There was plenty of good news regionally this week. In Maine, home sales jumped a whopping 63 percent last month. Sales of existing homes in Boston rose 41.8 percent, in Pittsburgh 42.2 percent, in Portland 49.2 percent, and in New York and its surrounding suburbs 39.6 percent. Wow! Also, in California house prices rose 21 percent in April from a year earlier as forecloses fell. Folks in the Midwest and South, are you seeing similar trends?

A report from Zillow found that foreclosed homes typically sell for an average 20 to 30 percent discount. It’s no wonder, then, that auctions have increased by about 10 percent a year since the early 2000s.

On another note, the FHA guaranteed 1.9 million loans last year, beating out competitors Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They’ve been working overtime!

Finally, just a little reminder of what our job is all about: finding people a home. Enjoy the holiday!

Reports out this week show the real estate industry may be one of the last to rebound from the recession. We sure hope they are wrong! What are some ways we can shift the increased consumer confidence of a general recessionary rebound to the real estate market? How can we get consumers to see the light at the end of the real estate tunnel, much like they are seeing in the Greater Boston area?

CoreLogic this week reported that 24 percent of home mortgages are considered “underwater,” with Las Vegas leading the pack. States that are most impacted by this are being charged to find innovative solutions with $2.1 billion in federal funding. I can not wait to see how these efforts pan out!

New numbers from Zillow show home prices around the country fell 3.8 percent year-over-year But, of course, there are exceptions and reports from NAR and Integrated Asset Services show prices are stabilizing in many markets, including California. Further, according to CoreLogic’s Home Price Index, when distressed sales are excluded from calculations, there is a 4.9 percent rise in U.S. prices from this February through next February. Phew!

On a personal note – my iPad arrived this week! Other than my shoes, it’s already my favorite accessory. Anyone else enjoying the iPad or another new device?

All of these efforts are to help the 2.4 million borrowers expected to lose their homes this year, with the biggest blows in states like California, Florida and Nevada, where home prices have dropped the most. The looming exit of the government in the real estate market has experts wondering how severe the effect will be, especially for these borrowers. What do you expect?

One in five people believe their home’s value increased during 2009, according to a Zillow survey. In reality, 28 percent of home’s values increased last year. Turns out, it’s a little better out there than we think!

NAR this week recognized the autonomy of today’s homeowner with the launch of HouseLogic, a Web site designed to help homeowners plan and organize their home projects as well as offer  home improvement advice and how-to’s, among other things. For those who want a hands-on experience, however, a duo in California opened a DIY Academy, where homeowners can learn everything from hanging drywall and installing crown molding to painting and wiring. As homeowners increasingly consider renovating their homes, we may see these types of schools pop up across the country. Anything like this in your area?

As these DIYers understand, for all the talk about digital and online interaction, it is still nice to have the one-on-one experience. While it may seem as ancient as a hand-written letter in the email age, there are plenty of valid arguments on the value of open-houses, including further engaging consumers and agents alike. What do you think is the biggest benefit for hosting open houses?

In advertising news… We have come a long way since Hot Wired ran the first banner ad in 1994. Now we can get as targeted and localized as you want, thanks to advertising exchanges like Google’s DoubleClick and others. Banner ads are still a great tool for the real estate industry. We should keep a close eye on this medium as Jon Brod, the executive vice president of AOL Ventures, believes “online local is the largest commercial opportunity yet to be won.” I bet leaders will start to emerge this year.

Following on the heels of Google’s Buzz announcement, Microsoft announced integration plans this week with Facebook and MySpace for its Outlook Social Connector. Thoughts? Do you plan to use either?

Speaking of, I know a lot of you are concerned with the ROI on social media efforts. Let’s be honest, being active in social media takes hard work and it is sometimes difficult to see the payoff. Fortune 500 companies are also wrestling with this same issue. Yet, we have to remember that the most important thing about communicating with consumers is talking to them where they already are. And I bet a lot of your audience is online. The effort is worth it!

