First, you must have an online presence.  Whether it be a static website or a blog, it’s your choice.  If you have time and willingness to learn (which I’m assuming you do because you’re reading this), I would suggest a blog.  For advice on starting a blog, RSS Pieces is a great place to start.  It’s smart to remember that often your website or at least web presence is a person’s first impression of you.  So make it a great one.

Next, participate in Social Networking.  I use participate for a reason because you can’t just sign up and expect business to come to you… if it were only that easy.  When you sign up for Facebook, twitter, Trulia Voices, Zillow Discussions, or the many other sites that enable you to have an online voice, make sure you maintain your presence.  I often compare online networks with offline networks.  You don’t get business the first night you attend a Chamber of Commerce meeting, and signing on a social network is the same… don’t expect same day business.  It takes time and participation. Join groups that peek your interest, or start one of your own.  Participate in the ongoing dialogue.  Answer and ask questions inside those groups.  One big no-no is to solicit business, especially before you get a feel for the group and get accepted.  Once people get to know and trust you, they will send you business.

Lastly or once you get listings, put those listing in a syndication website like ListHub, vFlyer or Postlets.  Those sites will push your listings to many listing websites like Zillow, Trulia, Google Base, HotPads, etc.  Most even provide a code that you can Copy and Paste into Craigslist to display your listing there.  You’re seller will be so happy with you when they see their property in front of millions of eyes vs. the few that still read offline print.

Hope you enjoyed the quick tutorial of getting yourself up to speed with online marketing for real estate.  Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

What is MyFrontSteps?

From the press release (PDF file):

MyFrontSteps connects people over social networks allowing them to share their home and home experiences with friends, family and the world - from their front steps in. Allowing everyone to leverage the collective experiences of their social graph - people they know and trust - to find inspiration and local service providers to improve home and lifestyle.

Consumers are beginning their search for services online. Many of the best service providers operate via referral and have no real online presence. MyFrontSteps allows people to open their “black book” of great service providers and share their experience with friends, family or anyone, via the social network of their choice.

MyFrontSteps’ first product, StepRep, will allow home service professionals to monitor, manage and build their online identity and reputation. MyFrontSteps will help consumers find, select and utilize home service providers and gain insight and knowledge about them from people they know and trust.

VendAsta was founded by several executives formerly with Point2 Agent — a leading real estate web site provider and search portal.

Inside sources confirm they are quite busy and are actively expanding their development/consulting workforce.

Add This Screen Shot:

Share this Screen Shot:

Quote from Zoltan:
Brad - I saw that you are using AddThis on your blog. Many large blogs have addthis.com like Techcrunch and many large ones have ShareThis like Mashable, Problogger and others. They are direct competition to ShareThis. I was using them as well on some of my sites, but I switched to ShareThis for many reasons:

My personal (!) preference - i like the design, the button (especially the rotating icon) and the overall implementation better.

When I deployed them on the RealBird listing sites (10,000+) ShareThis was very eager to help and assist.

Has a neat javascript API, which helped me with some of the non-trivial (AJAX) implementations, where the Url to share changes and I need Javascript to update the button’s parameters on -the-fly.

ShareThis has a built in email sharing as well - which turned out to be the most used sharing mechanism for some of our deployments according to ShareThis statistics.

The word “Share” implies more, than “Add this” for consumers. ShareThis also allows you to use the code with any custom links, buttons and HTML objects through their javascript API.

ShareThis raised a lot of money, which implies to me that they are well-positioned to be around for a longer time and should be up for something big. How can they justify raising $21 million otherwise ?

So which is it going to be? I like the 6 points made from my friend Zoltan, and I am heavily leaning toward the ShareThis option. Do you use these tools? Are you sharing and Social Bookmarking? What’s your take on these two competitors and their products? I’m always looking for better ways to help readers and Bloggers get the most out of their online experiences.

I’m far from an expert on the complexities of the mortgage industry and I’ve heard compelling arguments on both sides of the Ratespeed issue. One thing is for sure though, with an industry this large undergoing this much turmoil, new business models are bound to emerge. It will be interesting to see how products like Ratespeed fit into the mix. Take some time to listen to the interview and leave comments on what you think of Ratespeed and new mortgage pricing business models.

Click Here To Subscribe To This Podcast in iTunes

1. Mike Price with Todd Carpenter on the topic of REBlogWorld
2. Mike Price with Chris Koehler, CEO of Applied Real Estate Technology

1. Links built the Internet
2. Linking out = linking in
3. Links are useful
4. Links get you noticed

• FOREM
• Inman
• Zillow
• Trulia
• Geek Estate Blog
• 1000Watt
• Technology For Real Estate
• LivePads1.com
• future of real estate technology
• mike’s corner
• Bloodhound
• Phoenix Real Estate Guy

If you have other favorite real estate blogs you want included, please leave a comment and I’m sure Dennis will be accommodating.

I should also note that there is a preview available for those of you who don’t have an iPhone.

Head on over to Zillow Blog for more background from David.

Cuil.com, a new search engine, was released to much fanfare earlier this week.

Pronounced “Cool”, my initial findings were, well…. not so cool.

Cuil was founded by two former Google engineers (and another from IBM). Obviously these are very smart folks.

According to Cuil, their claim to fame is:

“Cuil searches more pages on the Web than anyone else—three times as many as Google and ten times as many as Microsoft.

Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.”

Well let’s just take a peek at their search returns…

A search for “Real Estate Blog” returns some well known and regarded real estate blogs. But in seventh position (out of 1.7M results) we’re presented with the New York Times blog, The Walk-Through. Now some might argue that a NYT blog should be highly ranked. But consider this — the last post on The Walk-Through was in September of 2006. And it was a post about the blog closing.

That’s the seventh most relevant real estate blog on the planet?

A search for “Phoenix Real Estate” returns 250 results (Google returns 1,980,000). My own blog shows up on page 1 of the results — no argument there ;)  but the exact same entry for my blog also shows up on page 2. The site in the #1 position also shows up on page 3.

Call me confused.

A search for “Zillow” returns absolutely nothing. Contrast that with Google’s return of 5,220,000 results…

Whoops, never mind. I searched Zillow again and got 987,000 results.

One of Cuil’s “features” is an “Explore by category” box that is claimed to allow the searcher to find sites related to their search. Cool idea, but I don’t understand why when you search “Phoenix Real Estate” one of the categories offered is “Cities in Indiana”. Thinking maybe there is a Phoenix, Indiana, I click on the tab and am offered a choice of seven Indiana cities… nope, no Phoenix there…

A search for “U.S. home prices” returns no results. A search for “US home prices” returns in the #1 position, “Paper Mart Packaging Store” and the #2 position belongs to checkaprice.com, with the headline “Compare prices: UK shop deals, low cost, best value”.

Huh?

And finally, if you search “Cuil” on Cuil, the #1 result is for “Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland”. At least Google puts Cuil in the #2 position for a search on Cuil. (and news about Cuil is #1 on Google).

I think I’ll stop now…