Great things from my feed
Truth, Damn Truth, and Consumer Reports - The Bloodhound Blog presents a fascinating article about branding. I love things that make me think.
Begin at the Beginning - Remodeling This Life writes a post about goals, and focusing on what’s in front of you instead of the big picture. Since we know my track record with setting/meeting goals…
Filed under Business, Internet, Marketing, real estate | Comments (2)Setting Information Free
An interesting article from the 1000WattBlog today, Forget the schools, tell me about the freaks, talks about being the person who puts the potentially negative information about a particular neighborhood in the hands of the public. A new homebuyer of course would want to know whether their potential neighbor is listed on RottenNeighbor.com for letting their barking-prone puppy outside at 3 a.m. in the morning.
Potential implimentations? For our agents I would suggest creating profiles for their buyers based on the areas they think they would like to live, and then going a step further and making another for potentially better areas that may also suit their needs. We already have eNeighborhoods at our disposal (a grossly underused resource in our office, unfortunately). This is just another step along the chain.
Another implimentation of the idea of being the one with the information, I had two new ideas for our agents. Anyone having an open house should spend Saturday (and better yet, Sunday morning) looking online and in the newspaper for other open houses A) in their area, and B) in their price range. Then spend thirty minutes looking up those property details in the MLS, and then spend another 30 minutes creating a quick flyer that will list details and open house times, maybe even directions, to those other open houses. Slap their information on the bottom, and they now the modern day real estate version of Macy’s in Miracle on 34th Street.
Filed under Marketing, real estate | Comment (0)Information Overload!
I am officially overloaded! Here is what has me so verklempt:
I read a post at The Real Estate Tomato about Twitter called People Really Do Want You to Tweet About Your Cat. It mentioned this foreign concept called Whuffies, which is a reputation-based currency in Cory Doctorow’s novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Now it’s a good novel in itself, and worth the read. But the whole concept has me rethinking my attitude on self-publication online. Maybe it’s not something I want to get into by myself, but maybe like Seth Godin, I would rather people read my books than buy them.
And then the previously mentioned post got me to rediscover my Twitter account, and now I’m trying to keep up with that, along with several other online tools that I’ve read about from the Real Estate Connect San Francisco Conference 2008 (it seems that my entire RSS Feed attended). MyBlogLog is slow in getting started, and may not even be for me, but I’m trying to give that some attention as well.
I’ve made more progress with the SEO aspect of my latest job, but haven’t been able to work on another job at all, yet. That isn’t only frustrating, but panicking.
And to top it all off, I have three marketing books at home, and I was just distracted long enough to buy two more off of Amazon - one about real estate, and one about web sites. I can’t wait - and yet, when am I going to be able to make the time to read them?
It’s this amazing mix of excitement, horror and anticipation. Wow.
Did I mention my feed has 78 unread items?
Filed under Internet, Marketing, real estate | Comment (0)First-time Homebuyer Help
As a first-time homebuyer myself, this article at Inman is incredibly important and valuable to me. It seems that using an IRA to buy a home has many rules attached to it, but one of them is that first-time home buyers may use up to $10,000 for closing costs. One would still owe taxes on this withdrawl, of course, but it wouldn’t be subject to any penalties.
The more I think about it, it is kind of a double edged sword. I’ve set aside money in my IRA before, but I’m not able to scrape together a down payment at this point. And now I don’t even have to try. Great, I can buy a house! Damn - I’m not being forced to learn to save money, either.
Apparently, this withdrawl is also subject to the whims of the IRS as well. I don’t understand completely, but it seems that advice from an IRS professional does not stand up in court!
“The court ruled that when IRS employees give incorrect interpretations of the law, the IRS is not bound by that advice.
“In fact, the IRS is not generally bound by the language of its own publications.”
Urk! The article instructs us to speak to a tax professional, but that may not be any guarantee either. But knowing that the option is there to look in to when my husband and I are ready to buy…well, that’s just awesome.
Filed under real estate | Comments (2)
