Real estate for dummies by Real Estate MAX

Who says there’s no more land? Why just last Tuesday a Swiss Scientist announced the discovery of Gliese 581c, an earth-like globe just 20 light years away. Coming soon — The Space Cadet, starring Donald Trump!

Could Toll Brothers be developing Roswell NM’s Area 51? Any Realtors in Flying Saucer SUVs with "581 [...]

Long time readers know that I take exception to the MLS reports, and in particular to the reports from the National Association of Realtors. [OK, you only had to be a reader since yesterday to know that, but that’s beside the point.]
Part of the problem with these reports is the willingness of the cheerleaders to [...]

An article from the Online Journal quotes Henry Paulson:
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson delivered an upbeat assessment of the slumping real estate market on Friday saying, “All the signs I look at” show “the housing market is at or near the bottom.”
Paulson added that the meltdown in subprime mortgages was not a “serious [...]

Nolo puts out a lot of good legal information geared for the average consumer, and
Nolo’s Essential Guide to Buying Your First Home is no exception.

When I think back to…

As you can imagine, as the mother of five, I know a fairy tale when I see one.  Consequently I recognized this one right away from the Arizona Republic:  [Hat tip M.R.!]  It was entitled U.S. Housing Market Worsens as Valley Improves.  Like all works of fantasy suited to the minds of children, I recognized [...]

The Marketwatch headline today?  New-Home Sales Inch Higher in March:
Boosted by warmer weather in the Northeast and Midwest, sales of new homes increased by 2.6% in March to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 858,000, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.
That is of course month-over-month.  Year-over-year, [YOY] sales are down 23.5%.  According to the Commerce Department:
Sales [...]

I Got SEO’d

We get approached all the time to do SEO.

Search engine optimization is the most over hyped, misunderstood activity on the web. And the spin starts at the top. Meaning the head spin meisters are Google, MSN , and Yahoo. Why would they do such a thing? They want you to spend money on their ads.

Additionally don’t think that the guys who get real online marketing, don’t do their own disinformation of what works today in SEO.

Yah, free is worth just that.

Its the part that boggles me most in the internet arena. Nothing is FREE, not forever anyway. MySpace had to make money somewhere. So they eventually littered their site with ads of buxum ladies who supposedly are looking for a date.

Murdock bought MySpace for the eyeballs. Google bought YouTube for the eyeballs.

Big dollars seem to cloud fundamentals in an industry (real estate) where real marketing is seldom understood or executed. I remember when I was green and I was taught the proverbial 30 points of action. In a listings presentation we were told to parrot, Yes we will do open houses, and hand out flyers, etc, etc. We don’t say that we would use their house as a device to harbor the local buyers. Sure if they buy this house great, but we also knew that chances were they would buy something else.Of course the 4 Color ad brings in the luxury buyers, but seldom sold the advertised house. But it sure makes for one hell of a presentation.

How many agents never figure out the misdirection? Whom of them never really get the marketing? Then along comes the web and these same agents jump right into the boiling pot where the TRUTH is further obfuscated.

First its YOU need a website. Then you need IDX, and then you need SEO. Blogs. Each with its own mind numbing set of nuances. The sale of course is always something for nothing.

And now the long tail . Ah yes. The proverbial long tail. The excuse that I cannot get real traffic, so I go after the scraps.

That’s the way it is typically executed anyway. The longail is also over hyped and severally misunderstood by most. At least as it applies to SEO in real estate. It is often used as the excuse on not spending any real budget in an online campaign. I can just blog and get traffic and business.

Yah RIGHT!

Search has morphed into a two headed beast.

The Blogosphere/Web 2.0

Traditional Search Engines

You can blog at the so called blogospere. But guess what they ain’t buyin’.

Or

You can blog for traffic and leads. That takes SEO from the real search side of the engine.

It requires muscle called link equity. And sorry your blog roll of yours isn’t going to do the trick.

Now don’t get me wrong I am not against the blogosphere, but I use that to leverage getting our SEO clients traffic. The Secrets to using the Blogosphere and the Longtail for optimal traffic are what I save for our clients.

For the most part, professionals engaged by a buyer in the home buying process represent the buyer. A real estate lawyer hired by a buyer represents the buyer. A real…

I bought one of my first homes from a For Sale by Owner, a FSBO. It was a quaint Cape Cod two-story with hardwood floors, an add-on family room, four…

Overall, buyers who need to sell a home before buying a replacement home are better off in the long run by taking out a home equity loan instead of a…