It is easy for people living in an area to sit back and relax while others promote their area. However, unless you are someone who is excited about being the last person in paradise, eventually how well where you live is promoted will be important to you.

This was recently brought home to me by Budget Travel's Coolest Small Town of 2012 Contest.  I live along North Carolina's Crystal Coast. How we came to live along the shores of the White Oak River offers insight into how people choose where they live in retirement and why a contest is important.

Both my wife and I were born in North Carolina.  I was already living and farming in Canada when my wife and I met.  An interesting career eventually brought us back to the United States after I started working with Apple Computer in the mid-eighties.  Later living in Roanoke, Virginia and working in Reston, Virginia made sense for my career with Apple which lasted until 2004.

In 2003 I decided to take my wife on a special trip to celebrate our thirtieth anniversary. Looking for a great bed and breakfast led me to Beaufort, North Carolina.  During my youth, Beaufort was nothing to rave about, but as the story in the previous link details Beaufort became a very neat place and experienced a complete rebirth.

We ended up visiting Beaufort for that thirtieth anniversary.  That visit rekindled my love for the North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.  We spent the next three years looking for a place to live in Beaufort. We could not find the right combination of water access and price to meet our needs.  A spot just under thirty miles west of Beaufort near Swansboro, North Carolina called Bluewater Cove turned out to be our magic place.

If we had not made that first visit for our thirtieth anniversary, we might well have ended up some other place.  We were already looking at places near West Jefferson, North Carolina and in the mountains of Southwest Virginia.

While most areas have economic development teams, it is surprising how important visitors and local blogs are to getting the word out about neat areas.  As more and more people turn to the Internet for information, how a particular area is presented on the Internet makes a huge difference. 

The Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina is far less well known than the Northern Outer Banks which stretch from Corolla down through Nags Head and eventually to Hatteras Island and Ocracoke.  However, there are a fair number of people, myself included, who find living permanently on the Southern Outer Banks more attractive than living on the Northern Outer Banks.

After living in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, I have a good understanding of maritime climates so perhaps where I chose to live is no surprise since I picked a cozy place out the cold winds where the winters don't last long.  Yet I would never have found the spot without that first trip to Beaufort.  I cannot even count the number of people who have written me and thanked me for the information that I provide about North Carolina's coast in my blogs.

In an information age, great information is a competitive edge for an area whether it comes to jobs or people moving to an area for retirement.  Sitting back and letting others tell the story about your area might be easy, but if you are articulate about your area, your words will be valuable to others.

When the contest came up for the Coolest Small Town in 2012, I was prompted to write an article about Why Beaufort is a Great Place to Visit.  No one had to convince me to write the article because my wife and I still enjoy driving down to Beaufort for the afternoon.  It is always one of the places that we take our visitors after they have gotten a full does of the beaches of Emerald Isle.

We live in an amazing area with many wonderful attractions and a lifestyle that is attractive to many people.  The picture at the top of the post was taken a short paddle from our home where I just slide my kayak in the water from my backyard. There aren't many places where you can find a spot like that beautiful oyster bar close to a subdivision.

Sharing pictures of an area and even movies of the local wildlife (Apple users click here) helps promote your area to people who often care about the same things that you do.  In 2012 we have enjoyed a wonderful winter on the North Carolina coast with some magic days on the beach even in January.  People who want to avoid the cold are interested in that story.

If I have tweaked your interest in the contest, please take the time to support Beaufort's effort to be the coolest small town in 2012. January 31 is the last day to vote.  I think Beaufort deserves to win.  It is a great place to visit.  There aren't many places you can park your car and forget about it while enjoying everything from Cape Lookout, to ponies, historical buildings, a wonderful maritime museum and great food.  Blackbeard had it figured out long ago.

If you are interested in my recommendation on a camera to help you promote your area, you can find my beach camera info at this link, and if you want to know about the challenging state of web movies outside of YouTube or why Apple viewers have a second link, you can read this Applepeels post.  Both provide helpful knowledge to those wanting to promote an area.

Back in 1971, I bought my first piece of real estate.  It involving writing letters, waiting for a response, and getting on the now retired Bluenose Ferry from Bar Harbor, Maine, to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.  The property was an old farm of 140 acres, and I ended up getting it for around $7,000.  Some friends and I spent considerable time gutting the house and fixing it up.  There are some pictures at this web album.

When we wanted to learn how to do something, we had to ask someone, or read a book.  A call home was a call on a party line. When we needed something for the project, we often ended up driving from one end of the Annapolis Valley to the other.  We sometimes had to find pieces of what we needed in three or four hardware stores.  There were no Lowe's Home Improvement or Home Depot stores.

