More of the Same

Pulling together these statistics on the Durham luxury home market is getting a little boring I’m afraid. Unlike our neighboring counties of Wake, Orange and Chatham, through the economic downturn Durham has not gotten worse…or better. You might see a glimmer of hope in the fact that for the last two quarters Durham’s market share has improved from about 5% to about 9% of the Triangle Market. But the truth is the change has come in the drop in sales in the other counties and not an increase in Durham.

Sales

All of these statistics are based on homes with current listing prices of $700,000 or more. In Durham there were 9 sales and there are 4 more under contract and pending. Four of the sales were in Hope Valley, two were in Croasdaile and there were one each in Forest Hills, Colvard Farms and The Oaks. There were no closed sales in Treyburn in this category.

All nine homes in Durham where sold for less that the original listing price. The average discount was over $80,000. The lowest was $15,000 and the highest was $310,000.

The chart below shows the number of Durham sales compared to Wake, Orange and Chatham. This translates into a market share for Durham of 9.5% while Wake enjoys a 69% share, Chapel Hill 16% and Chatham 5.3%. The total dollar sales in the region was slightly over $94M and the average sale was just over $1M. Durham’s average was $870,388 and the other counties averaged slightly more than $1M.

Inventory

The chart below shows the current inventory of each county. A simple absorption rate can be calculated by taking the quarterly numbers, multiplying by 4 and dividing into the inventory number. For example, at the rate of 9 sales per quarter, Durham’s annual rate is 36 homes sold. Dividing 36 into 94 gives you 2.6 years worth of inventory currently on the market. Raleigh has 2.8 years worth of inventory, Orange has 2.7 years and Chatham over 6 years worth of inventory.

Interestingly, Durham currently has the best absorption rate of the four counties even in spite of the addition of several new listings that comprise The Brownstones, luxury townhomes that are to be built on property that was once part of the old NC Eye and Ear Hospital near Brightleaf Square behind Papa Johns Pizza. None of these will actually be available until next year. Neither the listings nor the project website mention availability and an email to the listing agent has not yet elicited a response. This looks like a very ambitious project and will be a wonderful addition to the downtown landscape. I’ll report any additional information that I can get.

The average per square foot price of listings in all four counties are significantly higher than the actual per square foot prices paid during the second quarter, suggesting that there will be some additional price cutting and tough negotiations.

The inventory in Durham breaks down this way: Hope Valley 24 listings, Treyburn 16, Trinity Park/Watts Hillandale 11, The Oaks 9, Meadowmont 4, Maida Vale 4, Forest Hills and Duke Forest 2 each and 11 scattered around in other neighborhoods.

It is encouraging that Durham as kept up a modest pace during the downturn while our neighboring counties have suffered mightily in comparison. I sincerely believe that the community is well positioned to turn the corner and become the gem of the Triangle region and the most desirable place to live as well as work.

As always, comments are welcome here on the site. All this information has been drawn from searches performed directly in the Triangle MLS and is available to any REALTOR. Suggestions and points you might want clarified can be addressed directly to me at jay@jayzenner.com.

Just for fun, I decided to look at the top ten most expensive listings in the Triangle Multiple Listing Service at the end of June.. Here are some observations from the exercise:

1. The top ten range from $11,900,000 to $3,850,000. Only the top two are over $5 M. It still amazes me that many homes in this top tier use a discount from a round number like their audience consists of WalMart shoppers.  Why not make it a round $12M instead of $11,900,000. 100K one way or another is not going to faze somebody shopping in this price range.
2. Durham County doesn’t break the top ten list. In fact, you have to go all the way to number 19 before you get to a Durham listing. The good news is that two homes in the top ten actually list Durham as the address in MLS although both are in Chatham County. That’s good news because it means “Durham” is no longer a bad word and at least some agents don’t feel like they have to twist themselves into knots trying to position their listings in Chapel Hill.
3. Very few of the top ten homes are marketed with their own web site. This surprised me since it is so easy to do. I can’t say this unequivocally, but if they’re there, they aren’t easy to find. Doing Google searches on the addresses did not reveal any. This means that what is available online is the MLS information about the homes passed through to agent sites and syndicators like realtor.com, zillow.com and others. There’s nothing about the communities they are in.
4. Several of the agent remarks in MLS are in all caps. On-line that is considered shouting and is generally considered rude. It’s also harder to read. What are they thinking?
5. Most agents don’t put the owners name in MLS. We know that many affluents guard their privacy but the irony is that it’s all a matter of public record and anybody can find the details with a few entries and a few clicks. This crop included a professional athlete, a prominent realty executive, and a well known media personality. The most difficult one to crack was hidden behind an LLC. It took all of 5 minutes to figure it out. The other irony is that at least a couple of these homes are ridiculously flamboyant. Makes you wonder. It might actually help market the homes if people knew who owned them.

