Category Archives: Opinion

Opinion

Making the Market Guess At What You Are Selling

Information seeks to be free. However recently a company down in San Diego has morphed into its board of realty who has always tried vigilantly to protect its data.

I assume that is to be interpreted to mean to protect the sanctity of their listings for sale.

The problem that the broker has with the syndicates is the sloppy handling of the listings. Often wrongly priced, or out of date.  Arguably some of the old data never gets updated or deleted.

Welcome to the Internet folks!

As good as it is, it gets sloppy. And let’s have a moment of clarity can we? See I used to be a Realtor. And although the boards are much more diligent in making sure the listings are entered correctly and updated with penalty for non compliance. Many boards still do not.

But besides that, it is 2012. It is the information age and information demands to be free. The MLS is the last tangible tool that the real estate industry has. And when the net came, much of that tangibility got shared with Realtor.com, Zillow.com and Trulia.com, et al.

Before they got the Realtor to freely give them the listings. Some of these sites reportedly….GULP! Scraped the data. (Just like Google!)

So we can go back to the days of listings on post cards if this will make the brokers feel better. But how does this help the home seller?

Besides the little secret you learn very quickly if you are to survive in the real estate game is.

He who controls the listings controls the market.

And part of that reason is that you get the phone calls for all those for sale signs of homes for sale.

If you hold an open house, run an ad, or take a phone call on a listing from the net. Chances are you will not sell that inquiry for that house the prospect called on.  Afterall, how hard is it to say that the property has sold, I have 25 others just like it but better?

Besides, I always thought if you want to sell someone something, that the more you let that someone know you have something to sell as opposed to them having to read your mind is a good thing.

Furthermore, if a homeowner expects that their home is to be sold with the most zest and zeal possible they would expect to have indeed “THEIR” data spread viligantly across as many channels as humanly and digitally possible.

Of course thats just my opinion.

 

Google Shows Size is Bad: URL Shortener

Image representing Google as depicted in Crunc...
Image via CrunchBase

Google went live with its new URL shortening service. This service will take on favorites like:

  • bit.ly
  • tinyurl.com
  • doiop.com
  • readthisurl.com

These services shorten a long URL  into a nice short url that makes for a simpler transfer. Without risk of being truncated say in an email or in a service like Twitter that requires short messages.

From their blog post: There are many shorteners out there with great features, so some people may wonder whether the world really needs yet another. As we said late last year, we built goo.gl with a focus on quality. With goo.gl, every time you shorten a URL, you know it will work, it will work fast, and it will keep working. You also know that when you click a goo.gl shortened URL, you’re protected against malware, phishing and spam using the same industry-leading technology we use in search and other products.

The service offers cool tracking features that will list the URLs you have shortened in the past. You can discover real-time analytics, with traffic over time, top referrers and visitor profiles.

The soon to be famous Google URL shortener is:  http://goo.gl/

The Google URL Shortener and SEO

Getting links from these services can effect your rankings or SERPS because they do not pass necessarily pass on to you Page Rank or reputation.