When I sold the place a few years later, it was still an unfinished project, but it had come a long way.  I had learned a lot about copper plumbing, wiring, and carpentry.

Sometimes I feel that way about my career in real estate, I have learned a tremendous amount in the last five years, but it is still an unfinished project.

Technology permeates our lives today compared to the seventies.  Since we could only get two television channels while living on the shore of the Bay of Fundy, we mostly listened to CBC Radio. In Nova Scotia's winds, our television antenna was always blowing down.  Long distance telephone calls were very expensive. Air travel was something of a luxury, but you were treated very nicely.

Today, there are so many technology choices that it is hard to keep up with them.  While we have the Internet, computers, tablets, and smart-phones, there are so many technologies that it is easy to be paralyzed while trying to find the right tools to do your job.  It is easy to get so caught up in the gadgets of modern life that you lose you focus.  Advoiding distractions is one of the keys to success or just surviving the world of 2011-2012.

The good news is that computers, phones, and other technology gear are all very competitively priced.  They are also relatively easy to use.

A lot of what you end up using depends on what you have learned to use.  Some folks get comfortable with technology and don't want to change.  There is nothing wrong with living with what isn't broken, but after a certain time, some products need to go.

I would put Windows XP in that class.  While Vista was a disaster, Windows 7 has been a pleasant surprise.  Both my wife and have been using Windows 7 laptops for almost two years.  Their performance has been great.  When you consider that we paid less than $1500 total for two laptops, one I7 model and another I5 one made by HP, I cannot complain about the cost over time.  There have been no repair costs, and I certainly don't miss the forty-five minutes per week maintenance that I had to do on my Vista machine to keep it going.

Macintoshes also figure in my life.  I worked at Apple for nearly twenty years so I know Apple hardware and software.

Five years ago if you had asked me which platform to use if photography was important, I would not have hesitated to recommend that you buy a Macintosh.   The Windows world has closed the gap considerably, and I end up managing many of my photos on my HP laptop. A few things I still do on my Macintosh including developing websites.

Today I find a combination of Picasa and the online enhanced version of Piknik do almost everything that I need to do to with photos, and I am far more demanding than most people.

Cameras have also come a very long way in five years.  I have used both Panasonic Lumix cameras and more recently, a Sony Cybershot DSC HX7V camera. They are all pocket cameras.  The cameras also have the advantage of having wide angle lenses which are great for inside room photography. 

I also use a Nikon D3100 which has the advantage of an eyepiece instead of just an LCD screen for composing your picture.  In bright light, most LCD screens are unusable.  My Sony camera has built in GPS which I find very useful.  Both the Lumix and the Sony take video that is acceptable substitute for a dedicated video camera.  The Nikon takes video that is almost too good for the web.

One of the big things in 2011 is that the "Cloud" came of age. It is now not unusual for people to store photos and documents on-line. It is actually far safer and more convenient than using thumb drives which are easily lost.

If I had to nominate one piece of software as the most useful thing that I have found this year, it would be Dropbox.  It is free online storage which you can access from any computer, Windows, Mac, or Linux.  It also works with most smart-phones.  I save almost all of my important files there.  I never have to worry about being able to access them or leaving a file at home on the computer.  You can sign up for Dropbox at this link.  Dropbox is one of the few things in the world of technology that just works.  I have never had a problem.

While I am a strong supporter of Google's cloud services and Gmail, I have been favorably impressed with Microsoft's SkyDrive.  The servers are fast, and there are some interesting sharing options.  If you want to compare cloud services this article is a good primer.  I use online photos as a method of showing people the area.

I even have a great movie on YouTube that I took with my Sony camera.  It is a wonderful ride down the glassy smooth White Oak River in my skiff one summer morning at about thirty miles per hour.

Of course the world of cloud computing is evolving rapidly.  There can be some gotchas as I found out recently with Apple's iCloud services.  I have an I5 iMac that I purchased in October 2010 about fourteen months ago.  It is running Apple's Snow Leopard operating system.  I also use an Android phone purchased almost two years ago so I don't have an iOS device. Mapping is important to me so the Android phone is a better choice than an iPhone for my needs.

I recently found out that in order to use Apple's iCloud services, I either have to buy an iOS device or upgrade the operating system on my Mac.  I don't want to upgrade my Mac since I think it will break an application that I use extensively.  If you want more details you can read this post on my Applepeels blog.

In the world of blogs, I have become a firm believer in using Word Press on your own site as the best choice for most people.  I have a previous post which provides details on those recommendations.

The real clincher in technology is that your clients have access to all the same things as you do.  You may well run into a client who is more technology literate than you.  Sometimes technology can be like running on a treadmill where the speed always seems to be increasing.

