Portland Real Estate's Blog: All Categories

According to a study done for the February 2008 issue of Popular Science magazine, Portland, Oregon, is the #1 greenest city in America. The rankings were based on 4 criteria:

• Electricity: ie Where does the power come from?
• Transportation: ie How is the public transportation system?
• Green Living: ie Do you have lots of green buildings and parks?
• Recycling and Green Perspective: ie How much does the city recycle and do people care?

Of course, this isn't the first time Portland has been honored for being environmentally concious. In 2006, Sustain Lane, ranked Portland as the #1 most sustainable city in America.

This is the kind of thing that makes me proud to live in P-Town.

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Well the numbers are in for January, and it looks like it's definitely a Buyer's market. The January 2007 inventory was at 12.8 months, which is the highest recorded level. The last time inventory looked like this was in January 2000 when the market reached 10.1 months of inventory. Prices on the other hand are still holding steady, and the market is showing solid year-over-year gains.

Average Sale Prices

County Average Sale Price
Change 2006-2007 Clackamas $400,800 +3% Columbia $254,400 +11% Multnomah $336,300 … Read Full Post

Trying to compete against the some of the SEO veterans that are dominating this contest is really humbling, and also a great learning experience. The contest provides a living laboratory for what works and what doesn't when it comes to SEO. Right now, at least on Google, my site falls into the category of what doesn't work :( This is dissappointing, but it offers some great lessons, even though the limited time frame required by the contest does make some aspects of the experiment unrealistic.

I don't know why my first contest entry to the greatest real estate agent in the world contest has fallen on hard times, but I think it tripped a Google filter. I am guessing that this is one of the filters related to gaining too many links in too short a span of…

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So I've been studying the techniques being used by the current contest leader, Eric Blackwell, in the Greatest Real Estate Agent in the World contest, and one thing that particularly stands out is the number of trackbacks that have been posted to his blog entry. At last count there are 19 trackbacks, which means that there are 19 other blogs that have linked to his article and submitted a request for a trackback.

Now what the trackback appears to do is to create a reciprocal link between the originating blog, and the receiving blog. This helps establish a relationship between these two isolated pieces of content. However, the originating blog is typically giving an unfiltered link which has more link juice(TM), while the receiving blog typically…

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As a learning experiment, I have just entered the competition to become the greatest real estate agent in the world according to Google. Of course, this is really a fairly silly exercise, because I certainly don't think that Google is a good judge of who the greatest agent in the world is. But it is a good opportunity to practice and learn about effective Internet marketing and Search Engine Optimization.

Before entering the competition, I learned that one person had come up with the brililant idea of competing as a team of 10 people instead of doing it on their own. By working together they will certainly have much greater strength than any individual would have on their own. I even tried to join this team, figuring they were certain to win, but I was…

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I am testing out the new Real Estate Webmasters blogging platform, and so far I am quite impressed.

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