Turkey Tunes: The Uncanny Real Estate Insights of Today’s Hot Music Tracks

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As families gather around their Thanksgiving tables across America tonight, some are wondering how to handle the divisive issue of our country’s next president. Will politics rear its ugly, wattled head right next to the Butterball?

Looking for a break from all that? I vote for changing the subject to an immediate issue that matters to virtually everyone in the country. I’m talking about real estate, of course—and as my alter ego, DJ Smokey Smoke, I like to channel the trends I see through music.

Try putting on my playlist of hot new tracks (plus two extra, on Spotify) that highlight the key trends in real estate this fall. I see this shaping up as the U.S. housing market’s best year in more than a decade. Now that’s something to be thankful for!

‘The Greatest,’ by Sia, featuring Kendrick Lamar

Like Sia, this recovery has “got stamina.” We correctly forecast that this would be the best year since 2006, but we’re not at the end of seeing gains in home sales. Strong demographics, coupled with a still growing economy, will continue to create opportunities for buyers and sellers alike. Next year should be even better. This recovery is still alive.

‘Raging,’ by Kygo, featuring Kodaline

The Norwegian DJ Kygo probably didn’t set out to describe the growing but shifting U.S. real estate market in this song, but he did nonetheless. Home sales are up 4% so far this year, but underneath the growth are changing dynamics. We’re seeing a move towards more new homes on the supply side. And on the demand side, we’re seeing first-time buyers re-emerge. Forecasts call for more growth ahead, but the shifting currents will make for a “raging, raging” marketplace.

‘Jumpshot,’ by Dawin

While the real estate market has been recovering now, for five solid years, at least one aspect of the market has remained depressed: first-time buyers.

They typically make up about 40% of the market, but their share has been only gradually growing into the low 30% range. That appears to be changing. In August, we saw the percentage of first-time shoppers jump above 50% in August, and it has only gotten bigger since.

Something’s got first-time buyers jumping like “Boom shakalaka, boom shakalaka, boom.”

‘Crazy Love,’ by Audien

More than 60% of first-time shoppers are millennials aged 25 to 34. Getting married, moving in with partners, and building a family are life changes that lead them to consider buying a home. That sounds like a lot of love, a lot of crazy love.

‘Alone,’ by Marshmello

Marshmello has become on of my favorite DJs. (How does he stay cool in that giant marshmallow head?) His track “Alone” seems like the perfect anthem for first-time buyers. The journey to find a home can be long and arduous, but thankfully, one of the most important pieces of advice they need to hear is that they need not go it alone.

‘Cold Water,’ by Major Lazer, featuring MØ and Justin Bieber

First-time buyers face many challenges in this market, but finding an expert local Realtor® brings an experienced professional into your corner. After all, “you shouldn’t be drowning on your own.”

A Realtor can be a buyer’s lifeline. And even though you may be new at this, they will still be patient with you.

‘24K Magic,’ by Bruno Mars

I have no doubt that this song will be at the top of the charts in a few weeks. What can we learn from Bruno? He’s “a dangerous man with some money in [his] pocket.”

How are all of these millennials buying homes? They are benefiting the most from the job market. More than 1.1 million jobs have been created in the last 12 months for people aged 25 to 34. That’s more than 40% of all jobs created!

But don’t be foolish with that money in your pocket. Improving your credit score can deliver a lower interest rate. Don’t open new credit cards or take out new loans if you are about to try to qualify for a mortgage. Save up for the down payment by avoiding unnecessary expenses.

‘Good Grief,’ by Bastille

Speaking of mortgages, have you noticed that rates are now higher than they have been for the last five months? In a few years’ time, we are going to miss them, miss them, miss them. But don’t worry about the next year or so. Most experts believe that rates will only rise gradually. If that’s the case, we don’t need to worry about relatively low rates being gone just yet.

And slightly higher rates will probably encourage lenders to woo buyers by easing credit requirements somewhat, enabling more people to take advantage of relatively low rates.

‘Chase You Down,’ by Runaground

Finding a home to buy next spring could be very challenging. We’re seeing record numbers of shoppers now, mainly planning on purchasing next spring and summer. Yet the strong demand this year has reduced available homes for sale dramatically. In October, active listings on realtor.com declined 11% compared to 2015.