It is important to not fall into the trap of technology just for the sake of technology.  The latest computer or smart-phone, even an iPhone or iPad, might have little impact on your sales.  It still all boils down to connecting with clients.

I continue to get good leads from my Crystal Coast Life website.  But I also find that Internet leads are more challenging than people who are already on your door step looking.

If and when our market ever really turns, I suspect the web is going to be very important especially as we transition to the generation which doesn't use phone-books, read newspapers or pour over real estate magazines.

My children who are in their late twenties and early thirties are dedicated technology users.  Two have recently purchased Kindle Fires.  They all live and die by Google search.  They do most of their shopping online. 

We need to be prepared for clients who live and die with what they find on the web.

We all know that a web picture is no substitute for seeing a home in person. However, a lot of looking is done on the web every day.

Smart buyers eliminate a lot of homes by previewing them on the web.  However, we also know that a good real estate agent if they can get a few hours of showing homes to a client, can often narrow down their search very quickly.  Sometimes they show clients homes that fit their needs better than the clients could tell from what they saw on the web.

The world of real estate has certainly changed a lot since I showed up to Mr. Longmire's tiny office on the banks of the Annapolis river in 1971. 

A smart-phone was not part of the equation in those days, but it almost always is these days.  It is one of the reasons that your reputation on the web is more important than ever, but more about that in my next post.

We have had a great fall.  I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season just as peaceful as it is along the waters of North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks.  May your weather be as nice as the shorts weather that has made for more than one stellar day over on the beach this fall.

Like most consumers today, I depend on websites to give me information.  What I find on a website has a lot to do with whether or not I will do business with a particular person or company for that matter.

In a society that often doesn't have local roots to help make decisions in a particular area, websites have become a way of figuring out the lay of the land.

Many young people will turn to a website before they even pick up a phone to call their parents. It is a pattern of communication that isn't very surprising to the parents of this generation's young adults.

If you are someone looking to understand what you can take away from a website, you will find some valuable information in the following commentary that can help you evaluate a website. If you are a Realtor®, this advice is likely better than what you will get from most consultants who are trying to sell you something.   I am not interested in selling anything to you.

Everyone has advice for Realtors® when it comes to websites.  However about the only consensus that you will hear is that you need one.  Doing a website right doesn't have to be expensive in dollars, but there is a substantial recurring time commitment.

If you don't do a website right, it is possible to create more harm than good for your business.

The most basic rule of a good website is that it has to have good content which draws a specific audience. If you think that a website is something you create and don't have to touch for the next couple of years, you are better off not doing one.

If you are serious about doing a website, the following information is what I have gleaned from seven years of blogging and well over a dozen years building websites. I started using websites for internal communication when I was a manager at Apple Computer.

The most important thing you can do when starting down the road to an effective website is to get your own domain.  If your website is a subdomain off of somone else's website, at least part of your efforts are going to benefit the main website and not your site.

The two domains which I use the most in real estate are CoastalNC.org and CrystalCoastLife.com.

I have experimented with just about every tool that you could use from Dreamweaver which I used to build my homepage to various hard core HTML editors which I used to build and modify my "Welcome to the Beach" page.  I have found a number of Macintosh only web tools that I consider to be best in class. These include Coda, Rapidweaver, and Shutterbug.

That I haven't found Windows' equivalents isn't a problem for me since I use both platforms. However, what I am going to recommend for a typical real estate website is platform agnostic. You can do it just as easily on Windows as on a Macintosh.

The browser becomes your most important tool, and I strongly recommend that you use either Firefox or Chrome. I can assure you that my advice is dead on when it comes to browsers.

Next, and really first and foremost, you need a really good hosting company. Surprisingly that is not very expensive.  I use three different hosting companies, but I have found that the best for what I am going to recommend to be bluehost.  I tried to use my other two providers to do what I am now doing, and they failed miserably.  It took me a lot of time to come to this conclusion.  A company like bluehost can also provide you with your domain and make setup very easy.  They can also help you transfer a domain that you already own.

The key to a simple website is using a piece of very robust, free software called WordPress.  I have been using Wordpress software for years on their free site under their subdomain.  The blog that I have there is "Our Technological Infirmity."

Over the years, I have found it to be as reliable as other platforms that I use including Typepad, Squarespace, and Blogger.

The advantage that the combination of Wordpress and Bluehost have is that you can easily with one click install Wordpress on your bluehost domain. While this is not something that a completely non-technical person can do, it is something that anyone who has some blogging experience can work their way through without a lot of trouble.

Once you install Wordpress, you have to pick a theme, and decide how you want to organize your site, but essentially you are good to go. There are tremendous number of things you can do, but you can also get started fairly easily and add more capabilities as you learn the software.

