Larry DeGroat, ABR, CRS, e-PRO, GRI in Searcy

The chart below shows how many Residential properties that the Searcy Board of Realtors sold that were listed in CARMLS (our Multiple Listing Service). It also gives you the average listed price, average sold price, the list to sale ratio and how many days it was on the market. This information can be useful to let you know what the market conditions in the Searcy Board of Realtors area is doing.

As you can see, the number of properties sold in 2006 & 2007 is about 100 more properties than what was sold in 2008. One good thing about this, is the average sold prices have increased. This information alone is not the only information you need to look at to see what your property is worth. We'll need to look at the location, condition, age, number of bedrooms & baths as well as the square footage of other homes that are comparable to yours to determine recommended market selling price. I will be glad to provide you a Comparative Market Analysis (CMA) of your property.

Armed with this information, now is a good time to purchase that new home especially with the low interest rates we have. Call Larry today at 501-268-8489 and start packing!

For a printable copy of this report click on this link http://www.searcy4sale.com/pdf/Sold_2002_2008_Info.PDF

I am a Realtor in Searcy, Arkansas and I sell new homes, existing homes, commercial property, farms and land as well as manage and own rental properties. If you are looking for real estate for an investment or a home, I will be glad to assist you! You can call my personal cell number at 501-278-7659 or e-mail me at Larry@Searcy4Sale.com. Visit my website at http://www.searcy4sale.com

I am located about an hour north of Little Rock, Arkansas. We were at the edge of the ice storm that hit Arkansas the last couple of days. My daughter had to go to school both days and schools all around us were closing. We did not get hit that bad.

I had to drive to a foreclosure property that was having rehab done to it and needed to take pictures of the work that was completed. The property is about 25 miles west of Searcy and you could see a big difference in the weather and conditions there. The roads had spot ice and I have included some pictures to show the rest. I had to drive down a gravel road and the roads were frozen over with accumulated ice where there were culverts under the road.

It is suppose to thaw out today and everything back to normal, at least for us. Northern Arkansas was hit real bad. I have two children at ASU in Jonesboro and my son had electricity and my daughter lives in the dorms and their electricity was out until about noon Wednesday.

I am a Realtor in Searcy, Arkansas and I sell new homes, existing homes, commercial property, farms and land as well as manage and own rental properties. If you are looking for real estate for an investment or a home, I will be glad to assist you! You can call my personal cell number at 501-278-7659 or e-mail me at Larry@Searcy4Sale.com. Visit my website at http://www.searcy4sale.com

If you're in need of the address or phone number for a business or restaurant, you can always call 411 for help. If you send a text message to 466453 (which spells Google on a phone dial pad), you'll get the address and phone number on your screen, so you don't need to write anything down or worry about getting reconnected. Simply write the name of the business city and state in the body of the message and hit send. While this is a free service, you do have to pay your carrier's standard rate for messaging. This is pretty neat! Hope it helps you!

Also, I was just surfing the other day to see if there is anything else out there that would be helpful in my real estate business. I stumbled upon eyejot.com and it is really neat. If you have a webcam and a microphone on your computer you can send video e-mails to your customers, clients or family. I don't know if you feel this way but I was taking my daughter back to college on Sunday and I told her that I think I won't be text messaging them anymore because it took the personal touch out of it. I have two in college and a junior in high school. The two in college do about 11,000 to 14,000 text messages per month. We text and you read into the messages things that are not there. Since this is the way youth communicate, we have to get involved and I think this eyejot.com is a good way to keep feelings in your communications and use today technology.

This is simple to use and I learned it in about 10 minutes. There is no programs to load on your computer, it is all web based. The reason it took so long is I don't have a webcam on my computer and I was able to use a video camera I have and hooked to it my computer by the firewire cable. When you have eyejot configured to make sure your microphone and camera is working, you just hit the record button and start your message. Eyejot has a free service and a fee for service. If I begin to use this alot, I'll probably go to the fee for service. The free service/account lets you record upto 1 minute messages and your message stay on the system for only 30 days. Believe it or not, a 1 minute message is a lot of time to send for a quick update or to say hi. Then you add their e-mail address and you can even type a message and the hit send and that is it. The receiving party will get an e-mail and they click on the video and the browser will open eyejot and they can watch the video message you sent. If they have a webcam and microphone and an account with eyejot, they can hit reply and record one and send right back to you. I like this because you do keep the personal touch in it.

