Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I have been silent for quite a while on my blog because I was going through an evolution in my business and my own life that I thought demanded my full and undivided attention and that culminated in me applying for my new and hopefully final visa to stay in the United States. But these last months have been the time for a huge transformation in my attitude toward work and in my plans for the future and I have made some major progress in establishing a new and better direction that will expand even more my activities by bringing together everything I have learned so far.

Managing change successfully

My repositioning is still underway but I want to share with you my evolution because I have realized that actually continual evolution and change are a necessary ingredient in today’s world. You can never reach the perfect setup, the perfect positioning, the perfect knowledge, since every day and week there might be changes that bring major shifts to your operation and to your way of viewing things.

So I will share with you the changes, and the methods I am using to master them, hoping you find them valuable. The key concept here is mastering the various phases and motions that life demands of us while focusing more and more on a set direction a and making so that our eventual destination is reached despite all the detours, but also be ready to change destination as soon as we realize that we got onto a wrong course or that there is a better a more direct way to get where we want.

Quitting is not necessarily wrong, actually it is very right sometimes. Seth Godin, in his book “The Dip: A Little Book that Tells You When To Quit (and when to Stick)” tells us: “Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing, like stuff from Vince Lombardi: “Quitters never win and winners never quit”. Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.”

Choosing when to stay and when to go is in itself an ability and I believe that in this era of excessive information and “biased” information everybody gets swamped under an overwhelming number of options and doesn’t quite know where to go and why he should got there in the first place, and when to quit doing what he is doing and going somewhere else.

I have not transformed my self in a new self-help motivational guru, not yet at least. Don’t worry, but I believe that my down to earth experience as a real entrepreneur faced with the real challenges everybody faces every day, main of which the challenge of change, can offer some good and honest advice by sharing with you my itinerary and talking also about my business of course. In the end I have managed not only to change country, language, culture and business altogether, but I have also succeeded in pulling it through and coming out at the other end with a much bigger experience and with a better understanding of how to find the best directions ans more importantly how to change them when it is needed.

Let me know if you like this kind of subject and what you would like to know more on it, and I will do my best to offer you valuable contributions that will help you manage your change.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Get the time to read The Dip. Its is very short but it is worth your time.

Today I share the content of a very interesting article from Robert Hann, an entrepreneur now turned marketing consultant with a specific focus on real estate. The matter discussed here is whether you should be using a blog to promote yourself as an agent or an investor as compared to purely SEO strategies and tools.

Is the real estate blog really dead?

Should you provide valuable content that improves your image but drains your time and energy with no apparent immediate result or should you just focus on getting on the first page in Google no matter what the content and then try to convert your leads? My personal answer is that you probably need to do both, but the article describes very clearly that while SEO is the real deal when it comes to business generation,  a full fledged SEO strategy is well beyond the means of the average real estate investor or agent.

Also interestingly, Hann devalues the hyper-local approach that we have seen evolving in the last few years. We have been invited by the Internet Marketing “gurus” to go local, to focus on local search keywords. here is what Hann has to say about it: “When a Big Company decides that it wants to compete in SEO for some desirable keywords, it will simply outspend the little guy and just crush him.  The focus on hyperlocal and “long tail” strikes me as the result: small companies and individual agents pick up the crumbs that the big guys let fall from the table. In other words, their SEO-based strategies are viable only insofar as some Big Guy allows it to be viable.” (read the full article by Robert Hann)

So even if SEO has a key effect on your ranking it cannot be the backbone of your marketing effort as a little entrepreneur. Yet even blogging is not enough, and here we have the opinion of Garron Selliken, a technologist and broker in Portland: “When comes to generating leads from search, the past, present and future of real estate sites is SEO, not blogging, transparency, authenticity and finding your voice.  The way to get clients is to show up where the most concentrated group of most motivated buyers/sellers are hanging out and ask for the business. This is why SEO focused content kills blogging…it is targeted directly at the relevant phrases and lands on pages designed to satisfy needs AND convert into conversation.” (the full article by Selliken is well worth reading).

Gahlord Dewald, a SEO consultant, adds more weight in reducing the value of blogging as a business platform in this article: “Online business strategy and blogging” He says that “The real estate blog may have never been alive in the first place” and comments: “Though I don’t have any data to back it up, I’d wager that for every solid, compelling and meaningful real estate blog there are twenty zombie real estate blogs: packed with stolen/poorly crafted/duplicate content that is either devoid of purpose or stuffed to the gills with SEO keywords”.

Do you think this would be applicable for many other fields in addition to real estate? I do

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Share you experience on this topic by commenting on this post, or simply say hi

The National Association or Realtors reports that home sales have been up, nationwide, for two months in a row. Historically-low mortgage rates result in mortgage payments that sometimes are lower than rent. Indeed the national average commitment rate for a 30 year fixed rate conventional loan fell to 4.35 per cent in September 2010, which is a record low. As a comparison, the rate was 5.06 per cent in September of 2009.

Houses have never been so affordable as today.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist at NAR, states: “A housing recovery is taking place but will be choppy at times depending on the duration and impact of a foreclosure moratorium. But the overall direction should be a gradual rising trend in home sales with buyers responding to historically low mortgage interest rates and very favorable affordability conditions.” A decade ago mortgage rates were almost a double of what they are today and they are about 1.5% lower than the peak of the housing boom in 2005 and prices are 22% lower than in that time frame (in some states like Florida prices have been pretty much cut in half, really).

