Category Archives: Search

Real Estate Social “Notworking?” It was getting close to Inman Connect NY, and I could feel the urgency in a text message from Matt Beall, ”did you get my email regarding the social media case study for Inman?” I’m sure somewhere—in the ether that is my inbox—sat an email from Mr. Beall. Knee deep in a Hawaii Life interface redesign, however, my Gmail account was left unmanaged and overflowing its 200G limit. Since integrating social media into our real estate search in September 2011, I hadn’t really thought … Read More »

We don’t spend much time covering the rental market here on Geek Estate, though clearly it’s a significant chunk of business for many agents in markets like San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. This post on AG got me thinking about rentals a few days ago. I’ll admit I haven’t done extensive research, but I don’t think anyone has solved the rental market with a GREAT solution for renters. At least not for renters like me. What’s missing? SOCIAL context. Say I want to move … Read More »

Tom West, the central character in the Pulitzer Prize winning book “Soul of a New Machine” once said: “Not everything worth doing is worth doing well.” Back in the 70′s, Tom along with perhaps the finest company of computer engineers ever assembled sought to build Eclipse MV/8000. Under a blistering schedule and tremendous pressure a group of computer engineers needed to design and build a next generation computer. A running theme in the book is the tension between engineering quality and haste: the engineers, challenged … Read More »

First off, thanks Drew for allowing me to contribute here along with many of the best real estate tech writers around. Much appreciated. Recently I began to build my online presence as a real estate agent in my local area, Park City, UT. Prior to doing so, I taught myself anything and everything about real estate marketing, building wordpress sites with idx, basic SEO principles, link building, and anything else I could learn. I started out doing so for my dad who works in the … Read More »

In the past, I always concentrated on optimizing my web pages for Google first, and Yahoo! and Bing second. That’s because Google’s competitors delivered a fraction of the traffic—making the search giant my go to source. But when Yahoo! threw in the towel and announced that Bing would be powering its search (2009) I knew that Microsoft was going to give Google a run for their money…well, at least close the gap. Despite recently being busted by Google for copying their search results, Bing has … Read More »

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Twitter search is now one of the most widely used search engines on the web.  With more than 1 billion tweets indexed each month, and more than 150 million Twitter members, that’s a lot of timely content and people at your fingertips.  I know you may be thinking, “but real estate is local, none of those people are relevant to my business.”  While the vast majority of Twitter’s user base may not be relevant, there is a small sub-set of users that are highly relevant … Read More »

There is a lot of buzz out there about how great it is to get property listings from your IDX on your site indexed. There are some that say it brings a great benefit for SEO and others that think it is more important because of the increased traffic it brings.  I have had the property listings on my Hawaii real estate site indexed for over 5 years now and wanted to see if it really made a significant difference in conversions and search engine … Read More »

“This is not my Locker” I know it is inevitable that I will be asked (perhaps 100′s of times) “What did you learn from Inman Connect SF this week”? or “What was the most interesting thing you learned at Inman Connect SF”? or some variation of that general question. In years past I may have made something up to illicit a response like “That’s Nice” or “Wow, that’s great!”, but NOT this year! This year something very accidental, yet incredibly enlightening happened and it all … Read More »

Today’s feature: An interview with Real Estate Webmasters CEO Morgan Carey about the SEO benefits of indexable IDX.  He reveals hard data on the resulting increased traffic, and the ability of individual agents to compete in the elusive quest for search results. There’s been a lot of chatter about some of the newer listing scrapers and IDX wordpress plugins and what they can do, and what the value is or isn’t of having a spiderable IDX products. I’m interested in this topic because I got … Read More »