Home buyers search for their next house based on a number of criteria. How close is it to the local school? How about the parks in the area? What do the other houses look like?
And in today's green-conscious world, are their any stores and shops within walking distance?
Which is what brings me to the site, Walk Score.
The idea is quite simple: You type in an address, the city, state or zip and you get a list of "walkable" places around your neighborhood.
According to the site, "Walk Score helps people find walkable places to live. Walk Score calculates the walkability of an address by locating nearby stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc."
More was written up on this site at the blog, The Future of Real Estate Marketing.

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You know how busy everyone is today, so busy in fact that we do not even pick up the phone to call someone we just send a simple text message. I mean its fast; it cuts down on all of the unnecessary chit chat and gets right to the point. This feature has expanded into the business world. It is no longer letting your significant other know that you love them while on a conference call or receiving pictures from friends abroad as you toil away on spreadsheets. Texting is now an important feature for businesses.
Today, if Joe is looking for a home online, and clicks a house he is interested in, a text message will be sent to the Real Estate agent letting them know Joe’s name and phone number and the specific property that he is looking at. This is convenient because the Real Estate agent then calls Joe and talk with him about these properties. It’s known that 80% of buyers work with the first Real Estate agent that contacts them; this is a perfect way to get all of those new leads. Just goes to show that a simple gadget thought to just bring teens and young adults together in time of silence can help a business grow.

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Monitoring your reputation online can be a daunting task since currently there are over 60 million blogs created-and that's just the blogs. I haven't even counted the informational, e-commerce and brochure-style websites. There's a lot to sift through to try to find out what others might be saying about you.
I ran across an article that gives 31 places to monitor your reputation online.
A realtor's reputation is the cornerstone of his/her business. If that is lost online, or off, it can be difficult to rebuild. These sites might be able to at least give you a sense at where you stand in the online world.

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Having gadgets do pretty much everything for me during the day, the one thing I really do not need a technological device for is direction. I have all the new tools one could ever dream of, but I do not need them to find my way around and one thing that bothers me is when people cannot give good directions or read directions.
Home buyers are struggling with the same thing, either they cannot read directions or the agent is not good at giving out directions. This can hurt both of them, getting lost and missing an appointment, losing confidence in your agent; all of which translate into an unprofessional perception. All of these things can be set backs, but now more agents are getting improved maps to help with driving directions, neighborhood amenities, and more.
These maps have become so high tech that the user can choose the view that he or she would like to search. The maps can be viewed aerially, a new street view that puts the viewer on the street, and in real time, where the viewer actually sees the houses. These maps have gone beyond just new views, searchers can now draw a circle, hexagon, or even a rhombus and the map will show the searcher all the listings in that particular area. Convenient pins pop up to show houses for sale and now there are some maps that will have different colors that correspond to different price ranges. All in all these maps have become more advanced and can help a buyer or an agent with numerous things, now there should not be anymore excuses why an open house was missed or why someone cannot find the house in the first place.

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I will have to admit I am a technology junkie. I will confess that I have a cell phone and use it all the time, I use the internet everyday and I do not know how I would do my job without email. I keep in touch with friends from all over the country and some across seas with myspace.com, so I a, definitely for the advancement of technology.
What I do not like is the fact that technology has left a void in human interaction. So much of what we do is over the phone or through email that we never see people's faces anymore. A lot of content online is very generic and not personal at all. We have become a society of doing more and building more, getting more and selling more; so much so, that the personality and authenticity of products today are becoming less and less. Companies are now coming out with video applications where the camera, the time, and the editing are provided and all the agent provides is the content.
This is the beginning of an authentic Meet the Agent video, the time the agent is given can be filled with whatever he/she would like. Tours of houses, introduction and background, meet the team, etc. This type of product is bringing back the personal side of real estate. It is allowing the buyer of a property to get to know the agent or a specific side of the agent before they meet. Buyers will now be able to put a face to the voice they hear on the phone, or the person they are emailing three times a day. With the new video application, the technology barrier is being broken with technology itself; helping people become more personable. I still love my cell phone and all the gadgets that I use on a daily basis in my life but it is always good to sit down and talk to someone face-to-face, even if that face is thousands of miles away. It makes people feel better to have that human contact and these video applications are just the beginning of that.