Chasin’ down that perfect home will take patience, preparation, and an expert local Realtor working on your behalf. That’s exactly what it took for me to buy a home this summer, and next year is likely to be even tougher. Enjoy the holidays!

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These 8 Delicious and Decadent Dining Rooms Are Fit for a Feast

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On Thanksgiving, exactly who’s sitting at your table gorging on tofurkey and giblets souffle is certainly more important than what the table is made of or the dimensions and decor of the dining room.  But, hey, we’re realtor.com®—it’s our job to obsess about such things. So while your aunts and uncles overimbibe and then repair to various couches to snooze or catch some football on TV, you can fantasize about the perfect room for next year’s Thanksgiving. It’s our gift to you, dear reader!

So imagine having a holiday meal in one of America’s most decadent dining rooms. These eight sumptuous formal dining rooms are all in homes currently for sale. It’s too late to enjoy your meal in any of these spots this year, but there’s always next year.

1 Central Park West, Unit 47BC, New York City, NY

Price: $34.5 million
Fit for a feast: This dining room in Manhattan is set high above Central Park, with glorious views of the Hudson River and enough room for a sizable holiday crowd. The parquet flooring in this room was saved from a French chateau.

New York City, NY

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36 Glen Garry Dr., Aspen, CO

Price: $29.9 million
Fit for a feast: This 13,000-square-foot mansion features a formal dining room inside the wine cellar, with more than enough room for 10. Once the wine gets flowing, the next bottle is just steps away—in almost every direction!

Aspen, CO

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1943 N. Wolf Creek Ranch Road, Woodland, UT

Price: $25 million
Fit for a feast: This 17,861-square-foot mansion outside Park City was designed by architect Fred Babock. The cabin-style dining room features a vaulted ceiling and exposed timber beams. Imagine 18-person dinners under dual chandeliers, with a roaring fire inside and snow falling gently outside.

Woodland, UT

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2905 Nichols St, San Diego, CA

Price: $13 million
Fit for a feast: The formal dining room at the landmark Point Loma property features a picture window overlooking San Diego Bay, herringbone-patterned hardwood floors, hand-painted wooden beams, and arched french doors.

San Diego, CA

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41 North Broadway, Irvington, NY

Price: $9 million
Fit for a feast: This striking 12-person dining room in the 17,000-square-foot Longmeadow estate has a fireplace, chandelier, bay window, and hardwood flooring. Irvington is an attractive, historic village that’s home to wealthy New York City commuters.

Irvington, NY

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205 Hacienda Dr., Merritt Island, FL

Price: $7.5 million
Fit for a feast: If formal dining rooms with dark wood built-ins are more your speed, this Hacienda del Sol mansion is worth a look. The well-appointed room is flanked by large windows and features custom millwork and china cabinets.

Merritt Island, FL

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204 Vaccaro Dr, Cresskill, NJ

Price: $11.95 million
Fit for a feast: This French chateau–style home in Bergen County takes its inspiration from European castles of yore, so it’s no surprise that the dining room is more of a dining hall, with space to entertain dozens of guests. The room features gold-painted picture-frame wainscoting, a tall ceiling, a chandelier, and floor-to-ceiling windows.

Cresskill, NJ

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301 Caspian St, Tampa, FL

Price: $3.3 million
Fit for a feast: The dining room in this 1920s old Hollywood–style mansion has incredible scale and space, with tiled flooring, stone fireplace, archways, and dramatic boxed valance over rich drapery. A hallway balcony runs the length of the room, so guests can get a peek at the table being set before the holiday meal is served.

Tampa, FL

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Zamboni Not Included: 6 Homes With Their Own Hockey Rinks

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Your favorite NHL team gets stuck taking long road trips, but you can have home ice advantage all year long in one of these six properties available with hockey rinks. We found rinks on properties currently for sale across the country—including one in California.

Whether you want to be a sniper like Sid the Kid or dish assists to your buddies like Jumbo Joe, you can keep your skills sharp on one of these rinks. If you don’t want to really sharpen your skates, that’s OK, too—maybe an artificial rink is right for you.

