Ryan Ward's Blog: Atlanta, Georgia

This will effect how all real estate advertising is permitted on the internet.

The National Association of REALTORS® has amended the Code of Ethics that gives individual MLS companies the ability to prevent you from using the term "MLS" anywhere on your website for advertising to consumers because, at least so they say, it does not provide a "true picture" to consumers. Here is the amended code:

Section 4.4 – Use of the terms MLS and Multiple Listing Service No MLS participant, subscriber or licensee affiliated with any participant shall, through the name of their firm, their URLs, their e-mail addresses, their website addresses, or in any other way represent, suggest or imply that the individual or firm is an MLS, or that they operate an MLS.…

Read Full Post

Warning! Warning!

Many of us saw it coming and they just said it wasn't true. You may remember a post I wrote about Trulia and other third party real estate website listing services and how it will end up being nothing but bad news for the consumer in the long run. well, you may be interested in an email I just received from Trulia about PAID ADVERTISING. Here is an excerpt from that email:

Greetings Ryan Ward,

Thank you all for your hard work and participation on Trulia Voices! Trulia has been hard at work the past month putting together our first ever agent advertising product and we want to make sure Voices users get something special. In the holiday spirit, we would like to gift all the dedicated Voices users a $100 coupon for our Agent Featured…

Read Full Post

As it has become more difficult to sell real estate in the current market, it has become more important that your home be in excellent condition if you are to attract a buyer for your home. Curb appeal remains very high on the priority list of items that should be addressed and improved prior to listing your home for sale. As a homeowner, it is sometimes difficult to objectively review all of the parts of a home that have slowly lost the luster and newness associated with them. One item of particular importance is often overlooked when addressing the exterior of a home and preparing it for sale. Gutters may seem like a boring, utilitarian device of little consequence, but, the truth is that gutters are found on nearly all homes and act as a sort of jewelry…

Read Full Post

So the guys on the TV tell us that it's a bad real estate market. Really? I disagree. Not just with the premise, but with the idea that this type of reporting is relevant, accurate or even news to begin with. Let's start with the premise of a "good" or "bad" real estate market. There is no such thing. It's really quite simple and to say a market is good or bad in and of itself is irresponsible at best - especially when they don't put in perspective whether they are talking about it from the perspective of a buyer or seller.

You need to understand that if it is a bad market for sellers that this means something else as well. It means that it is a good market for buyers. They always leave that part out and it makes the entire report worthless.

I just put…

Read Full Post

What if I could tell you that I know the exact day to list your home that will give you the best chance to sell your home? Would you believe me? It's true. I can, and, I'm going to tell you how!

By utilizing some readily available information, you can do this for any home anywhere. But, before we get too far along here, I feel that it is important to have a caveat to my final answer as this is really a very broad generalization, and for your particular home, you will need specific data. That said, it's possible to determine the exact day of the year that you should list your home for sale in Atlanta to provide the greatest statistical chance to sell.Let's gather the necessary information.

Below, you will see a graph indicating the number homes sold in…

Read Full Post

I have searched and searched without success to find a plugin to transform a WordPress blog page into a user friendly way to showcase lisitngs. Until now. It took me about three hours to get it to look right so this will be a tutorial to save time for you if you like it. Before you bother going to far in your reading, take a look at this blog post I created using this plugin to advertise my Brookhaven townhome for sale.

So if you like it here is what you will need:

• FTP access to your WordPress blog
• The slideshow plugin
• Follow the instructions to upload and activate the plugin

O.K. That's the easy part so here is where I will save you some time. This is how my installation went based on a width of 500 pixels for my content box. You…

Read Full Post

Do you have buyers sign a Buyer Brokerage Agreement? You should. This is more of a vent and you can look at me as an example if you aren't using an agreement before you show houses. We all know how important it is to get that agreement signed and many of us don't take the time to get it signed right away because we are afraid we are going to lose a potential sale.

What if I told you that you can lose sales by not getting this agreement signed? Would that help you to get it signed? Well, that wasn't enough for me and I knew better. It won't ever happen again though. This year I have lost two sales directly because I did not have this agreement signed. Two. One just happened last night. I'm pissed - at myself. I knew better and I didn't do it. All the usual…

Read Full Post

O.K. I'm pretty excited about this because I figured it out on my own (well, with the help of the internet anyway). Last week I figured out how to in bed Google maps into my website so that each city page has an interactive Google map specific to its own area. I thought that was cool, but, then I started poking around at some other websites that have map a map search and thought that it would be a neat idea to showcase only our listings on a map. Really, I was trying to come up with a way to add exposure to our listings. So with that in mind I decided that it would be a good idea to add our listings to the maps. You can take a look at an example of how they look here on our Alpharetta real estate page. So basically I just have one more thing to figure out… Read Full Post