Economic Storm Clouds Continue to Build In what many feel is yet another sign of a brewing economic storm, sales of new single-family homes in October showed a significant drop of 8.9% below the rate of home sales in September, … Continue reading
Recently, I warned of some troubling housing related news. You may recall that a collapse in the housing sector was a key driver of the last recession in 2007-2009 that was so painful for the custom integration community, and for … Continue reading
Five Steps to Take Now to Protect Your Business Occasionally, I’ll chat with an integrator or other industry colleague about that ugly shared nightmare experience, otherwise known as the recession of 2007-2009. This recession, unlike others in the past, zeroed … Continue reading
September housing starts, the government’s measure of new residential construction activity, showed an overall decline to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1,127,000 units. This rate is down 4.7% from the revised August rate of 1,183,000 units. This is the … Continue reading
Calling 2016 “a year of transition,” NAPCO Media announced yesterday that it has printed its last Technology Integrator (TI) magazine – deciding to withdraw from print media and reinvent itself into an online-only property. The move has been rumored for weeks, … Continue reading
Apple, Inc. is starting to look brown, bruised, and past its prime in wake of the surprising quarterly results that showed growth in sales of their bellwether iPhone product to be the slowest since the company launched the product category in 2007. … Continue reading
In a result that exceeded economists’ estimates, November overall housing starts jumped an impressive 10.5% to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.173 million units. Well over the revised October rate of 1.062 million units, it also exceeded the 1.007 … Continue reading
Probably the biggest news in business today is that the Federal Reserve Board hiked interest rates for the first time in almost a decade. Wall Street celebrated by driving up stock values in the wake of the news. Yet consumer … Continue reading
Outdoor Kitchens & Media Rooms are Out, Walk-in Closets & Programmable Thermostats are In The National Association of Home Builders has completed a comprehensive survey of home builders to learn what features home buyers are asking for in homes being … Continue reading
New data from market researcher Forrester Research Inc. suggests that retailers should forget about trying to attract millennials or other younger shoppers and instead shift gears to reach out to baby boomers. Why? Quite simply, that’s where the money is. … Continue reading