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wknc881 · 5 years ago

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WKNC Hopscotch Day Party Artist Feature: Juxton Roy

With Hopscotch right around the corner, and WKNC’s Day Party at Legends following closely in its wake– how better to promote both events than by give y'all a lil’ insight into our Day Party Line-up!

WKNC’s Day Party description is as follows.

This year has been full of milestones, and WKNC aims to celebrate them all. 2019 held Raleigh’s first ever Pride Festival, was the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, and marks ten years of Hopscotch. With this in mind, WKNC’s Hopscotch Day Party aims to promote and celebrate LGBTQ+ affiliated artists from across the state to keep the Pride Party going all year long! Featuring Petrov, Emily Musolino, Juxton Roy, Through the Tallwoods, Black Bouquet, and To Julian, the party will be hosted on Saturday, September 7th at Legends Club. This event is all-ages and supported by the NC State GLBT Center.

This will be a series up until the Day Party, so the questions will be the same, but we can guarantee that every artist will add their own personal flare to each answer. Juxton Roy is a self-described queermo band that has strong ties in the DIY scene of the Triangle, though they may take a more business-oriented route to musical success. Nonetheless, their music is empowered and raw, tugging at your heartstrings in the only way they know how– with honesty. Read the second artist of this series’ answers– Juxton Roy.

Give us a lil rundown of how your band got formed! When/where/how/why! Juxton started sometime in 2017, as an idea to start an alt-country band that slowly blossomed into genreless project we are now. It was a slow year of rehearsing and writing the songs that eventually would make up our debut “Why are you so afraid of ___”. We solidified our first lineup in that time and played our first show at Sound Off records in April of that 2018. We picked up our manager, Jonas, during that time as well which led to us being picked up by Emo Raleigh. We then did things backwards by recording our debut immediately after our first show but we’ve hit the ground running ever since. Playing more and more shows. We’ve been nonstop ever since.

What can an audience member expect from one of your shows? Our shows are an experience. We aim to create a space of community and catharsis all at once. There’s a lot of energy, a lot of singalongs, and a big sense of unity. The goal is create a safe space for LGBTQIA+ people to feel safe in a scene predominantly led by cis white men. We make at point at every show to always say that with Jux, you are safe, seen, valid and our family.

Do you see performance as a task or an endeavor? In that vein, what part about performing is most challenging or liberating? That’s an interesting question, I don’t know if I (Jess) would ever see performance as a task. Endeavor doesn’t quite sound right either but it may be closer. We put all of who we are into our live performance. We make a point to never play the same setlist twice. I think all of us are really channeling our varied experiences into the music when we perform it live, and it comes out as this loud, almost worshipful form of honest catharsis. Everything we are as people is laid bare on that stage, so I guess it could be an endeavor cause it can be draining to do that. But it also feels really good to do it, to look an audience in the eye and know you’re going through the same thing. Performance is more validating for us then a task or an endeavor.

What does Pride mean to you? How do you embody those meanings in your music? In your everyday life? Another great question. Pride to me means visibility. It means being seen and heard, acknowledged and safe. It means not denoting the LGBTQIA+ experience down to one singular narrative. Queer voices are varied and beautiful and rarely listened to, especially in this day and age. It’s amazing that Hopscotch and WKNC are including more queer centered shows and events, it’s something I cherish. Within Juxton, we approach pride within our music and shows. We stay visibly queer not as an act of defiance, but as an invitation for dialogue and the opportunity to create safe spaces for people who may not find that often enough. Our music touches on a lot of issues, be it mental health, gender identity, drug/alcohol abuse, and the ever confusing concept of love. But it always circles back to our overarching message of self love, self acceptance and community. I think that’s important in any scene. Especially for people who go to shows looking for acceptance/answers. There’s to many bands around doing it solely because they want to/are good at it. That’s not good enough anymore, you have to stand for something, in my opinion.

What are you most excited about during Hopscotch? I’m still hoping I’ll be able to go to some of the main bill shows but I’m really excited about the Museum Mouth/Kissisippi show. Same goes for the Sarah Shook and the Disarmers set. So many of our friends are playing as well and it’s hard to narrow it down. Stand outs to me would be Through the Tallwoods are playing with us at the WKNC showcase, that band is full of amazing people and they rip.

