tigho is forcery, nyc, real estate, advertising, tech

I'm not sure how this correlates to the Feast Of San Gennaro (running until the end of this weekend)...

Twice a year, we ask people across the U.S. (though an online survey conducted by Harris Interactive) if homeownership is still part of their personal American Dream along with a few other questions about the obstacles that are keeping them from buying at this time. So what did our Fall 2011 survey tell us? To give you the inside scoop, we put together an infographic to help us walk though all the key findings. Let’s get started…

Survey Says: American Dream (of Homeownership) is Alive and Well
This past year has been filled with a series of unfortunate events – from the economy hovering on the edge of another recession and a lackluster real estate market to politics that are making people second guess their 2008 vote. Given everything that has happened, it’s only natural to assume that fewer people would say buying a home is a good idea, right? Surprisingly, this is not the case.

What our survey told us is that a whooping 70% of Americans said they still see homeownership as being part of their personal American Dream. When we asked this same question back in January, it was also 70%. What this means is being a homeowner is still on most Americans’ “I’ve made it in the U.S.A.” to-do list and that nothing (that’s happening politically or economically) is going to bring them down. Even when you look at the data by age (as we did below), most said their American Dream includes owning a home. In particular, we thought this sentiment was pretty strikingly high among young people – the children of the 90s and 80s in this case – especially when you consider the fact that most do not own their own homes.

Homeowners Can’t Get Enough (Of Buying Homes)
Believe it or not, 57% of current homeowners said owning a home is among the best long-term investments they could make – even more than buying gold and putting cash under a mattress (go figure). If you think about it, that’s a bold statement considering how many people have lost their homes to foreclosure thus far. As a matter of fact, 80% of these folks say they want to buy another house in the future. But wait, there’s more. When we broke down this stat by age, we found out that an astonishing 69% of current homeowners age 55 years old or older (we’re talking retired or almost retired Baby boomers here) plan to buy another home. Must be something about that homebuying rush that they can’t get enough of, eh?

Buying A Home Ain’t No Walk In The Park
Most housing markets may be “offering” a blue light special on real estate all year long, but times have changed. The home buying process isn’t easy anymore.

Hands down, the biggest barrier to being a homeowners is saving up for a down payment (though this isn’t necessary a bad thing ’cause you should be putting at least 20% down. Letting people buy with zero down was one of many things that got us into this mess of a housing crisis). This especially rang true for Millennials (18-34 year olds) – 62%  said this was among the biggest hurdles that they faced in trying to buy a home. On the flip side, qualifying for a mortgage and having a poor credit history were a bigger concern among Gen X’ers (35-54 year olds).

Click here to view the full photogallery.

Calling all fans of urban renewal projects who might be suffering from High Line anticipation withdrawal! New York reveals plans for a proposed underground park called the "Low Line" in the Lower East Side. Thought up by satellite engineer turned architect James Ramsey, PopTech exec Dan Barasch and money manager R. Boykin Curry IV, it's essentially a plan to convert an unused trolley terminal on Delancey Street into an underground park, illuminated by "remote skylights" which is "a system that channels sunlight along fiber-optic cables, filtering out harmful ultraviolet and infrared light but keeping the wavelengths used in photosynthesis." Ramsey goes on to say “Technology enables us to create an appealing green space in an underserved neighborhood...We’re channeling sunlight the way they did in ancient Egyptian tombs, but in a supermodern way.” Well then. We are very excited, although some of the renderings do resemble a mall-like atmosphere. The plan faces its first obstacle this Wednesday when Community Board 3 takes a look at the plan. Of course, we'll keep you up to date on what could just very well be a new obsession.

Alongside today's design refresh, we're excited to announce a new partnership with Zillow. If you look to your right, you'll see a new module that allows you to search for listings directly from Curbed. Clicking "Go" (or just clicking on the map if you don't have a specific search in mind) will take you to a co-branded Curbed-Zillow marketplace of listings. From there, you can search for or browse the millions of listings in Zillow's comprehensive database.

We're excited about this partnership for a couple of reasons: 1) We know that many of you are already using our sites for homebuying research. This easy access to Zillow's rich listings will only make that process easier. 2) We've long believed that a good real estate listing makes for great content. This allows us, and you, to tap in to a tremendous trove of those listings.

Today's release introduces the Zillow module to Curbed National and all of our city sites outside of New York. As always, any and all feedback is welcome.

For Curbed advertisers in the crowd, we're happy to note that we are introducing an enhanced version of our own featured listings products on the homepages of all of our sites. These featured listings are a terrific way to get your hot properties in front of our real-estate-obsessed audience.

From Curbed

I have been a bit down on Trulia lately, but the Trulia Insights (the team from Movity) have won me back again!  When, what and where a user searches (during the day, week) is incredibly valuable to any online marketer.  Just choosing when and where to place an advertisement is one of the most important factors in placing a well performing campaign.  We sift through seemingly endless sets of data, just to glean a little insight into when is a better day or time to launch a given advertisement, from a multi-channel strategy to a single real estate listing.

FROM Time comes a report of a delightful study published in Language. Why does it seem like some languages are spoken faster than others?  The answer is that speed depends on the average amount of information packed in a single syllable.  It takes people about the same amount of time to read a simple story out loud whether it is translated into English, French, German, Japanese or Mandarin.  But the number of syllables that will have been spoken in that amount of time varies; those languages that need more syllables to convey the same story sound faster. Fascinating. 

At first blush, I have a guess as to why this would be. Languages that have simpler sound systems (fewer consonants and vowels, no tones, nasal vowels or other such tricks) tend to require longer words. This is because if you only have eight consonants and five vowels, as Hawaiian does, you're going to get lots of homophones. So words have to be longer to remain distinct; this is the reason that the famous state fish is the humuhumunukunukuapua'a.

But as they say, everyone gets only the same 24 hours in a day, so it's little wonder that the lower-information-content syllables have to come at a faster rate.  Though I don't have counts of their phonemic inventories to hand, it seems little wonder that Japanese, with a fairly simple sound system, was the fastest in the study, and Spanish was second. The "slowest" language, Mandarin, partly thanks to the four tones, has around 2000 possible syllables, far more than Japanese or Spanish.

(This post briefly mis-stated that the study appeared in Nature, not Language.)