Archive for January, 2007

I just noticed a press release from MaryShop.com, an online catholic gift store. They were claiming that frustrated home sellers and agents were turning to “the old catholic tradition” of burying a statue of Joseph in the ground, and praying to Joseph to help sell the home.

Last November, we were approached by Broderick Perkins, who was at the time doing a story on the Joseph statue phenomenon. I guess he thought that we would have some insight being that we are a Christian company… but I think he was surprised when we told him that we thought the whole thing was ridiculous. He didn’t end up doing the full story, but mentioned it in a short blurb on one of his roundup articles.

Commonly known as the “underground real estate agent”, the statue must be buried in the ground using a special bag that is provided, and special prayers must be offered to Joseph until the home sells. One site still seems to believe in traditional marketing by offering referrals to agents and even offering to list your property on it’s site:

A FREE listing for your home on St Joseph’s Homeseller Listing. The listing lasts until you sell your home. You can even add or include a photo!!

Although controversial, Joseph was not a real estate agent, and burying his likeness in the ground will NOT help your home sell. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not against praying(to God) for your home to sell… but trusting in a statue to help you sell?? I’ll just use an “above ground” real estate agent, thank you.

Wikipedia finally wised up to the PR link spamming rings, and has added a no follow tag to all of their outgoing links. The no follow tag was removed back in Nov. 2005 but just recently re-added it to help combat all the spammy links. A quote from the great Matt Cutts:

“I think it’s the right call: the incentive to create spammy links on Wikipedia has been massively reduced. Over time, I believe Wikipedia will probably find ways to remove nofollow from links that are more trusted.”

Top 10 Real Estate Websites by Traffic (According to Alexa Category Search):

1. Realtor.com — Overall Rank: 572
www.realtor.com

2. LoopNet — Overall Rank: 3,043
www.loopnet.com

3. RE/MAX International, Inc. — Overall Rank:5,524
www.remax.com

4. ForSaleByOwner — Overall Rank: 9,162
www.forsalebyowner.com

5. Inman News Features — Overall Rank: 10,715
www.inman.com

6. Century 21 Real Estate LLC — Overall Rank: 12,227
www.century21.com

7. Coldwell Banker — Overall Rank: 13,659
www.coldwellbanker.com

8. LuxuryRealEstate.com — Overall Rank: 12,406
www.luxuryrealestate.com

9. Realty Times — Overall Rank: 15,618
www.realtytimes.com

10. Viviun International Property Listings — Overall Rank: 14,497
www.viviun.com

Now, I’m not going to get into the highly debated argument about whether Alexa’s data is reliable or not. But I will mention briefly, that I do believe that it can be helpful information for the websites under the 50,000 ranking mark, as there is more data to calculate therefore making it nominally more reliable than sites ranked 50,000+.

Interestingly enough, Alexa’s category system seems to have failed miserably in that it has left out some of the highest rated real estate websites. I’m not sure how they are categorizing the websites, but it doesn’t seem to be working… I found that the total number of websites in the real estate category on Alexa are suspiciously close to the total number of RE sites on DMOZ… perhaps there is a correlation there.

For whatever reason, the results are just terrible. You can see on the last 4 results that that the numbers don’t even go in order, which indicated to me that the category rankings aren’t updated regularly. I’m beginning to see why Alexa has alot of critics.

So, now that I’ve listed the highest ranking real estate websites, please completely disregard the results… Here are some of the real estate websites that should have made the list:

Zillow.com — Rank: 1,412
Trulia.com — Rank: 4,452
Homes.com — Rank: 6,573
RealEstateWebMasters.com — Rank: 7,181
ActiveRain.com — Rank: 7,506
Windermere.com — Rank: 9,536

I’m sure that there are plenty of others I missed that are sub 15,000, but this short list will have to do for now.

In the future, I plan to just take a few of the top sites and analyze their traffic and rankings. Perhaps Quantcast would be better suited for this task…

Everyone knows the Foreclosure rate is spinning out of Control, with Colorado leading the pack. Here are a few stats from Realtytrac, an online foreclosure marketplace:

(http://www.realtytrac.com), the leading online marketplace for foreclosure properties, today released year-end data from its 2006 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, which shows more than 1.2 million foreclosure filings were reported nationwide during the year, up 42 percent from 2005 and a foreclosure rate of one foreclosure filing for every 92 U.S. households.

Many of you know that I subscribe to Michael Campbell’s Internet Marketing Secrets newsletter. Yes, I know that the newsletter is full of affiliate ads, and sometimes reads like an advertisement… but there is some really good stuff in there.

Last year we posted an article on marketing on youtube that was sparked by one of Michael’s newsletters.

In his most recent article, he talked about the “200 page challenge” . It was just a personal challenge, and didn’t really have any real significance, but his method intrigued me. He takes PLR (Private Label Rights) articles, and re-writes them with his own keywords. PLR articles can be changed in anyway you see fit. The only thing you can’t do is re-sell them. One popular source for PLR articles is the Article Underground. They sell a package where they send you 400 new articles per month within a particular category.

So, the strategy is to sit down for about 30 minutes per day, pick a few relevant PLR articles, change up the keywords, and post to your site. If done correctly, it could result in a content rich site in a very short amount of time. And since you change the content to your liking, supposedly, you won’t get caught by any dup filters.

Admittedly, this tactic is used mostly by affiliate marketing gurus, and splogs… but used correctly, I believe that it could have some value to the budding real estate blogger or marketer. Imagine a good PLR article written about a specific market. Simply taking one of these articles and changing some of the keywords could be a way to quickly populate a new blog with useful information. Or perhaps you come across some good “how to” articles that you can change to your liking.

The key of course would be to change the content enough so as not to get caught by a filter, and to make it readable and presentable enough for you to want to post it on your site with pride as you would any other article or post.

We were honored for the opportunity to be able to interview Brandell Heron, the vice president of Business Development for Neighborhoodmatch.com

They have recently changed their business model to focus more on real estate consumers. A model that is similar in some ways to a service like Trulia. But the features that set this site apart are the demographic tools…

Press Play to Listen to this Podcast.

Just read an interested article in Businessweek Magazine about how agents are manipulating listings in the MLS to make them appear to be new listings. The online version can be found here. This tactic basically allows a listing to pop back up as a new listing, thus getting re-published in some of the “new listing” or “hot sheet” publications.

There are alot of problems with this. One being that it violates the rules for most MLS’.
Here is an excerpt:

“When many homes in an area are relisted as new, it skews the ‘average days on market’ statistic, making the market look healthier than it really is.”

Many of the MLS’ have been cracking down with new algorithms and new disclosures of sale histories. And yet, many other MLS boards are fighting amongst themselves on whether they should remove the cancel/relist option altogether.

Here are a couple of examples of manipulation:

1. Withdrawing a property, then relisting it to reset the “days on market” to zero.
2. Changing the property ID to all zeros which disrupts proper tracking.
3. Manipulating the address so the system can’t see that it’s been listed before.

If you are an agent, and you are in the habit of doing this… watch out. Your MLS will become savvy to it sooner or later. You may even get caught and fined… or worse.