7 Carriglea Dr, Riverside, CT

Price: $7,495,000
Home ice advantage: While this home is walking distance to the beach, the indoor rink means that you can work on your power play year round. If you’re looking to have a Champagne shower after winning it all, the 1,100-bottle wine cellar could come in handy. Or, just have “Slap Shot” ready to screen in the 10-seat theater.

Take your best shot in this indoor hockey rink…

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21 Hurlingham Dr, Greenwich, CT

Price: $8,495,000
Home ice advantage: If you’d rather host your own Winter Classic in Connecticut, perhaps this Greenwich home is for you. If you can’t coax any NHL stars to come by, then head to the observatory for some real-life stargazing instead.

… or take it outside when you drop your gloves!

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214 Lowder St, Dedham, MA

Price: $8,300,000
Home ice advantage: This home’s outdoor rink comes with a locker room, so you can get ready just like Tuukka Rask or Patrice Bergeron. The steam room and sauna are nice ways to warm up and soothe your muscles after being checked into the boards.

Want to make your own inspiring locker room speech? Now you can!

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14 Sandy Lake Rd, Englewood, CO

Price: $4,650,000
Home ice advantage: Avalanche fans can channel their inner Joe Sakic in the comfort of their own home, or outside of it! There’s the rink pictured below and the outdoor sport court, which can be converted into a rink. Either way, you can warm up by one of the home’s Jerusalem limestone fireplaces after the big game.

Advertisements on the boards make you feel like you’re playing at the Pepsi Center.

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19085 Chaumont Way, Northville Township, MI

Price: $2,299,995
Home ice advantage: This epoxy minirink is for peewee players. Watch your little great one work on drills from the comfort of the standing bar. The humidor is also nearby.

We don’t recommend throwing octopi on this rink.

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5805 Orvieto Ct, San Jose, CA

Price: $3,300,000
Home ice advantage: Just a 20-minute drive from the SAP Center, this home has a million-dollar price tag, which is a steal in the San Francisco Bay Area’s expensive housing market. Play like a Shark all summer, and then jump in the pool and swim like one!

Raise the next generation of California hockey players in this Silicon Valley home.

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Beware of Brown Friday: Plumbers’ Busiest Day of the Year

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While throngs of shoppers descend on stores everywhere in pursuit of the best sales this Black Friday, hordes of plumbers will be dispatched across the nation to deal with the ugly aftermath of those gut-busting Thanksgiving feasts: clogged disposals, pipes, and toilets.

Welcome to Brown Friday, the busiest day of the year for plumbers.

“With everybody having guests and family in town, the plumbing system is under more demand,” says Beau Means, operations manager at Benjamin Franklin Plumbers in Wichita, KS. “It can become overloaded.”

The day after Thanksgiving is twice as busy as any other day of the year—even more so than Hanukkah and Christmas, he says.

“The meal preparation tends to cause clogs in the kitchen sinks and disposals,” says Paul Abrams, spokesman for Roto-Rooter, a plumbing and drain company with more than 600 locations in the U.S. and Canada. “When you have a house full of guests, they tend to flush toilets more often. They’re taking more showers, and it may lead to extra laundry loads.”

The top problem the company sees are backed-up kitchen sinks and disposals overflowing with turkey bones, vegetable peelings, and just about anything else that went into the Thanksgiving dinner.

That’s followed by blocked sewer lines (which include all household wastewater) and then toilets that won’t flush. (Thank Uncle Pete, who ate the last helping of baked beans, for that last one.)

Tips for keeping drains, disposals, and toilets unclogged

• Ask guests to space out their showers by about 10 to 15 minutes so the drains have an “opportunity to do their job,” says Abrams.
• Scrape leftover food from plates, pots, and pans into the trash—instead of the kitchen disposal. It’s key to keep turkey bones and other trash out of the kitchen disposals so they don’t clog up them up.
• Make sure the disposal is running when scraps are thrown down it.
• Never pour grease, oils, or fats down the drain, as they could solidify and block it up.
• Avoid flushing cotton balls and wet wipes down the toilet, as those could clog up the toilet and cause it to overflow.
• Put a wastebasket and a toilet plunger in all guest bathrooms. “Nobody wants to make the walk of shame if they clog your toilet,” Abrams says.

