William Raveis explains the new raveis.com Housing Data Matrix -- the important benchmarks and indicators of market activity

“We are proud to receive this honor,” said Mr. Raveis.  “It is an award that is quite meaningful to us. This prize substantiates our efforts to make raveis.com the best website in real estate.  Each year, raveis.com becomes more robust and more popular as a result of our initiative to deliver leading-edge technology to our customers.”

Raveis.com is recognized in the Northeast as “the best website in real estate” and draws more than 10 million visitors annually.

The Connecticut Quality Improvement Award  (CQIA) is America’s first state-level quality award using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for Performance Excellence criteria.  CQIA was founded in 1987 in an effort to advance innovative programs that improve quality and performance excellence in the marketplace.   

The Baldrige Award is given by the President of the United States to businesses and to education and healthcare organizations that apply and are judged to be outstanding in seven areas: leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information and analysis, human resource focus, process management, and business results.

William Raveis Real Estate, Mortgage & Insurance is one of the top companies in the nation.  It is rated as the #1 family-owned real estate company in the Northeast, the #6 independent real estate company nationwide and most recently, rated by Realtor Magazine, as the 10^th largest real estate company in the USA based on sales volume.  The innovative firm is nationally recognized as an industry leader in technology, marketing and REALTOR^® education.

The company’s Connecticut offices were recently voted “the best residential real estate company” in Connecticut by the readers of Commercial Record in the “BEST OF” Commercial Record 2009 Readers Poll. The company’s Massachusetts offices also received the same award by the readers of Banker & Tradesman. This is the second year in a row that the company received the First Place Gold Award in MA.

William Raveis recently began its New York expansion and presently has an office in Rye as well as in Harrison in Westchester County.  Future plans entail expansion into Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Presently, the firm has 2,100 highly trained sales professionals and 65 offices / two affiliates in Connecticut; Massachusetts; Westchester County, New York; and Rhode Island.

Bill Raveis shares important information for buyers and sellers on how to evaluate facts and figures to assist with the home buying and selling process.

He summarizes key data points for both buyers and sellers.

William Raveis, Chairman and CEO of William Raveis Real Estate, Mortgage and Insurance, is most pleased to announce that the company website, raveis.com, has recently received a silver innovation award from the Connecticut Quality Improvement Award Partnership, Inc. (CQIA)

“We are proud to receive this honor from the Connecticut Quality Improvement Award Partnership,” said Mr. Raveis.  “This prize substantiates our efforts to make raveis.com the best website in real estate.  Each year, raveis.com becomes more robust and more popular as a result of our initiative to deliver leading-edge technology to our customers.”

Presently, raveis.com draws more than 10 million visitors annually.

The Connecticut Quality Improvement Award Partnership, Inc., America’s first state-level quality award, was founded in 1987 using the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award for Performance Excellence criteria in an effort to advance innovative programs that improve quality, performance excellence, and marketplace competitiveness.

The Baldrige Award is given by the President of the United States to businesses and to education and healthcare organizations that apply and are judged to be outstanding in seven areas: leadership, strategic planning, customer and market focus, information and analysis, human resource focus, process management, and business results.

William Raveis Real Estate, Mortgage & Insurance is one of the top companies in the nation.  It is rated as the #1 family-owned real estate company in the Northeast, the #6 independent real estate company nationwide and most recently, rated by Realtor Magazine, as the 10^th largest real estate company in the USA based on sales volume.  The innovative firm is nationally recognized as an industry leader in technology, marketing and REALTOR^® education. Its award-winning website, raveis.com, is recognized as “the best website in real estate” and draws more than 10 million visitors annually.

The company’s Massachusetts offices were recently voted “the best residential real estate company” in Massachusetts by the readers of Banker & Tradesman in the Banker & Tradesman Best of 2009 Readers Poll. This is the second year in a row that the company received the First Place Gold Award.

William Raveis began its New York expansion with the recent opening of the Rye office in Westchester County.  Future plans entail expansion into Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. Presently, the firm has 2,100 highly trained sales professionals and 63 offices / two affiliates in Connecticut; Massachusetts; Westchester County, New York; and Rhode Island.

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Today through raveis.com, the popular William Raveis website, consumers can subscribe to a free newsletter that highlights market conditions for up to 5 towns of the consumers’ choice. The housing stats and charts are available in real time and updated monthly. The newsletter offers an unbiased summarization of trends in the towns chosen by the consumer and also includes easy-to-read graphs showing the number of homes currently on the market, the number of homes sold, the average days on the market for houses that sold during the month and the median sales price in the requested towns.