My Wordpress site which has become the home for my real estate web presence gives me all the flexibility that I need. I have a tremendous amount of content there.  When I was still doing listings, I had four listings that I kept on my main real estate home page.  They were similiar to the one property shown there now.  The information on the homepage referred interested parties to a listing specific website with all the information needed to decide on whether the property was one a client might want to view.

The yearly monetary cost for my Wordpress site is just a few dollars over $100 per year.  Of course the amount of time that I put into the site is much greater than most people who are just looking to do a real estate site.  My site has everything from a local travel guide to Emerald Isle to information on growing tomatoes in the local area.  You likely would not need as much content, but I am trying to do more than just real estate with my site.  In essence I am building a brand around Crystal Coast Life.

So has my site been successful? That is a very hard thing to measure in a tough market especially considering I am leaning towards spending more of my time in technology than in real estate which is why I am no longer doing listings.  I stopped doing duty in the office about eighteen months ago so I have been dependent on the web and the few listings that I had for leads for a long time. I continue to average about two good leads a month. Unfortunately, I had two sellers back out on their listings just as we had found buyers for their properties so I can't give a complete thumbs up to my strategy, but I believe it is a good long term startegy and one that will work as the market improves.  The world is not going back to telephone books.

If you look at some pure metrics, my site has been a tremendous success.  While I started the site in late spring, I just started keep statistics in the last couple of months. I am averaging a little over 900 unique visitors each month. That compares very favorably to numbers that I saw when I was doing a contract blog for our real estate firm.  Those 900 visitors a month are my audience, and just yesterday I got a call from a professor to whom I had sold computers in the eighties.  He found my website, printed out the PDF flyer that I created for the area and was sitting in the parking lot of our real estate office looking for me.

I continue to get positive comments on the content that I post, and if you do a Google search for information about the Southern Outer Banks or the Crystal Coast, you will likely find me somewhere in the top search results.  Very little of that would be possible without using my own domain and creating content that demonstrates that I really know our area.

While some of what I have outlined might be beyond the technical capabilities of some agents, there are plenty of sharp web people around that can be hired for less than an arm and a leg to get you up and going.  Someone who knows what they are doing can get you started in just a few hours.  If you have the time and energy, you can make a huge difference in your web presence in just a few months. If you really are selling something besides just houses, having a presence on the web is a really good way to get your message across and show your clients that you are interested in them finding the right spot for their lifestyle not just the first listing that they can afford.

An easy first step is to go to Word Press, and try a little blogging just to see if you can get the hang of it.  You cannot complain about the price since it is free.  I believe in the web so much that I have even posted my own home which is listed with another agent in another state. I think the traffic that I can drive to the listing will make my home sell quicker.

If you are ignoring the web or trusting your company to do it for you, you should ask someone to tell you how often your company profile is viewed.  If they have any kind of decent web people, that information is easily available and might just surprise you. If you think Facebook is the solution, good luck with that.

I have a client whose listing has gotten very few showings. I am reaching out to other REALTORS® and interested consumers to get some different perspectives on the marketing of this really special home.

It is a very attractive waterfront property on North Carolina's Crystal Coast which is approximately three hours by car from Raleigh. The house is next door to the community pool and comes with a wonderful boat slip not far from the back deck.

The property is ten minutes from the beaches of Emerald Isle, and you can easily be to the Intracoastal Waterway by boat in ten minutes and out into the ocean in another ten.

The subdivision is a friendly, gated community called Bluewater Cove located on the shores of the beautiful White Oak River which is nearly two miles wide at that point. The area has great schools and plenty of first rate services.

The house is listed at $559,900 which is slightly less than a bank appraisal done last month. Last summer a larger home just up the street with not nearly as nice water frontage and view of the river sold for $585K.

I have a secondary but very important interest. The person who buys the property will be our next door neighbor, so I would love to attract someone who not only buys the property but ends up being a great neighbor.

I would appreciate any feedback on the property that you could provide. I value all opinions and comments.

I have created a web based form where you can easily provide comments.

You can view pictures and general information about the property at the 141 White Heron Lne site I set up to help other agents market the property.

Specific information including a link to the listing in MLS is available at: our Crystal Coast Real Estate Portal or my real estate home page.

Thanks for your time, and any feedback that you might provide. I really appreciate any help,

Even living at the beach along North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks, I am never surprised to hear someone say that they haven't been to the beach in years.  It is like living in the mountains and knowing that most people enjoy looking at the mountains but not acutally getting out and walking them.

It is certainly not unusal these days to hear of children who rarely play outside and adults who retreat to their homes and focus mainly on watching television.

