Marc Rasmussen's Blog: All Categories

I am curious to hear what real estate commissions are doing in your area through this current real estate roller coaster. Here in Sarasota, Florida the average real estate commission is on the rise. 

When I started selling real estate in 2000 I remember a good mix of 7% and 6% commissions with probably the majority of listings at 7%. Back in 2000 you could purchase a nice starter home for $90,000. It seemed to stay this way from 2000-2003.   Like most areas from 2003 to 2005 we took off. Our prices went through the roof. We, of course, are paying for this now. During those boom years commissions started to dip below 6%. We saw discount brokers pop up everywhere. The market was so good that Realtors had a hard time justifying more than 6% because they… Read Full Post

Last week I wanted some articles written to promote my new luxury sarasota home website. I had a good buyer in town last week (they were good buyers because they bought) and did not have the energy to write an article. So, instead of scanning the realestatewebmasters forum to find a good vendor I just did a quick search on Google. Does REW write articles? Sorry Morgan that I don't know this. Below is one of the articles that was written for me. What do you think of the quality? I paid $20 for it.

Investing in Sarasota Real Estate  The real estate jitters. Rightly so. If you’re new to real estate or if this is the first time you’re investing in a Sarasota home – be it a single family detached home or a condo in a high-rise, the standard advice… Read Full Post

Forbes came out with the top 50 cities with the worst homeowner debt. You can read the entire article here. I don't know how accurate it is but I can tell the put some effort into the article. As a Floridian, it is refreshing to see that there is only 1 Florida city on the list. However, it makes me wonder how good the study is since Florida is one of the worst states for foreclosures.

Here are the top 50 cities for worst homeowner debt:
1. Sacramento--Arden- Arcade--Roseville, CA
2. Denver-Aurora, CO
3. San Diego-Carlsbad- San Marcos, CA
4. Minneapolis-St. Paul- Bloomington, MN-WI
5. Washington-Arlington- Alexandria, DC-VA-MD- WV
6. Los Angeles-Long Beach- Santa Ana, CA
7. Boise City-Nampa, ID
8. Colordo Springs, CO
9. Las Vegas-Paradise, NV Read Full Post

1. Don’t work with buyers. You can make a lot of money if you are a good listing agent. Remember the old saying that you have to “list to last”. I don’t completely agree with that since most of my income the last 5 years have come from buyers. However, if you look in any market the largest producers are usually the big listing agents.

2. Qualify. Qualify. Qualify. I see way too many agents just hop in the car to go show property without really qualifying the prospect. Ask as many questions as you can get away with. Here are a few examples:

a. Are you working with an agent yet?
b. When are you looking to buy?
c. Are you paying cash or have you arranged financing yet?
d. Do you need to sell a home prior to buying?
e. How large of home do you need? Read Full Post

 

Take a look at these charts showing of the number of Sarasota homes and condos for sale, pending and closed. I ran them from May of 2004 to January 2008. This gives you a pretty good perspective of what is happening in the Sarasota, Florida real estate market.

In May of 2004 we had 1904 homes and condos on the market with 819 units closing that month. In stark contrast, in January 2008 we have 7,975 homes and condos for sale with 228 closing that month.

I find these charts useful when I go into a listing presentation. It helps the seller understand where our market is right now. In most instances, it makes the unrealistic sellers think twice about putting their property on the market. Fortunately, for my website I don't have to play the game of…

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A shot across the bow

  Advanced Access is an enormous real estate website provider with around 30,000 Realtor websites. I am not up to speed on the details but apparently many or all of the Advanced Access users were penalized by Yahoo. Many of the AA users would trade links with each other and it was possibly viewed by Yahoo as one big incestuous link farm.   Advanced Access hired Greg Boser, a search engine guru, to solve their problems with Yahoo. His recommendation to AA users was to erase all state pages containing excessive reciprocal links. He viewed them as useless spam. Not all of the AA users took his advice. Many of the customers resisted because of the hundreds of man hours they put into accumulating all of the links. Others were probably… Read Full Post

I have been debating the last half hour on whether I should even write this article/blog post. I have recently made a few comments over at Matt Cutts’ blog about what Google has recently done and a few of my real estate peers thought it was a bit brave or stupid for being outspoken. I will take my chances and write about what is happening. Hopefully, someone can learn from this in the future. Will Google keep me in the penalty box longer? Hopefully not.   If you have any experience or background in SEO (search engine optimization) you know that Google likes website that have links pointing to it. A part of their search algorithm involves the popularity of the site determined by the number of other sites pointing to it via a link. With all else being… Read Full Post

Happy Holidays to everyone!  I really like the new blog design.  I will really start actively reading and participating here. Read Full Post