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The Modern Farmhouse That Takes Your Breath Away At Mononk View Lane

loudog — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 09:37:02 -0700

This Modern Ulster County Farmhouse takes you back to yesterday when life was a little simpler and homes were simply built with spaces and forms that offered excitement. The combination of a modern innovative approach that offers class with the smart urban style makes this American Farmhouse unique and mesmerizing. The textures, forms and shapes utilized in the creation of this iconic farmhouse reflect fondly upon the classic upstate rural homes of yesterday. It is as if those who traveled the country roads pulled this home from tantalizing memories where huge white homes rested upon hills and were only gazed upon by those who dreamed of inhabiting them.

This home was designed to make you feel right at home and yet offer that sense of discovery that always greets a new beginning. It could easily be a weekend home or a place you would dwell in the entire year with its efficient green design that challenges the ordinary.

The living area in this house will astonish you with its 28- foot ceilings, a wooden crackling fireplace on one end and the entertainment center on the other. The two decks, which appear to be an extension of the living area lead to separate views to appreciate. One deck offers you the beauty of roaming farmlands that climb to the Shawangunk mountain range while the other invites you to the 18-hole golf course that spreads out in front of it. Built with the homeowner that loves to host large parties these decks are warm and welcoming while still offering seclusion for those intimately private moments.

The master suite seems to seclude you from all other areas of the home offering a relaxingly private getaway to enjoy the six foot Japanese style bath tub that finds a home between his and her vanities especially designed for your convenience. In addition the toilet room and shower are separated allowing for a spa like appearance that sooths the spirit and above windows that let the warmth of nature greet you in relaxation.

Visit the Mohonk View Lane Website

Ulster County New York Foreclosure Listings

loudog — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:05:28 -0700

If you are in the market for real estate in New York it will be essential for you to do some research before purchasing. You will want to find the best deal available and capitalize on it. In todays real estate market, with property values consistently falling, it is increasingly important to ensure that your investment will be a good one. There are some steps that you can take to guarantee that you have indeed made a sound investment. One of the top things you can do to protect yourself is to invest in New York foreclosure listings.

Typically, most individuals in New York who are looking to purchase real estate go through a real estate agent. However, most do not know that they can purchase New York foreclosure listings at a public auction through mortgage lenders. The process is really quite simple and easy for anyone to become skilled at. Just about all of the properties on the foreclosure lists are sold as repossessions, giving buyers of Ulster County New York Foreclosure listings a huge savings of up to 50% below market value. When individuals capitalize on these bargains they instantly have a great investment and a home with great equity.

If you are wondering how to get started, you will need to find a listing service and begin searching the Ulster County New York foreclosure listings. The best place to begin is to log onto UlsterCountyLiving.com. This site has an abundance of great information including accurate listings filled with detailed descriptions. You will also be able to find some great tips on how to familiarize yourself with the Ulster County New York foreclosure listings.

The History of New Paltz New York

loudog — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 19:22:30 -0700

The history of New Paltz begins with a small group of French Huguenots, refugees from Mannheim, Germany, who came to the New World in the mid-17th century. In 1677 they negotiated the purchase of 39,000 acres with Native Americans in the area, obtained patent to that land from England, and in 1678 founded the present-day village of New Paltz.

Their hometown of Mannheim was the capital of an area called the Rhenish Palatinate or, Rhein Pfalz in German. The founders discarded the “f” in the name Pfalz as it was silent, pronouncing it “Paltz”. Oddly enough, the first recorded name of the village was expressed in French as “Nouveau Palatinat”, according to records from the New Paltz Reformed Church, itself founded in 1683.

The settlers of New Paltz implemented a form of government known as the Duzine which was headed by a body of twelve patriarchs, one person from each of the 12 families that held patent to the 39,000 acres of land. The Duzine was New Paltzs official form of government until the town was officially incorporated in the 19th century.

Eventually, the a large portion of the land extending to the banks of the Hudson River as well as some additional land grants to the south, were divided amongst the 12 members of the Duzine and their families. These divisions were both farmland and wilderness, the farms located near and around the heights of the Wallkill River. A commercial center was formed on the eastern shore of the Wallkill to accommodate the needs of these farms forming what is now known as Huguenot Street.

It was on this street that the farmers needs for goods and services brought forth a variety of commerce including churches, schools, supply stores and blacksmiths. Today, a number of the buildings that housed these businesses are still standing, serving as a museum exhibit for all.

