Little Rock Realtor® Maurice Taylor says agents wanting to address the fastest growing demographic in the nation owe it to themselves to obtain the Seniors Real Estate Specialist (SRES) designation.
“I completed the SRES designation course in 2008 and I knew we had to bring this class back to our membership in 2009,” said Taylor, the [...]

Google Latitude is a new Google map service that is proving to be quite popular with Internet enabled cell phone users.
Once installed on your phone, you can import your contacts and friends, and invite them to share locations with you.  In other words, you can let your selected contacts see where you are on Google [...]

The real estate marketing gurus who are sold on blogging have been pushing the benefits for a couple of years now.
And, many real estate professionals are blogging as a stand-alone Web presence, or as an adjunct to a regular website. But, what if you don’t want to blog, or you are blogging but want to [...]

It’s been said that real estate is all about location, location, location, but ask any real estate professional and they’ll likely tell you that there’s a whole lot more to the job than that.
Sure – location is key, but as if working long hours, often under intense pressure and time constraints weren’t enough, have you [...]

Local Market Monitor, a real estate forecasting company based in Cary, N.C., has predicted three housing markets in central Arkansas will perform well in terms of prices over the next 12 months.
On June 23, Local Market Monitor released a list of metropolitan statistical areas (MSA) that are expected to be top performers over the next [...]

At the end of May, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) announced that homebuyers can apply the first time homebuyer’s tax credit toward the purchase costs of an FHA-insured home.
The announcement caught some people by surprise.
Bob Walker, a Cabot Realtor® and president of the Arkansas Realtors® Association (ARA), said many close to the real estate industry [...]

Some people in the real estate industry in Arkansas say the Home Valuation Code of Conduct (HVCC) is a classic example of a solution being worse than the problem it is supposed to correct.
The HVCC is an agreement between Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the New York Attorney General’s office that was developed because of [...]

Interest rates on jumbo mortgage loans have always been a bit higher than what is paid on conventional mortgages, but there was a time when they were considerably higher.
Mike Milner – a Conway mortgage banker and a past president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of Arkansas – said those rates have started to come down [...]

Since June mortgage rates trended upward and that has prompted some people to ask why that is happening.

Michael Stewart, president of the Mortgage Bankers Association of Arkansas, said rates are climbing because of an oversupply of mortgage bonds. One of the factors causing an abundance of mortgage bonds has to do with the high volume [...]

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a record 10,552 fair housing discrimination complaints were filed in fiscal 2008.

Retweet this post

As the topics of sustainability and green building continue to gain momentum, clients and customers interested in green features and amenities will become more and more common. But who is the green buyer, tenant, owner or seller? And how can you determine what green means to them?

Retweet this post

The National Association of Realtors® (NAR) has come out in support of the goals behind federal legislation encouraging energy efficiency, but says a system of incentives is the best way to encourage people to go green. The two bills at issue are the Green Resources for Energy Efficient Neighborhoods (GREEN) Act – H.R. 2336 – [...]

At the Arkansas Realtors® Association (ARA) Board of Directors meeting on June 16, a recommendation from the Public Relations Committee to set up a blog was approved. The group chosen to design a custom template for the blog and host it is Positive Real Estate Professionals (PREP), which is an established real estate community. The [...]

Wow – this September is the 50th Anniversary of the Arkansas Realtors® Association’s Realtor® of the Year program! Lesia and I are so excited to have been asked by ARA President Bob Walker to be your hosts for this once in a lifetime event.
Retweet this post

What do you do if someone is practicing real estate without holding an Arkansas Real Estate license? Contact the Arkansas Real Estate Commission (AREC) and furnish all the information you have. If it appears  the person is conducting real estate activities without holding an active real estate license, AREC will investigate.

Retweet this post