Month: May 2008

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Syesha Coming Home to Sarasota… But Just for a Visit!

After this week’s emotional round on American Idol, it’s official, Syesha is in the AI Season 7 Top 3!!  Congratulations, Syesha!!

We’ve already posted our support for this hometown Sarasota girl, but the exciting news this week is that local residents will have a chance to see Syesha tomorrow (Friday, May 9th) when she blazes through on a whirlwind visit to the Gulf Coast of Florida.

Evidently, she’ll be making some stops in the morning on Tampa TV & Radio, but she visits Bradenton (where she’ll receive a key to the city) and then comes to Sarasota for a concert on the gorgeous grounds of the John & Mable Ringling Museum!

According to the Sarasota Convention & Visitors Bureau, the concert is FREE and open to the public!  Park nearby on the New College Campus.  I’d get there early (parking is available at 1pm) for the 3:30PM concert.  It’ll most likely be brief, as she’s got to get back to Hollywood!

If previous seasons are any indication, we should see footage of Syesha’s Homecoming Visit on next week’s American Idol!

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Sarasota Real Estate Market: Rebounding or Not?

Ever the optimists, Real Estate brokers always manage to locate a silver lining… no matter how far and how hard they have to look.  And, with a number of friends and business associates connected to the real estate business, I certainly am personally hopeful that their optimism has its roots firmly cemented in reality.

But alas, this is not always the case.

Take, for example, the blog published by Michael Saunders & Company.  Here’s a great example of a company reaching as deeply as it can for data — any data — to support the notion that somehow the market is on its way back to normal.  Is their data pulled from the number of transactions in the MLS, you ask?  Perhaps it’s based upon some newfound trend in the tax rolls?

Nope.

In fact, it’s taken from their Google Analytics account.  Yes, that’s right folks.  Now we’re basing the real estate outlook for Sarasota on the performance of Michael Saunders’ website according to the ever-so-reliable folks at Google.

Now… don’t get me wrong.  I’m a big fan of Google.  Chances are you’re here thanks to one of the many Google searches that we rank well on.  But… as we know, their analytics package — feature-rich though it may be — is fraught with inaccuracies.  And… even if it were 100% accurate, the Michael Saunders blog post smacks of a self-congratulatory webmaster more than it does market realities in the real estate business.  After all, our traffic is way the heck up, too!  Doesn’t say anything about the consulting business, though…

But… I digress.  (By the way, business is better than ever!  Not a touch of whining here!)

What Michael and gang aren’t really interested in pointing out is the simple fact that, by every measure, the housing crisis is only deepening.  Even if transactions are up, prices are down.  And this is based on real data from none other than Standard & Poor. Granted, the data are not local to Florida.  But then, we the unwashed don’t have ready access to the data for our market.  This is part of the classic information asymmetry associated with buying and selling real estate.  Your broker knows more than you do.  Perhaps someone with readily-analyzed data would be willing to step forward and comment.

In the meantime, I’m going back to my web analytics to look for more optimism…

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Financial Revolution – Featuring Gary Keesee

*Update (May, 2011): Unfortunately, the downloads we originally linked to are no longer available as The Kingdom Alliance website (see below) has been taken down. We have located this downloadable product (link fixed, January 2014) available for purchase directly from Gary Keesee’s ministry that can serve as an update to / replacement for the materials we originally recommended here.

Gary and Drenda KeeseeThis week’s Financial Revolution Conference in Sarasota got underway last night with a powerful kickoff meeting.  Gary and Drenda Keesee shared the emotional story about how they turned the tide on their drastic financial situation — credit cards, finance company loans, IRS debt, medical bills, personal loans from family, mortgages, etc. — and began creating wealth instead.  Gary pointed out that the “switch” for this about face was in their hearts.

The Kingdom Alliance has posted the audio from Gary’s talk (*Update: 5/11/2011, the Kingdom Alliance website is unfortunately no longer available) last night for all to hear at no cost.  It is definitely worth the time to listen to it.  Those who came to the event last night expecting to hear a talk on better money management, budgets and numbers were surprised at what Gary had to say.  Not only did he address the issues of the heart, but he also dealt with what he characterizes as misconceptions that have been perpetuated by church teachings regarding money.  Based upon the content of last night’s talk, the remainder of the conference promises to be significant.

The conference continues with meetings tonight (Friday) at 7pm and Saturday at 9am.  The meetings are being held at the facility belonging to the First Church of the Nazarene, 3375 Fruitville Road in Sarasota.

If you’re not familiar with who they are, The Kingdom Alliance is a group of 5 congregations who have joined forces to increase their impact on the communities of Sarasota & Bradenton.  This type of cooperation among church leadership is quite rare in a landscape filled with competition over what some experts would describe as a dwindling pool of potential congregants.  This is the first community event that they have publicized, and it’s a good taste of things to come!