What is even more important, housing affordability conditions are today 60% higher than during the housing boom so it has become an even stronger buyer’s market especially for families with long-terms plan that will reap the benefits of the low rates not only now but for all the many years to come (see the original article from NAR).

The glut of foreclosure is still keeping the market down in terms of median prices, but the recovery signs are visible also in new homes sales that have risen 6.6% in September, reducing the overall inventory from 8.6 to 8 % of new homes monthly supply (see the article from Agent Genius).

Roberto Mazzoni

The Federal Reserve is joining the bandwagon of the agencies and institutions that will be investigating the behavior of banks while originating loans during the heydays of the real estate bubble. Officers have apparently been signing off loan paperwork without even reading them (see the full story at Fed throws its weight into foreclosure probe). Banks are countering the accusation by saying there is little evidence that any foreclosures were improper, but investigators are replying that some of the documentation later produced could be forged.

The Federal Reserve gets into the foreclosure fraud investigation.

So far banks have tried to play the issue down, but the new stand of the Federal Reserve, that could impose penalties on banks, is letting them take the issue more seriously now. “The banking agencies are looking into whether companies had controls in place when foreclosure documents were signed and whether employees involved in the foreclosure process were adequately trained.” On the market side, buyers are already inquiring aggressively as to the availability of proper paperwork before they buy a house that has been foreclosed on. This puts a totally new slant on the market and reduces markedly the desirability of buying a repossessed property (REO – Real Estate Owned).

So we will see buyers shifting more into purchasing from an individual seller who has been holding his house for some time and there could also be a recoil on short sales since they are anyway bank-related and they depend on the availability of documentation that is possibly not there any more. For one thing, banks will have an hard time in general and that will translate in more complexity in the selling and lending process. Several sales could be canceled at the very last minute.

Apparently there will be no easy and fast solution to the issue and the experts say it will have to be solved eventually by the states, while the federal government is also going to probably have an hard time because of it:
Foreclosuregate: BofA Thanks WH For Caving. The original international investors who bought the loans that have defaulted and that lost a fortune on them could come back now and ask the US banks to buy these loans back since they might have been originated without following the proper procedures.

Iceland was one of the main purchasers of the securities built upon these potentially faulty mortgages and is not faring well at all an a country after the massive burst of the real estate bubble in the US (see
New Mortgage Crisis in Iceland: Could U.S. Be Far Behind?), this can very well lead to a bold move to recover their money now that the so called “foreclosuregate” is coming to light.

Things are sure changing in the world of real estate, you’d better watch closely the outcome as it unfolds.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Add your comments about any real life experience you have on this.

Banks are back: Bank of America and GMAC Mortgage just stated they will resume to work on foreclosures after having stopped the process few weeks ago in order to check on mortgages and other documents. Allegedly Bank of America has verified over 100,000 documents and, while we don’t know what they found, they have decided to resume the frozen foreclosure process and continue with the litigation as needed.

Burning credibility in real estate tile equals burning money.

What is apparently going to happen is that there will be some kind of settlement with previous owners if the mortgage papers are missing, for example previous owners could be condoned the so called “deficiency judgement” that is the bank will formally renounce to try to collect from them the remaining balance of the loan and the owner will not get a 1099 (a tax income statement) so that he will not have to pay taxes on the money she has “gained” by not paying the loan in full (see the original article from the Orlando Sentinel).

Another outcome could be that present owners could have an easier time in renegotiating the existing loan terms. But what happens to the buyer on the other side? Let’s say that a bank forecloses without having the proper paperwork and there is no evidence that shows that they do have an interest in the property, they might still be able to negotiate the existing owner out of the house, but there can be a serious cloud on title for the new owner coming in.

A great percentage of real estate being offered on the market today, particularly in Florida, is connected to a foreclosure, therefore sound foreclosure paperwork is a must in order to maintain and re-establish credibility for local and international real estate investors. It cannot be simply reduced to a financial settlement between private parties (the bank and the current owner for example), but the federal government has to step in and define ways that will ensure future owners protection of their own rights (see Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 5: The Necessity of Government Action and Ways Out of The Crisis).

If not properly addressed, this can be a far more serious crisis than the real estate bubble of 2007. By the time the United States real estate market loses credibility in its ability to defend title and to warranty private ownership, international buyers are going to flee to other more secure destinations and the foreclosure glut is going to take much longer to clean up.

Here is a summary of the consequences that can ensue out of the mismanagement of loan documentation:

1) Government investigations: “the various parties accused of misleading the court could be investigated for fraud if there is evidence of systematic action designed to improperly speed up the foreclosure process at the expense of the defaulting homeowners.”

2) Civil suits: “there are likely to be two potential classes of plaintiffs pursuing civil suits against the banks and others for their roles: first, homeowners who earlier lost their properties to foreclosure in which questionable documents were filed, and second, title insurance companies that may be on the hook for claims by purchasers of foreclosed properties who now have a cloud on the title to their house. Each may claim that the faulty documentation in the foreclosure cases caused them harm.”

3) Mass litigation: “the potential liability for a violation includes triple damages and – music to any lawyer’s ears.

To get the full scope of the thunderstorm in the making, you can read The Gathering Storm Over Foreclosures. The effects aren’t going to be immediate. It usually takes 6 months before buyers and investors realize the tide is turning, but once is turned and the long standing trustworthiness of real estate title in the US gets tarnished, a major shift in the market is likely to occur.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. if you know or are aware of real solutions being developed in this area please share.