Here are links to the top ten most expensive homes in the Triangle MLS as of June 27, 2009:

1. 7505 New Sharon Church Road - $11,900,000

2. 1400 Alpine Creek Drive - $7,950,000

3. 250 Blue Violet Way - $4,900,000

4. 2600 Village Manor Way - $4,700,000

5. 2720 Toxey Drive - $4, 500,000

6. 1300 Glennis Court - $4,398.000

7. 367 Royal Sunset Drive - $4,300,000

8. 2421 Acanthus Drive - $3,950,000

9. 24107 Cherry - $3,950,000

10. 10625 Marion Stone Way - $3,850,000

If you have followed DurhamLuxRE for the last several months you may have wondered about the growing list of followers are of the DurhamLuxRe Twitter Account. As I write this there are 455 followers but there is a good chance that when this gets read there will be more.

There are three basic groups of followers. The first group are Durhamites that want to keep up with the Durham luxury market. The next group consists of real estate agents from all parts of the country. The way I acquire these followers is to find them and follow them. Many agents will then reciprocate and follow us. One motivation for doing this is to spread the word about Durham and its luxury market and inform them of my willingness to take referrals. The final group is people that follow because they have something to sell you especially those that market scams that tell you how to get more followers. These I basically ignore and don’t follow back.

If you also wonder if I regularly read the London Guardian, (see the previous post) I don’t. I do subscribe to one of Google’s free services called Google Alerts. Whenever the search engine catelogs any story or post on the topics I’ve set up, it notifies me by email. The Guardian story came to me via an alert set up on Durham Luxury Homes. Occasionally it will serve up something on Durham in the UK but those can be interesting too.

Oh, the tangled Web 2.0 we weave.

It may be ironic that sweeping legislation to put tobacco regulation under the control of the FDA has been done during the administration of a president who himself is struggling with a tobacco addiction.  But as Terry Mancour of the London Guardian points out in the article here such regulation was inevitable.

I’m no fan of tobacco (three people very close to me have died of tobacco related diseases) but I’ve lived in three cities, Richmond, Winston-Salem and Durham, where tobacco was an important driver of the economy and where when conditions were right the sweet smell of the tobacco blends would waft through the air during processing.  The fortunes made by those factories built schools like Duke and were the source of much of the early wealth in Durham and built many of its historic homes.

In the late 80’s I did some public relations work for the North Carolina Tobacco Growers Association and saw first hand some of the changes taking place that Moncour shares in his article.  By then allotments were already being consolidated in the hands of farmers who could muster the capital to mechanize operations instead of depending totally on migrant labor. Many of the farmers were also beginning to switch to alternate crops but the alternatives that produce the same return on investment were and are few.  One farmer I got to know pretty well was growing an annual crop of pumpkins that his wife took to Raleigh to market during Halloween. He was also experimenting with oats, which is a speciality crop here, meant for the equestrian market. Others were moving to horticulture crops that were destined for the landscaping and decoration of the growing metropolitian areas, and not for food consumption. Interestingly, there seemed to be a love/hate relationship between the farmers and the manufacturers. Moncour points out that North Carolina did grow the best tobacco in the world but adaquate tobacco can be grown much more cheaply in countries in Africa and South America.  One of the large tobacco companies was actually paying for our work with the NCTBA and I got the strong impression that what the companies were interested in was the political support of the farmers, not necessarily their production.

Tobacco is not the force it once was in creating wealth in eastern North Carolina nor the urban areas that grew up around tobacco factories, but its legacy is still with us in many ways including fine historic homes that became the base of Durham’s luxury home market.

US News and World Report is big on “Best of” lists to generate some readership and sometimes even some controversy. A story published earlier this month listed their Ten Best Places to Live for 2009. Number 7 on the list is…ta da…Durham.

