Labels: Boise, Idaho, Listings, Pocket Real Estate Listings, Quality of Life, Real Estate

Stumbled across this excellent article from the Spokane Home Builder's Association. Here's a snippet:

Generation Y relies on e-mail, the Internet, PDAs, BlackBerrys and other electronic devices and, for many, these technologies are their preferred method of communication. In addition, studies show that eight out of 10 Generation Y home buyers use the Internet to research their home choices.

Once they have narrowed their choices, they expect their requests for more information to be answered quickly and for those answers to be personalized ― they don’t want to wait a week or two for a generic response.

I wonder if Generation Y'ers mind being labeled? We're cautioned about defining home buyers (empty nesters, seniors, minorities, etc), but when it comes to young people, the rules seem to change.

There is a lot of truth here, though. We find that a lot of our younger buyers use our automated home search tools and rely more heavily on email. Undoubtedly many of our clients are also using social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Blogger.

To that end, we now provide our sellers with the tools and expertise to integrate their home’s listing to any number of websites, increasing exposure to potential (and potentially younger) buyers. Here are some examples:

 Through our relationship with Realbird.com, you can use social book-marking or networking services to save and share your personalized listing website. Forwarding to friends, family or prospects is easy and encourages viral marketing.

 Your listing is featured on our blog using a handy program called a “widget” that is regularly updated and user-friendly.

 We have all the information and coding available to help sellers imbed a beautiful slideshow of their listing onto their blog, website, Facebook profile—or just about any site !

Labels: Blogging, Listing, Real Estate Trends, Successful Marketing

Remember the cover of Newsweek naming the Hottest Tech Cities? If your city wasn't on there, you probably don't. But Boise does. (The enlarged cover is even hanging in the Boise Chamber of Commerce.)

In addition to the kudos Forbes regularly gives Boise, add "Up and Coming Tech City" to the list.

Calling Boise an "up and coming" tech city is a head-scratcher, but the news is still welcome.

Since the 1970s, chip maker Micron Technology and computer giant Hewlett-Packard, along with the Idaho National Laboratory, had buoyed Boise's technology sector. But now there are new faces. In 2006, Idaho ranked seventh nationally in the percentage increase in venture capital investments and 11th in concentration of high-tech workers. One home-grown start-up, Quantum Point Technologies, provides a suite of information-technology management services to agencies at the U.S. Department of the Interior and regional businesses like Washington Trust Bank.

Over time we've accumulated a list of kudos for the Boise Valley. No doubt there are more!

“Best Cities to Do Business in America--#2” Inc (2005)
“No. 1 Best Place for Business and Careers” Forbes (2005)
"No. 8 Best Place to Live" Money (2006)
“No. 1 Mountain Biking Town” Bike Magazine (2003)
“No. 2 Safest Places to Live” Forbes
"No. 4 Best Walking City" Prevention (2006)
"Top 10 Places for Outdoor Activities" Sperling's Best Places (2005)

As part of the information we send to out-of-town buyers, we created a document called "Why You Should Move to Boise."

Labels: Boise, Idaho, News