This week I have been busy cheering on both of my “home countries,” Canada and the United States, as the world’s best athletes battle on the slopes of Vancouver at the XXI Olympic Winter Games. Besides the competition, there is a lot to be said about the advertising opportunities available on this world stage. Many brands, including Procter & Gamble, tied the launch of campaigns to the lighting of the torch, leading to one of the most concentrated periods of big-name marketing efforts in years. Although your companies’ soapboxes will likely never allow you to be as “loud” as these mega-brands, we can take an important lesson from these brands: talk to your consumers when they will be listening. If the Olympic Games are inspiring more than just your branding and you’re looking to hit the slopes and challenge the likes of gold medalist Lindsay Vonn, there are new interesting (and cool) GPS ski gloves that could navigate you safely. I might have to get myself a pair!

With all that in mind, people are getting creative with mortgages and refinancing for 15-year loans, as opposed to the traditional 30-year. Also, as we discussed last week, there is a growing demand for rentals, evidenced again this week by Zillow’s new rental search, which offers visitors the ability to use a monthly payment tracker to search for homes and rentals they can afford side by side on a map.

The environment has taken center stage this week while world leaders gather in Copenhagen at the climate summit. It should be no surprise, then, that eco-friendly housing programs came to light. A new report by Vice President Joe Biden projects that the Recovery Act will help fund the installation of smart meters, which track energy usage by month, week and even hour in 18 million homes. Additionally, a proposed “cash for caulkers” program will aim to encourage homeowners to invest in things like caulking air leaks and installing insulation and more efficient heating and cooling equipment. Although in its infancy with significant details yet to be worked out, the plan is estimated to save homeowners up to 20 percent on heating and cooling costs. In my opinion, anything that saves homeowners money and stress is great for our industry!

In marketing news, according to RISMedia, “Ninety percent of agents and brokers fail in their Internet marketing efforts. In most industries, failure rates of 90 percent results in a complete change in the way things get done. In real estate, however, the same old things that don’t work continue to be treated as ‘must haves’ for every agent.” So this brings me to the question: What are we doing wrong? If 90 percent are failing, that does mean 10 percent of us are not. We need to collaborate and share our best practices so we’re not making each other’s mistakes. Leave a comment below and tell us all what has worked for you.

On the social media front or, in this case, the almost anti-social media front, research from ShareThis and Nielsen Company confirm that email is still the channel preferred for sharing content. In fact, email beat Facebook by 13 percent and Twitter by 40 percent as the preferred method. This is especially interesting as we consider how to communicate with potential or existing consumers. Although social networking can be beneficial, it is important to remember that email is still far more important – at least for now.

Also this week, HomeFinder.com launched an “Open Houses” iPhone application dedicated to helping homebuyers find open houses and connect with a local Realtor. An iPhone truly is a homebuyer’s best friend these days and we hope you’ll all consider downloading these helpful applications, including our own, to help make your and your homebuyers’ and sellers’ lives easier.

And lastly, although it may be unrelated to real estate, in last week’s blog I dreamed of a day when an application would do my shopping for me. Well, in less than one week, that day arrived. Sears this week launched a “personal shopper” iPhone application. Do you think they read my blog??

According to Zillow’s David Gibbons, blogging is so 2008. This comment created a quite a discussion on line that culminated with this vlog by David explaining in detail what he means. It’s worth the 10 minutes to better understand what it mean to consistently reevaluate your marketing strategics year after year.

Despite the death toll within the newspaper industry, smaller newspaper are persevering according to TechCrunch.

ComScore published this chart naming the top 20 countries for social media engagement. Russia tops the list followed by Brazil and Canada third. Read more on ThisIsHerd.

