SEO Steps to Effectively Market Your Online Listings

According to the National Association of Realtors, 90% of buyers start their real estate search online. Each transaction is very important on today's competitive real estate market. Anything you can do to improve the chances of a sale to happen becomes crucial.

The best way to get exposure, drive traffic and stand out from the crowd is to optimize your own online listings for search engines. This will improve the marketability of your listings since regular MLS does not allow or support SEO.

Real estate listings are a very effective form of content. They provide many opportunities for marketing besides social media posts, online syndication, and open houses. Since MLS data is shared with every other website on that MLS feed, search engines do not index. This means MLS data brings no SEO value to real estate agents.

Get more value from your listings following Gahlord Dewald's steps as laid out in this infographics. Gahlord is an online marketing strategist and contributor at Inman and he published his real estate online listings SEO here.

Is the 500-Page Mortgage Application the New Norm?

A few years ago, before the housing market meltdown, the typical mortgage application file ran to about a hundred pages. The mortgage application file has now reached 500 pages on average.

A middle-class applicant looking to finance a median-priced home may end up with just a few hundred pages. Business owners on the other hand, or affluent people with more than one stream of income "can generate paperwork better measured with yardsticks than page numbers" according to an article published on CNN Money.

So what do these mortgage files include to make them so thick? In each one of them you will now find a credit report, appraisal and property information, income and asset records, two years tax returns, two months' bank statements, sourcing of every deposit, and other financial documents. Due to the tighter rules put in place, "the disclosure documents alone account for nearly 50 pages" according to the article.

According to the post 9/11 Patriot Act legislation, no matter how much money you have in the bank, you have to show the source of your recent deposits to make sure you are not suspected of funneling money to terrorist groups.

Just the checklist lenders use to manage the application can run three pages long, with 55 separate boxes to check, covering items like the good faith estimate, asset statements, and the original appraisal report.

Gone are the days when you signed your name and got a check. No one expects to get through the process of borrowing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars too easily. Yet, filling yards of paperwork does not help the housing market recovery process either.

Read the entire article here...

Home Improvement and Renovation Projects to Avoid

Many home owners try to add value to their investment and make it more valuable. People hope that through renovations and alterations they add value to their home. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Real estate agents and appraisers agree that many such changes add little to no value, while in some cases accomplish the opposite effect, dragging down the value of a home.

On the other hand, you don't want a lack of upkeep to have a negative impact on your home and its value. When you decide to start a renovation or addition project, the best way to avoid mistakes is to think like a buyer. What are such mistakes? Here are a few examples, but keep in mind that the list of renovation or improvement projects that can hurt the value of a home is much longer:

• it is easy to over do it for the neighborhood you live in, turning your home into a pricey outlier;
• invest a bunch of money into a single project while the rest of the house remains untouched;
• remodel the home too much by the personal taste and style;
• additions to the home that are not functional and mess up with the floor plan;
• be cheap by adding the disastrous above-ground pool that no home buyer loves.

Since today's typical buyers plan to live in their homes for just five to seven years, it is more important than ever to consider resale when making home improvements. Read this article to learn more about 14 home project faux-pas and tips on how to avoid them.

Holidays Are The Best Time For Successful Realtors to Ready Themselves For 2014

If you are a real estate agent you may wrongly believe that holidays are the best time to turn off your cell phone, put aside the laptop and forget about your real estate business. You couldn't be further from the truth, as this article on Inman News points out.

The end of the year is a great time to reflect back on the ups and downs of real estate in 2013. It is also a great time to set things in order for a great start for your real estate business in 2014.

In case you wonder what can you spend the precious holidays time on, here are some activities successful realtors put on their list: real estate business health check; contacts database cleanup; web site content review; home office clean-up; holiday prospecting and network expansion. As you can see the list is pretty long and for a good reason: you want to give yourself a clean and strong start in 2014. How else can you be a successful real estate agent next year? Let your competitors rest for the holidays while you set the ground for a nice "eat-my-dust" start.

Once you have everything on that list covered, take care of two more things: revise (or write, you have not yet done this) a business plan for your real estate business, and re-examine your market niche. Establish clear objectives for 2014 and make sure you spend your time and effort chasing the buck in the right niche.

Read the entire article here...

5 Predictions for the Evolution of the Residential Real Estate Market in 2014

It's that time of year, the time when we all begin to reflect on the year we leave behind and look for what the future may hold. That even holds true for the real estate market! Housing market recovery in 2013 was anything but weak and the upward trend will continue through 2014.

According to ”5 Housing Predictions for 2014"  published on the real estate section of the MSN network: "National numbers can tell a story about the economy in general, but home prices, inventory and foreclosure activity depend on local market conditions."

Price gains are expected to slow while inventory will grow next year. A few factors in the real estate market will bring a balance between buyers and sellers: "While positive trends, such as increasing home values, are expected to continue into 2014, mortgage rates are also expected to rise in the coming year and could put a damper on homebuyers' abilities to afford new homes." Here are briefly the five predictions for the 2014 real estate market. Make sure you read the full article to get a better understanding of each of them:

1. Housing  inventory to rise back to seasonal levels
2. More residential properties to return to a state of positive equity
3. Rising mortgage rates
4. Number of homes entering foreclosure process to decrease
5. Housing affordability continues to decline

The future of the U.S. housing market in 2014 is bright, despite predictions made by some economists that buying a home in 2014 will be less affordable.  Click here to read more about the 5 housing predictions and what is in the bag for real estate in 2014.