Real estate for dummies by Real Estate MAX

The Commerce Department’s report Friday showed how the slumping residential real estate market is affecting the national economy. The combination of slower sales and tighter lending led to the economy rising only 1.3 percent in the first quarter of 2007. Businesses are pulling back in the face of the slowdown as they do not want [...]

Morgan Stanley and Inland Western Retail Real Estate Trust are teaming together to form a billion dollar fund to invest in shopping centers across the country. The REIT is aimed at upscale retail centers that are experiencing increasing rents and valuations. The open air shopping centers are some of the best performing real estate in [...]

Bank of America is purchasing Seattle Mortgage Co. from Seattle Financial Group for an undisclosed amount. Seattle Mortgage had been doing business as Reverse Mortgage of America since 1995 having written over 40,000 reverse mortgages and over 4 billion in outstanding balances.
Is this another example of the big boys moving in during a slowdown, [...]

Michigan has been seeing a tough time of it lately. The slowdown in the automotive industry and the free fall of housing prices in metropolitan Detroit is now taking it’s toll on state tax revenue. Of course you can trust the government officials to take the low road and automatically tell the populace that they [...]

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 [...]

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…

And the winners are:Adam Bailey – Next Level Realty representing Cambridge MA Real EstatePeg Archibald-Representing Savannah Georgia Real EstateTony Marriott-From Arizona Representing Scottsdale Phoenix Real Estateand last but not least, this would not have been a contest without a Texan!Brad…

I received a call yesterday from a reader in Louisiana who works as a mortgage broker. He wanted to know how he could get more referrals from real estate agents….