Did you hear the news?  I am Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.  And so are all our clients.  Essentially, we are part of the Web 2.0 revolution where the Internet allows us to collaborate and create communities.  If you blogged, added video to YouTube, contributed an article to Wikipedia or updated your website, then you have participated, perhaps unknowingly, in this incredible social experiment.  This new digital democracy has allowed small contributions from millions of people to become a powerrful force, breaking from the historical model where a few powerful people make the decisions that shape our collective destiny.  We are all directors, producers, composers, writers, artists and entrepeneurs and the Internet has given us the freedom, the vehicle to distribute our skills and knowledge. 

I read an article in the Province last week. The article was titled, “Social Media Scrap For Space”. Essentially, it detailed the competion between social-networking and social media websites such as MySpace, YouTube, Google Video and Yahoo! Video Search. But it was the small chart on the bottom right hand side that caught my attention. It was a list of these social networking sites and their average visit length. Essentially, it is the amount of the time a visitor stays at a website.

It can be argued that average visit length is a better measurement of the effectiveness of a website than number of pages, hits or visitors. The length of time is fair evaluation of how captivated visitors are by the content on a particular website. How captivated are viewers of our videos? The average visit length to our website was 270 seconds in 2006. Since our videos are generally between 90 to 150 seconds in length, it is safe to conclude that the majority of our Video Openhouse Tours are being watched in their entirety! Essentially, as a realtor, you have the undivided attention of a potential buyer for 1 and a half to 2 and a half minutes! Your name, picture and contact information at the top of the page for the duration of a video. Video tours not only promote listings, they promote agents!

I was looking through our web statistics for 2006 and was surprised to find that the top country by page views behind Canada and the United States was South Korea.  I have since found an interesting article from the August 22nd, 2006 issue of the Asian Pacific Post titled, “Koreans Snap Up Local Real Estate”.  Here is the article:

Canada is among the top destinations for rich South Koreans who are capitalizing on an easing of rules on overseas real estate investment.

Koreans invested more than US$100 million in overseas real estate in the two months to July in the wake of the foreign exchange deregulation in May, the Ministry of Finance and Economy said in Seoul.

The sharp rise came after the government allowed an individual to buy overseas real estate worth up to US$1 million for investment purposes beginning May 22.

The government eased the rule to increase the flow of dollars out of the country and curb the won’s further rise against the greenback.

Despite growing concerns about a cool-off of the global property market amid rising interest rates, affluent Koreans are shifting their funds into overseas property in the belief that they cannot make capital gains as strong as before on the local market. In July, applications for overseas real estate investment totaled $54.4 million in 143 cases, compared with $54.2 million in 145 cases in June.

Most investments landed in the U.S., Canada and China. In July alone, 49 applications were for investments in the U.S., 37 cases in Canada and 24 in China.

Real estate brokers say that the actual amount of investment in properties in foreign countries is probably far higher than that reported to the Bank of Korea.

For the first seven months of the year, investment in overseas real estate reached $190 million in 526 cases.

Brokers say that more Koreans will opt to increase investment in homes and land overseas as a means to avoid higher property-related taxes here.

“Overseas real estate is appealing, especially to those wealthy multiple homeowners who face heavy property holding taxations here,’’ Lim Chae-kwan of Lootiz Korea, a local real-estate brokerage firm, said, according to the Korea Times.

“They also think they can make currency gains if the dollar strengthens as it did in recent weeks,’’ he said.

This means that they will have to take some currency losses if the dollar weakens going forward, he said.

Types of overseas properties are also become diversified from residential houses to condos.

One area attracting Koreans in large numbers is Coquitlam’s Westwood Plateau.

Andrew Yan, a former Vancouver resident studying in the department of urban planning at UCLA’s School of Public Affairs, crunched some census numbers in the area.

He found dramatic increases in the numbers of people of Chinese descent settling on the Westwood Plateau and also in the numbers of people with other Asian ethnic backgrounds moving there.

In 1991, there were only 25 people described as Korean living on the Westwood Plateau, out of a total population of 7,205, according to Yan.

Ten years later, there were 23,600 people living on the Westwood Plateau – and 2,015 of them (about 8.5 per cent) were Korean.

Yan said the increase in Korean-Canadians living on the Westwood Plateau may be largely due to the Canadian government’s decision to grant a visa exemption to South Koreans in the mid-1990s.

While North Road is known for its Korean businesses, Yan said many of the people who own those businesses live on the Westwood Plateau.

Source: Asian Pacific Post
August 22nd, 2006
Koreans Snap Up Local Real Estate

Video tours are a great way to market to overseas clients.  Our web traffic clearly indicates that there is significant international interest from South Korea, Australia, Great Britian, Taiwan, Hong Kong, China, the Russian Federation, and European Union. 

Here is a video we produced for Karen Bong of a listing in the Westwood Plateau:

3138 Plateau Boulevard video – photos