If these tips fail and something does go wrong, folks shouldn’t hesitate to call a plumber. Many don’t charge extra over the holidays—although it may take a little longer for them to pry themselves away from their own Thanksgiving feasts to reach their destinations.

“It can’t hurt to call and ask,” Abrams says.

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New-Home Sales Show That Builders Are Ramping Up

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In a market that’s been dogged by a lack of housing supply, builders are finally, well, building—and not just the luxury homes that they’ve been favoring in recent years, according to a recent report.

About 45,000 newly constructed homes either sold or were for sale in October, according to the U.S. Commerce Department’s new residential sales report. That’s roughly the same as in September, but it represents a nearly 15.4% jump from the same month a year earlier.

“Sales this month are flat … [but] on a year-over-year basis, sales of new homes are up considerably,” says realtor.com®‘s senior economist, Joe Kirchner. “I’m seeing builders build more homes compared to last year. That’s good for buyers.”

The share of new homes priced between $150,000 and $199,999 rose to 17%. That’s up from 12% in September and 11% the same time a year ago. However, Kirchner warns against getting too excited about that jump, saying it’s “within the normal range” for homes in that price range.

And only 5% of new homes sold in October were in the lowest price bracket, under $150,000. Sorry, cash-strapped aspiring homeowners. That’s compared with just 3% in September, but down from 6% in October of last year

Realtor.com® looked only at the numbers that were not seasonally adjusted. This means that they weren’t smoothed out over a 12-month period to account for seasonal fluctuations.

But builders’ main target remains buyers who are typically older, wealthier, and looking to trade up from their existing home to a larger, nicer one.

The median price of a new home was $304,500 in October, according to the report. That’s down nearly 3.1% from September, but up 1.9% from the same time a year earlier.

And new homes are considerably more expensive than existing abodes (i.e., those previously lived in)—by about 31.3%. The median price for an existing home was $232,000 in October, according to a recent National Association of Realtors® report.

The bulk of new homes, at about 54%, cost between $200,000 and $399,999, according to the report. About 11% cost between $400,000 and $499,999, while 9% were between $500,000 and $749,999.

Despite all the talk of a slowdown in the luxury market, about 4% of new homes were priced at $750,000 and up. That’s an increase from 3% in September, but down from 5% a year ago.

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Jeff Bridges Slashes $5M Off the Price of His Montecito Mansion

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Oscar winner Jeff Bridges recently cut $5 million more off the asking price of his luxurious estate in Montecito, CA. It’s now available for $18.5 million. It was originally listed for $29.5 million.

The Tuscan-style property is drop-dead gorgeous with mountain and ocean views. The main house is 9,500 square feet with lavish hallways, soaring and exposed wood-beam ceilings, and a private tower/study that opens to a rooftop terrace. There’s a master suite, three en suite bedrooms, an eat-in kitchen, and a four-car garage.

The estate also includes a one-bedroom guest cottage, a two-bedroom caretaker’s cottage, and a swimming pool. The19.5-acre property also boasts a sculpted fountain, walking path, fruit orchard, and Italian cypress trees. A stately, iron gate rests between two pillars at the property’s entrance.

Views of the Pacific Ocean

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Music studio

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The six-bedroom, 6.5-bath home quietly came on the market in July 2015 for $29.5 million. At the time, the actor’s wife, Susan Bridges, told The Wall Street Journal their daughters had moved out of the family home and they were ready to downsize. In September 2016, they reduced the price to $23.5 million.

Jeff Bridges, who recently starred in the sleeper hit “Hell or High Water,” won the Oscar for best actor for his role as Otis “Bad” Blake in the 2009 film “Crazy Heart.”

• For more photos and details, check out the full listing.
• Homes for sale in Montecito
• Learn more about Montecito, CA

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Slideshow: See this year's most expensive homes in Memphis

Memphis' residential real estate market has seen significant sales price growth during 2016. These 20 properties were the top sellers for the year. Click the slideshow to see the 20 most-expensive homes sold in 2016. In the Memphis Area Association of Realtors' (MAAR) market report for September, total home sales for the month totaled 1,616 — up from 1,451 in September 2015, a more than 11 percent gain. Both the median and average sales prices saw increases that month. In the median sales price…

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