As both commerce and the population of the town grew, homes and businesses expanded away from the riverbank onto what is now known as Front Street, Chestnut Street and Main Street. In the mid-nineteenth century the Town of Lloyd along with parts of Gardiner, Shawangunk and Esopus seceded from New Paltz, reducing its boundaries to the present day. Later, in 1887 the Village of New Paltz was incorporated within the Town of New Paltz.

The State University College of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz has held a prominent place in the New Paltz community since its origin on North Front Street. It later moved to Plattekill Avenue and then finally to its current location on Manheim Boulevard.

Initially the residents of New Paltz, the nearby communities and even New York City served as a solid market for the farmers of New Paltz. This commerce expanded considerably with the advent of the Wallkill Valley Railroad in 1870. Some fifty years later the automobile slowly began to replace the train. In 1956 the New York State Thruway opened, which was a catalyst to the flourishing business climate we know today.

For more information on New Paltz History and New Paltz Real Estate please visit TaftStreetRealty.com.

Willam Dafoe's Rubber House is for Sale

loudog — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 11:51:35 -0700

Here in Ulster County, because of our easy access to New York City, we get a lot of celebs coming out here for a bit of country living. The celebrities we get as buyers usually demand absolute privacy using corporation names on office documents and meeting in absolute secrecy. The funny thing is that when it comes time to sell they use every branding tool available to them including telling the world who they are.

Among those celebrities is actor Willem Dafoe who is currently listed at 850,000 for his rubber-clad Modernist house located in the Hudson Valley of upstate New York. Dafoe has been twice nominated for an Academy Award for the movies "Platoon" in 1987 and "Shadow of the Vampire" in 2001. One of his latest work includes the part of the Green Goblin in "Spider-Man". Dafoe, whose primary residence is in Manhattan, first bought the home in 1988.

Prior to belonging to Willem Dafoe, a choreographer named Eugene Loring had the house built using specs that were to make the home blend into the landscape. The outer shell of the structure is made up of a thick skin of gray/black rubber material that was stretched over a more traditional wood frame exterior. The house still maintains a mirrored room originally used by Mr. Loring as a dance studio.

The home is not for everyone but if it is for you, I would love to show it to you.

Moet the Office Turtle

loudog — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 20:42:52 -0700

It's a tortoise actually and he has made his new home in a back corner of the real estate office opposite my desk. A few weeks ago he was brought in by one of the owners, so we could keep an eye on him while they were on vacation. Moet used to be the household pet of the Sweeneys who along with Tom Jackson own and operate Prudential Nutshell Realty . The name "Moet" was undoubtedly chosen by Tim Sweeney who also owns a local wine shop and has nothing to do with the toroises choice in champagne. Now Moet enjoys being fed constantly by every real estate agent that passes by. His diet is made up of brightly colored fruits and vegetables with his favorites being tomatoes and strawberries.

What's the difference between a tortoise and a turtle?

According to the reptile guide found on Discovery.com, tortoises live on land and eat a primarily vegetarian diet, and turtles live in or near the water and eat a meat-based diet or a combination of meat and vegetation. The way to physically identify the difference is the height of the shell. Tortoises have a high domed shell where turtles are lower and wider.

Email Marketing and Abuse Report Thresholds

loudog — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:30:15 -0700

I want to apologize in advance for getting a little ranty, but I have to get this out.

I was shut down by my email marketing vendor for the second time because I exceeded an abuse threshold of .04 percent. What constitutes abuse you ask? According to my vendor, abuse is when a user flags an email as spam using either an independent anti-spam software or built in protection provided by the ISP handling the mail. The abuse rate has nothing to do with the users who use the UNSUBSCRIBE link located at the end of the email. Now the next question on your mind is how bad did you exceed the threshold. My level of abuse was .08 (double the maximum allowance).

Just so you know . . .

I am well aware of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 compliance requirements and adhere to them best I can. Do I slip up, probably, but for the most part I am on top of what is considered spam and what is not. First off, I do not send to unsolicited users. Each email address on my list (about 8,136) is a registered user of my website under my terms of use agreement which clearly states that I will be sending them mail. Secondly, I am not sending them information on replica watches, Viagra or Russian mail order brides. I send a monthly newsletter with tips and information on the local market and for the most part it works. We know it works, because I have 99.92 percent of those users not clicking the spam button. Other proof to its effectiveness is the large spike in traffic for the three days after the mailing. I even double up on the exposure by posting a blog similar to the email newsletter on the website with a click thru from the email and get lots of positive comments.

