As of July 1st real estate agents in California now must have their license number on solicitation materials that are considered a point of first contact with consumers.  Most of the discussion that I have seen at my brokerage has talked about the need for updated business cards with the license number added, but I just ran across a memo produced by the California Association of Realtors that also includes the need for the license number to be included on websites.

I had asked several staff people with my local MLS if websites like my Sacramento site were considered first point of contact - they felt they were not.  In their opinion, first point of contact would be an email to a consumer - so I did not fully prepare for this change.  Well with the CAR…

The city of West Sacramento has seen a dramatic decrease in inventory from May 2008 to May 2009.  May 2008 saw 249 homes for sale while the same period this year there were only 98 homes for sale.  The number of sold homes May 2008 was 67 and there were 89 sales pending that month.  In May 2009 67 homes were pending and 50 sold.  Part of the decrease in inventory is due to banks taking more time to complete the foreclosure process. Prices declined during this 12 month period from an average sales price of $285,000 in May 2008 to $236,000 in May 2009.

The state of California recently enacted a moratorium or a suspension on new foreclosures that will slow the foreclosure process even more.  This does not affect homes that were already in the foreclosure…

One big mistake when I started building links to my Davis site was to maily focus on links pointing to my home page.  Probably a lot of people here know that I knew NOTHING about how search engines worked when I started spending time on the forum and the entire reason I wanted a custom IDX was just so I could have a website where I could break the different areas of Davis onto their own page because I felt there are a lot of buyers here that search for homes that way.  I did not really consider the benefits of what an custom IDX would do for SEO - I didn't even know that term. 

To really create a dynamic site though, you probably want certain pages to be considered more important than others.  People often call this page rank sculpting.  Anyway, after…

The average sales price for homes in Winters declined 33.9%  from $339,000 to $224,000 from March 2008 to March 2009.  Like so much of the greater Sacramento region, the majority of sales in Winters for March were REO’s/Foreclosures, only one out of the six sales were not bank owned homes.  March Trendgraphix information indicates that 11 out of the 33 homes listed for sale were foreclosed homes.  To get an idea of where the market is headed, the number of listed foreclosed properties is a good indicator to watch.

Winters, CA is a small town with a population of 6,990 (July 2007) so everything that happens is at a much smaller scale but the numbers do fit into trends seen in the greater…

I started blogging on Active Rain and Real Estate Webmasters about the same time- the last quarter of 2007.  I actually have more posts on my AR blog than my REW blog but I've spent more time recently on REW for a lot of reasons but thought it might be an interesting test to see which blog had more strength. 

Both my Active Rain and Real Estate Webmaster blogs have posts on that rank on the first page of google for similar types of terms.  Both blogs have a couple of posts that pull in a moderate amount of traffic - although one brings in a steadier stream than the other. 

I realize this isn't a completely scientific test - other people are more than welcome to do something similar - more data points the better.  There are so many cities I haven't…

Homes for Sale in Granite Bay CA

Granite Bay is a higher end market for the Sacramento region and has not had as many sales as compared with some other parts of the region.

While the total number of homes has remained fairly steady over time, typically just under 200 homes for sale, the number of closing has varried.  Granite Bay has also not been a foreclosure market, the number of foreclosure listings has not gone above 25 in any one month. 

This means that as a buyer - there is probably less competition than in areas where there is a strong foreclosure market - the bank owned/foreclosed homes are still getting multiple offers - however, the majority of the sellers may be less willing to negotiate than sellers of distressed properties.

This chart…

Sacramento Market Stats for February 2009

I'm a little late on reporting this information-however there are a couple of interesting trends.

Inventory is still decreasing in Sacramento.  Trendgraphix is indicating there is only 3.5 months based on closed sales.  There has also been a 41.4% decrease in total inventory for sale in Sacramento county from February 2008.  Homes are being absobed more quickly but there is also an actual decline of properties coming onto the market.  The moratorium of new foreclosures placed by some of the big players has really started to affect the number of new properties hitting the market.  When banks/investors etc. start foreclosing on homes again, it will be very interesting to see if inventory starts to jump again or if…

Here's a short video from Matt Cutts, head of Google's spam team about why blog posts tend to show up so quickly.

We tend to talk a lot here about google alerts some people even have them sent instantly. The video points out that often once a post is made google blog search comes and crawls the site. This does not guarantee that the site will be indexed. Matt also said, like he always says, create good content and become "well known" google is going to notice your site.

I found this information helpful because I had noticed that my posts in my new real estate blog were getting listed into google very quickly but were not ranking for keywords. This is likely the reason why.  Give the blog more time to build authority and it will be crawled more…