Microsoft’s BING search engine may cause a radical shift for real estate website SEO strategies.  In the recent WAV Group report on Broker Website Effectiveness, Google was responsible for 64% of of search engine traffic.  All other search engines (including Microsoft) were responsible for 19%.  As a result, SEO specialists have focused their optimization efforts on Google as the primary search engine for their strategy. Today, in a report from web traffic measurement agency ComScore, Bing is now responsible for 16.7% of search.  This total is up from 11% when BING launched June second.  This is a remarkable shift in such [...]

Today, the Federal Funds Rate is at 0%.  This has created a surplus of Bank Reserves to fight the financial crisis.  We are also seeing deflation in the Consumer Price Index.  In parlance, the cost of living has gone down.  But deflation today, combined with a mounting Federal Deficit should lead to inflation tomorrow.  This shift should create a stimulus for real estate. In the absence of the mortgage industry and employment melt down, lower interest rates and a dip in housing prices would naturally lead to a real estate buying party.  Sadly there has not been such fanfare, and [...]

Now that blog readership has passed newspaper readership in most US communities,  I wonder what is next for blogs. Today, blogs are all about open access to content.  Indeed most bloggers are expressly interested in having readers “share” their blog content, and even provide socialization tools that allow readers to republish the blog content to any number of sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Stumbleupon, etc. As the plummet of newspaper readership continues, what happens to the writers?  It is easy to hate the newspapers, but the writers have fans.  Today, despite the efforts of unions, newspapers have been faced with [...]

Top performing sales professionals ignore market downturn and turn in record year. The Wall Street Journal and LORE announced the 2009 rankings of the top real estate professionals in the country based on calendar 2008 results.  The rankings will be posted onRealestatejournal.com, Realtrends.com and Loremagazine.comas of 11:00AM eastern time June 4th. The Wall Street Journal/LORE Top 400 is based on a survey of over 7,000 brokerage firms, associations of Realtors® and hundreds of other sources to determine the top real estate professionals in the United States.  Now in its 4th year, this ranking is the only independent study of its kind where [...]