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Marlow Harris is a Seattle-based real estate agent and she has a blog called 360digest.com. She was highlighted last Friday on the Future of Real Estate Marketing via Inman TV. She is a full-time real estate agent, a real estate blogger and an editor, occasional writer and administrator for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's blog.
In short, she is a busy and entrepreneurial woman.
Her interviews and her blog give us insight into what is necessary for today's person of business. It takes a lot to juggle a full-time career and maintain a blog effectively, but the blog, if it is run correctly, can drive the kind of traffic, and eventually client footsteps, to her doorstep.
What Marlow has figured out is that she can speak directly to potential and existing clients through her blog as personally and effectively as any direct-mail marketing strategy-and blogging is FREE!
The blog is another marketing avenue in which to drive a business to success.

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Why has Jacob Nielson sometimes been referred to as "the king of usability" (Internet Magazine)? Because while others have covered the Internet landscape with fancy and cool-looking stuff, he has plodded along satisfied with non-fancy. He has only been interested in getting his site(s) easily found online.
He has sometimes been criticized as the curmudgeon, if there is such a person, of the internet, but the things he has been preaching and teaching seem to ring true even more now.
SEO and SEM for any site has got to be numbers one and two if a site is to be found. How many websites are there now? I rest my case.
To read more about this amazing man, you can, of course, Google him. You can also go to his very plain and usable website. How cool is that!

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Technorati is a search engine for blogs and it is chock full of good stuff, smart information and and all-around view of the blogosphere. Search on any topic under the sun and you will find something useful.
When I am doing my research each week, I head to technorati first. The beauty of a blog search engine is you know that when you type in a keyword or a key phrase, you won't have to sift much to find good blog information. When going to the major search engines, type in "search engine new" and see what you get. You'll get good sites with good information, but mixed in with those useful sites are the ones that are just link farms with not much help. They just send you somewhere else that may or may not be useful.
Technorati.com gathers most of the appropriate blogs for our perusal, based on the small couple sentence blurb we can choose to click further and we get to very informative blogs. Of course many of the blogs are moving to monetize themselves, but that doesn't bother me too much because blogs, by their nature, give away so much awesome information. One doesn't go away hungry.
Go to technorati.com and poke around. You'll find what you like and you'll enjoy your time along the way.

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A rather interesting week for Real Estate (and related) news. Those of you feeling the pinch as the market slows, take a look at a recent Inman News article that speaks directly to Getting Leads in a Slow Market.
Being a consistent closer is what makes or breaks a realtor. RIS is always offering up helpful industry hints and this time their discussing The Anatomy of a Lead: Turning Leads into Closed Sales.
If you're looking for something a bit lighter to peruse this weekend, take a look at the 5 Most Expensive Addresses. Be warned; these aren't the sites you're expecting!

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With the market the way it is these days and people wanting more bang for their buck it can make searching for the perfect home feel more like a treasure hunt. Some people spend all day driving around a nice neighborhood, spotting for sale signs that belong to the house that they dream about owning; only to find out they are out of their budget. Other people will do some research and call a real estate agent, or go to a real estate website, and then venture out and view these houses in person just to be greeted by a major flaw that was not mentioned online.
With the internet evolving everyday, finding your buried treasure could be right as simple as ‘X marks the spot’. Online property listing features have experienced incredible upgrades recently. Whether you are searching for a specific school district, trying to calculate home values or simply want compare properties before you hit the road-the options are endless!
All of this information can be paired with the new Google street maps. With Google street maps buyers can get 360 degree views as well as virtual tours of city sidewalks, neighborhoods and more. Now potential buyers can see real estate before you take the photo. It might take the fun out of “hunting” for buried treasure but in the end buyers will be happier with their purchase without going through all the stress.

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