Author Archive

Your favorite real estate sites and blogs today are slick and shiny, modern and contemporary, functional and 2.0. But that wasn’t always the case. Check out some of your favorite sites way back when: Zillow.com circa January 2005 The Phoenix Real Estate Guy circa January 2006 Trulia.com circa October 2005 AgentGenius circa October 2007 RealCentralVA (Jim Duncan) circa October 2005 Wanna play? Head over to Wayback Machine and see what your favorite site used to look like in the internet ice ages.

Since single property websites became a powerful (somewhat) mainstream marketing tool for real estate, forward thinking agents all over the country have starting building them for every single one of the listings they market. But so far, the choices we have at our disposal, leave me (and others) wanting more: 1. Postlets – This site gets most everything right, especially with their new Postlets Pro option. Positives: Huge photos in a Flash Slideshow, Modern (Enough) Look, Embedded Google Maps and Virtual tours, Walkscore and School … Read More »

To my surprise, during the last two press releases regarding the Houston Real Estate market stats, HAR has gone video. By and large, the clip consists of summarizing the association’s position already stated in the release. Nevertheless, this is a small step forward in the 2.0-ification of HAR. Suggestions going forward Better Sharing – Currently, the video player allows sharing via email only at the very end. Sharing through Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon etc.  in addition to email would be a much better idea in … Read More »

About a month ago, I got tipped by a developer buddy of mine, Stephen Parker about a powerful new platform called GoodBarry. Originally out of Australia, this platform markets itself as providing a complete online business solution to turn your website into an efficient money making machine. So, I tried it. For about a couple of days. I took that long for me to switch my company website to them. Features When they say complete solution they mean just that. In one dashboard, you can … Read More »

All along, I had a feeling this would happen. Just like an unreasonable seller in a declining real estate market, Yahoo rebuffed the advances of a ready and willing buyer (Microsoft) numerous times. Reason? The offer presented by Mr Softee “shortchanged” Yahoo’s past stock value even though it came at a significant premium over current stock price. At first, the rejection was thought to be an attempt to get the buyer to sweeten the deal. But after Microsoft did just that this past weekend, it … Read More »

I was a late comer to the blogging party. About a year and a half ago, I found Active Rain and first discovered purposeful blogging. This was around the same time that most traditionalists were discounting this phenomenon as just a fad for ‘youngins” looking to waste some time on the Internet. And I must admit, that when you get started, it is pretty difficult to see the big picture of how writing blog posts can produce real results, both financial and otherwise. But as … Read More »

When I first came into the blogging world (seems like a long time ago), there was a period of time when I could not decide which blogging platform was best for my personal needs. Each option had positive aspects as well as negative ones and I could not find one that was just the perfect medium.I was looking for a platform that would allow me to give my blog a distinctive look, in-site search capability and ease of use. WordPress, I read, was the way … Read More »

About a month ago, the Houston Association of Realtors released a revamped [consumer-oriented] website. I tried to cover this release as objectively as I could, trying to point out the positives and the negatives from a REALTOR’s standpoint. In an effort to get the point of view of other fellow agents I posted something about my post on Active Rain hoping to spark a constructive debate on the topic. What followed is in my view, a legitimate debate and the premise for this post. Count … Read More »

Let’s just say that I’m having lunch with Sergei Brin and he asks me for my opinion on how to make Google Adwords better. (Official odds – 1 in 999999999999999999999999; look it up!). This would be my response: RSS Feeds and Google Adwords! Here’s why. We have been using Google Adwords for about two years now with stellar results. No other form of advertising even comes close to comparing with the Almighty Adwords. And I haven’t touched the copy of my ads for over a … Read More »

According to a feature story on Yahoo’s home page yesterday, many folks around the country are turning to house swapping to move properties in hard markets. Originally a practice utilized primarily for vacation homes, house swapping works by matching relocation clients with similarly valued homes. Any difference in value is to be paid in cash to balance the deal. While this is definitely creative, I see many obstacles in this practice becoming anything close to mainstream. First, it severely limits the selection of homes available … Read More »