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The summer real estate season is over in Davis and the students have come back to town to fill up the rental homes and apartments. The number of homes sold in Davis was down in the summer quarter compared to the same period in 2008.

Why are sales down? One reason might be the change in lending standards that have occurred since the financial “meltdown” that took place last fall. With tighter credit standards, it’s harder to get home loans, so less people are qualifying as prospective buyers. Fewer buyers can mean fewer sales, and usually lower prices. The median price is also affected by the simple fact that entry level homes and first time buyers are moving faster than the rest of the market due to the $8,000 first time buyer tax credit…

The first question local friends and neighbors ask when the subject of real estate comes up is "how much are prices down"?  It's a simple question that can lead to complicated answers.

The question needs to be more specific -

For what time period?

This year?

From the market top?

The answer is different depending on the type of home you are talking about.

Condo or Single Family Home?

Conventional wisdom says that the high-end homes have taken a bigger hit because the volume of buyers at that level has fallen off.  Conventional wisdom also says that lower priced homes have held up better because there is still demand at the low end (more so now with first time buyer tax incentives).

There was a headline in the New York Times this…

So you've got your real estate license, found a Broker, got your business cards, and set up a website. You're all ready to start your career as a Realtor. You might be wondering what kind of business your website will be bringing you?

Providing you work hard on your SEO and get decent Search Engine generated traffic, or buy some PPC ads, you should get people visiting your website.

From my own experience of having three websites serving three different California communities, here are a few generalizations I can pass on to you:

• 95% of your leads will be buyers.

Why?    Because people that own a home and are looking to sell it already have an existing relationship with a Realtor. The Realtor helped them buy the house they live in…

I have been an REW customer for many years with my Davis CA Real Estate site.

During the same time, I kept a second, Non-REW site that served the nearby community of Woodland. Although it did manage to get good search engine rankings, it was an old "framed" website with a clumsy MLS search tool that generated very little business.

After the REW Summit last year, I decided to drop the old provider of my Woodland site and replace it with an REW template site with REW IDX and  a few other modifications.

The folks at REW worked with me to build the new Woodland CA Real Estate website with it's focus on quick and easy search, for any town in Yolo County, with minimum effort.

The site went live on February 28th.

It started generating leads from…

We are all seeing things in the current real estate market that we have never seen before, and now we are hearing something new also....the "chirping" smoke detector.

More and more frequently these days, I am showing Bank Owned homes to prospective buyers of Woodland Real Estate. It's just a mathematical fact. Over the last two years, a larger portion of homes on the market are short sales and Bank Owned homes. So more often I am showing clients empty homes that are bank owned.

With the drop in interest rates in December, I find more investors from out of state are interested in the area. Recently I have been working with an east coast buyer interested in Wild Wings real estate. They want a to buy a golf course home and hold onto it for a few years…

Well, another year comes to a close for Davis, California real estate.

So we make a quick check to see how the market did compared to 2007. 

Although no chart goes up forever, we count ourselves lucky in Davis that our housing market has not been hit as hard as some other areas of the country.

In other areas of the Central Valley, we have seen the volume of sales increase in 2008 because the median home price was falling at 20% or more from 2007. In some area markets, 50% or more of the sales are short sales or foreclosures.  This is not the case in Davis.

Since prices have remained relatively stable in Davis (down just 5% from 2007), we have not seen the pick up in sales volume that other towns in the Sacramento area have experienced. The chart…

I had an experience recently, which may explain why Google seems to be giving less value, in the last 6 months, to links from Articles distributed on article sites.

I have written about a 12 articles in the last three years and posted them to the major article sites. I'm a small time player compared to the prolific article-posters that are out there.

In September, I posted an article to ArticleBiz.com for the first time. Last week, I go back to check the article and all is well. But ArticleBiz also recommends some similar articles about real estate that I might be interested in reading.  There on the list of recommended articles is one with the same title as another article I had previously posted to GoArticles.com back in…

* note - My webmaster and husband Tom is the guest writer of this post today...

How many of us have had this experience ….

You travel overseas for a few days. When it comes time to catch a flight home to the US, you rush to check your bags, get through security and find your gate. When you finally get home, you empty your pockets placing the contents on top of the Dresser. It’s then that you realize that you forgot to exchange the foreign currency in your pocket back into good old American dollars. (“D’oh!”)

Those colorful bills and aluminum coins will now reside forever in the bottom of a desk or dresser drawer. If you have kids, you give it to them (“look what I got for you on my…