The Government and housebuilder-backed initiative has been hailed as a great boost for the industry and is being offered by a number of the major mortgage lenders.

NewBuy is available on brand-new properties up to £500,000 and means that credit-worthy first time buyers may now only need to save a five per cent deposit before they can get on the property ladder.

Home movers with limited equity in their existing house will also benefit from the increase in availability of 95 per cent loan to value mortgages.

Taylor Wimpey has developed the new, easy-to-understand video to explain how NewBuy works. It gives house-hunters an overview of the scheme, highlighting who is eligible, how NewBuy can assist them and provides a handy worked example.

It also gives viewers details on how they can find out more information and subsequently apply for the scheme.

Watch  the video guide below or contact the following local Taylor Wimpey developments to find out more about NewBuy availability.

Source:  Spaulding Today

The app combines property search facilities, mortgage affordability calculators, local area information and property buyers’ guides.

Available to download on iPhone, the free Halifax Home Finder app uses state of the art technology to revolutionise the way UK house hunters find and secure their dream home.

Offering more support to buyers than any other app, the Halifax Home Finder also incorporates the functionality of social media apps. The app allows users to manage the complex home buying process by enabling them to book viewings, rate properties, add comments and images of the property during viewings and subsequently share their thoughts with family and friends via an emailed PDF summary.

Other features of the Halifax home finder app include:

- Advanced augmented reality – enables homebuyers to view properties currently for sale in the surrounding area, wherever they are, simply by holding up their smart phone
- Built-in mortgage and repayment estimator – prospective buyers can work out how much they might be able to borrow and estimate their new monthly mortgage repayments
- Access to Land Registry data – giving extra information about previous sold prices which supports the crucial buying decision
- Local area guides – highlighting information such as distance from schools and train/tube stations in the local vicinity
- Homebuyer guides – contain useful hits and tips to support buyers through the home buying process

Whether serious buyers or just property voyeurs, the way people search for properties over the last decade has changed extensively, with more and more people looking to access information on the move.

Recent Halifax online research shows that 62% of people who purchased a property in the last five years undertook their property search online, with 80% of those looking to buy in the next five years likely to search for their next property in the same way.

It also revealed that the percentage of buyers looking to use a smartphone to purchase their next property is expected to rise three-fold over the next five years compared to those who used a smartphone in the last five years.

The UK’s fascination with house prices and the desire to know what is happening on their doorstop remains high, with 31% of respondents regularly searching properties for sale in their local area, with 18% admitting to having no intention of buying them. Those aged between 25-34 in the east of the country.

Managing finances and making purchases through online and web based technology is prevalent as almost 1 in 5 adults have spent more than £500 on an item without seeing it in person. When looking to purchase a property in the future, 13% of adults would initially use a mortgage calculator to estimate the maximum amount that they would be eligible to borrow from a bank/ building society – this rose to 19% of current smartphone users.

Stephen Noakes, Mortgages Director at Halifax, comments:

“We know that today’s house hunters want to be able to carry out their searches on a daily basis and when they are on the move. So the Halifax Home Finder app is perfect – it means that you can search properties, book viewings, rate properties and get an indicative mortgage calculation in one place.

“It’s a fantastic development which gives house hunters all the tools they need using the latest technology available. Using augmented reality means that all a house hunter needs to do is lift their handset to see the properties for sale in the streets around them.

“Our aim is to provide house hunters with information and guidance to help them make sense of the residential property market and make better-informed property decisions. With this new app, our services will be easily and readily accessible whilst on the move.

Repost: myintroducer.com

The Awards focused on four key themes which remain critical to the industry’s future success – customers, people, partnership and design.