I am happy to have grown up in a different world. When we were children, we were outside until we had squeezed all the time out of the day. Whether it was running through fields, playing pickup football, or seining minnows in creeks, we lived outside and the newly introduced television was poor competition for our imaginations.

Somehow that has carried over into my adult life. Being outside and exploring my surroundings has always been a part of my life. Now that I am on the coast, I spend as much time as possible out on the water or exploring the local beaches. I even find that making day trips makes me appreciate our area even more.

As for lcoal exploration, it is s not unusual for me to ride down the White Oak River to Swansboro before breakfast. Sometimes I will drop the boat in the water just to ride out and see a sunset on the river.

Since I have my boat on a lift, a trip down the river might take me just a few minutes, On the other hand I have been known to spend a morning or two out on the boat fishing during the week or hike on the beach for over five miles at a time.

The question is does this make me a better REALTOR®? I actually think it does, and here is why.

Many people move to our area to enjoy boating and the beaches.  When I came to the Crystal Coast, I had a very hard time finding REALTORS® who could talk intelligently about boating.  While it might seem that boating is a simple subject, Water and access to it is a very complex subject here.  It is not unfair to call the whole subject of water on the Crystal Coast a water puzzle.

I think the time I spend exploring local waters makes me a better REALTOR because the experience of being in a boat a few times a week gives me a better perspective of the area.  One of the things that becomes very obvious after living here is that the channels that get you to some of the neatest places on the coast change appreciably each year and sometimes from week to week. It turns out that there is no substitute for current experience on the water.

It is the same way for our beaches.  You can rely on a Google map for the Point area of Emerald Isle,but you will be very surprised to learn that the map isn't anything close to reality.  If you take a look at this aerial photo from Google maps and note the blue line which is a GPS track generated by my Android phone as I walked along the beaches of the Point, you will be very surprised.  While it might look like I am walking on water, I actually stayed on sand the whole trip coming and going.

This past March I set out with the goal of walking every foot of beach inside the town limits of Emerald Isle. By the third week of June I finished walking all of the beaches in the town from the northernmost tip of the Point to the town border at Salter Path.  Actually I had done all the beaches at least twice and some of my favorite areas several times.  This map shows the last leg that I completed.

My point from all of this is that if beaches, boating, fishing, and hiking are important to you as a home buyer, you might want to consider talking to someone who not only knows local homes but intimately understands the environment around them.  While you might be able to change some features of your new home, you cannot change the water it is on or how hard it might be to get from the house to the nicest parts of the beaches or some of our special spots on area waters.

How your new home fits into the area's environment is going to have a lot to do with how much you end up enjoying your home.

Take the time to check out the detailed information that I provide about the area, and judge for yourself whether or not you want a real local expert on your team or someone who mostly experiences the area from an air conditioned car.

I am not sure when I learned the value of finding experts and listening to them, but I have a feeling I was pretty young.  Expertise is a simple proposition to me, and it is probably best illustrated by telling the story of one of my first fishing trips in Beaufort, NC.  

I have been fishing on the coast of North Carolina since I could hold a fishing pole, so I am not a newcomer to fishing.  I even fished the Point at Emerald Isle when I waa a teenager, and the only way to get there was by driving a four wheel drive down the beach for miles.

Fishing is a challenging sport. Even in the best of conditions with expert advice, the best equipment and being in the right place at the right time, sometimes you can come up empty handed.

When I finally got the time to fish in Beaufort, I was smart enough to know that I could spend days trying to figure out the area, or I could pay to hire someone who already had the area figured out.  I did some research, asked some people whose opinions I respected, and I ended up fishing with Captain Tom Roller of Waterdog Guide Service.

My first fishing trip with Captain Tom, I caught some fish, but nothing really to excite me.  However, I did decide that I had picked the right guide.  We went for another fishing trip in challenging conditions and came back empty handed.  I knew the red drum we were after in that particular trip were a real challenge so I wasn't upset that we came back after a half day of fishing without any results.

I didn't give up on Captain Tom. Late in the fall of 2005, a much better time for fishing, we went out for another shot even though the weather was terrible.  It turned out to be one of the best fishing trips I had ever done.  It was a magical time, and if you are a fisherman or fisherwoman, you might enjoying reading the story of my Beaufort fishing trip.

So why did I put my trust and my money in the hands of Captain Tom instead of someone else.  First and most important of all, I figured out that he was an authentic person.  Not only did he know how to fish, he understood and loved the area where he fished.  He valued the fish we were catching, and I could tell he was a true conservationist.  Also he actually cared more about meeting my needs than meeting his needs.

In a sense he was what I call a professional sales person. I have been very successfully selling one thing or the other for most of my adult life.  About six years ago, I wrote an article about what sales is really all about.  As most people who have done a lot of sales know, sales is more about figuring out what people need and want than it is about convincing someone to buy something you just happen to have for sale.

