jolenta's Blog: For Realtors

It's no secret the first-time homebuyers tax credit has been wildly successful. The prospect of free money to the tune of $8,000 has kept consumer interest steady in an otherwise dismal housing market. But the credit is due to expire on November 30th, 2009. A number of forces are at work that will make it impossible for some who want to buy before the deadline capable of closing in time. Compounding the problem are the way appraisals are being done and the inability to lock rates with less than 30 days. Moreover, short sales and foreclosures are on the increase and Spring is expected to bring even more new inventory on the market. After all, sellers who have held back for better markets can only hold out so much longer. With all these forces at work, the…

Over the past few days I've shown 45 different properties ranging in price from $125K to over $800K to three different sets of buyers. That's enough properties to give almost anyone a decent idea what's happening with the Madison real estate market which, by the way, is still a buyer's market like most of the U.S. housing market.

That's why I feel compelled to tell you how surprised I am at some of the obvious transgressions sellers are still making when it comes to preparing their homes to be shown by a Realtor. And no, you are not seeing things. That is, in fact, a pile of three knee-pad sized bras laying on the bed of an otherwise perfectly immaculate house!

How did this happen when the rest of the house was so beautifully and meticulously prepared?…

There have been dozens of articles written about the value of entering the keywords you want to get ranked for in the anchor text of backlinks you build to promote your site. As you know, backlinks help your site get ranked by search engines for your target keywords, resulting in more traffic to your site. A virtuous circle of sorts.

One important source of backlinks are the comments that you leave on DoFollow blogs, however usually the only opportunity to build anchor text on DoFollow blogs consists of little more than leaving your name. While this helps you rank well for your name, it’s more or less worthless for the keywords you're trying to rank for. That’s why lots of commentators like to enter keywords into the name field, but they do run the risk…