Promoting sustainability and the environmental agenda, approaches to housing delivery and customer experience as well as acknowledging young talent, the following companies and individuals were recognised in front of a 700-strong crowd at the largest such annual industry gathering at the ceremony on Friday 4 May:

Best Customer Service Initiative (sponsored by West Central Staff)
winner: Barratt Homes Scotland
commended: Gladedale Capital

Best Marketing Campaign (sponsored by Anderson Strathern)
winner: CALA Homes
commended: Miller Homes Scotland – social media

Young Achiever (sponsored by Forster Roofing)
winner: Stewart Lynes – Miller Homes

Outstanding Achievement (sponsored by Pinsent Masons)
winner: Derek Mickel – Mactaggart & Mickel

Best Partnership in Planning (sponsored by Paull & Williamsons)
winner: Persimmon Homes East Scotland
commended: Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire’s Planning Modernisation Group as submitted by Stewart Milne Homes

Best Partnership in Affordable Housing Delivery (sponsored by NHBC)
winner: The Cruden Group
commended: Tweed Homes

Best Home Design (sponsored by Ross + Liddell)
winner: Cruden Homes West
commended: City Building/Glasgow Housing Association

Best Low Carbon Initiative (sponsored by Forster Energy Solutions)
winner: Stewart Milne Homes
commended: Bancon Homes

Homes for Scotland Supporting Company of the Year
winner: Forster Roofing

(For details on why these submissions stood out to the judges, please click here.)

In an innovative twist to the Awards, which are now in their 10th year, the audience also voted for Cruden Group as Home Builder of the Year using a special electronic voting system (generously supplied by Campbell Dallas).

Glasgow Solicitors Property Centre Chief Executive Mark Hordern, chair of the independent judging panel, said:

“A record number of 80 submissions were received for this year’s awards, 30 more than the previous year. This is quite an achievement for an industry that has been at the eye of the economic storm for the past three years.

“It is a testimony to the energy, determination and creativity of home builders that there were entries to impress in every category. Those recognised in these Awards have demonstrated an admirable dedication to improving standards for both their own organisations and for the industry as a whole.”

Repost:  Homes for Scotland

In this article, you’ll learn…

• What type of content marketers should pin, and how
• How to integrate email campaigns with Pinterest

Pinterest, the popular image-driven social network, is one of the hottest topics du jour. In the past year, traffic to the virtual pinboard site has shot up more than 9,000% (source: Compete). Companies are jumping on the Pinterest bandwagon, and your brand, too, can benefit from what is now one of the world’s largest social networks.

The following are tips—beyond the basics—on how to use Pinterest to get results.

1. Don’t be the dullest kid on the block

After signing up for Pinterest, you might be tempted to hurry through the boring set-up stuff and skip right to the pinning. But you won’t be doing yourself any favors in terms of “searchability,” both within and outside of Pinterest. Make sure you complete your profile and include links to your other social network profiles and accounts.

The first impression you make should not be one that shouts, “I am marketing at you.” Pinterest presents a great opportunity to show a more personal side of your company or brand than what can be found on your corporate website.

Demonstrating a little personality will help you stand out. For example, instead of posting your logo, post a picture of your staff or even an image that presents what you do in a more creative way. You can also create interesting boards on your profile that represent your company’s values or aspirations as opposed to just its core products.

2. Keeping it interesting… one board at a time

With Pinterest’s recent profile-layout change, you have more control of how boards look on your profile. Boards now feature one large image, which users can select, followed by four smaller thumbnails that appear below it.

Because users can have more than one board, those who don’t plan on regularly pinning should have a few good-looking boards populated with five carefully selected images. Doing so will enable those users to develop an interesting presence without the need for constant upkeep.

If you’re looking to use Pinterest on an ongoing basis, you should still consider developing a few inactive boards alongside the active ones. A mix of the two can help keep your important boards looking great while affording you a place to pin great new content.

3. Conduct equal opportunity pinning

When pinning, always consider your source. You can use various methods to pin images to your boards. But, if your objective is to drive traffic to a specific website, do you know the best way to pin relevant images and cultivate interest?

For example, you have the perfect image saved to your hard drive. You know, the super fun image that you used in a brochure? Yes, you can upload the image directly from your desktop. But what happens when a user clicks on it? Well, the image leads to a dead end. So, although desktop uploading works, it won’t necessarily deliver the results you want.

