortgage rates in the US are dropping to try and increase purchasing rates and entice new buyers, which is great, but in Canada they’re going up…and they’re cutting mortgages shorter to boot, pushing new buyers even further away from their purchasing goals. Homes and properties are being purchased, but the way this is weighted doesn’t spell good news looking down the road. If the rich get richer, while the rest of us scrape our change together to make the same level of purchases, the market won’t stabilize. Keep in mind that renting rates are going up in conjunction with available properties instead of the ideal situation of new buyers rising in conjunction with increasingly available properties. Collectively, this doesn’t exactly scream “recovering market” as much as it does “impending monopoly”.

article originally published via EstateVue

photo courtesy of f_shields

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Greenland’s Getting Greener

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Yes indeed, Greenland’s starting to show it’s true colours, but not in a good way. Recently, scientists discovered that Greenland, which is nearly completely covered by ice, started melting…in fact, about 97% of Greenland’s massive ice sheet showed signs of melting, even in the coldest highest places. This incident is receiving mixed attention from the scientific community, as some are looking to climate change and global warming as a probable cause for the expansive amount of melting, and others are declaring that this incident is cyclical for Greenland, as the country experienced the same phenomenon about 150 years ago.

What we do know, is that, other than a piece of ice the size of Manhattan breaking off from the sheet, this melting is getting resource gathering companies excited at the idea of tapping this unexplored source. Yes, from the ashes of any terrible situation there always rises those who keep profitability closest to their hearts as opposed to humanity. Unfortunately, this could lead to another situation where overzealous foreign interest and militarization turns one country into another’s cash cow, while their resources are extorted and exported. However, hopefully the melting will not continue to catastrophic lengths and Greenland, and their valuable deposits of resources, can remain in tact. This could be a whole lot of speculating for nothing, so let’s hang back and see what comes next.

For more information on the newfound interest in Greenland’s resources, please visit the following article: http://grist.org/news/let-the-games-begin-the-rush-for-resources-in-greenland/

photo courtesy of christine zenino

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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No! Not My Commission!

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Calling all agents – we have a situation on our hands. A recent website, http://bidcomhomes.com/, has taken the real estate world by surprise, and is changing the structures of how you guys are making your commission.

Once upon a time, Giorgio Lupinacci asked some of his real estate agent friends if they’d lower their commission rate when he was looking at selling his property. To his surprise, none of them agreed to his proposition, so he took matters into his own hands and started bigcomhomes.com – a website where agents bid their commission rates on user-submitted listings in hopes to find an agent who’s willing to provide their clients with a more discounted rate than the standard format in BC: “seven per cent on the first $100,000 and 3.5 per cent on the remainder of the sale price”.

This website’s concept is raising some pulses in the real estate game, as it’s directly threatening the more or less monopolized MLS system, and the accustomed livelihood of many agents. Agents, we want to know what you think of this game changing website. Will only “certain types” of agents be using this service, or could this lead to the creation of an even more competitive market? Does this platform show potential for expansion? How would you feel about commission rates being more competitive altogether, should this concept catch on?

Let us know your answers on Twitter by using the hashtag #commissionproblems, or by commenting below. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

 

photo courtesy of CarbonNYC

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