Eric Blackwell's Blog: Real Estate Agents Only

Yesterday afternoon ComScore reported that there were over 10 Billion (yes that is a B) videos viewed in September alone. Here is one account of what that means that I hope you will find interesting.

In case you did not click on that link and read to the bottom, please do. These statistics are telling. YouTube is WELL ahead of Yahoo in terms of searches as well. And look right below that to the video of Coldwell Banker at SES 2009. Interesting at least to me

Google was #1 with 9.4 billion expanded search queries.
YouTube was #2 with 3.5 billion.
Yahoo! as #3 with 2.7 billion.
Bing was #4 with 1.2 billion.

Granted, much of it is teenagers viewing fun stuff. My kids came to me and told me to check out the Vitamin String Quartet doing Bohemian Rhapsody…

I find it interesting some of the changes that I have been observing lately in R,com. Up until now, they have shunned an SEO centric approach in favor of name recognition. Now it seems, they are playing the SEO game for real.

Those who know me well realize just how much I dislike REALTOR.com and those who portend to help REALTORS while not helping anyone but themselves. Anyway enough of that....

Here's what they are apparently starting to target:

Google this phrase:   Homes In (insert city here) Try Austin if it does not work in your neck of the woods. If you look at the page that ranks, you will see that it is far more SEO'd than a regular R,com page...

I'd be interested in folks' thoughts on this.

Eric

This last week, one of the members of our blogging group, Anne Mayhugh, asked me one of those questions... the kind that keep nagging at you until you do something about it.

Here's her concern. She and partner David Hartlage are both highly experienced real estate investors and REALTORS in our office. Anne focus with her first blogging effort was for those who wanted to buy and hold. She is looking now to expand that to all areas of real estate investing here in Louisville.

One thing that she is still struggling with is that she finds noobie investors an incredible waste of time. (And there seems to be more and more of them every day. Anne can smell them a mile away. They are fresh off of this seminar or that. They haven't and won't buy anything. They…

Well, isn't that nice. I woke up Saturday morning to read an email from a fellow blogger telling me that Trulia is now hiring a "team" of real estate industry execs to go influence and "connect with" NAR and local MLS's.  He posted it here on my blog (he's a reporter).  I have spent much of the weekend thinking (and editorializing about the implications of this.

Lobbyists.

Great. Now we are left with the task of combating the mis-information on both the REALTOR and the MLS / NAR level. 

Here's two open questions for the industry:

Aren't lobbyists hired to convince people in another industry to do stuff THEIR way? Whether it is RIGHT or not? They answer to the dudes that pay them. Plain and simple.

How's this strategy working for Congress and the…

$7500 Tax Credit?

Congress recently passed (and the president signed into law yesterday) a housing stimulus package that has been billed as the $7500 Tax Credit for first time buyers. What does this mean to frist time home buyers? The correct answer is--it depends.

First off, we know that people are inquisitive about the tax credit and we are getting more than a few questions here at RE/MAX Properties East about it. We have put together an information pack about the details of the new law...as always, we recommend that you visit with a competent financial professional before doing anything.  That is always good advise!

Secondly, it is not, by precise terms, a tax "credit". It is actually a no interest loan over 15 years. You GET the tax "credit" for…

Well, we finally did it! We rolled out a new Open House section last week for our site. The goal was to create a place for the 120 agents in our office to be able to post their open houses that would provide them traffic and exposure far beyond the levels of the Louisville Courier Cournal (local paper).

One nice thing about having 120 agents in your office is that they have a lot of open houses! Currently on our site we have 23 open houses scheduled for this weekend! Each open house has a date and time, brief decsription, driving directions and contact information for the showing agent in case people want to come early to view the properties.

One of the challenges of this project is keeping it current. We pull open houses currently from theMLS and enter…

I really enjoy sharing some of the more creative things that some of the 120 REALTORS in our office do. They are amazing. One of the more unique and creative teams for us is the Medley - Sokoler Team. They are always coming up with new and inventive ways to effectively brand themeselves.

The funny part about a slower market is that it typically has one of two effects on people. Either they spend more time hanging out at the office and commenting on the economic weather, or they "double down" and use the available time to dig even harder to differentiate themselves. Bob called some of his favorite past clients, asked them to visit him at the office and as fast as you can say "Bob's your uncle." He created a testimonial video. Bob just sent me the ROUGH…

Many of you know that I am not a fan of third party sites, like Trulia, Zillow, hey, even REALTOR.com for that matter. But there is one thing that is getting out of hand that needs to be addressed and the Realtor community made aware of.

Galen Ward wrote an excellent post on the Bloodhound Blog exposing Trulia for link hoarding in an effort to get the top spot on the search engines for many of the addresses in the country. The response to that has been the usual corporate spin of "what...us???" "We wouldn't do that!" and etc.

Then came the topper. One of the trulia guys had the gall to say that they were not returning the favor of a link because they didn't want us "spamming" them...WHAT?

Hey Trulia! as REALTORS it is OUR information. Who died and…