Another recent enhancement, which is specially geared to today’s time-pressed homebuyer, is the inclusion of all weekend MLS open houses. Buyers no longer have to sort through page after page of newspapers looking for open houses at various real estate companies when now they can find all MLS open houses in one place merely by clicking “Open Houses” on the front page of raveis.com. A pleasant surprise awaits any consumer who visits the page for they have the opportunity to win a free trip to the Bahamas by simply filling in the form.

According to William Raveis, “We’re especially excited about our housing newsletter which is sent out automatically and available to everyone. With mortgage rates at an all-time low, consumer interest is high and our newsletter keeps current statistics in front of them.”

“We are diligent in seeking out new features to make it effortless for our customers to receive the information they need,” he added. “Raveis.com is a one-stop website that offers extensive real estate services in one location so that the customer does not have to go from place to place. We are continuing to invest in raveis.com to provide the latest technological advancements to our customers.”

The website has also been upgraded to allow advanced search capability as well as a detailed analysis to the existing local housing charts. The consumer can now refine their search criteria to include the price range, number of bedrooms and square footage. In addition, a detailed analysis is available for each town that documents similar inventory by price range, price per square foot, sales by price range and days on the market.

New features have also been added to each individual listing. They include current market data graphs and notification in red if the property is newly listed along with the listing date.

Raveis.com continues to grow in popularity as the number of visitors to the site continue to soar. Usage reports reveal an extensive increase in website hits to one billion in 2008. Total visitors were up 31% to more than seven million and the e-mail notification subscribers has increased 39% over last year to 27,000 subscribers.

Mr. Raveis expects the number of visitors to the site to accelerate even more significantly in the future because of anticipated growth. “With our plans of expansion into the New York marketplace, we have now included property listings in Dutchess, Putnam and Westchester County,” he said, “offering site visitors the ability to browse among hundreds of New York property listings. We also anticipate moving into Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, making raveis.com the one source website for the entire Northeast.

William Raveis Real Estate, Mortgage & Insurance is one of the top companies in the nation. It is rated as the #1 family-owned real estate firms in New England, the #2 family-owned real estate company in the United States and #12 out of 100,000 real estate firms nationwide. The innovative company is nationally recognized as an industry leader and is dedicated to providing an unparalleled real estate experience to its customers. Since 1974, the firm’s 2,000 highly trained sales professionals have been dedicated to strengthening their position as industry leaders in technology, marketing and REALTOR® education. The company has 63 offices, including two affiliates, in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Future plans entail expansion into New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine. ###

Through the GPS application, consumers can stand on a street and view detailed home information on almost any home for sale in that neighborhood or the entire market at the touch of a button. Information includes sales price, square footage, tax information, beds/baths, interior and exterior features—even pictures!

The application also features a “Call to See” button. With one click, the consumer will be transferred to an experienced William Raveis customer service representative who can answer in-depth questions or schedule a tour of the property.

“As mobile adoption has surpassed 250 million people nationwide, Smarter Agent has provided us with an exciting, accurate and easy to use tool to empower our customers,” noted Raveis, CEO of William Raveis.

The application is available for download from raveis.com. There, consumers will find a “William Raveis Go Mobile” tool, which will provide instructions on how to send the application to their personal cell phones. Users simply select their cell phone carrier, the make/model of their cell phone and their cell phone number. Instantly, the application is sent via text message and downloaded to the cell phone, similarly to a ringtone or game. This makes Smarter Agent the most comprehensive mobile real estate tool in the New England region, as well as the nation.

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The new information-rich website features a powerful technologically-advanced mapping tool, Power Alert, not available to any other real estate company in the nation, that allows the consumer to highlight the neighborhood they desire, and when a property for sale appears in that area, the buyer will be notified via email.

Another exclusive feature on the versatile raveis.com website includes the Go Mobile tool, a new patented GPS mobile application which gives consumers the ability to search homes for sale in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, using their personal cell phones. Through the GPS application, consumers can stand on a street and view detailed home information on almost any home for sale in that neighborhood or the entire market at the touch of a button. Information includes sales price, square footage, tax information, beds/baths, interior and exterior features-even pictures!

The application also features a “Call to See” button. With one click, the consumer will be transferred to a William Raveis customer service representative who can answer in-depth questions or schedule a tour of the property.

William Raveis is the only real estate company in New England to offer the Go Mobile application.