For the tenth anniversary of Hopscotch, what would you ten years ago think about you now? I don’t think ten years ago I was aware of the existence of Hopscotch hahaha. I don’t think then I would’ve ever thought I would be entering my second year of playing it so I guess I would be proud of myself. I don’t think anyone in Juxton ever thought we’d be where we are now as fast as we got there, and we’re all really grateful for it.

Please list some fun facts about your band! • Our guitarist Matt is in approximately 10k bands(Flood District, Fredfin Wallaby) and they all rip. Same goes for our drummer Parker(Hi-Dive). • Our name may or may not be based on a drunken Sean Connery accent. • Juxton Roy will have new music out this year, and it sounds sounds absolutely bonkers. We’re really proud of it.

You can learn more about Juxton Roy by visiting their Facebook page or Instagram (@juxtonroy) and, of course, by attending WKNC’s Hopscotch Day Party. It will be held at Legends Club on Saturday, September 7th and begins at noon!

How else can I convince you other than saying its Prideful, FREE, and on a WEEKEND? BE THERE!!!!

#DJ Beowvlf #hopscotch #hopscotch day party #hopscotch 2019 #submission

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riichardwilson · 4 years ago

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A Smashing Guide To The World Of Search Engine Optimization

About The Author

Frederick O’Brien is a freelance journalist who conforms to most British stereotypes. His interests include American literature, graphic design, sustainable … More about Frederick …

SEO Company is an ever-changing world. Blink and you’ll miss the latest best practices, thought leaders, and tools. Feeling out of touch is natural. This guide is your way back into the groove, baby.

search engine optimization is essential to most websites. The industry is worth more than $70 billion a year, and it’s only going to grow. It has specialists, sub-specialists, thought leaders, dedicated publications, fantastically complex tools, and constant uncertainty at its heart. As Bob Dylan says, it’s just a shadow we’re all chasing.

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And remember, this is a live document. If there’s something we’ve missed, tell us. In a world as fast-changing as SEO Company no resources can afford to sit on their hands.

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Image by John Caldwell of The New Yorker. (Large preview)

In a word, the appeal of SEO Company is traffic. It’s getting people to drop by and hopefully stick around. More traffic means more readers, more viewers, more customers, more attention.

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Hot Topics

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As for the rest of you, what follows are some of the SEO Company space’s slightly more technical hot topics, complete with conventional wisdom and resources for keeping up with their evolutions.

Great Content

I had to put this first. The sheer amount of data involved in SEO Company makes it easy to lose sight of an important fact: you’re making websites for people, not search engines. As corny as it sounds, in the long term the best way to perform well in organic search is to be the best you possible.

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Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T),

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) Pages,

The reputation of websites and creators,

Mobile user needs,

Auto-generated content,

Deceptive page design,

What low quality pages look like.

Whether you’re a designer or a copywriter, this is all valuable information.

Say what you like about Google’s more nefarious practices, but where organic search is concerned they want websites to be goodie two shoes. Write brilliant articles; build fast, practical sites; use beautiful visuals; design ethically; be transparent about who you are and what you do; and never, ever let SEO Company be the tail that wags the dog. Quality will win out in the end.

Accessibility

Happily, the web development space seems to be warming up to talk of accessibility. There is plenty of natural overlap between SEO Company and accessibility, though sadly there is currently little evidence that super accessible websites get a boost in search. Accessibility barely features in Google’s mammoth Search Quality Guidelines document.

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Image alt text,

Descriptive title and header tags,

Video transcriptions,

Content sections,

Clear, logical sitemaps,

Colour contrast,

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WebAIM publishes annual reports on web accessibility, and Global Accessibility Awareness Day is a fantastic hub for events and campaigns. Also, to get a Smashing plug in, Steven Lambert’s piece on designing for accessibility and inclusion breaks the topic down splendidly.

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JavaScript has grown into the third pillar of web design — joining HTML and CSS. The language allows for all manner of fancy interactive features that aren’t possible on static sites. That sophistication has brought with it some confusion where SEO Company is concerned.

Can JavaScript-heavy websites perform well in search? Yes, they can and do. When issues arise it’s almost always in the indexing process, when search engines crawl and render web pages for their databases.

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(Large preview)

In short, let search engines see pages the way people see them. Google Search Console has a URL Inspection Tool that will show you what it retrieves, what it renders, and any glaring issues.