Just like writing, part of being good in sales comes from being authentic.  You have to know what you are talking about and actually steer people in the right direction for the right reasons.

Before becoming a Realtor® I sold a lot of things during my career from Angus cattle, Vermeer round balers, and Apple computers to email services.  Not a single one of those products did I sell to another person until after I was using them and was convinced of the value proposition behind the product or service.

I came to the Southern Outer Banks of North Carolina and settled along the Crystal Coast not as someone who was already a Realtor®. but as someone who was searching for a certain kind of life style.  My wife and I actually spent over three years looking for the right place before we chose our home in Bluewater Cove on the shores of the White Oak River.

After living in the area for several months, I became a Realtor®.  I eventually chose a slogan, "Carteret County, A Secret to Share."  I even have some tee-shirts printed up with that on them, and I use it on my Crystal Coast Life website.  Most of the people who find me and use me as a Realtor® are looking for something similar to what I have found.  They often decide to work with me because of something that I have written, and they have read it on the Internet.

While I don't come out and advertise it, if someone is looking for a place near the water, and they want to put a boat in the water, I can probably save them as much or more time as Captain Tom did for me.

I have tried to become something of a specialist.  Now that I have figured out what I am good at in real estate, I will actually turn down properties which don't fit the dream that I am selling.  Actually a fairly wide range of property can fit the dream, the property just has to be a good value and close to the water. If a buyer wants a condo on the beach, I have a colleague who is an expert at that.

I am most in my element when I am working with people who want to enjoy the area's waters.  While you often hear of people who live at the beach and never go to the beach, I am not one of those people. I make time to go to the beach and enjoy it so I can share my experiences in writing and in person with my clients and followers.  One recent Saturday I did a hike along the Point at Emerald Isle, I spent considerable time hiking the 3.5 miles and actually creating a map for others to follow.

Often I work with people who want to boat in the area.  I am a boater, I write about boating, and it is not unusual for me to put clients in my skiff during good weather and prove that I really do know what I am talking about when I say it takes ten minutes to run down the White Oak to the Intracoastal Waterway from our subdivision.

I also fish, and I have had some great fishing adventures in the area where I live.  When I talk fishing, I can tell you where you might actually catch some fish.  Two of my former clients are now my best fishing buddies.

When I did my recent area guide and my Emerald Isle Travel Guide, the information didn't come from what I had heard, it came from my actual experiences. Had I done it any other way, it would not have been authentic.

Everyone is different and has unique needs, but staying authentic and telling people the truth based on your real experiences instead of what you think they want to hear or what will bring you the most gain will always win in the long run. Whether it is hot weather, frost when growing tomatoes, beach traffic or snow in our coastal paradise, the truth is a lot easier to keep straight.

Being authentic and true to yourself is a good way to be able to crawl in bed at night and sleep soundly.  Remember if I tell you the beach is beautiful, it is because that I have been there, and you can count on me having a picture to prove it like the one at the top of the post.

I have spent a lot of time writing and talking about North Carolina’s Southern Outer Banks. 

I love to write and take pictures so I have an extensive amount of information about the area online.

My start in blogging came back in the fall of 2004 well before we moved to the area.  I made it a priority from my first post onwards to stick to what I knew and to leave the speculation to others.

The one exception was my popular Applepeels blog where I sometimes joined in on the guessing game regarding Apple’s future moves.  That is something of a national sport in the technology world, and my nearly twenty years at the company gave me more insight than most folks.

When I put up my first websites about my experiences about living on the Crystal Coast in the fall of 2006, it was more like a personal journal than trying to market the area to anyone. Later years evolved into more detailed information.

I have been coming to the area since I could walk so living here is the culmination of a dream.  It just took me many years to figure this was the right dream and the right place.

I have continued to write about the area and even did one stint of two years being paid to write about living here on the Crystal Coast.  I tried hard to be factual about the area, and I have continued to add that collections of posts.

Back in 2007, I noticed there were lots of questions being asked about the Crystal Coast on some online forums.  I was appalled at some of the misinformation that got passed around as the truth.  It seemed like people would make comments about areas where they obviously had never been, and some of the comments ended up being very negative.

I got involved with one particular online forum and spent a lot of time trying to correct misconceptions.  Late last year, I actually gave up, and quit posting.

Why I quit posting is a good lesson for both REALTORS® and their clients.

While part of the reason I quit was in frustration from trying to answer questions that you can only answer for yourself through personal experience,  I also just got tired of trying to win arguments with people who were deliberately trying to mislead people for a variety of motives.
When you have someone trying to make you or a particular area look bad, they are not going to respond to logic or the truth.