Enter Pinterest’s add-on, Pinmarklet, which makes grabbing images online a breeze. Once installed in your browser, Pinmarklet provides a “Pin It” button that allows you to grab an image from any website and add it to one of your pinboards.

Sounds easy enough, right? Well, not quite.

Websites have not yet been designed to accommodate Pinterest. Some images, therefore, won’t render properly. They might appear blurry, or they might be cut off, or they just won’t look good. But if you’re using only Pinmarklet, you have no choice. You have to use the images that are available on the source URL to which you want to drive traffic.

Never fear, a workaround is near! Trumpets blow, and the angels sing…

By customizing a URL and pasting it into your browser’s address bar, you can pin the exact image you want—from anywhere on the Web—and specify both the description and its location.

Here’s a step-by-step procedure:

1. Choose the image you want.
2. Right-click on the image and select the source URL.
3. Paste the following URL into your browser bar, inserting the appropriate text and URLs where indicated:

   http://pinterest.com/pin/create/button/?url=REPLACE_WITH_DESIRED LINKBACK_URL&media=REPLACE_WITH_ORIGINAL IMAGE_SOURCE&description=REPLACE_WITH_DESIRED DESCRIPTION

   When you click “enter” with the revised URL, you will be redirected to Pinterest, and the button will be ready for you to pin to your board.

Now you can start populating your boards with great creative that directs interested users to a specific landing page. As a channel, Pinterest will have suddenly brought you a little closer to achieving your marketing targets.

4. Aim to rank high in Pinterest search

At the moment, no one outside of Pinterest headquarters has a clear idea of how the site ranks search results. Are results ranked by number of likes? Upload date? Number of shares? At the moment, all signs point to a combination of how recently an image was uploaded and what keywords were attached to it. That makes pinning often and writing descriptions of images really important.

If you’re pinning an image of a product, options in the description field allow you to add a price. Take advantage of that feature! Simply add “$” or “£” followed by the amount in the description. Voila! Your pin is now automatically added to the Pinterest Gifts section.

Also, hyperlinks can be used in descriptions to generate traffic. Hashtags, too, can be used for linked Pinterest searches.

5. Integrate to make great email marketing campaigns

Email marketers are thinking of creative ways to integrate their email campaigns with this new, hot social network. Some are integrating social buttons into their messages (including ones that lead to their Pinterest page), but is doing so truly sufficient?

What email marketers really want is higher open rates, more clicks, and more people viewing their campaigns. We at Emailvision have picked up on this trend, having developed “Pin Your Inbox,” which allows marketers to “pin” their email campaigns with links to the online version of that campaign.

6. Vote! Like! Share! Win!

Remember, on Pinterest (and, really, in life… no?) in-your-face self-promotion is not looked upon kindly. But creative marketing can be. Is your campaign new, different, and clever enough?

Emailvision, for example, is running a competition in which email marketers and subscribers are invited to share their favorite email campaigns on Pinterest. The competition not only drives traffic to the submitted campaign but also elicits constructive feedback from peers (users are encouraged to vote via “Likes” for their favorites).

Of course, a contest requires a prize, and that’s another big plus: The most popular campaign will win custom-design services from Emailvision’s in-house creative team.

Repost: Marketing Profs

The advice from the Commons’ Communities and Local Government Select Committee is based on research that shows only 110,000 new homes were built last year, while over 230,000 households develop every year.

And Clive Betts, the Labour MP who chairs the committee, believes that the Government needs to build on its current housing strategy in order to increase the supply of housing in the UK property market.

“There is no silver bullet. We have to muster all the resources we can,” he said.

“The Government’s housing strategy has made a useful start and we hope many of its measures will provide a stimulus over the short to medium term.

“But we need more action if we are to see significant long-term improvement in housing supply.”

The committee also recommended that pension funds and other investment funds should be urged to invest in property and the construction of new houses.

At the same time, it also stressed that local authorities need to have a bigger say in housing projects.

Copyright Press Association 2012

Created by the guys at MDG Advertising, the video infographic highlights just about all the key Pinterest statistics, stats and facts you might have seen or heard about this year. Enjoy.

