https://www.bestdigitalmate.com/craigslist-vt/ A vast majority of the sub-areas of the South Bay experienced a leveling off of or an increase in the number of homes sold in 2009 from 2008. Many of these areas appeared to do this with discounted pricing, as median sales prices dropped in all but a handful or so of the areas. The Hermosa Beach East area had the same number of single family home sales this past year as the year before, but the median sales price dropped by 10 percent during the process.
Nonetheless, the median sales price in 2000 was $475 K and now stands at just under $800 K, a solid return on investment for that period. Additional good news is that sales data from this month already show promise of a possible uptick here in the months ahead.
Escrow
There have already been seven sales here in the past few weeks. Of these, one has already closed escrow. This is an auspicious pace for 2010 and more impressively, both the average and median sales prices for these sales exceeds $1 M. If this trend continues, this area will be flirting with the peak sales year of 2006 and may even break the record.
On a side note, there are some areas in the South Bay that have seen median sales price hits because of a sharp decline in the sales of new homes. These numbers have an effect, but not a significant one when spread across 40 total sales.
Manhattan Beach Tree Section Home Sales in 2009
This past year has been a tough one for home sales in the Tree section of Manhattan Beach. In fact, the word tough may actually be sugar-coating it. Only a handful of these sub-areas had a decrease in the number of single family homes sold from 2008 to 2009. The Tree section not only had a drop in sales, but the number of sales fell sharply by over 20 percent.
Median sales prices fell by a similar percentage. To put this into a broader context, the strongest year for home sales in the Tree section was back in 2002, as it was for most areas in the South Bay. Whereas most areas had sales in 2009 drop to about half of the peak of 2002, the Tree section sales this past year were only 38 percent of the 192 sales back then. So this begs the question: What has changed in the market conditions for the results to be off by this much? During the three years leading up to 2009, there were at least 26 or more new single family homes sold here each year. Last year there were only 13. This is clearly an artifact of the credit market crash of 2007. The huge drop in available lending made it difficult for builders to develop new homes.
The number of projects subsequently dropped rapidly, though perhaps not by as much as some might have expected. It is, therefore, no wonder that the median sales price would drop as it has. This would no doubt impact the number of homes sold as well.
Do Boards Need a Technology Audit Committee?
https://thetimebusiness.com/technology/look-wellsaid-vocalid-aihao-mit-technologyreview/ What does FedEx, Pfizer, Wachovia, 3Com, Mellon Financial, Shurgard Storage, Sempra Energy and Proctor & Gamble have in common? What board committee exists for only 10% of publicly traded companies but generates 6.5% greater returns for those companies? What is the single largest budget item after salaries and manufacturing equipment?
Technology decisions will outlive the tenure of the management team making those decisions. While the current fast pace of technological change means that corporate technology decisions are frequent and far-reaching, the consequences of the decisions-both good and bad-will stay with the firm for a long time.
For the Board of a business to perform its duty to exercise business judgment over key decisions, the Board must have a mechanism for reviewing and guiding technology decisions.
Enterprise Resource Planning
A recent example where this sort of oversight would have helped was the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) mania of the mid-1990’s. At the time, many companies were investing tens of millions of dollars (and sometimes hundreds of millions) on ERP systems from SAP and Oracle. Often these purchases were justified by executives in Finance, HR, or Operations strongly advocating their purchase as a way of keeping up with their competitors, who were also installing such systems.
CIO’s and line executives often did not give enough thought to the problem of how to make a successful transition to these very complex systems.
Certainly, no successful medium or large business can be run today without computers and the software that makes them useful. Technology also represents one of the single largest capital and operating line item for business expenditures, outside of labor and manufacturing equipment. For both of these reasons, Board-level oversight of technology is appropriate at some level.
Can the Board of Directors continue to leave these fundamental decisions solely to the current management team?
Most large technology decisions are inherently risky (studies have shown less than half deliver on promises), while poor decisions take years to be repaired or replaced. Over half of the technology investments are not returning anticipated gains in business performance; Boards are consequently becoming involved in technology decisions. It is surprising that only ten percent of the publicly traded corporations have IT Audit Committees as part of their boards. However, those companies enjoy a clear competitive advantage in the form of a compounded annual return 6.5% greater than their competitors.
Tectonic shifts are under way in how technology is being supplied, which the Board needs to understand. IT industry consolidation seriously decreases strategic flexibility by undercutting management’s ability to consider competitive options, and it creates potentially dangerous reliance on only a few key suppliers.