Developers should not shy away from JavaScript for fear of angering the SEO Company gods. Yes, bloated, slow, gratuitous JavaScript will hurt your website’s search performance, but applied properly the language can also improve it. Indeed, formats like JSON are a staple of more sophisticated SEO Company markup, like Schema.

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Remember also that the more solid your SEO Company foundations are, the less pressure there is on JavaScript to perform. Think of it as something that enhances the browsing experience rather than carries the water.

Structured Data

Metadata has come a long way since the early days of SEO Company. Meta titles and descriptions remain important, but there’s a whole other level becoming increasingly difficult to ignore — structured data.

Structured data, more specifically Schema, has been adopted by all the major search engines. Part of the Semantic Web push to make online data machine-readable, it allows you to label content with specificity that simply wasn’t possible before. Structured data is how search engines display rich results like recipes, reviews excerpts, event details, and more.

Schema vocabulary works alongside Microdata, RDFa, and JSON-LD formats, and there are plenty of free tools to help you learn the language and how to implement it. These include:

Search engines are ominously clever, but they’re not that clever. Structured data removes much of the guesswork from the crawling process, making it easier to understand and index content for relevant searches.

For a more in-depth introduction to the topic I humbly point you towards my article on Baking Structured Data Into the Design Process.

Site Speed

Search engines like fast websites. They’re easier to crawl, and they’re easier for users to browse. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your site is, if it takes ages to load people aren’t going to stick around to find out. Search engines are similarly impatient.

Like most things SEO Company, site speed best practice covers a spectrum all the way from common sense to highly technical tinkering. On the common sense side, don’t upload 12MB images when 200KB ones look exactly the same. If you absolutely must have massive high resolution images, link away to them instead. Images are the most popular resource type on the web, so don’t skimp on the compression. Most people will be browsing on their phones anyway.

Beyond that you get into more technical waters, though the goal remains the same: load quickly and smoothly. Streamline your code, cut out superfluous HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Most importantly, as always, test what you’ve done. Site speed isn’t a theoretical concern; it’s a practical one.

Typically, Google has a dedicated tool for that purpose:

It will tell you exactly what’s wrong with a URL’s content and what you can do to improve it. Site speed is no great mystery; more often than not it’s simply a case of trimming the fat.

Mobile First

Most web browsing now takes place on mobile devices, not desktops. It is for this reason that Google will move to mobile-first indexing for all websites in September 2020. What that means is mobile renders of a page are what will be indexed, not desktop. That’s where you need to bring your A-game.

People are understandably drawn to the broad canvas offered by desktop-first design, but it’s not where our skills are most useful. If your website is a work of art on desktop but a mess on mobile your SEO Company will suffer — and that’s to say nothing of user experience.

More Articles On Mobile Usability

The Dark Side Of SEO

There’s no substitute for quality long-term SEO Company strategies. Which brings us to…

Playing The Long Game

A reminder also that this is a live document, so don’t be shy about suggesting adjustments and additions as the SEO Company world continues to change.

Happy searching.

A Smashing SEO Cheat Sheet

Documentation

Authorities And Journalists

Publications, Blogs, & Forums

Tools

Free

Freemium/Paid

Podcasts And Video Series

Conferences

(ra, yk, il)

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

Delray Beach SEO

source http://www.scpie.org/a-smashing-guide-to-the-world-of-search-engine-optimization/ source https://scpie1.blogspot.com/2020/08/a-smashing-guide-to-world-of-search.html

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vrsocialsystem-com · 5 years ago

