“The economy went through a very soggy period,’’ said Lynn Reaser, chief economist at Bank of America’s Investment Strategies Group. “The biggest risk to the economy is if the housing market doesn’t stabilize. That could force consumers and businesses to cut back sharply in spending. Those risks seem to be limited at this juncture,’’ she said.

Even though the economy slowed in the first quarter, inflation picked up. That could complicate the Fed’s work of keeping the economy and inflation on an even keel. “This is a knife’s edge scenario,’’ observed John Silvia, chief economist at Wachovia Economics Group.

An inflation gauge tied to the GDP report and closely watched by the Fed showed that core prices — excluding food and energy — rose at a rate of 2.2 percent in the first quarter, up from 1.8 percent in the fourth quarter. via Pantagraph.com

The group will acquire and manage high-quality neighborhood, community and outdoor shopping centers, Oak Brook-based Inland Western said in a statement.
Inland Western will contribute properties valued at up to $500 million to start the venture and the partners will spend another $500 million to buy and redevelop properties. An unidentified pension fund client of Morgan Stanley’s will provide 80 percent of the equity capital and Inland Western the remaining 20 percent. via Daily Herald

Bank of America

Is this another example of the big boys moving in during a slowdown, or is it a market that Bank of America thinks is ripe as the baby boomers gray?

Bank of America Corp. has agreed to buy the reverse-mortgage business of Seattle Mortgage Co., a subsidiary of Seattle Financial Group Inc. Seattle Mortgage markets its reverse mortgages under the name Reverse Mortgage of America.

Charlotte-based BofA (NYSE:BAC) has been piloting reverse-mortgage products with customers in Arizona since November. “Seattle Mortgage has been a pioneer in developing mortgage products and services that address the senior population’s growing need for greater financial liquidity,” says Floyd Robinson, president of BofA consumer real estate. “This is in line with Bank of America’s desire to grow its consumer real estate business by utilizing our significant advantages in size and scale.” via the  Charlotte Business Journal:

Why is it that when it is time to cut services the first thing the policians look to is education and not the pork that surrounds them like road projects to the middle of nowhere. Don’t bother answering that, we all know that politicians have learned the fastest way to a tax increase is to threaten the children. (they hate it when I phrase it that way)

So watch out Detroit homeowners, soon the fine folks from the state government will be doing is hurting the schools to make a point and further depress the value of your homes.

This time it looks like slow real estate and construction markets are dragging down sales tax receipts. The state School Aid Fund relies on sales and real estate transfer taxes for nearly 45% of the $12.6 billion it had expected to receive by Oct. 1. Granholm’s proposed $125-per-pupil cut is based on the expectation that $200 million of that money won’t be available.
Sales tax collections have been below year-ago levels in four of the last five months, and total collections are 3.9% below those in 2006, according to the latest report from the Senate Fiscal Agency. Jay Wortley, the agency’s economist, said Thursday that economic anxiety among consumers, who are delaying or canceling buying decisions, is the likely culprit. via the Detroit Free Press

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.