Track the progress you make toward your goals to ensure your business survives and thrives through drastic changes in the real estate market.

As summer winds down, many new to gardening are asking what they should do now. Do they rip out dead plants or grab their shears to prune? Share these tips with your clients.

Sales managers can get teams into a rhythm and coach them consistently when they can develop 10 crucial characteristics, writes Erica Schultz, chief marketing officer for Rain Group. For example, top-performing sales managers tend to excel at motivation, productivity and focus, studies show.

Business owners can increase sales despite current economic headwinds by tapping into six strategies, including modifying business plans as needed, hiring people who know how to sell and marketing to loyal customers, writes Rohit Arora, co-founder of Biz2Credit. "Businesses that are on social media are easy to find, and fans are eager to share your company with their friends," Arora writes.

Increasing mortgage rates have caused a pullback in demand, with application volume down significantly compared with 2021 levels. Joel Kan of the Mortgage Bankers Association says "rising inventories and slower home-price growth could potentially bring some buyers back into the market later this year."

Architects, interior designers and other experts suggest a number of ideas on how to create modern hallways that make the most of the space in homes. Paying attention to lighting, personalizing the space to suit the owner's style and adding bright colors will help create a modern space that is stylish and elegant.

Gartner says marketing will continue to incorporate artificial intelligence, and its use will be propelled by technologies that monitor consumers' emotional reactions through vision analysis and other techniques. "By combining [Emotion AI] with computer vision to analyze the composition of each frame in a video, [machine learning] can discover which features (music, dialogue, celebrity appearances, logos, etc.) elicit the strongest responses or lead to tune-out among select contextual audience segments," Gartner says in a report.

How this year's finalists for NAR's Good Neighbor Awards have accomplished extraordinary feats—from creating a grocery store-style food pantry to innovative affordable housing units—to improve their communities through volunteerism.

Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey wants to use $2.1 million in federal aid to convert downtown office space into affordable rental units. Some office buildings in the city center are being converted to market-rate condos and apartments.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has announced a wide-ranging review of Federal Home Loan Banks to investigate whether they are still fulfilling their original goal of promoting home-loan lending. Critics of the network of 11 co-operative banks say a review is warranted because the lenders were set up to meet the needs of a housing market that no longer exists and have since strayed from that purpose into other areas of lending.