Sources: Digital Buzz

In 2006 I had another “ah-ha” moment as well, though. I met Steve Coast, the founder of OpenStreetMap. He explained the idea – a free and editable map of the world made by user contribution. A map that would not just allow me to get the final rendered output, but also the actual data underneath. At the time, looking at Steve as he showed me the GPS device he was using to map the details of our meeting (which took place in a little cafe in Soho across the street from the John Snow pub), the idea of creating a viable map via volunteer submissions seemed preposterous in the extreme. But I watched as OSM grew and grew from those humble beginnings. Now, less than six years later, that map powers Nestoria thanks to millions of man hours of contribution by individuals and organizations that recognize the power of open data.

So, why have we switched? There are four main reasons

1. The maps are equal or better

OpenStreetMap’s great strength is that anyone can contibute. Since the project started over 500,000 people around the world have signed up to do just that, often going into insane levels of detail. Fixes can be added and reflected in the maps very quickly. It is a fundamentally different model than the traditional “only an expert from the government can come make the map” model. People can map whichever features are important to them (paths, pubs, buildings, etc) and escape the car centric focus of many mapping services. All of this data is then made freely available for all to use. Increasingly government agencies are realising that it makes more sense to cooperate with and benefit from this new approach to data gathering and maintenance.

Thanks to the hard work of all of these volunteers, in many places of the world, particularly the European countries we were focused on, OSM maps are of equal or better quality than any other widely available mapping service.

2. It’s another visible way for us to support open data

Our service does nothing more (and nothing less!) than aggregate data from many different sources and present it in an easy to use format. We benefit greatly from open data, and as such we want to do our part (within the limited resources of a start-up) to help the open data movement. This is why we sponsor OpenStreetMap conferences and recently donated toOpenStreetMap’s humanitarian efforts. This is why we feature the work of open data advocates on our blog, and also why we make our own data available via our API and other tools. We are a company that believes in open data.

3. Google introduced charging for map usage

Earlier [last] year Google announced that they would begin introducing limits to the use of Google maps by commercial websites. The good news is that Nestoria has grown nicely since our start in 2006. The bad news was that our size meant that we were well over the free usage limits Google announced.

In November I was contacted by a sales person from the Google Enterprise team. I had suspected we might be over the limit. Obviously no one looks forward to a new cost for their business, but I approached the talk with an open mind. Google Maps is a great service, and we had benefited greatly from it. As a businessperson, I know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and so I was open to paying Google a reasonable fee for their continued service.

Unfortunately Google’s sales process was not good. Having agreed to a time for a call, the sales rep missed the appointment with no warning, instead calling me 45 minutes late. It was quickly obvious he had done no research whatsoever about our service, what we do, or even where (in which countries) we do it. He was unable to explain the basics of the new charging regime – for example, what exactly is a “map-view”, telling me instead to “ask your developers”. Finally he quoted a price to continue using Google Maps (just on nestoria.co.uk, one of eight countries we operate in) that would have bankrupted our company.

Google’s excellence in technical services was definitely not matched by its salesmanship. The experience was disappointing, and I say this as the founder of a site that has often been featured by Google in promotional literature for our innovative use of Google maps. Having always envisioned that we would someday move to OSM, this was the nudge that pushed us over the cliff.

In the interest of fairness I should also mention that Google has been a great supporter of OSM in the past, donating funds for hardware for instance, and hopefully they will continue to be far into the future. Google remains a great supporter of opensource software with initiatives like their excellent Summer of Code initiative.

We’re very thankful to Google for all the innovation they encourage and for allowing us to use their maps service for free for years. The decision to introduce charging is theirs to make and we can’t argue with it. Despite this though, I have to question some of the logic they presented regarding their reasons for introducing charging now. Google claims charging is needed to ensure the long term commercial viability of the service, but is belt tightening really needed at the same time as Google announces record revenues and profits?