From Programmable Web this week – How to add GEO data to your blog posts

James Kimmons provides an example of what happens when agents don’t always cross their T’s or dot their I’s during a listing presentation in his post published on About.com titled Tell them what IDX search is and why it’s better. The post raises some interesting points about the variety of tools, technologies, services and designations that Realtors possess often not clearly defined or leveraged to their best advantage with customers. 1000wattblog explored the branding side of this discussion a while back in their post title Releasing Real Estate’s Pheromones.

Adam Singer, blogger for the The Future Buzz provided 140 of his own insights regarding Twitter that helps expand the way we look at and use this broadcasting tool.

The sky opened up at Active Rain this week as thunder cracked and lightening lit up from its clouds via Jeff Corbett’s post which tackles the issues surrounding public perception of the real estate industry now at an all time record low. Many agents have left comments but it’s going to take more than that to change an industry and shift public opinion.

The dangers of Web 2.o beared its sharp teeth and bit the Domino’s Pizza brand in you know what. Brian Solis offers some wise words and caution to company owners who brands might be at risk from the foolhardy antics of their employees in his post titled The Domino Effect.

The problem we face regards the way search engines index new websites and where in the ranking they reside despite our desire to see our site at the top of a result query.  We have seen several cases, including our own website www.bhgrealestate.com, where past (GMAC) brand and franchisee websites rank higher than ours even for our OWN brand terms.  This demonstrates how much emphasis search engines place on historic information including links and web page meta data to determine your organic search ranking.

We also face stiff competition for non-brand search keywords from Trulia, Zillow, Homes.com, HomeGain, Move.com and many other competing websites.  These sites have worked hard at Search Engine Optimization (SEO), making their website content very attractive to search engines –  in some cases, using our listings more effectively for SEO than we do!

All the sites you see at the top of the free results have invested a lot of time, effort and expense getting there.

Below are the top four SEO fundamentals you need to focus on to build a solid foundation that will return favorable search engine ranking results:

1. Target the right keywords, such as “real estate search” and “homes for sale in <your city>”
2. Present content that contains those keywords in a way that search engines favor, such as in title tags, headings and text on the web page.
3. Use a website structure that allows search engines to find and index all their key pages, including “clean” links that do not use JavaScript or parameters (the stuff after a ‘?’ in the URL).
4. Build up links to the website, which search engines count as “votes” to help a site rank higher.  Good sources for links are partners, press releases, community websites and social media sites.

In these tough economic times, free SEO traffic is a wonderful thing. But what if you don’t have the budget to rebuild your website? What you can do is get up to speed on SEO and determine what you can do to optimize your site without breaking your budget.  You can improve your rankings by finding out what keywords to target, changing or adding simple content on your website, spending some time getting links to your site, linking your site out to other important places, creating a blog, requesting a better implementation from your IDX listings vendor, and other things that won’t cost an arm and a leg.

The first step is to get educated on SEO, and start working on those things that help your site rank higher:  keywords, content, structure and linking.

Here are a few great sites that hopefully enlighten you to the wonderful world of SEO:

Google has a very good starter guide:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html

This site also has a good guide (though not updated in the last year, it is still useful):
http://www.websitepublisher.net/seo-guide/

SEOMoz.org also has a good starter guide (and lots of much more advanced articles as well): http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

Over the next few months I will be doing some additional posts on SEO, including how real estate brokers can use their brand, local focus and other advantages to compete.

As you may know from my last blog post, my family and I are in the market for a new home. I began the research process of finding an agent both on the web via Active Rain and through local referrals from friends and family in our prospective neighborhoods. We chose the agent through active rain as they happened to be much more knowledgeable and in tune with our requirements for finding a new home. The agent set up an automated email from their local MLS that would send us listings as they hit the market. In addition I went to Realtor.com, Zillow & Trulia daily just to make sure I had all of the bases covered so that the perfect house wouldn’t fall through the cracks. About a week ago a very promising home hit the market in our price range and it just seemed too good to be true. The pictures on the MLS site were plentiful, good school system, taxes were in line with our expectations and most of the all the price seemed low for the amount of property/beds/baths. There wasn’t an address listed so I went off to Trulia to see if I could figure out where in the town this home was located and sure enough there was an address. The default view is “map” and the location appeared to be ideal as it bordered a large wooded area. I zoomed in a bit and then hit the “satellite” view and that’s when things really came into focus. There appeared to be a building with 4 large round towers no more than 50 yards behind the woods in the rear of the property.