A few examples will make my reasoning a little easier to understand.

First of all, I do applaud people trying to find out about an area before moving to it, but I think you have to ask yourself upfront, just how much do you want to trust people whom you have never met and who often operate with anonymous names?

One of my favorite annoying questions which I am betting still pops up is “Does it get hot in coastal North Carolina and just how unbearable is the humidity?”

I started out by trying to explain what most coastal residents know.  Carteret County is over 60% water, and for much of the year the water around us provides either natural cooling or warming.  The closer you live to the water the more you feel the effect.  From late spring until late summer, the water helps keep us cool.  From late fall until early winter the water helps keep us warm. In general we rarely get above 93F in the summer and normally not below 24F in the winter.  Of course after this winter, we all know there are exceptions to the rule.

I went on the explain that you can go inland ten or fifteen miles from Emerald towards Jacksonville and often see summer temperatures jump to 100F or sometimes more.

When it came to humidity, I tried to explain that humidity is something that most people learn to tolerate.  My personal experience of moving from Canada where I lived for sixteen years to Columbia, MD in 1987 was about as much of a shock to the system as you can find.  Just before we moved, we were living in Halifax, Nova Scotia where hardly anyone bothered with air conditioning at the time

I have been here on the North Carolina coast for going on five years, and I look forward to our warm weather.  When it gets really hot, we either get on the water or in the water.   And there are some nasty days when we spend as much time as possible enjoying that modern wonder of air conditioning.

I even wrote a couple of posts about heat and even mowing my yard in the summer which as any person living in the south knows is best done early in the morning if possible.

The debate this set off was formidable with people trying to prove their particular area was better.  However this was nothing compared to the discussion about traffic.

People looking to move are often concerned about beach traffic and how it might interfere with their day to day life. Having worked for many years in the Washington, DC area with considerable time on the infamous beltway, Interstate 66, and the Dulles Toll Road on top of many trips to California, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Atlanta, I think I have a pretty good grasp of what bad traffic looks like.

On top of that I live just a few miles from the beach and often shop at the Food Lion in Emerald Isle even on the weekend during the heart of beach season.

This debate brought opinions ranging from Emerald Isle is uninhabitable during the summer because of beach traffic to those whose only solution was to recommend people moving to Oriental which has no traffic but also has very few services.

I even took the time to time a trip on the 4th of July across the bridge to Emerald Isle to the other end of town and write a post about it.  Of course none of that put an end to the discussion since it seems everyone is an expert on traffic even if they have never visited a particular area.

The traffic and weather debates paled in comparison to the silly one over shallow water beaches.

Someone asked if the area had any shallow water beaches.  Since I spent a lot of time on the beach and near the beach in my skiff, I responded with places that I knew had shallow water.

Another real estate agent decided to argue that the places I called beaches couldn’t be called beaches because the sand moved too much there.  I suppose the people swimming and wading there on the beach would be surprised to know their beach was not a beach in the mind of someone.

I suspect that beach argument and some silly rules on the forum were the straws that broke the camel’s back.

Many of the questions endlessly debated were ones which can only truthfully be answered by a person’s own experience.  I was born in North Carolina, lived in Canada, and on a mountain in Virginia.  What is comfortable to me might not be comfortable to you.

Traffic is similar, I have been stuck in enough one to two hour traffic jams that I have a hard time considering a trip of a few miles taking eight minutes instead of six minutes really being traffic that makes an area uninhabitable.

And as for beaches, if it has sand, water,  waves, and people enjoying it, I consider it a beach just like the Mayor of Emerald Isle does.

My suggestion is that people looking into an area spend some time finding credible sources of information on the web, and there are plenty.  Do your research, and if the area looks promising, visit the area until you either reject it or decide you like it.  Talk to local people who live there.  In a small town area like the Southern Outer Banks, it is not very hard to strike up a conversation with someone.  It is a whole lot easier to tell whether or not you are talking to a credible source in person than it is on the web.

When you have picked an area and figured out your finances by talking to a bank, go interview a few REALTORS®.  A little web research can help you find one that matches your personality and perhaps specializes in the area you want and/or the type of property that is your dream.
You will likely find someone whose opinions of the area match yours except that they will know a lot more important details about the area.  Most are just interested in finding you a place that you will love.

I like to tell people that the Crystal Coast North Carolina website which I maintain is an accurate representation of my very local area, including my experiences on the White Oak River, Bogue Inlet, and along the beaches of Emerald Isle.  I tend to use my Crystal Coast Life site to talk about the area in a more generalized format.  I even maintain a site, The Crystal Coast, Salt Water on my Feet, with posts specifically targeted to answering questions people moving here might have. There are plenty of other links on those sites which can help you decide whether or not you might like to work with me.