More importantly though I wonder if the decision really achieves the desired outcome. While us moving away from Google Maps will reduce some fractional amount of bandwidth costs for Google it also means our team of engineers will be spending our time working with, and innovating on, other geo technologies. While on the one hand Google spends a lot of effort trying to court developers, decisions like this turn them away. Especially combined with the subpar sales implementation I experienced, this seems to go completely against the ecosystem model that has enabled Google Maps to flourish, which is disappointing.

4. The tools are ready.

Despite all of this, we would not have been technically able to make the switch unless there was a solid set of tools and services around OSM that made the switch possible. I’ll go into these in more detail in the technical part of this post, but let me here once again publicly thank all the developers around the world who have worked hard over the last few years to create the modern neogeo tool chain from scratch. Also let me explicitly thank the companies like AOL’sMapquest and Microsoft’s Bing who are actively supporting OpenStreetMap.

The original article (slightly edited) from Ed Freyfogle.

Source: Propertyportalwatch

The decrease in the average house price, to £159,883, follows an increase of 2.2% in March and leaves the three-month measure 0.3% higher, Halifax said.

Martin Ellis, housing economist at Halifax, said: “Despite the slight improvement in the underlying trend in recent months, house prices continue to lack real direction, with the current UK average price little different to where it was at the end of 2011.”

The rise in the three-month indicator was the first increase on this measure since September, following six successive falls, Halifax said. But prices in the three months to April were 0.5% lower than in the same period a year earlier.

The UK average price in April 2012, at £159,883, was almost equal to the £159,888 in December.

The ending of the stamp duty holiday for first-time buyers in late March appears to have boosted home sales early this year as buyers strove to beat the deadline, and has probably contributed to the volatility in house prices, Halifax added.

Howard Archer, chief UK and European economist at IHS Global Insight, expects house prices to fall by a further 3% by the end of 2012. He said: “Housing market activity is very low compared to long-term norms. And the economic fundamentals currently look worrying overall for the housing market with unemployment high and likely to rise further, earnings growth muted, and the outlook uncertain.”

On Thursday, mortgage lender Nationwide said house prices dipped a further 0.2% in April, after a steeper 1% fall recorded the previous month, meaning average UK house prices now stand at £164,134.

Borrowers are facing tougher hurdles to getting a mortgage in the first place. Availability is expected to decrease in the coming months as lenders tighten their borrowing criteria, something which has already triggered a fall in the proportion of mortgages being approved by lenders.

Bank of England figures showed earlier in the week that the number of mortgage approvals for house purchase rose by 1.5% in March but remained firmly below the previous six-month average.

Copyright © 2012 The Press Association. All rights reserved.

More QR codes must mean more people are using them! Right? Well..sort of! There is evidence to support people are scanning, but the problem is most codes just lead you to a website that you could have arrived at more easily by typing in the URL or via a propertyportal. Nothing thrilling, nothing exclusive and certainly nothing worth sharing.

If you want to make best use of these little patterned squares then they have to lead to something which is exclusive. A QR code is the perfect path to an online deal. If I’m going to go through the trouble to pull out my phone, line up the code and scan, then I want something for my efforts. Something tangible, something of value. QR codes are codes. That implies they hold the secret or a treasure. But why bother if what you access via the code is available to anyone who visits your site online, code or not? No secret treasure means no value to the user!

Here is a very smart use of QR codes from Korea, a region known for it’s high levels of traction with this technology. This campaign from Emart, one of the largest retailers in Korea, needed to increase sales during lunchtime.

Emart introduced “The Sunny Sale” which involved a three-dimensional QR code that was placed across the city and could only be scanned during the hours of 12 and 1 each day, due to the sunlight casting a shadow to complete the QR code. Anybody who did scan the code was given a special discount code with 25% off that could be redeemed in store or through their mobile e commerce site. Emart have seen a great increase in sales during the lunchtime period and have doubled the number of locations for this promotion.

By putting something truly unique and cool inside the QR codes, Emart demonstrates an effective way of using technology to drive sales. Pretty cool thinking  dont ya think?  Watch the video here!