After many months of waiting, Max, the HomeGain Gorilla, agreed to meet and spend the day with me. The plan: to uncover the life of a spokes-gorilla and learn more about our friend Max (no monkey business).

I was able to catch Max in between press appearances. Max and I took the HomeGain Jet to an undisclosed location and began our day at the local Starbucks, where we casually discussed his HomeGain role, thoughts on blogging, agent tips for this market, etc.

I briefly mentioned that I’m looking to make the most of this market and have been considering options for moving up. Max gladly booted up his laptop and showed me how to utilize the tools on HomeGain to estimate my home’s value. We also contacted an agent and found a couple of great listings in my area. Max even accompanied me to an open house.

Anyway, here’s the skinny on Max: Continue reading this post

I once impressed a CEO in another line of work, distribution, by making a statement regarding a Wal-Mart account – “I don’t want to meet their needs, I want to astound them.”

I know, it sounds like I was kissing up, but I really meant it, it’s how I was trained early on—nothing special, just ingrained into my mental model of doing business.

It’s difficult to practice this over and over with online leads that you could easily dismiss as “not serious” or “just lookers”.

But the trick is to train the mind to visualize each email address as an embodiment—living, breathing people who you are meeting in theory, and, if all turns out well, face to face.

You’ll want to astound those who can make you successful, but first you’ll need to believe.

Having gone from 5% to 20% to, last year, 80% of my revenue coming from the internet, I’m a true believer. When email addresses turn into satisfied, happy clients receiving keys at a closing table often enough, you become a true believer. Continue reading this post

You can probably guess this, but I vote for ‘something else.’ Before I get to that, let’s do some statistics. Thanks to Mike Wright of our MLS NORMLS system for putting together market stats.

January 2008 saw 5,462 listings on the market in our six county area of NE Ohio. (This includes Medina, Cuyahoga, Lorain, Lake, Geauga and Ashtabula.) This was an 84.1% increase from the same time frame in January 2007.

There were 1,112 homes sold (single family) in January of 2008 in the six county region. That was a 25.5% decline over last year’s figures.

The lowest sale price was $1.000.00 (yes, you are looking at that correctly, that is one thousand). The highest sale price in January 2008 was $1,825,000.00. Overall, sales prices are down about 50%.

The biggest factor, in my opinion, is the rate of foreclosures we are experiencing.

Tie that in with anyone who gets a job transfer and tries to sell a home when they have not owned it for a long period of time and well, they might be in a short sale or foreclosure situation, too.

Some of this is sobering, yes. There are some up sides, however.

The interest rates may be hovering closer to 6% now, but is that still not better than the 14% rates I had as a homeowner in the 80s? And home buyers are finding they have a larger choice of homes available than they would have a few years ago. Continue reading this post

The Federal Reserve Bank Cut both the discount rate and federal funds rate .75% today in an effort to stimulate this slowing economy.

While commodities’ prices accelerate, the housing market and subsequent liquidity crisis is dragging the economy into a recession.

We call this phenomenon stagflation and it’s REALLY bad for the economy. The Fed has been aggressively cutting interest rates and the declining housing market is closing down mortgage companies, investment banking firms, and real estate brokerages. What more can the Fed do to help?

The Fed can (and will) buy mortgage-backed securities.

Rather than to buy treasury notes in the open market, the Fed will be buying mortgage-backed securities. They will want to get those assets off investment banking firms’ balance sheets and provide stability to the MBS market. Remember when I said that only the uneducated pay attention to the treasury note to determine the direction of mortgage rates?

Today is proof.

The spread between treasury notes and mortgage-backed securities has been widening these past six weeks. Why? America was considered to be a sub-prime nation; everybody was expected to default on their home loans. Expect the Fed to prop up the MBS market in the next 4-6 weeks. That will be bad for treasury notes and good for MBS. Continue reading this post

We have been very fortunate to have attracted some of the top guest bloggers in the country to the HomeGain real estate blog.

Quality attracts quality and we have received numerous requests by bloggers all over the country to contribute. Next up we have two established bloggers: Carole Cohen and Mike Farmer.

Presenting: Carole Cohen

Carole, a former school teacher, blogs about real estate in Cleveland and the Northeast Area of Ohio in her blog, Cleveland Real Estate News.

Carole is passionate about the Cleveland area and returned to her native city 10 years ago after an extended period away. She is committed to working with first time home buyers and those relocating to the Cleveland. Carole considers herself an expert in the Cleveland area and we expect her to be contributing posts that share her real estate knowledge as well as expertise regarding her beloved hometown.

Presenting: Mike Farmer

Mike Farmer is the owner broker of Mike Farmer Realty in Savannah, Georgia. Mike is also an accomplished blogger contributing to the BloodHound Blog and the Bigger Pockets Blog. Mike loves philosophy, poetry, writing and real estate. He covers all of the preceding topics at his own blog the Bonzai Real Estate Blog. We look forward to Mike’s first blog post on how to manage online leads later this week. Continue reading this post

OK OK, only a retarded monkey would think SEO doesn’t matter. (Sorry to call out your mentally challenged peeps, Max).

But being on top of Google’s first page totally matters. In fact, I can prove it.

I write a lot about SEO, but what I don’t write about a lot are the results people get by using simple search engine optimization techniques. ROI on SEO is very easy to measure. You measure it in terms of positioning in Google for your prime terms and on the increase in traffic.

And, by virtue of those two simple things you WILL see more leads and if you are a good Realtor you will be able to convert those leads into dollars.

Read also: How to select the best possible keywords for real estate blogs

Remedial Learning: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic“) search results for targeted keywords. Continue reading this post