The story is available on the USNWR website at this link along with links to other stories and an interesting tool that allows you to plug in some criteria and let the system determine an ideal place for you.  I put my criteria in and the system came up with some small community in Florida that I’ve never heard of. Huh?

But I still think they got it right about Durham.

Economy Up, Service Down

I have long believed that the health of the economy is inversely proportional to the quality of service in fast food restaurants. When the economy is good, service truly sucks because they are forced to hire  the dregs of the labor pool.  When the economy is bad they can be more selective and the help they hire is more motivated to do a good job .  If there is a silver lining to a recession it is that it does make individuals and companies focus harder on finding and satisfying customers.

Bad economy = Good service

Amateur economist that I am, I formulated this hypothesis several years ago when the two worst fast food places I have ever encountered where within a mile of each other and also happened to be the two most convenient to me when I was renovating my kitchen and eating a lot of fast food. The first was the McDonald’s at the convergence of Chapel Hill Blvd and University Drive. It was dirty, the help appeared to be not only indifferent but probably illiterate and possibly larcenous. One time, needing a quick breakfast sandwich, I went through the drive thru. The voice coming through the speaker was polite and knowledgeable. I was so stunned that I paid at the first window and drove away without my sausage biscuit. But that was very unusual. The inevitable finally happened and they closed in spite of what had to be considered great area demographics.

Turnaround story

Just west of the McDonalds was a Hardees that ran a close second in awfulness. I hadn’t been in years but decided to try them again when the chain introduced Thickburgers. Thickburgers are actually very tasty especially if  you want to get two days worth of calories in one meal. But I vowed never again after getting stuck in their drive thru for 20 minutes one evening when I was very hungry and tired.  And I do mean stuck…no way to even get out of the line until somebody up ahead moves.

But here’s the happy ending to that story.  I really don’t know if it’s the result of current economic pressure or some enlightened manager. Hardees is one of the few national franchises to serve hot dogs. I had about a half hour to kill one afternoon before an appointment and it was lunch time and a couple of hot dogs just seemed like something that would hit the spot. The parking lot at Hardees was nearly vacant which I didn’t take as a good sign.

Good service

But everything else was a big surprise. I was greeted as soon as I walked in the door, assured that they still had hot dogs (strangely they aren’t on the menu on the wall). I ordered two and this same pleasant person suggested I try the onion rings instead of the fries. She then asked if I would be dining in or carrying out. “Dining in!” I thought in surprise, accustomed as I had become to the perfunctory “ear or ta-go?”  I did intend to dine in and they handed me a little plastic numbered tent card…not as cute as the puppy pictures at Nosh, but adequate. She politely tried to up-sell me to a large drink and shared with me where the drink machine was.  I responded that the regular size was fine but enthusiastically remarked, “You’re good!”  She smiled shyly. She was happy to get the compliment but she already knew it. A few minutes later the meal was on my table.  A little later a very small man came by and pleasantly asked if he could remove the empty food basket and refill my drink.

Good food

So, the service was excellent and the food was good. The beer battered onion rings are really much better than what is offered at Burger King and compare favorably to those served right around the corner at the Q-Shack. The hot dogs are large and grilled and the buns are toasted and they come with chili, mustard and fresh onions and for a few pennies more a nice cole slaw. The store was very clean and although the decor was standard Hardees it seemed light and cheerful…and empty.  It obviously hasn’t been rediscovered yet except by passionate hot dog lovers like me.

Happy customer tells his friends

What does this have to do with real estate, especially luxury real estate? Well, my favorite place to eat in that neighborhood…or any neighborhood for that matter…is Nana’s. But I can’t eat there every day.  These are tough times for real estate people. If you’re buying or selling a home you might notice a notably more attentive attitude from agents hoping for your business.

A frequent theme on this website and the primary theme of another I have just launched for real estate people is that it isn’t simply a matter of attitude; it’s also a matter of providing more sophisticated marketing of a client’s property. Like our friends in the fast food industry, acquiring the skills to do that may mean the difference between staying in business or closing the doors.

Expect more.

Whatever else you think of the New York Times, the writing is great and the coverage topical. None more topical than a story in Sunday’s Times about a woman in New York who makes her living writing copy for real estate companies. Topical for me because I’m in the process of launching a new website targeting real estate agents. The site, www.4PsRE.com, will deal with developing marketing plans for homes using the four P’s of marketing, product, price, place and promotion.

