January 2014

Home Energy Saving Tips

 home energy

SIMPLE WAYS YOU CAN REDUCE ENERGY IN YOUR HOME AND SAVE MONEY!!!

 

The Boutique Real Estate Group

These days we all can appreciate saving a buck or two, right? By living a little greener, you may see a little more green in your wallet! Reducing energy use in your home is a great way to save YOU money!. Also, by using less energy there will be less pollution and cleaner air to breath. Sounds like a win-win to me!

Here are helpful tips which may help you save energy and some money in the process too!

 

ROOFING

  • Save money and the environment by installing an ENERGY STAR roof.
  • Reflective coating on your roof will reduce the strain on your AC and lower the amount of heat coming into your home.

 

COOLING

  •  Switch your ceiling fans to reverse or a counter clockwise position in the summer and in the winter run it at low speeds in the clockwise position.
  • Use ceiling fans to cool off as they are cheaper than the A/C and use no more energy than a standard light bulb. HOWEVER, make sure that you turn them off when you leave as they do not cool down a room, only people!

 

HEATING

  •  When you want to heat up your home, do it slowly and it will keep your bills down. Quickly raising the heat pump’s temperature activates the heat strip and uses a lot of energy. Slow and steady wins the race here!
  • Keep the temperature inside your home as close to the outside temperature. It is cheaper to heat a home to 75 degrees when it is 60 degrees outside then when it is 45 degrees outside.

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Real Estate + Technology

Contributing Author: Raj Qsar – Principal | Owner The Boutique Real Estate Group

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Real Estate + Technology. Not really two words that go hand in hand. Two words that usually do not embrace each other. Two words that scare off the most seasoned real estate professional.

Our story goes a little something like this: We love tech. We love real estate. So why not marry the two? Why not have a “forever relationship” with these two words? Why not incorporate technology into every aspect of the real estate experience? Our clients do not need to be tech savvy to use these products, but our agents need to understand how this technology is a benefit.

We have embraced every aspect of technology at The Boutique Real Estate Group here in Orange County, California, and we feel we have successfully digitized the real estate experience for our clientele. Most of our clients are finding us online. Most of our clients are seeing our listings online. So, it only makes sense that we need technology for real estate to survive. If our clients have instant access to data on their mobile devices, so should our agents. Everyone is head down and focused on their phones and tablets. Everyone is in the moment, and we are now able to step into that moment and grab his or her attention.

You won’t find our clients running to a fax machine to fax something to us. We don’t ask our clients to print, fill out, scan, and then save and email anything to us. It’s not how we roll. We sign digitally with DocuSign. Got mobile? No problem. Got a tablet? No problem. DocuSign allows our clients to sign on the go with ease from any device they carry.

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Furthermore, our in-transaction platform of choice is Cartavi, which seamlessly has integrated the DocuSign platform for electronic signatures. Our agents have their own personal Transaction Concierge (TC) who is trained on DocuSign and Cartavi. It only makes sense to be able to store our clients’ documents digitally, have access to them on our mobile devices, and then share the documents with all parties involved in the transaction. Our agents and TCs not only communicate digitally via DocuSign and Caravi, but we are able to manage the most complicated of transactions with these two platforms. No more emailing huge files between escrow, lenders, title, buyers, sellers, and agents. We share our files through Cartavi.

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Several members of our team are heading to Inman Real Estate Connect NYC this week. This gathering is tech real estate heaven! If you’re looking for the best and the brightest in our industry, then Connect is where you should be.

Have a question for Raj and team? Contact them here: http//www.TheBoutiqueRE.com | @RajQsar | @TheBoutiqueRE