The Real Estate Blog

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Alex Schattner - November 2, 2006

The American real estate market has clearly taken a turn for the worse. Prices for new homes in September plunged nearly 10 percent from a year ago. This was the steepest drop in 35 years. Prices for existing-home sales also fell 2.5% for this period, representing the largest decline in almost four decades.

For real estate agents and brokers, this is not good news, however industry veterans will not be surprised. Those who have been in the industry prior to the beginning of the real estate boom that started in the late 90s understand that housing prices are cyclical. Good agents will be able to weather the current downturn in the market, which is necessary to restore balance.

Year after year of huge price increases in homes was simply not sustainable. The market had become too frothy with too much speculative activity and too many no-interest loans. The shakeout that is now underway will separate the wheat from the chafe in the real estate industry. Those who jumped on the bandwagon when the market was hot thinking they could make a quick buck may now want to consider a different line of work.

However, those who are serious about building a long-term career in real estate will take this in stride. Although incomes may drop in the interim, this is all part of working in a cyclical industry. In the meantime, there are some ways in which to deal with the slowdown to help you survive and thrive in this more competitive market.

The most important way to remain competitive is by staying on top of the technological changes that are transforming the industry. Having an effective website with high visibility is perhaps the most crucial element of an agent’s marketing plan in this day and age. Consumers have turned to the web in droves to get the information they seek when buying or selling a home. As a real estate professional, you are nobody unless you have an online presence that helps consumers answer their questions and ultimately converts them into your customers.

Although the news lately may sound grim, the real estate downturn is actually a positive development, since it will restore balance to the market, and force a lot of the charlatans out of the industry. By using technology and marketing savvy, the better real estate professionals will be able to weather this temporary storm, and emerge better equipped to reap the benefits of an upturn in the market when it comes.

Toronto, October 25, 2006

Amid a growing chorus of voices predicting a slowdown in the Toronto Area real estate market, home buyers continue to defy the gloomy prognostications. In the first half of October, home sales were essentially unchanged from last year,  at 3,012 and 3,007 respectively.

In addition, sales were up nearly 3.5% from the first half of September. This suggests that this autumn, home sales in the Toronto Area continue to be robust.  While the Toronto Area remains steady overall, there are some pockets where sales growth has been significant over the past year.

Condominiums continue to grow in popularity among Torontonians with sales increasing 43% over last year for the first half of October in the downtown core. Rexdale also saw an impressive increase in condo sales for this time period with 43%. Other areas which saw significant increases include Northeast Scarborough and the western half of Thornhill.

This strong, steady demand for both new and resale homes has translated into price appreciation that on average exceeds inflation. However, inventory has grown somewhat (2% above mid-September), which has put a lid on price appreciation, and provided home buyers with greater selection.

So far, the Toronto Area housing market appears to be holding up. Only time will tell if the pessimists who predict declining sales numbers and prices are right.

Alex Schattner

Finding the right keywords for your website is essential, you should not start building your website before you find out where your market is and in our case what your potential clients are searching for.

The definition of keywords is: Search terms or phrases that are related to an advertisement or ad copy.

The best place to find the right keywords for your campaign is to either use our keyword suggestion tool or go directly to word tracker, word tracker is the leading keyword research tool that is connected to all major search engines. The cost of using their service is a little pricy but it does the job.

For the Real Estate market the search terms are usually the same across all areas. The hardest and most rewarding search term will most likely be City + Real Estate. When you’re first starting out with your website it’s probably not the best idea to try and rank for these terms first. You need to gather a list of all the areas within your market and use word tracker to figure out the right keywords for those areas.

If you don’t have the time to do your own keyword research contact us for a quote.

Selecting a domain name you’re going with is also important factor in website optimization.  A large number of domain names on the internet has already been registered a while ago and may have expired.  Some of those domain names have been banned by some search engines.  You must make sure that the domain name you’re picking has not been banned by Google.  Checking the history of that domain name is a good idea just to find out if has been registered before.  There are other ways you can check if a domain name has been banned by Google or other search engines but it’s a little to confusing to explain.

Now that you’re aware of that factor let’s go into finding out what your domain name should contain.  For a real estate website it’s a good idea to get a domain name that has real estate within the domain name. Most of the cities with the “City-Real-Estate.com” domain names have already been registered so we have to find some other good terms we can use, we still want the domain name to be somewhat easy to remember but also want it to contain our main keyword which will be “Real Estate”.  Also, if a .net domain name is available for the same domain name go ahead and get it, don’t worry about the fact that .com is already registered as that has nothing to do with SEO.

Some words you can use with real estate:

Top, Best, No1, The, Your, MLS, Agent or any other word that makes sense.

Example City:  San Diego
Let’s say you’re in San Diego, below is some example domain names you could try to register.
1)  www.Top-San-Diego-Real-Estate.com
2)  www.TopSanDiegoRealEstate.net
3)  www.San-Dieg-Agent.net

All of the above domain names were available when I wrote this tutorial on Sep 05, 2006.

There are also some domain name suggestion tools out there that you could use, we’re building our own domain name suggestion tool.  You can also do a search on Google for “Domain Name Suggestions”

In the last month or so MSN has released a patch which has a huge impact on some sites.  It took sites from being right on top of the rankings down to almost nowhere to be found.  In some cases it took down only the home page and in others they took down almost the entire site.

What Did MSN Do?

Sites which repeat words within the title of the page, the meta tags and within the content were affected by the patch.

Is There A Fix?

Yes there is, we’ve found that websites which have fixed the following have come back up in rankings there where the once were before.

• Titles
  Do not repeat words within your title. An example of a bad Title would be “New York Real Estate, Real Estate New York, New York MLS”.  What MSN wants you to do is make your page title between 50 to 80 characters (including spaces) and should be as close to a complete sentence as possible.
• Keyword Density
  Watch how many times you repeat the same keyword over and over and over again.  As a rule of thumb, never go over 10%, if you do be sure to know that you’re website will be flagged not only by MSN but Yahoo & Google as well.  You can check out KeywordDensity.com and check what your current keyword density is.
• Outgoing Links
  This is a common one to all search engines, MSN has actually made an improvement on this feature and has made sure that if a site has way too many outgoing links even if you have a huge number of incoming links into that page it will take you down.