Now while New York is probably as unique as real estate markets get in this country, certain principles still apply so the article is instructive even for agents and their cleints  in more typical markets like Durham.

If you read the article you will learn that the speciality of Valarie Haboush, the copywriter, isn’t homes at all, but doing agent profiles for companies like the Corcoran Group.  This reinforces the argument that most real estate marketing over the last few decades hasn’t been about selling homes but selling agents.  You can link to the article here.

While the article about Ms. Haboush highlights one way to improve the promotion of a property,  a companion article provides a counterpoint arguing for the primacy of price during current market conditions. It’s interesting because it also details some ways clients are getting more involved in the pricing of their homes through websites like Trulia.  The fact is that pricing has gotten much trickier and paradoxically has increased the pressure on sellers and agents to use the other P’s to establish value. This companion article can be read here.

This post is here for technical reasons as part of “claiming” this blog and getting it cataloged by Technorati.com which is a site that keeps track of blogs. This should increase DurhamLuxRE’s visibility on the web showcasing Durham and its finer homes.

Technorati Profile

<a href=”http://technorati.com/claim/aj2h5ybkqg” rel=”me”>Technorati Profile</a>

aj2h5ybkqg

Bob Herbert is a columnist who is regularly seen on the opinion pages of the New York Times.  In today’s edition of the paper Mr. Herbert comments on an event that happened in Durham in 1944.  Strict racial segregation was the norm at the time, of course, but a white basketball team from the Duke University Medical School who had bragged that they were the best players in the state had agreed to play an illegal game against an equally proud team from the North Carolina College for Negroes, or what is now known as NCCU.

The white players literally had to sneak through town to the NCC gym as criminal conspiritors, which is exactly what they were at the time.  50 years later, two Duke basketball teammates, Christian Laettner, who is white, and Brian Davis, who is black, became partners and backers of Blue Devil Ventures and developed West Village in Durham out of cast off properties of the old Liggett Tobacco complex.

There are currently 82 homes on the market in Durham listed for more than $700,000, an arbitrary cutoff that I established for the luxury market I started to track in this blog over a year ago. Of those only about 10% were around when that basketball game was played and there is a good chance that several of them were passed by the Duke players on the way to that game, which was played behind locked doors with no spectators in the stands.

Earlier this week at a Rotary Club meeting I enjoyed a presentation on the Research Triangle Park by Tena Valdecanas, the VP of Corporate Strategy at RTPF which has ongoing responsibility for developing the region’s largest economic engine and the pre-eminent such facility in the country. The attractive and articulate Ms. Valdecanas, who is obviously not of WASPish origins, talked about celebrating the RTP’s 50th anniversiary this year. That means that the park, our foremost symbol of modernity,  was founded a mere 15 years after that basketball game was played in 1944.

My explanation of why time seems to move more swiftly the older you get is that each year you live is a smaller proportion of the life you’ve led than the year before was when you were living it.  This comes to mind as I reflect on these events. The first post on this blog was my recollection of seeing a fox run through Downtown Durham 25 years ago, a symbol that nature was reclaiming our inner city when it was probably at the low point before the turnaround began. When we predicted that it would take twenty years to turn it around that seemed forever but now that it’s happened it seems but a blink of the eye.

Durham is a city of tremendous character that is still developing and maybe the ten or fifteen years it’s image may still need to catch up with it’s reality isn’t so long after all. Those considering moving to the RTP area should keep in mind that most of RTP and Duke University and it’s Medical Centers are in Durham County and will consider the homes, both new and historic, as great options live in.

If you want to know who the winner of that basketball game is you can read Bob Herbert’s column at http://budurl.com/jz1002.  Who won may not surprise you but the score almost certainly will.

7 Cortona Drive from TMLS. One of Nine Sales in Durham during the Qtr.

Increased Share for Durham in Luxury Market

For the second quarter in a row we observe the odd phenomena of Durham increasing it’s market share of luxury homes sold in the four county area of the Triangle area that I look at that includes Durham, Wake, Orange and Chatham counties. This happened without a significant increase in sales. In fact, Durham County’s luxury home market seems relatively unaffected by the housing bust. The explanation, of course, is that Durham never really had the boom in the $700,000 plus market that other areas of the Triangle did.

