What better time to update sales in Crooked Creek than right now when we have a listing for sale and right after I'm back with some fresh photos of the golf course. I'll post a couple photos down the page a little, but, I do want to get to the actual market. Crooked Creek is in an extraordinary community and if you live there or you are familiar with it, you probably don't need me to tell you that :). For everyone else, I think it's important to talk about what Crooked Creek is in the process of doing right now. At a time in the real estate market where many would argue that it isn't the best time to put money in your property or neighborhood, Crooked Creek is in full swing of doing more than your average upgrade. They are gating the main entrance on…

The sky has fallen on the real estate market. Banks are even afraid to foreclose on homes until the new administration tells them how they are going to bail them out. Prices are down nationally and almost on all local levels as well. But, not everything is all bad. It never is. I don't participate in spin, but, what I just said above isn't bad spin. It's just not the entire story.

Here's the problem when we hear a news caption like this; it never tells the whole story. Let's look at a market I know well - Alpharetta. In Alpharetta as in most places, there are less sales than in the past. Fundamentally, this is because the sub prime market for home loans is gone and fewer people qualify. I have an economics question that just begs to be answered, but, the…

Deciphering boundaries between Alpharetta and Milton can be difficult to manage using the FMLS because too many agents still enter listings that are actually in Milton as "Alpharetta" because they don't understand (this is just my opinion) that there is a specific desire by consumers to search specifically for homes for sale in Milton vs. Alpharetta due to some of the inherent differences between the 2 cities. Complicating the statistics even farther is the very large number of unmapped properties in Milton which makes it impossible to even use the map search feature to accurately ascertain what's happening in Milton compared with other areas.

My experience has been that while there are truly some differences between the two, for the most part, the real…

I have taken the week off and not spent any real time with the contest in the last week as I have been quite busy with the actual real estate part of my job. That's a good thing. I've fallen back to 5th place in the contest in that week as I see lots of others have kept quite busy by participating in online blog discussions, writing articles and more. So, my strategy for the last week has been to watch and see what others are doing/have done and see if there is anything new to learn.

So far, it seems to be those who have strong domains to start with and adding some extra link pop to a post with the aforementioned methods. One entry however, has quite a different approach. Eric Blackwell has gone the 'team' route and it seems to be working well as he sits…

This contest has taken on a mind of its own now and entries are pouring in and the competition is extremely stiff. No telling who has the best chance to win at this point, but, I still think that it will be fun and a learning experience. To that learning experience - In my first REW blog post about this, I talked about the importance of utilizing the categories within the blog.

Today, I think I will talk about some of the more mundane aspects, but, probably the most important. For me, the best way to get links for so meting is that of truly unsolicited because the person linking to you is doing so simply because they want to. This is where you should ask yourself. So when you write, do you write things that that people want to read> Is it funny, helpful…

And I'm In!

Here is my entry in the greatest real estate agent in the world contest.

I'm excited about the opportunity to learn and share what works and what doesn't as the contest unfolds and I hope that everyone involved is willing to share as well. I think this is a great opportunity for all of us to learn how best to use the internet to market for our clients as well as ourselves.

So with that in mind, as the contest moves forward, I will post some of the techniques that I am using to try and help me rank my entry as high as possible. So here is the first tip:

I have entered this entry into my strongest category on the blog because I want it to have the most punch pointing a link back to my entry. What's the lesson here? Well, it's simple...We need…

The next few posts will be about the area within Atlanta that I live, Alpharetta. For quite some time, Alpharetta has been used as a general area which now consists of two additional cities; John's Creek and Milton. So, from now on I will separate statistics as best as is possible into the correct areas because agents are beginning to list homes in the correct cities making the statistics more and more accurate. Alpharetta (not John's Creek and Milton), can still be broken in to 2 different areas and three different zip codes; East Alpharetta (30022 and 30005) and West Alpharetta (30004) and is separated basically by Georgia 400 which runs north and south from Atlanta up through Cumming and beyond. Personally, I think it would be more accurate to talk…

The slower sales of real estate has increased inventory of homes across Metro Atlanta and Alpharetta is no exception. Interestingly, many buyers seem to be catching on to the idea that there are more homes to choose from and we have seen much more interest in the last few weeks on the part of buyers. A couple of interesting notes of interest as I have been out with buyers;

Currently I have three buyers looking at homes for sale in Alpharetta and have looked at quite a few homes in the last two weeks. Most of these homes have major problems impeding a sale.…