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Best Oculus Go Social Apps

hey what's up guys it's Dre when you kind of think about it VR is kind of pretty isolating the whole idea that one day we'll all be isolated in our dark rooms escaping into second lives in a bleak black mirror or ready player one style future now don't get me wrong this will completely happen now granted we don't live in a depressing black mirror style feature just yet and I would say that the opposite is actually true or even more true to virtual reality helps you be social with lots of people around the world especially when you're not limited by distance or even physical limitations which is what we're going to be diving into today I'm gonna be sharing four of my favorite apps that help you meet and interact with strangers in VR as always if you want to go ahead and check these apps out for yourself make sure to go down to the description and while you're down there make sure to subscribe to the channel hit the notification bell and let me know what types of videos you want to see next first step alt space VR alt space VR is a free cross-platform social app that lets you meet strangers play games and attend events all in virtual reality now when I first thought of this video this is actually the only app that really came to mind alt space VR really stands out because of how many people use it compared to other apps that I've tried I mean a social app without people like isn't really social so that's a huge plus you can customize your avatar voice chats teleport around and choose from different rooms to meet new people in and not only do you have your just typical common rooms but you also have a lot of custom worlds that you can explore that have been made by other alt space via our users just like you and me people get pretty creative with these and I've loved wasting time just checking out different worlds some of them pretty cool some of them pretty weird like this one breadsticks anyone but at the end of the day what makes alt space we are the clear leader in my opinion are the diverse events that you can attend on the platform these events are moderated and hosted by alt space at different times and there are a lot of them want to go to church see you on Sunday want to watch Virtua improv we can cringe together there really is something for everybody now I'm not gonna lie when I first joined alt space it felt really weird and I think it was because I was used to playing games but these avatars that I was looking at weren't just code or AI they were actual people like there are is an actual person behind these virtual eyes kind of weird but after a while of interacting with you know random people and just kind of going with the flow it really did start feeling natural in its own way to the point where I am hopeful that yes I see a future where we can go to school and learn or work together in virtual reality and at the end of the day alt space VR is a great example of a company that's actually building this future oh and did I mention that Microsoft bought them yeah so this is something to definitely keep an eye on especially next year but until that future of diverse worlds with hundreds of thousands of virtual people just hanging out comes to fruition alt space VR is still the crown jewel of virtual reality communities and events and you should definitely check them out on to the next one v time similar to alt span is another cross-platform app that lets people interact and share content in different environments or destinations after creating your avatar you immediately jump into what feels kind of like a lobby you'll see other users just kind of floating around and can join public environments when you see these connections between different people there are different destinations or environments to hang out in and you can invite up to three other people to join you some of these environments are dynamic while other rooms are pretty straightforward sort of just like sit down standard meeting rooms you can share content by uploading regular or 360 images on their website and on their website you can also manage your profile add or accept friend requests and even send in-game messages to your friends to me alt space VR felt kind of like a public VR world with lots to explore while the time felt more of like a private / personal VR meeting room if I wanted a quick way to meet and share something in VR I'd probably use V time I think the ability to share uploaded content is super interesting and I hope that they continue to expand on this and support video audio and potentially other file types like presentations that would make V time into something like a virtual conference room setup then an open world but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing if you want something where you don't have to teleport around like an alt space VR and instead interact in a more personal way with only three other people v time is definitely worth checking out as well the last two apps that I'm going to talk about are less come hang out and do things in VR and more let's go watch things with others in VR does that make sense I don't know oculus venues is an official app that lets you attend live events and sports games in virtual reality with others for free bringing live entertainment into venues is a big strategy for oculus this year in particular oculus really doubled down on the strategy by partnering with the NBA Lionsgate big movie studios the World Cup and even big musical mainstream artists to bring their concerts into virtual reality anybody can register and attend these events live for free now when an event is actually live you'll be placed in a virtual seat or you can interact with three other people and of course you can talk to them or you can mute them if you don't want to talk to them or hear them and just experience the events what I really love about this app though is being able to move around venue and watch the live event from different camera angles this way you can really follow the action if you're watching a you know live sports match or actually experience your favorite artists front row it's really clear that venues will continue to be important for oculus especially for the oculus go heck they even live-streamed their main Kino inventors and like I said it's all for free now when I first heard about oculus venues I wasn't really sold because I mean there isn't a replacement to actually being there that is until I watched most of the World Cup in oculus venues and I'll be honest celebrating with fellow fans you know trash-talking like the entire experience was a lot of fun and it kind of felt in a small way what it must feel like to be at the actual World Cup except I didn't have to go anywhere if you get the chance to attend one of these events do it this will be an actual thing eventually why on earth would you settle for a 2d television that's like so 2,000 and the last app that I'm going to talk about today is big screen be our big-screen VR is another cross-platform app except this one lets you stream your own movies or videos into a virtual room that you can then obviously invite your friends into if you have a desktop you can download the app and choose you know whatever you want to stream and you can also share your screen which means you can play your computer games like fortnight on a giant screen the reason why I included it in today's video and what makes this app social is that you can also crash random public rooms I was even able to watch infinity war one night with a bunch of strangers like way before it was actually released in stores I'm sure was legal I think and it also looks like they're working with big companies like Paramount to host you know movie events actual live movie screenings so I'd keep an eye on that for 2019 but for now if you're just bored and want to watch you know random things or movies that you legally own with strangers or your friends go check them out all right so let's just wrap this up what I hope to do with today's video was show side of virtual reality that kind of contradicts what most people perceive virtual reality as which is isolating and lonely it's an exciting time right now guys because one day we really will be able to work and make friends with anyone anywhere around the world and all you need to do is just put on a headset virtual reality will let us experience things that we could never imagine in the real world so which world will you choose once again guys my name is Dre if you're new to the channel make sure to hit that big red subscribe button somewhere down below on this page otherwise I'm just talking to myself so please do that and also drop a comment below let me know if I'm full of hot air and until next time Boosh