Inventory

At the end of the quarter there were 79 $700,000 plus homes listed on the market in Durham County, up form 70 at the end of the year. 18 of these homes were in Hope Valley, 16 in Treyburn, 9 in The Oaks, 7 in Croasdaile, 4 in Maide Verde and 4 in Meadowmont. There were 21 scattered in other neighborhoods and a couple were horse farms in still rural sections of the county. For several years Durham has consistently had two to two and a half years worth of inventory on the market at any one time.

1st Qtr. Sales

The Triangle MLS recorded 9 sales of homes listed at $700,000 or more out of 83 recorded in the four county area. That’s a 10.8% share which is double the average of 5.3% for the preceeding 4 years. At nine sales, however, Durham is on track for 36 annual sales which is just slightly above the average for the last four year. In other words, the market share increase is totally the result of the market decline in the other three counties.  At the end of the quarter there was only one other listing showing as under contract and pending but there are three now.

During the quarter Orange had 14 closing and has 27 pending. Wake had 57 closings and 53 pending. Chatham surrendered third place in the rankings to Durham with only 3 closings but still has 9 pending. Of the 9 closings in Durham the sales price compared to the last listing price continued to show weakness.  8 of the 9 declined in price and one increased in price. The average discount was $78K and the largest was over $186K.  4 were $99K or more.

Of the nine sales 5 were in Hope Valley, and there were 1 each in Forest Hills, Maida Verde, Meadowmont, Southpoint Manor and The Oaks. There were no closed sales in Croasdaile or Treyburn during the quarter.

Conclusions

With such a small number of sales it’s hard to call anything a trend. However, it is pretty obvious that Hope Valley is doing better than the other neighborhoods tracked.  It is also hard to pinpoint a reason why but several factors probably contribute. Hope Valley has an active neighborhood association and a preservation group trying to preserve the historical character of the neighborhood in street signage and other things.

Secondly, Hope Valley relative proximity to the rivived Durham downtown as an arts and entertainment center for the region could be part of the explanation. Throw in the sale in Forest Hills and six of the nine sales share this characteristic.

Finally, Hope Valley is also in close proximity to the Streets of Southpoint which has the finest shopping in the county and arguably the entire Triange region and probably west and south until you get to Charlotte.

As the economy strengthens progressive sellers will take advantage of these characteristics and promote them aggressively. Only then will Durham’s luxury home market achieve parity with its neighbors to the east and west.

Next Tuesday will mark the anniversary of the first post published on this blog. It was entitled “The Fox”  and was meant to set the stage for future discussions about how far Durham has come since I saw a fox running down Chapel Hill Street near the post office in Downtown Durham in 1985. To me it was a sign that nature was reclaiming the crumbling and increasingly abandoned heart of our city.

Recently I freshened up the look of the site’s graphics a little bit and initiated a Twitter version of the site. Twitter, if you’ve been in a coma for the last couple of years, is for “mini-blogging.” Posts are limited to 140 characters so you have to be pretty concise.  Anyone with a Twitter account of their own can “follow” you from their account. Twitter accounts are free and very easy to set up.  So far I’ve built a modest following of about 120 folks. You can also insert your Twitter posts on a regular website like I’ve done in the sidebar on the left.

My original intention was to simply post information about new listings in the Durham luxury market but the temptation to put other things there was too great. Part of the fun of twitter is to building  an audience of followers which you do by following other twitterers that you identify by conducting searches on particular topics. Others are doing the same thing and find me.  So I get several emails a day with messages that somebody is following durhamluxre or my other twitter account, zenmanrdu, which I set up for another purpose.

This leads you to some strange places. By far, most of my followers on both accounts are others with real estate interests, including REALTORs from all over the country and many places in the world. One of my earliest followers was from a guy who runs a listing service for properties in France. What he’s trying to do, of course, is provide a point of contact for anyone who has a client interested in buying a property in France. The cost of him doing this is negligible. Most of his posts are very short descriptions of a piece of property and a link (often shortened by a service called Tinyurl.com to fit the 140 character format) to more information on the property.

The best of all worlds for him is that something “goes viral,” that is, somebody sees something of interest and “retweets” the post, which immediately shares it with his followers, some of who will start to follow the original twitterer. Eventually, the theory goes, somebody who knows somebody who is looking for a property in France will forward the post or his website link and a connection is made.

