Friday, June 17, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Around town Sunday, January 30, 2011
I was out with clients this afternoon in the Redwood Shores area. We had been out the past two weekends and, last weekend, we saw a couple of interesting homes out of 5.
Today, one of the two, went pending with an all cash offer, 3 day close. I had spoken to the listing agent yesterday and, at that time, there were no prospects in sight. Evidentially, this a.m., someone stepped up to the plate and gave this seller what he was asking. The seller has had 3 prior offers but he was holding out for his price.
Then, 2 other properties that we saw last weekend also were pending. Low inventory and buyers are out. Spring market has come a little early this year.
San Jose Mercury Article -- Sunday, January 30th
Found this article to be quite interesting. Meg
Today: Los Altos, Cupertino and Los Gatos were among the state's 10 most expensive communities last month by median home price, and Santa Cruz and Gilroy were among the 10 with the biggest price gains. Plus: Google tries to block "webspam." And: Silicon Valley's jobless rate falls.
California real estate
The real estate market in the Golden State ended 2010 with a 5.9 percent upturn in sales in December from the month before, the California Association of Realtors reported today. Year over year, though, the number of transactions dropped 6.8 percent.
Statewide, the median price for an existing single-family house was up 1.7 percent from November to $301,850 -- but that
figure was down 1.6 percent from December 2009."While sales rose in December, the sales pace in the second half of the year was lower than the first half as the housing market weaned itself off homebuyer tax credits," Leslie Appleton-Young, the group's vice president and chief economist, noted in an e-mail.
The group's data is based on data from regional multiple listing services. (By contrast, the monthly housing report from MDA DataQuick is based on information collected from county governments.)
Year over year, the median home price in the Santa Clara Valley was flat, the group reported. Many regions had declines, including Los Angeles, Santa Cruz County, Orange County and Sacramento. However, the San Francisco Bay Area
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Three Silicon Valley communities were among the top 10 ranked by median sale prices last month: Los Altos was No. 2 at $1.3 million; Cupertino was No. 8 at $904,500; and Los Gatos was No. 10 at $840,000. (Other communities in the top 10 were Beverly Hills, Calabasas, Laguna Beach, Manhattan Beach, Newport Beach, Santa Monica and Rancho Palos Verdes.)
Two nearby communities, meanwhile, were among the top 10 ranked by greatest increase in median prices: Santa Cruz and Gilroy were tied for No. 8 at 14 percent. (Others in the top 10 were Beverly Hills, Calabasas, Poway, Ridgecrest, San Juan Capistrano, Compton, Laguna Hills and La Habra.)
Google spam attack?
Responding to reports that spammy content has been rising to the top of Google search results, the Mountain View Internet juggernaut today promised "to improve our search quality."
Among the complaints, Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's School of Information, contended in a TechCrunch post that Google "has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers."
"Almost every search takes you to websites that want you to click on links that make them money, or to sponsored sites that make Google money," Wadhwa wrote.
ReadWriteWeb founder and Editor-In-Chief Richard MacManus, meanwhile, claimed that creators of high-quality information could be threatened by "content farms" that produce "a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines."
Acknowledging threats to the quality of Google's flagship search engine, principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in a blog post that the company has
been reworking its search algorithm to block what it calls "webspam."
"To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly," Cutts wrote, singling out, for example, "junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments."
As for content farms, Cutts said Google began working on the problem last year with two changes to its search algorithm. "Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the Web loud and clear: People are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content," he wrote.
Cutts also insisted that the site's search results aren't influenced by whether a site displays or buys ads from Google.
Silicon Valley jobs
Silicon Valley's employment market improved slightly in December, as the jobless rate in the beautiful (if bureaucratically named) San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara metro area dropped to 10.7 percent, the state Employment Development Department reported today.
By contrast, the unemployment rate in the region -- which includes Santa Clara County, the hub of Silicon Valley's tech industry, and mostly agricultural San Benito County -- was a revised to 10.9 percent in November and 11.5 percent in December 2009.
Employers in the two counties (well, mostly Santa Clara County) added 900 payroll jobs last month, with gains by computer and electronics manufacturers. Retailers, though, added jobs at just one-third the usual seasonal rate. At 859,500, the total number of payroll jobs was up 1 percent from December 2009, with gains in tech-related industries offsetting job cuts by government employers.
Tech headlines
Venture capital: At $5 billion, startup funding in the fourth quarter was down 7 percent from a year earlier, The Associated Press reported, citing a study by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association that used Thomson Reuters data. Twitter -- the San Francisco microblogging upstart -- had the single biggest investment at $200 million.
For all of 2010, startup funding jumped 19 percent to $21.8 billion. The largest investment was $350 million in electric vehicle infrastructure upstart Better Place.
HTC: The Taiwanese smartphone maker reported a profit of about $500 million for its fourth quarter, up 160 percent from a year earlier, according to AP. HTC's results were boosted by the popularity of its smart new phones running Google's Android operating system.
Silicon Valley tech stocks
Up: Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, VMware, Gilead Sciences.
Down: Apple, Google, Intel, Cisco Systems, eBay, Yahoo.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index: Down 14.75, or 0.5 percent, to 2,689.54.
The blue chip Dow Jones industrial average: Up 49.04, or 0.4 percent, to 11,871.84.
And the widely watched Standard & Poor's 500 index: Up 3.09, or 0.2 percent, to 1,283.35.
Check in weekday afternoons for the 60-Second Business Break, a summary of news from Mercury News staff writers, The Associated Press, Bloomberg News and other wire services. Contact Frank Russell at 408-920-5876. Follow him at Twitter.com/mercspike.
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