https://youtu.be/688JXNUaOL8

#vr social system #vr

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Instagram announced on Wednesday, in a short company blog post, that it would make the app more accessible to the visually impaired.

“With more than 285 million people in the world who have visual impairments, we know there are many people who could benefit from a more accessible Instagram,” the company wrote, before describing the new functionality: alternative text descriptions for photos in the Feed and the Explore sections of the app, which would allow screen-reading software to automatically describe photos out loud to users.

Users can manually add the descriptions in the advanced settings of their posts, only a slight tweak from what many accessibility-conscious users were doing already — putting more detailed or literal descriptions of their photos directly in the image’s caption. More importantly, Instagram will use its object recognition capabilities to automatically generate descriptions for images that the poster doesn’t provide them for.

Responses to the addition were generally warm, with the company receiving thanks from visually impaired users in reply to the announcement tweet. But the change was also widely discussed on Twitter as merely a start, particularly in the #a11y hashtag — a shorthand for an online accessibility movement called the A11Y Project, which shares open source accessibility-friendly software information on GitHub and operates a blog about design and internet community.

When user testing, use testers with mixed abilities and confidence. Maybe someone that is new to using a screen reader, not just a veteran. #a11y #TechSharePro

— Zara Gemmell (@ZaraGeeUK) November 29, 2018

The Royal National Institute of Blind People, a British nonprofit, commended Instagram, tweeting congrats on the company’s commitment to accessibility, but also asked that the feature be extended to Stories — important, considering 40 percent of the platform’s 1 billion users post to their Story every day. Louise Taylor, a software engineer at the BBC, tweeted that the feature would perhaps be slightly more usable “if the option to add alt text was easier to find than by clicking on a button with very questionable contrast.”

Others were slightly confused as to why the addition took so long, reacting with a friendly “finally.”

Another thing that’s a little odd here: Instagram’s object recognition capabilities seemingly would have allowed this feature to exist for some time.

The story of how Instagram tweaks its algorithm, identifying content that’s most relevant or interesting to its users, has always been a little opaque, but we know object recognition is at least one part of the puzzle. Facebook has been using Instagram’s wealth of public photos to train its machine learning models, as revealed by chief technology officer Mike Schroepfer at the company’s annual developer conference in May. He didn’t say how long the company had been doing this, but he did say it had already processed 3.5 billion images from Instagram, and that the company had “produced state-of-the-art results that are 1 to 2 percent better than any other system on the ImageNet benchmark.” (ImageNet is the online visual database most commonly used for object recognition software testing.)

Object recognition is obviously a priority for Instagram and its parent company — it will be useful for their advertising business if it isn’t already, and their moderation protocols definitely demand that it be very good.

Facebook, for its part, has had artificial intelligence-generated alternative text as an accessibility feature since April 2016, and allowed users to manually input text for some time before that. Even setting aside the challenges of AI, manual input options for alternative text are more or less standard across the web, and Twitter added them in 2016. If it took this long for Instagram to tack a new text input box onto its app, it’s kind of hard to believe that’s because it was technologically difficult, and not because it was an afterthought.

Screenshots explaining how alt text will work on Instagram. Instagram

Reached for comment, an Instagram spokesperson said accessibility features have been “an ongoing project for some time,” and that they were unable to be more specific about the timeline.

“The challenge was ensuring that we could provide valuable descriptions at scale,” the spokesperson said. Essentially: It’s not that the system can’t recognize what’s in the photo, it’s that it struggles to determine what’s important about it, and to establish context.

