Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

How good is you Web presence? Are you really leveraging your tools to their best? What’s missing that is giving an advantage to your competition? How can you measure your progress? Are you an entrepreneur like me, who has no time to figure out complex systems to evaluate your Web presence? You don’t trust consultants or just don’t plain know what to ask them? Well here is your answer.

Grading your Web footprint.

I have just found a presentation by a social media marketing company named HubSpot that I am embedding in this blog because it contains some really interesting information, but above all this company has created three free tools that measure instantly the value of your Web footprint in three different domains: Twitter, Facebook and your own blog or blogs.
Try them and you will get some very informative information as well as maybe some flattering comment. This is what happened to me. As soon as I found these tools I was immediately attracted by twitter.grader.com. I am a real fan of Twitter and I was curious to measure how they though I was doing. I went to the page, I entered my Twitter user name and I got almost immediately a 100/100 grade! How flattering, but what is even more interesting I can analyze the status of my followers and see the top 100 of them, based on grade, number of followers they have and so on. Apparently my top follower is @chrisbrogan president of new Marketing Labs and New York Times best selling author, in addition to being of the the top bloggers on the planet. The top Twelfth (Twitter fellow) that I follow instead is @guykawasaki that we all know, but third comes @mvolpe which is the VP of “Inbound Marketing” at @HubSpot. This is getting interesting.

But now let’s go and see how am I doing on Facebook with facebook.grader.com. Here things don’t look so shiny: I get 68/100 and I also get some suggestions of the actions I should take. For starters completing my profile which I did immediately and then I definitely need to build a fan page on Facebook. I confess, I haven’t done it yet. Here I find that the best graded of my friends is Lee Lickorish a British Internet Marketer that “makes stuff happen” based on his definition. Well, I will have to follow him more closely.

But now we come to the best part. The third step was rating my own blog, the one you are reading right now, at websitegrader.com. Here the result was astonishing. I got 97/100 which means that I got scored higher than 97.2% of the other millions blogs that have been previously evaluated. And this value measures my “marketing effectiveness”.

Here is what they say in the report: I rank in position 58,388 of 2,112,586 other web sites but they give me immediately a host of suggestions on how to improve my ranking and my ability to be indexed by Google. A very valuable report that I can store and go back for comparison in a few weeks and keep improving.

So there you have it, in a few minutes you can have a complete picture of your main Web footprint and advice on how to improve it. Cool isn’t it?

Roberto Mazzoni

I have was just watching the stream of messages on my Twitter account before starting to write this post and I notice a message that read: “rewrite and submit 15 articles to ezinearticles.com about our product and service…”. I am a contributor to ezinearticles and therefore I clicked on the link and I landed on site that was advertising a freelance job where you would be paid 2 dollar per article, long between 400 and 600 words, on a specific product. They will provide you with original articles, text links and keywords for SEO optimization.

Just two dollars per article.

They require the freelance to be member of ezinearticles and preferably to have obtained platinum status, which is gained after you submit a substantial amount of impeccable articles that get published with no correction. Therefore the freelance that would bid for this job need to have a very good knowledge of English, write in a way that is acceptable to the editorial staff that perform the screening in ezinearticles and still manage to advertise a specific product in 15 different way making a total of 30 dollars. Just the upload of the articles will probably take over 30 minutes.
Read the rest of this entry »

There is an interesting story just released by The Daily Telegraph, on its Web site. It is about the Candy brothers, two of the most famous and rich property developers in the US. These self made billionaires who live in Monaco, have created their fortune dealing with luxury homes, but this time they are losing an eight acre site in Beverly Hills that is going up for auction after they defaulted on a $ 365.5 million loan. Apparently they paid this parcel of land $ 500 million, just before the real estate bubble burst, but the price was already quite high then and they surprisingly overpaid for it for a lack of due diligence (here is the original article).

The golden egg kids have laid a big egg this time.

Last year they had won a suit against four British elderly con men that managed to sell them a land in Berkshire they didn’t own and collected with fraud £ 6.5 million. The British Land Registry was also conned and let the transaction move forward based on false documents, so the Candy brothers were reimbursed of their loss by the Land Registry itself; but still one would have expected a much closer due diligence for such a major purchase. And there are more controversies piling up around these two brothers that seemed always right in any transaction they did.
Read the rest of this entry »

Roberto Mazzoni, here, and today I have an incredible story to tell, that of Joe Rivera, a previous WBA welterweight world champion that has toured the whole world in the 80ies and 90ies fighting against some of the most formidable boxers and winning three championships, and now living a very frugal life, biking 37 miles a day, both ways, to get to work.

I have met this man by chance today in a little rehab project I was running in Clearwater, Florida. He was brought to the site by a friend of mine who is the general contractor running the show and I was surprised by the incredible energy coming out of this man who self proclaimed himself one hundred per cent American Indian, with a Puerto Rican accent.

Joe Rivera is the name of this gentleman who has become an handyman after having come very close to being incredibly rich. I couldn’t believe his story myself, so I spent some time researching online and checking it with my friend the contractor, and Joe is the real deal. He has actually fought on the most important boxing rings in the world.

He is a simple man with little education that apparently succumbed to the cunning of agents that knew much better how to read contracts. And he, on his side, was not able to govern his riches when he had them due to plain lack of education. A man who has learned to live life in a tough way and he enjoys doing it. Listening to his video interview you will get three advices:

1. keep your hands up
2. always throw punches
3. never, never, never doubt your corner

which mean never doubt the advice of your coach and be always ready to follow them promptly and precisely. Your coach will make you great providing he is a great coach and you are willing to listen.
A lesson that is applicable to any field and that I want to pass on to you today.

And remember: Always a “nobody” can beat a “somebody”. Do you feel like you are nobody, well you could as well be the next champion.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. there is another Rivera who is also a boxing champion of much more recent times and who is all over the Internet, therefore Joe not only has lost everything but the very memory of him his challenged. Help me build him a little piece of eternity on the Web by linking to this post or passing along  the video of him.

There is still a substantial inventory of foreclosures that banks are holding off the market for various reasons. In some cases the foreclosure procedure has been stalled for over a year just to avoid the repossession and the financial consequences that it would bring. Banks are in the money business and need to show profits to their stock holders as well as protect their balance sheets. As long as a house is in the foreclosure process but has not been repossessed yet, or sold as a short sale, the bank can still keep it in its books at its initial loan value.

Bank are still holding off many foreclosure so to avoid to repossess many houses at the same time.

Only when the repossession happens, the value has then to be readjusted by carrying a loss on the balance sheet and reducing the value of the asset. In such a scenario the bank has three bad effects combined: it has a loss, it is forced to keep more money blocked in its reserved and its lending capability is reduced. When the number of houses pending foreclosure becomes massive (900,000 is the number that circulates amongst experienced investors) then the banking system can become unstable unless it regulates very closely the release of these properties on the market.
At the current sale rate, the analysts company Standard & Poor’s estimates that it will take 3 years before the whole inventory gets cleared up, for a total of 7 million of worth (see original article).
S&P estimates that more houses are falling in delinquency (more than 13% of mortgages delinquent in November 2009) than transactions get closed on bank owned properties (the so called REO’s). There is some effort in try to avoid foreclosure through loan modification, but it is not as effective as it could be.
Lot of play ground still available for investors dealing with bank owned properties, although the trickle of repossessed houses that trickle back on the market will affect values in some areas for still some time.

Roberto Mazzoni