My first assumption was some sort of water treatment facility so I threw a search into Google Maps and it turns out I was pretty close, but it wasn’t water — it was sewage. After seeing Erin Brokovich I decided to pass on this house, but it got me thinking that 5 years ago I may have put an offer on it.

Today we live in an age where all industries and rapidly moving towards pure transparency. And as a real estate professional you have to assume the process I went through to expose the “too good to be true” scenario is typical. In my case it was extreme as I found something negative, but on the flip side I could have just as easily found out how far we were from local schools or what the neighbors paid for their house 2 years ago.

Coming from the travel agent industry, our front line sales force hated Tripadvisor.com as it could undermine every sale they made. Picture this, you just put a down payment on a vacation, went home and searched for the resort the agent recommended and found out that someone was there last week and saw a roach in their room. The agent would pick up the phone the next day and ask me to call Tripadvisor to remove the negative review. I told them that #1 it’s impossible, but #2 that they should always be one step ahead of their customer and have checked the site before recommending the resort in the first place.

At this point we should all be pretty confident that in the end the consumer will play a large role in shaping the direction of the real estate industry. And, to be successful, we have to observe and embrace their usage patterns and mold our systems to accommodate their needs.

Last week was interesting. I kept bumping into things that raised a question that’s floated around the real estate business since the first home was marketed on the Web back in 1994: Who should reap the benefits of traffic, advertising, and customer engagement derived from broker-supplied listings?

For a while there, it seemed like we settled into a comfortable agreement on this issue. Sites such as Trulia, Zillow, Oodle, Google Base, and others distributed broker listings for free. This content gave them a foundation upon which to build consumer-facing, ad-supported businesses.

Everybody wins, right? Unfortunately, I don’t think it’s quite that simple.

Consider now, my week.

It started off with a visit from the NAR leadership, who updated us on various initiatives that seem very forward thinking and pretty cool. The team there is very much focused on arming Realtors with the information they need to compete. A good thing. But I couldn’t help but wonder if many of their efforts were reactions to forces–or, more specifically, companies–brokers themselves helped create.

Then Dave Phillips at BloodHoundBlog made it known that REALTOR.com is now going to provide free upgrades (no more fees for multiple photos!) after having charged agents and brokers for so many years. Why, some people asked, are they doing this? Why now?

Those who own the listings, those who market and sell them, are becoming restless.

Then an Inman News story reporting that a prominent blog suggested Zillow is valued at $225M hit my iGoogle page.

Late in the week, I found myself discussing licensing content with various companies for the Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate consumer site launch in July. The talks always led in the same direction–the licensor wanting the traffic to count on their site. The shoe was now on the other foot for me–the consumer site owner trying to assess the value of third-party content.

The week ended in a flurry of blog posts and articles about Trulia and their Web-ranking strategy, which illustrated more than anything else just how close beneath the surface the tensions between brokers and online listings aggregators really are.  The talk about “no-follows” and “temporary redirects” was really about ownership of the listing–and the customer.

All of this activity casts new light on the value of listings–and how and with whom–brokers and agents market them. Does aggressive Web syndication ultimately benefit the Realtor? Does it move homes faster for sellers? Or does it create a crowd of players that needlessly interrupt the conversation between the consumer and the practitioner?

As we work behind the scenes to launch the new Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate brand in July, these questions are front and center. While I will continue to support strategic syndication opportunities, I also believe that it’s critically important that our brokers and agents are provided with the tools and support needed to create their own traffic.

There is a lot of grey area here. So I thank all of those above for helping us sort through the issues.

We’ll see what this week brings!