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Video :: Virtual Tours & Real Estate

Virtual Tours for me have always been a bit cartoonish. They have always seemed kind of cool, but never seemed to have much viability as a marketing tool. They always made me dizzy.;-)

I will be making my real estate marketing predictions for 2005 in the next few days and one tool that I think finally has some possibility is audio and video.

(If you have an interest we will be launching this service very shortly. Unlike other service, ours will act as a marketing tool for you in the engines.---read on--call at 310-533-9145 or write Tim @ SpiderJuiceTechnoliges.com )

Google and Yahoo have recently launched a search tool for video. What if you could get these positioned indepently. Call or write now to reserve your spot.

            

MSN open for Business

It appears the MSN search engine is out of Beta and it appears the engine is feed is no longer feeding Yahoo data and this is MSN's home grown data.

Submit here to get MSNbot to visit your site, but it probably will be better to let it find your inbounds links. Time & Testing will tell.

Real Estate Depression Blues

To the dismay of the doomsdayers, the housing bubble just won't burst.

As I have said before, supply and demand is a tough nut to crack as long as interest rates stay favorable.

In California, home builders will still fall nearly 40,000 units short of the amount of new housing that is needed to meet continued strong demand, even though builders will start construction on as many homes and apartments in 2005 as they did in 2004. This according to a recent forcast put out just recently by the CBIA.

The forecast, authored by CBIA Chief Economist Alan Nevin, projects that California will see a total of 210,000 housing starts in 2005, equaling 2004's production numbers. Last year was the first year since 1989 in which construction began on more than 200,000 new homes and apartments.

• Housing Units Needed: 250,000 homes and apartments
• Housing Units projected to be  built in 2005: 155,000
• Housing Units being built in 2004: 155,000
• Housing Units built in the lat 1980's: 255,000 housing units

Nevin expects prices of single-family product should increase 4 percent to 5 percent on average statewide.

On the multifamily side, he forecast that 55,000 apartments and condominiums will be built, adding that the split between the two can't be determined because many projects originally permitted as rentals convert to condominiums prior to completion.

Interest Rates are going up

We have been hearing forever how the bubble is going to burst, and interest rates can't stay low forever.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal polled 56 economists, and 55 agree: Long-term interest rates will RISE in 2005.

Youch!

No worries though. As it turns out, http://www.ArborResearch.com has found that in the last 6 Wall Street Polls, the "experts" have predicted rising interest rates in each and every poll. However, interest rates have of course moved down.

Not only that, interest rates have been consistently moving down since the early 1980s, and the experts have consistently predicted incorrectly. With all due respect to the Journal, these guys suck. My 6 year old could have been right, more often.

Dr. Steve Sjuggerud,President, Investment U alerted me to this silliness through his online letter.

He says, "The actual forecasting record of the world's highest paid financial "experts" for forecasting interest rates is nothing short of disastrous...

...Since 1982, the beginning of Wall Street Journal's Forecasting Survey, the experts have gotten the direction of interest rates right in their predictions less than one third of the time.

Said another way, you or I could have flipped a coin as our prediction of the direction of interest rates. And we would have crushed the predictions of the experts.Right now, 55 out of 56 experts are predicting higher long-term interest rates in 2005.Most people will believe these forecasts. If they have any value at all, it is as a contrary indicator... Which tells us that interest rates may well fall in 2005."

Real Estate News Paper Online Advertising

Or:Real Estate MLS gone.. again

Inman recently included a piece that alerted me to a new vortal that inlcudes newspapers' property listings. The site is called Homescape.com, a division of Classified Ventures. They have mirrored sites at HomeHunter.com and NewHomeNetwork.com.

Why isn't there alarm bells and prophesies of Armageddon going off in the Realtor world?

This site is aggregating "their" listings. We just talked about this at Real Estate MLS gone.

If you were to do a search for Sacramento homes, you would find the on line classifieds feed from the Sacramento Bee.

I did find that at least for Sacramento, the MLS listings that the newspaper-on line mls advertising was not included in the feed.

I guess if I were a Realtor, I could be upset for a few reasons.

One. Why don't they include the MLS listings? Two. And more disconcerning. Is this the beginning of the the big push to replace the MLS sharing that has been the mainstay and foundation of "Realty" Marketing as we know it. Three. Does the Realtor need another industry to compete for on line positioning? Especially when the Realtor community subsidizes many of these media outlets existence?

Real Estate MLS gone

According to recent reports by Borrell & Associates, real-estate brokers' and agents' websites are losing online market share of the real estate listings marketplace. They report that certain keyword real-estate searches have recently began to ignore most of the Realtor Websites in the search engines.

According to Borrell, real-estate agents' websites now populate Google's top 10 results only 9% of the time, vs. 29% only a year ago.

Newspaper real-estate sites now get in the top 10 about 12% of the time, vs. 16% a year ago.

To quote the popular song...."isn't it ironic"?

Realtor offices and agents pay their local and national Board of Realtors, Department of Real Estate and National Association of Realtors to protect them. Yet these lobbyists only serve to create the napster affect thru the IDX and VOW initiatives.

Yet, in many of the cases, the Newspaper sites that are beating the pants off the Realtor in search engine referrals, are getting the data from their friendly, local Realtor.

Does anyone in the Realtor community care that your "advocates" are giving your business away?

OK so here is the bad news. The above mentioned report is from a year ago (Dec, 2003). And the search engine environment has only gotten tougher as Google seems to have given way to relevancy and would rather you spend your money on their ADWords.

In September of this year Borrell released a report called:

2004 ANALYSIS:  ONLINE REAL ESTATE ADVERTISING COMES OF AGE. A superheated home-sales market has masked some subtle shifts in the $11.5 billion Real Estate advertising category.  Homes are selling faster than agents can advertise them, and a new, less expensive way of reaching home buyers has emerged in the form of MLS-based Web sites.  Meanwhile, an erosion of traditional media advertising -- particularly for newspapers --  has been occurring.  In 1997, newspapers received $755 per home sold in advertising revenues; today it's $605.   This report examines the shift and and provides additional insights from surveys with classified advertising, online managers, and MLS executives.