I was also directed to a research paper Facebook published last February, explaining the problems it had dealt with when it built the automatic alternative text feature for the Newsfeed, and how the feature had been received in its first 10 months in use:

… it’s a pretty trivial task for a person to pick out the most interesting part of a photo, whereas it can be quite difficult for even the most intelligent AI. The social context and the right amount of feedback is what would give this service a magical experience, and we hope to get to that point eventually! From our interviews, we saw that it can often be worse to provide incorrect information about a picture rather than just leaving out items we aren’t sure about. For example, if the service were to say the photo contained a child, accidentally misidentifying a small woman.

Fair! However, when I asked why it took two and a half years for the Facebook feature to be tweaked to work for Instagram, the representative responded simply that Instagram is “predominantly visual,” and that investments in accessibility take time. This is an important change that deserves celebration; it’s also a change that took two and a half years.

Original Source -> Why did it take Instagram so long to add features for visually impaired people?

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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mikemortgage · 6 years ago

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New $10 bill featuring Viola Desmond enters circulation

Wanda Robson still finds it hard to believe that her big sister is the new face of the $10 bill — and the first Canadian woman to be featured on a regularly circulating banknote.

The sister of the late Nova Scotia civil rights pioneer and businesswoman Viola Desmond, Robson said the move to include a black woman on the bill is a “giant step forward” in continuing Desmond’s work toward equality.

In an interview, she said she has difficulty putting her excitement into words.

“I’m so grateful and I’m happy,” said Robson, who turns 92 next month. “Those are sort of mundane words, but I’m looking for a word that would describe it, and all I can say is what the kids say today: it’s awesome!”

Bank of Canada hides old-school video game in new bank note website

Viola Desmond will be first woman other than the Queen featured on Canadian currency

Bank of Canada releases short list of women who could be featured on next bank note

Robson will make the first purchase with the new bill during a ceremony Monday at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, where Bank of Canada governor Stephen Poloz and museum president John Young will officially launch the banknote.

For her first purchase, Robson plans to buy a book co-written by her and Cape Breton University professor Graham Reynolds about Desmond’s life and legacy, and give it to her 12-year-old granddaughter so she can learn more about her great-aunt’s story.

Wanda Robson, sister of Viola Desmond, holds the new $10 bank note featuring Desmond during a press conference in Halifax on Thursday, March 8, 2018.

Robson said her granddaughter has shown a longtime interest in Desmond, despite being born decades after her death in 1965.

“She said, ‘You know nan, when I get my first ten dollar bill with aunt Viola on it, I’m going to frame it, and put it on a wall, and never, ever spend it,”‘ Robson said.

On Nov. 8, 1946, Desmond was arrested after refusing to leave a whites-only section of the Roseland Theatre in New Glasgow, N.S., in an incident that has since become one of the most high-profile cases of racial discrimination in Canadian history.

It would take 63 years for Nova Scotia to issue Desmond a posthumous apology and pardon.

Robson has spent years educating children and adults alike about how her sister’s case helped shine a light on Canada’s burgeoning civil rights movement.

She said the new bill’s national circulation will lead to even more awareness about Desmond’s story, and the wider issue of racial discrimination in Canada.

“It’s a giant step forward into knowledge about who we are, where we’ve been, and where we’re going,” she said. “There’s still a lot of work to be done, and I really hope that this bill will get not only children, but adults, to say, ‘who is that?’ And then people will be able to pass on what Viola did and the amazing differences she made.”

Desmond was selected to be on the bill after an open call for nominations and a public opinion survey on the Bank of Canada website.

Behind her portrait, the banknote also shows a map of Halifax’s historic north end, home to one of Canada’s oldest black communities and the area where Desmond grew up.

The map includes the stretch of Gottingen Street, where Desmond opened a salon as part of a business that would eventually expand into her own line of cosmetics and a beauty school, which allowed her to mentor black women from across the country.

In recognition of the bill launch, Halifax’s North End Business Association is hosting “Celebrate Viola,” a multi-day event from Wednesday to Sunday that will feature a roundtable discussion about the civil rights movement, an original musical about Desmond’s life, and a tribute concert.

The bill is the first vertically oriented banknote in Canada, and also includes a picture of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, an excerpt from the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and an eagle feather, which the Bank of Canada said represents the “ongoing journey toward recognizing rights and freedoms for Indigenous Peoples in Canada.”

Desmond has received numerous posthumous accolades, including having a Halifax Transit ferry named after her and receiving a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame.