Here comes the ranty part

Like I said before, I am extra careful to comply with the AntiSpam requirements, so much that I will read every unsubscribe and double check to see that they were actually taken off the list. Sometimes the user will send an unsubscribe request from an email address different then what they registered and I go out of my way to find the right address and remove it. Here is where it gets stupid. Some times I will get an email asking me to remove them because the unsubscribe link doesn't work. Now, the unsubscribe feature is fully provided by my vendor, I have no control over it whatsoever. I explain to my vendor that it is very likely that I am being reported as spam because your stupid unsubscribe link doesn't work. I have have been sending to this this list for four years, and never had a problem until now.

The abuse rate thresholds are dumb too.

Like I said before, my abuse rate was .08 percent and I send to 8136 users. .08 percent is like 6 users. So I have 8130 users that want my newsletter, and I get shut down because 6 of them don't. When I put this to the vendor, he told me that the abuse rates where not set by the vendor rather by the ISPs, so if my vendor allows me to operate at a .08 percent, the vendor and all of their other clients (which happens to be all of Prudential and more) run the risk of getting blacklisted by those ISPs. the vendor went on to tell me I needed to "tighten up" my registration process by putting in another step to detail the terms of use before the registration completion. Well I guess that is a good idea, but why would I do that when I am effective with the majority of my subscribers. If I add another step to the registration process I will only effect the 99.92 percent that are OK with my emails.

Here is my frustration.

With the Internet being what it is in the real estate industry, we that effectively use web and email based prospecting tools have a competitive advantage over those who wait for the lead to come walking through the door. What this means for us is that we as e-realtors (or whatever you want to call it) have this advantage because we can reach people at their first notion of home buying. It's a numbers game at this stage, some will be receptive, some will not but with these low abuse thresholds we may not be able to reach them at all in the future.

What do we do?

When being chased by a bear . . .

loudog — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 08:12:48 -0700

According to most SEO professionals I have read and followed, it is their advice to always write web content naturally on the subject (keyword term) you are targeting and the link juice will flow. Other say that you should work on the title and just be sure you use the keywords a few times in your content. I'm not so sure.

Where do we spend our time?

I listened to a pod-cast today where Mike Marshall (creator of the Theme Master LSI tool) talked about not spending your time on trying to figure out what Google is doing rather it more important to figure out what your competitor is doing and do it better. He used the analogy "When being chased by a bear, it is not important to out run the bear but to out run the others who are also being chased by the bear"

Getting to the point

So, obviously this guy is hawking his product right, but what he says makes a lot of sense. Is it enough to write a good title, sprinkle in some keywords and let it fly or should we carefully analyze those that outrank us and try to figure out why that is? Now I know the first thing to do is get links, but after that, I would have to think that some on-page SEO will be the real differentiator between you and those that outrank you.

How do we analyse our competition?

Well that is the reason for my post. I would like to hear how others do it. What I have done so far was to add the SEO Quake to my firefox browser and look at the difference between myself and the competing page but there has to be something better. When professional writers write for SEO, they probably do write naturally but I am sure that almost subconsiously things like keyword density, height, relevancy, supporting terms, h1 tags, bolded terms and other SEO practices are "naturally" flowing out of the writing. With every real estate market being different (and the competition within them), how do the writers know how to write content that outrank competing pages?

To put my question a little more clearly, is it worth it to use a page critic tool/service and if so, what are some good ones to use?

Search Phrases are Growing

loudog — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:56:33 -0700

Now I know some of you more advanced SEO types are probably aware of this trend already, I just wanted to drop-a-post putting it out there for others like me that are a little less "SEO Savvy". Lately I have seen increased traffic in some of my longer keyword phrases in my analytics account. Naturally, I go to my favorite keyword research tool to see what was going on and discovered that the search volume on my 4,5 and 6 word phrases were up significantly when compared to some of the shorter terms that used to be the money makers. The trend I am seeing is that users are beginning to abandon the use of short phrases for a more direct and efficient search using more words.

Right away I begin to theorize as to why users are increasing their use on more keywords in their search phrase. Is it because of the depth and speed at which stuff is getting indexed? I remember the way we used to search was to use a short phrase and then manually scan and click to do our own drill-down because we knew the information we were searching for would be too new or too specific for search engines to understand. Or is it that search engines always indexed this way and users in general are just getting smarter and are making better use of more keywords?