That's all I have right now and I need to get back to work. There is endless oportunity with eyejot, if you buy the service, you can record a message and embed it on your website and it will stay on eyejot until you remove it. Technology is great but it can also distract you. Have fun with 466453 and eyejot!

I am a Realtor in Searcy, Arkansas and I sell new homes, existing homes, commercial property, farms and land as well as manage and own rental properties. If you are looking for real estate for an investment or a home, I will be glad to assist you! You can call my personal cell number at 501-278-7659 or e-mail me at Larry@Searcy4Sale.com. Visit my website at http://www.searcy4sale.com

Phishing (pronounced "fishing") is getting unreal! I get a lot of e-mail and if you didn't know what to look for, you could get scammed into giving your information.

THIS IS A COPY OF THE E-MAIL THAT I RECEIVED THIS MORNING. IT LOOKS VERY REAL! DO NOT REPLY TO THIS E-MAIL.

DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK IN THE BOX BELOW, YOU CAN WAVE YOUR MOUSE OVER IT AND IT WILL SHOW YOU AT THE BOTTOM OF YOUR BROWSER WHERE IT WILL SEND YOU. I DID CLICK ON IT AND MY VIRUS PROGRAM SHUT IT DOWN AFTER IT OPENED.

REMEMBER! NEVER give your social security number out over the internet! If they are contacting you like this message ABOVE is doing, then they should already have it.

Also, never give out credit card information, your login & passwordsover the internet unless you go to that site and was not directed to there like this e-mail has. If you do go to the site, make sure it has in the url address https: Most of the time, this will let you know that it is a secure site. I was directed to a site a few weeks ago from an e-mail and it was to a https site and I noticed they added an extra character in the name LIKE (I don't remember the site and this is just an illustration) https://www.ebay.com to https://www.ebays.com be very careful in today's teckie world. I shut the page down and deleted the e-mail.

Also, if you get an e-mail and you don't recognize the sender, it is usually best to delete it. Sometimes though, I get e-mails and I didn't know who it was and it was a real customer. (Being in the real estate business though, this should happen a lot) Before opening it, I;ll right click on the senders name and see if is a real person. You can put a different name to appear in the e-mail than the actual e-mail address of the sender. So be very careful out there.

I hope this helps you! You need to be very cautious these days and times! If you are still troubled on what to do, make a phone call to the requesting party. If it is real, and everything on the e-mail looks real and the link I went to looked very real, it should have a phone number to call.

I am a Realtor in Searcy, Arkansas and I sell new homes, existing homes, commercial property, farms and land as well as manage and own rental properties. If you are looking for real estate for an investment or a home, I will be glad to assist you! You can call my personal cell number at 501-278-7659 or e-mail me at Larry@Searcy4Sale.com. Visit my website at http://www.searcy4sale.com

It looks like things are about to happen. In our market, October through January are our slower times and it has been that way since I have been in the real estate business 16 years ago.

My indicator that I am using is my website counter. My counter is NOT the normal counter that counts people whenever they hit the page or counts them when my site comes up on a internet search. These numbers are or can be very deceiving. My counter ONLY counts you when you preview a listing. So, when you visit any of my informative pages, it does not count you, if you do a property search and there are 25 properties that meet your criteria, you are not counted. You will only be counted when you do your search and you click on one of the properties in that search. You may click on 10 properties, you are counted 10 times. I think that I would rather count the number of properties looked at, than how many people that may have stumbled across my website.

My site is dial-up friendly (people still do use dial up) and there are a number of people that use it. I even had an Exit agent call me yesterday and his customer found a listing on my site and he was trying to find more information about it, all he knew he was on my website. When you do a property search for my city, I am one of the ones that show up first and it is very user friendly.

Anyway, back to the subject of this blog. I wrote down the counter number on 1-5-09 and then compared it to the current count. In the past 10 days, there were 3,760 properties viewed. That averages 376 properties viewed per day. That is alot of LOOKERS! So, I hope this will be a good "sign for 2009". (wow, that rhymed) Have a blessed and successful 2009 everyone!

I am a Realtor in Searcy, Arkansas and I sell new homes, existing homes, commercial property, farms and land as well as manage and own rental properties. If you are looking for real estate for an investment or a home, I will be glad to assist you! You can call my personal cell number at 501-278-7659 or e-mail me at Larry@Searcy4Sale.com. Visit my website at http://www.searcy4sale.com