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rebeccahpedersen · 7 years ago

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The Tao Of The 2017 Buyer

TorontoRealtyBlog

The spring of 2017 was the hottest market I have ever seen. It was probably the hottest market that any Realtor, regardless of his or her experience in this city, has ever seen.

I told a lot of stories back in the spring on TRB, many of which conveyed exactly how hot the market was.

But one story was left untold, because it just concluded. And ironically, it took place after the market changed, as our journey began in June.

Allow me to regale you with the Tao of the 2017 Buyer…

Back in 2014, I wrote an epic four-part blog series which I entitled, “The Tao of the 2014 Buyer.”

Ah yes, 2014 – back when I wrote four blogs per week, rather than the three that I cut it back to in 2015 when I started my Thursday “Pick5” feature. Four blogs. Wow. I actually just got anxiety thinking about that…

A four-part series wasn’t how I set out to tell that story, but as I began the framework for a post that I thought might result in a “To Be Continued,” I soon realized that in order to properly convey the story, I needed to let the post write itself.

I remember that spring, 2014 market very well.

It was a continuation of a 2013 fall market that just seemed to come out of nowhere, culminating with a whopping 11.3% year-over-year increase in average home price in the month of November. Yes, 11.3%. Remember when that was significant?

When the spring of 2014 began, we all knew it would be busy.

The average home price of $520,398 in December continued to rise and rise throughout 2014, hitting $585,204 – a 12.4% increase in a mere 5 months; an annual rate of close to 30%.

I was working with a lot of buyers in that market, and every buyer who purchased between January and June continued to follow new listings, and send me emails with, “Did you see the sale price of such-and-such house? Wow, am I ever glad we bought!”

One of my buyer couples from that spring (actually from the fall of 2013, if you read the series) had just about the worst luck I had ever seen, in all my time in the business.

While we often say there is no “luck” involved in buying real estate, that’s not entirely true.

I’ve sold houses to buyers on the night of a storm, or an election, or a holiday, that would have, could have, should have sold for more. That’s lucky, for certain.

I’ve won in multiple offers because the buyer picked a price that ended in say, “512,” because they got married on May 12th – enabling them to beat the second-highest offer which ended in “000.” That sounds skillful, but it’s luck.

Luck is ever-present in real estate, especially on the buy-side.

But my clients from the 2014 “Tao” blog series had no luck, and as a result, they lose EIGHT offers, before finally securing a property on their 9th try – a journey that began on October 1st, 2013, and ended on May 5th, 2014.

They bid $781,200 on a house, and lost to a bid of $785,100.

They bid $800,000 on a house, and lost to a bid of $805,000.

They bid on eight houses, with an average loss margin of 3.0%, and taking away the two blowouts, their loss margin was a mere 1.45% on six lost properties.

Well, if this doesn’t entice you to read a four part blog series, then I don’t know what will!

I’ll make it easy on you, here are the four parts:

The Tao of The 2014 Buyer – Part I

The Tao of The 2014 Buyer – Part II

The Tao of The 2014 Buyer – Part III

The Tao of The 2014 Buyer – Part IV

–

My clients paid $776,00 for a house that’s probably worth $1.1M today, and like so many people before them, they likely thought, “This amount of money is just absurd for what we’re getting,” only to watch the market continue to grow, month after month, year after year.

A question I’m asked by a majority of buyers at the onset of the search is, “How many properties would you say your average buyer sees before they buy one?”

That’s a good question, but unfortunately, the answer is of zero help to the buyer.

“Eleven point four,” I might tell them, whether that’s in any way accurate.

The problem with putting a number to that question is, if the number is high, the buyer might feel like he or she should pass on the perfect property, right there in front of them, in order to simply “see more of what’s out there.” If the number is low, the buyer might feel rushed into making a decision, when he or she isn’t really ready.

Every buyer is different, pardon the obvious.

Every buyer comes into the search with a different amount of knowledge, about real estate, but also about personal finance, mortgage regulations, Toronto’s geography and demographics, and a host of other variables affecting the search.

The second question I get with regularity, specifically in the midst of hot market cycles, is, “How many offers do your buyers lose before they win one?”

Great question.

And perhaps this time, the answer I provide could shed some light on their search.

I don’t know the answer, but if we’re talking freehold buyers, in 2016 through 2017, I’d say probably 2.5.

Now, because I know that you’re very curious to know the answer, I’ve just taken about 45 minutes while writing this, to log all the offers I made in the spring, and find out the real answer to this question.