In my opinion I think it may be a combination of both. I have read in other blogs that the increase in use of long phrases vs. the shorter phrases is industry specific and speaks to the experience level of the consumer ion those industries. Now in real estate we know that the majority of our customers are "bonded" to the internet which would explain why we are seeing this trend now. Regardless of industry, it is only a matter of time before the entire internet consumer base are now using more specific search terms for the majority of their product searches. We as website owners should realize this trend and market accordingly.

My Journey to PR 5

loudog — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 10:37:22 -0700

I know for a lot of you, page rank is an old blog topic that has been beat to death by SEOs and developers all over but for me, page rank still baffles me. Currently, my website is a PR3 and it is my short term goal to get it to PR5. Obviously, I would like it to be a PR10, but it is my plan to document my journey to PR5 here on this blog in hopes that some of the community can benefit.

Getting started

Although I have some ideas on how to start off, I am want to see what type of comments get posted in terms of advice. Now before you guys tee of on whether page rank really matters or not, I have to say that I have read plenty on both sides of the issue. My take on it is that improving my PR isn't really going to hurt anything (best case scenario is that it helps). In either case, the purpose of my blog is to provide some insight and help others that are in the same position as I am.

Here are the details on my site:

My site is located at www.nutshellrealty.com. We are currently using an REW template that in my opinion is top notch as far as templates go. The template takes all the basic SEO rules and practices into consideration. The content is of fair quality and as good as I can get it without hiring a professional to write it or dedicating more time to it.

Keep checking back

So follow along with me on my journey to PR 5. I will post every thing I do to help me accomplish this goal. I intend to attain a PR5 without the purchase of any additional services. If you are a real estate professional struggling with some of these SEO concepts, chime in. If you are one of those ultra hip SEO types and want to strut your stuff by dropping some knowledge on some of us "commoners", feel free to show off here.

Going Green, what does it mean?!

loudog — Mon, 12 May 2008 13:38:26 -0700

Go Green, Go Eco-friendly. It seems everywhere you look you see buzz words like Carbon footprint, Global warming and Energy-efficient. These catch phrases have become part of our every day vocabulary (especially if you are in the real estate biz like I am). As local real estate agents, we here at nutshell are doing our part to help Ulster County Green Real Estate.

If you are looking to purchase or build a home, ask your builder or real estate sales person about energy efficient home features. In my market (the Ulster County Real Estate Market) there are more and more energy efficient homes are coming on the market that are considered to be

If you are already a homeowner, there are some very simple and inexpensive ways you can make your home energy-efficient (Green). Here are five things you can do to get on the green bandwagon.

Change The Light Bulbs

By replacing just five incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent (CFL) bulbs, you can save $100 per year on electric bills while using up to 75 percent less energy and removing greenhouse gases from the environment.

Washer broken? Make sure the next one you buy is an ENERGY STAR Appliance

ENERGY STAR appliances meet a higher level of energy efficiency set by the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and U.S. Department of Energy than most of the standard models. Switching to these energy efficient appliances is not only good for the environment, it can also save you a few bucks. Although initially these appliances may costs more, down the road you can reduce your energy bill by $80 per year.

Seal It Up!

Cracks, gaps and air leaks are responsible for your cash seeping from doors and windows. A tube of caulk from your local hardware store can fix those leaks right up. By doing this, you will take a small bite out of your heating and cooling bill. One thing to keep in mind though: make sure you use silicone sealants. Acrylic caulk will shrink over time, while silicone is waterproof and will hold its shape.

Go Easy on the H2O

The majority of the homes use of water comes from the bathroom. The biggest water guzzler is the commode, the household toilet accounts for 27 percent of your entire water supply every year. Low-flow toilets, faucets and shower heads and can save thousands of gallons of water each year. Coming in at a close second are leaky fixtures. Slow-dripping faucets can waste as much as 2,400 gallons of water each year.

Thermostat: stay on top of it or go automatic or both

As a rule of thumb, you should turn up the dial in the summer and down in the winter. You would be surprised to find out how much energy you can save by adjusting the thermostat by one degree above or below your normal comfort zone (chances are you won't even notice). The best bet is to use a programmable thermostat. You can easily program your cooling and heating systems to be used less at night or when no one is home. Ceiling fans are also a good idea as they circulating warm and cool air putting less strain on your heating and air-conditioning system.

Going green doesn't have to be overwhelming or cost you an arm and a leg. By making just a few small changes in your home, you can significantly decrease the consumption of energy and help make the world a “greener” place.