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April 25, 2018

Property

Quick Things Worth Knowing About Multiple Listing Services

Selling your home is easier said than one. While buyers are constantly looking for properties for their respective budgets, sellers are having a tough time dealing with agents. To be fair, real estate agents have helped in propelling the industry for decades, but with technology, updating the process was necessary and important. That’s exactly the point where Multiple Listing Services or MLSs worked for everyone involved. In essence, Multiple Listing Services or MLSs are like platforms that have databases of available properties for an area. Brokers may become a member of one or more Multiple Listing Services as they please, and it allows them to find buyers for homes listed on sale.

What about the advantages of MLSs?

There are many. First and foremost, Multiple Listing Services or MLSs consolidates the local real estate industry, which is important for buyers, brokers, and sellers alike. If you are the buyer, you agent will have access to thousands of properties, and if you are selling your home, your listing gets the services of thousands of brokers. As for the real estate agents, they get the platform to connect and bring buyers, which is eventually all about commissions. If you use a Realtor to enlist your home, you don’t have to pay them beyond the cost of the listing. Yes, there are websites that enlist properties and homes for sale by owner, but with Realtor and MLSs, you can get a bigger advantage.

How does this work?

Some realtors have specific listing services, which allows you to market your home on different MLSs in your area. The cost is a onetime expense, typically not exceeding $500. You can fill up the form, complete the formalities and sign the papers to get done, and your listing will be up within three days. With all that said, you will still have to pay a commission for the buyer’s agent, if the buyer has engaged one, and that doesn’t or shouldn’t increase beyond 3% of the selling price. However, do check if the realtor has a limit or time frame for the listing. Ideally, your property should be listed, until it is sold.

As you can guess, Multiple Listing Services are of extreme importance. According to “National Association of Realtors”, more than 85% of all properties sold have online exposure, with majority of them coming from MLSs. No matter which side of the deal you belong to, this is relevant for you!

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Shopping

The Best Shoes to Wear To Work

Well cut, sober but high on style – this is the mantra to follow when buying shoes for the office.

It appears simple at first glance, but it is not. Dressing for the office is not as elementary as it first appears. There are many ways you can get it wrong. But when you do get it right, the result is a well-dressed persona with loads of oomph and confidence.

Once you’ve got your office wear sorted out – just go online and check out the latest styles and cuts on leading fashion sites like Jabong – you can begin to pay attention to your footwear. The right footwear is crucial: you want to present a clean, sophisticated look, so your shoes must have the latest styles and be immaculately maintained.

Let’s get straight off the bat here and declare that office footwear is more about comfort than being fashion forward. Some of us spend long days on our feet, and the shoes must offer superior cushioning and heel and arch support. On the other hand, certain places of work demand a certain kind of footwear – fashion houses, for example, demand strappy shoes – and wearing anything else would be a sartorial bloomer of the worst kind.

Unless your place of work has a strict code for footwear – no high heeled, noisy shoes or flip flops, for example – you have the freedom to choose whichever style of footwear you most prefer. But your selection must be tempered with the knowledge of which type of footwear and colours go well with your office wardrobe.

We’ve compiled a basic primer on the kind of office footwear that both men and women can choose.

Shoes for men

Men’s footwear has often been confined to just a few basic styles over the years. But the times are changing, and men’s fashion is radically different than it used to be. Today, the accent is on metro sexual dressing, and mixing styles and palettes even for the workplace. Where earlier generations of office goers would stick to baggy trousers and chunky laced leather shoes, men today wear slim fit chinos, ankle-length straight fit linen pants and also loose denims on casual dressing days.

Naturally, this shift in clothing necessitates a shift in men’s footwear also. Numerous footwear brands like Lee Cooper shoes are available on leading fashion sites like Jabong, catering to the uber cool male office goer. Men can choose from Moccasins, brogues, Oxfords, boots and slim trainers for office footwear. The cardinal rule for men’s footwear is to not play ‘matchy-matchy’ with your clothes: instead of matching the colour of your shoes and pants, do pick colours like black, deep brown, navy and tan that can go with most of your trousers.

Hot tip: Pick formal Lee Cooper shoes and a pair of boots, as also trainers and brogues in other brands.

Shoes for women

Women have umpteen varieties of shoes for work, but some categories are more practical than others. For example, a pair of kitten heels is far friendlier on the feet than a pair of five-inch stilettos. On the other hand, a pair of trainers may not be the best fit for the workplace, unless your office has no dress code and casual dressing is the norm.

When it comes to women’s footwear for the office, these categories are the preferred choice: sandals, kitten heels, open toed pumps, low heeled wedges and brogues. Of course, the kind of footwear you pick depends on what you are wearing to work that day.

Hot tip: Dress your feet for your commute and all day comfort. Stow away a pair of stilettos in your office locker and slip them on your feet only at work.

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BusinessMarketingTech

Pre-Paid Plans

With the prepaid pricing war heating up in the Indian market, Indian mobile users never had it so good. The best of plan options across multiple service providers offering best of network connectivity with complete transparent consumer side audit possibility, eg. open network feature being provided by the leading telecom player Airtel.

In the first of its kind, open network feature Airtel is trying to leverage the crowd power to understand the chinks in their network and improve upon them. They have opened up their networks and customers themselves can check the network coverage in their locality with existing services besides the plans for new and future towers in the area. Customers are given an option to provide feedbacks with respect to the service issues in terms of connectivity, call drops and voice quality so company can improve upon the pointed out network issues.

With so much of focus upon customer experience, the company is not leaving any stones unturned to retain their top spot. They have fought back with the new entrants by matching and sometimes bettering the best pre-paid mobile plan available in the market. Gone are the days of limitations and unlimited is the new game changer. The least priced unlimited plan is for Rs. 199 in Tamil Nadu circle which comes with a validity of 28 days, 100 SMS and 1.40 GB data per day, besides free unlimited voice calls in roaming incoming, roaming outgoing, all STD and local calls.

A similar plan is available for Rs. 249 in rest of India, the only change being increased data limit of 2 GB per day, this plan’s validity can be extended for 82 days from 28 days by paying Rs. 250 extra. Other unlimited packs are for Rs. 448 for 82 days with 1.4 GB data per day which can be extended to 90 days by paying Rs. 51 extra. (all these plans are as on Airtel website at the time of writing this article). The validity of these plans on your Airtel pre-paid number can be checked by entering the mobile number on Airtel’s recharge page. Now if we compare the least priced similar plans of the closest rivals of Airtel, Vodafone is not offering any free SMS and Jio has a plan of Rs. 299 with the maximum data limit of 3 GB per day besides similar voice and SMS facility as reported on NDTV.com.

Besides these unlimited plans, Airtel has very recently come out with a Rs. 49 plan in select circles offering 3GB of 4G data for 1 day, users in other circles get 1 GB of 4G data for 1 day, as reported in NDTV.com.

I also started with a Pre-paid number of Vodafone in year 2000, when I was in my post graduate years but got it ported to Airtel once the porting facility started in India to avail facility of a better network, and had not repented my decision. Today due to the price war between the mobile biggies, the Indian mobile telephony market, which was already the lowest in tariff across all countries, is offering incomparable benefits to the end users besides connecting the whole of India from unknownrural sleepy hamlets to the best urban centers of modern India.

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