A further development on raveis.com is the new open house feature on the property detail page which gives the date and time of the open house along with the weather forecast for that day. The raveis.com mapping application can even chart the consumers’ open house itinerary with directions from one open house to another. The website advertises weekend open houses in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island on Fridays.

Local news, demographics and crime statistics are also additions to the new mapping site as well as information on neighborhoods such as – schools, crime statistics, child care, cafes, health care, fire department, hospitals, post offices, senior care, service providers and much more.

The new easy-to-use raveis.com also provides significant value-added features such as larger photos, local housing data and charts, sold homes, property comparisons, price per square foot, insurance quotes, and mortgage pre-approval directly on each listing’s personal “Property Details” page. The site features a complete, printable Buyers and Sellers Guide and offers the ability for customers to search for rental properties as well.

“Being a family-owned real estate company with a strong focus on our customer, we’re always looking to take our services to the next level,” said Mr. Raveis. “Our new and improved raveis.com is a state-of-the-art 2.0 website, offering features not found on any other real estate website in the nation.”

“At its essence, raveis.com provides an easy to use search experience in a one-stop shopping fashion for today’s time-pressed homebuyer,” he continued. “Our commitment to home buyers does not end with the purchase. And our support of home sellers does not end with the sale. Where else can a homebuyer conduct their home search, check out the neighborhood amenities and demographics, finance and insure their home, and coordinate everything from phone hookups to invisible fence installation – all in one place.”

Raveis.com annually attracts more than 7 million visitors* worldwide. For more information and to view the improvements to the William Raveis website, please visit raveis.com today.

William Raveis Real Estate, Mortgage & Insurance is one of the top companies in the nation. It is rated as the #1 family-owned real estate firm in New England, the #2 family-owned real estate company in the United States and #12 out of 100,000 real estate firms nationwide. With a 2007 sales volume of $5.5 billion, the innovative company is nationally recognized as an industry leader and is dedicated to providing an unparalleled real estate experience to its customers. Since 1974, the firm’s 2,000 highly trained sales professionals have been dedicated to strengthening their position as industry leaders in technology, marketing and REALTOR� education. The company has 60 offices, including two affiliates, in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Future plans entail expansion into New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
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*estimated 2008

“This most recent addition to our Local Housing Data service adds a new dimension to the information visitors can access at raveis.com,” said William Raveis, chairman and CEO of William Raveis Real Estate, Mortgage & Insurance. “There’s been concern over buyer reluctance mostly because of the negative national press, but our local housing data helps the average consumer see that, contrary to what they’ve been hearing, our local markets have been holding up from a pricing standpoint.”

Growing in popularity since it’s launch last November, Local Housing Data at raveis.com has attracted the attention of consumers, industry professionals and media personnel alike. In January alone, Local Housing Data generated nearly 10,000 reports for visitors to the site. Providing accurate, comprehensive and free real estate statistics compiled from various statewide multiple listing services, the feature is an unbiased, quantitative window into current local housing market conditions. It is designed to assist both buyers and sellers in making informed real estate decisions. And, unlike most sources of information of its kind, Local Housing Data is updated on a monthly basis and is continuously adding new features and enhancements.

The William Raveis Family of Companies attributes its success to a consistent emphasis on integrity, service and experience. Offering one-stop shopping for its clients, William Raveis provides mortgage, insurance and closing/title services, all with the additional ability to earn points, services and cash back via the company’s own Visa�/Bank of America credit card, a part of the William Raveis Rewards program. The firm’s website, raveis.com, offers homebuyers property comparisons, price per square foot calculations, online appointment scheduling, online home value capabilities, interactive neighborhood mapping of all active and sold listings, relocation information and the ability to conveniently search more than 100,000 properties listed through various multiple listing services. With the recent launch of a new interactive widget and RSS technology, the site is now capable of delivering the latest customized listing and mortgage rate notifications directly to customers’ computer desktops and favorite RSS readers. Annually, raveis.com attracts more than 5 million visitors worldwide.

William Raveis Real Estate, Mortgage & Insurance is New England’s largest privately held, family-owned real estate firm. With a 2007 estimated sales volume of $5.5 billion, the innovative company is nationally recognized as an industry leader and is dedicated to providing an unparalleled real estate experience to its customers. Since 1974, the firm’s 1,900 highly trained sales professionals have been dedicated to strengthening their position as industry leaders in technology, marketing and REALTOR� education. The company has 59 offices, including two affiliates, in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Future plans entail expansion into New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.