Here’s an example. Because of the nature of DurhamLuxRE.com, I get followed by people with some interest in luxury stuff.   This morning I got a follow from a twitterer in New York City who is an antique dealer who specializes in portrait miniatures. To be perfectly honest about it, I had no idea that this was a collectible category. But if I “retweet” her post on my account, all who follow me will also see it. (If you’re interested, the website is www.archibaldminiatures.com.)

Because the DurhamLuxRE.com link is part of the profile on my DurhamLuxRE twitter account, traffic to this site has more than doubled since I started twittering.  Sometime during anniversary week I will post the quarterly report about first quarter activity in the Durham luxury market and also do a “tweet” or twitter post at both of my accounts about. It will be interesting to see what that does to traffic here at the site.

All this effort during the last year will be worth it if it has the desired effect of spreading the word that Durham is an interesting and fun place to live, work  raise families and, of course, look for luxury properties.

Click above for more accolades

In the pantheon of Durham bloggers, Reyn Bowman of the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau is beginning to take his rightful place, primarily using this new media to extend the role of the DCVB as Durham’s marketing agency. But as his profile points out, this is his personal blog  so it also has posts about creativity, destination marketing and whatever else arouses his fertile mind.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I often get ideas for DurhamLuxRE from his blog, Bull City Mutterings because it is my belief that one of the biggest obstacles to a vibrant upscale housing market in Durham is Durham’s lingering image. No organization has fought harder for setting the record straight than the DCVB and Reyn. This post on Reyn’s blog illustrates the problem. ‘tudes

I urge anybody who cares about Durham and it’s image to follow Reyn’s blog.

Holy cow! How did I miss this. 

If you like Durham you’ll love this.  If you thought you didn’t like Durham, this might make you reconsider. If you just overpaid for a home in Chapel Hill this might be depressing.

A recurring theme here at DurhamLuxRe.com is the importance of bringing Durham’s image in line with reality.  For years Durham had a reputation for chaotic government, poor schools, high crime rates and a crumbling downtown.  Some of the reputation might have been deserved but much has changed and the Durham that is emerging not only has personality, it has a very pleasant personality.  A revival in Durham’s luxury home market depends heavily how well that is communicated both within the community and to real estate professionals all over the country.

Reyn Bowman and the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau have long led the effort to promote our image and strike down those who would malign our reputation.  Their latest effort is the Durham Image Watch, which gathers good news and distributes it widely, hither and yon.

To join the Durham Image Watch go to www.durhamimagewatch.com. Or go to www.wheregreatthingshappen.com to learn about all the great things in Durham.

Takes about 30 seconds to set up a Twitter account

I’ve resisted the idea that old dogs can’t learn new tricks but recently getting my arms around the usefulness of the so-called “social media” like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter has been difficult. But I’m finally getting it, I think, maybe.

It turns out that they can be useful and a lot of fun. In the sidebar on the left is an example. You can’t miss the Blue Twitter box that I added last week. What I did was create an account on the Twitter website (www.twitter.com/durhamluxre). The sidebar box is known as a “widget.” It monitors that account and lists recent “tweets” that I have posted to the site.  A tweet is a mini-blog post of no more than 140 characters. I’m going to use this Twitter account to post one thing, changes in the Durham luxury listings in MLS, including new listings, pending sales and price changes. Each of these tweets will include a link to additional information on the property.

Anytime you want to see the whole list of tweets you can click the top of the widget and go to the DurhamLuxRE twitter page.  If you are already a twitterer and have your own account, you can “follow” DurhamLuxRE and my tweets will go right to your twitter account.

Many bloggers also post a “tweet” whenever they write a new post for their blog. I do NOT intend to do this with the DurhamLuxRe twitter page because I want keep it clean for anyone who wants to just follow the Durham luxury home market. I will, however, post a tweet on another account I maintain for use with my real estate business.  If you want to follow this blog on Twitter you can follow that account which is www.twitter.com/zenmanrdu.

One of the “aha!” moments I had trying to figure out what has attracted so many people to Twitter and the other social media is that it is in many ways an improvement over email. For example, a small network of friends with Twitter accounts can communicate directly or as a group once everybody is “following” one another. This seems much “cleaner” in some ways than email because it can’t be inundated by SPAM.

You can also use the “Share” button at the bottom of each post here on the website to send a link of the posts to someone through regular email or by posting to one of many social media sites. For example, if you liked this post and wanted to share it with everybody “following” you on Twitter, click on the “Share” button below and follow the directions. It’s pretty easy even for old dogs like me.