I think this will be tremendously helpful for active buyers, even though the market has changed.

Of all the freehold properties I sold to buyers in the spring, 2017 real estate market, and not including buyers who made offers but didn’t eventually buy (there were a few), here is the number of offers that my successful buyers made:

1 1 1 1 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 4 4 9

That’s an average of 2.53 offers per buyer.

And since I had guessed 2.5, I feel like I just wasted an hour of my life.

Oh, the things we do in the pursuit of integrity…

You’ll notice that at the bottom of the list, is the number “9.”

At the risk of spoiling the conclusion to this blog series, let me clarify that, yes, this is the story I want to tell today.

The tale, story, journey, or Tao of the 2017 real estate buyer, but also the excitement, heartache, anguish, anxiety, frustration, and experience of two very normal people, well-informed, well-qualified financially, and extremely intelligent, who, as was the case with my couple in 2014, simply had, dare I say, bad luck.

This is, as you would assume from the list of offers above, not the typical real estate experience. But it’s a learning experience for those of you reading it, since we had not one, but many odd situations and events through the course of our search.

All of these events make for those learning moments that so many would-be buyers seek while reading Toronto Realty Blog.

You just hope that they don’t all happen to you…

Jake and Amanda emailed me in March of 2017 to say that they were getting married, and needed more space, and like many buyers in their position, they found that browsing what was available on Realtor.ca wasn’t providing enough information.

I had sold Jake the condo way back in 2010, and while small, it had brought him through a series of transitions in life that one in their 20’s and 30’s would experience while living in downtown Toronto. When I think back to where I was in life when I bought my first condo, and where I was when I left five years later, I can’t believe how many miles I put on the odometer of life.

Jake’s condo was small, and I could imagine how two people living there would be tight. Imagine my surprise when we finally met up and they told me they’d been living there together, in 540 square feet, for several years!

That is certainly getting the most out of your investment!

What’s more, is they absolutely loved the place, and Amanda beamed as she told me what life in the condo had been like.

We got together in April when their search went from browsing online to checking out open houses in person, and they told me that they were looking to spend around $850,000, but were completely open to location, style, and size.

Everybody says they’re completely open; flexible, willing to compromise, make concessions, etc.

In practice, however, I find most buyers have no idea what “concessions” really are, and when you’ve got Cadillac-tastes on a Pontiac-budget, in this market, it makes it very difficult to get in tune with reality. Many of these buyers, unfortunately, get left behind.

But once I started searching with Jake & Amanda, I realized they really were open to just about everything. Our search would eventually take us from Scarlett Woods to Scarborough, and just about everywhere in between.

That flexibility ultimately enabled them to look for value in a market where there often wasn’t any, and draw a firm line in the sand with each and every property. Rarely, if ever, did they get emotionally involved with a house.

After our initial meeting in April, Jake & Amanda hammered out their “must have” list as follows:

Must Haves:

2+ Bed; 1.5+ Bath

Turn key (limited renos if any (cosmetic only); finished basement)

Walkable neighbourhood; near transit

Parking

In/Around Toronto (40 minute max commute to, say, Eaton Centre)

They set their ceiling at $800,000 even, and our search began.

When meeting with clients who have broad search criteria – whether it’s geographic in nature, or rather they’re open to various housing styles, I find it’s best to see a property, any property, and do a thorough walkthrough, pointing out the pros and cons.

The first property we saw together was a small rowhouse on Norwood Terrace, just west of the bridge on Main Street, south of Danforth.

While walking up to the house, we encountered a middle-aged man doing crossfit on the sidewalk, completely in a zone. He was skipping, doing burpies, and I believe he did a few overhead dumbell snatches as well. If that isn’t “a sign” that this is your future neighbourhood, then I don’t know what is.

I immediately saw how organized Jake & Amanda were, as Jake came equipped with pages of notes, transit routes, and important questions to ask.

Listed at $668,000, I told them I thought the house would push $800,000, and for a 2-bed, 2-bath, with no parking, they just didn’t “connect” with the house.

It ended up selling for $765,000, and they had no reaction whatsoever. They had already moved on to other options.

This would become a pattern in a very rational, unemotional search, the likes of which are extremely rare in this business.

The following week, I took them to Danforth Village to check out a few houses that I really liked, and we would end up putting our first offer on paper…

(TO BE CONTINUED…)

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