If you look at those sites, you can find out more about weather in this area than probably anyone but me would want to know.  If you search the archives of the sites, you can find out information on just about any activity or destination in the area.  When those sites have satisfied your curiosity about the area, you can give me a call or visit one of my real estate sites if you like what I have written. 

I even post GPS tracks of my hikes and boat rides, and of course there are always plenty of photos and tweets.  I use Foursquare to comment on local venues, and sometimes people interested in the area even convince me to be their friends on Facebook.  It practically impossible to hide the truth about this area with all that online information available.

In general I am willing to bet that just about everyone will do better making an informed effort to find credible Internet or face to face information instead of relying on the "expert" opinions of forum strangers who just might have some strange ulterior motives.

Whether you are a buyer, seller, or a real estate agent, there is a benefit to not getting lost in the crowd. Recent news that Apple would be skipping CES once again brought this point back home to me.  This is not a change in strategy for Steve Jobs and company. 

As someone who worked at Apple for nearly twenty years, I can tell you there are some very simple reasons for Apple's absence.

The number one reason is that Steve Jobs does not like to share the spotlight with anyone.

Secondly, Apple believes that they get the most bang for their bucks if they only participate in venues where they dominate the show.

If there are any of you Apple users out there, you next question might be, "Then why would Apple pull out of MacWorld which is obviously a show that they dominate."

And the answer to that is that Apple not only wants to dominate the show physically, but they also want to completely control the message.

Steve does not want to have to follow the rules of any show organizer who may or may not have rigged things in Apple's favor.

We all know that Apple is a tremendously successful marketing company, so are there any lessons from Apple's behavior that we can take away and use in the real estate market?

While I absolutely believe that you need to strive for maximum exposure for listings, I would qualify that by saying that I believe that many of the real sites we populate with listings do us very little good.

I sometimes refer to it as the needle in the haystack phenomenon.  If your listing is one of hundreds of thousands of properties on a site where it is hard to stand out, it may also be hard for it to be found by people searching for it.

Ideally a home is best positioned to be found if it is on a site with lots of traffic and not so many properties.

I actually think it works similarly for buyers. If you are looking for just the right property, you can spend countless hours searching for a particular property, or you can find a site or a Realtor® that specializes in the area or type of property that you want.

For a little over two years I have been working towards developing a site which combines local information and real estate in a dynamic format. If you want to know what is happening on the Crystal Coast, if is good place to visit, and information from it shows up in search engines.

It is very hard to get Realtors® to try anything that costs money in this market. The result is that the site doesn't have as many listings as it needs, but I still think the concept of providing solid area information that is regularly updated in conjunction with real estate listings is a good one. Recent results seem to back that up.

In the last two months of the year, I got more contacts from serious clients than I have seen since I started real estate.  This happened in spite of retiring from doing phone duty back in March 2010.

Everyone who contacted me recently had found me on the Internet through one of the sites that I manage myself. Obviously on those sites, I am going to give myself top billing.  When I changed my main real estate page to focus on two listings, I started getting more calls on those listings.

I understand the need for real estate companies to treat all their agents equally, but in the long run, I don't want equal treatment any more than Apple does.  I want to be the star of the show.  I can be the star on my own sites

Being very picky about what I will list also benefits buyers.  If buyers coming to my sites consistently find homes that are well priced with quality that exceeds their expectations, then I think that I will be well positioned for success in the coming years. At least that is what I am telling my self after recently turning down a couple of listings. I will also continue to use other local content that I write and websites I have developed where I have a consistent audience to bring people to my real estate sites.

I am going to keep my efforts focused on sites that I control or the ones where I can standout with some additional work. I have also recently backed out of a forum which uses the local expertise of perople like me to attract buyers to the site. The problem was the only advertising permitted was advertising done by them.

It did not seem to make much sense to answer questions for people who would then go and work with another local Realtor®.

When we decided to sell our family home after living in it part time for the last four years, we chose one of the top producing Realtors® in the Roanoke Valley to help us sell our home.  While we have lived in the area for over twenty years, I knew without question that we needed a local professional.  While our home hasn't not sold in the last four months, I will be sticking with the same agent.  I continue to value his local real estate knowledge and input.

My local real estate knowledge happens to be grounded in the area many of us like to call the Southern Outer Banks.  It is under six hours by car away from our Roanoke Valley home. The Crystal Coast as it is also known is where we have chosen to live the next few years.  It is close to the beaches of Emerald Isle and the history of Beaufort, NC, and the area is one of the best on the east coast for boating and fishing.

We even normally have nice temperature in December with an average high of 58F and an average low of 35F.  Unfortunately like most of the east coast in December 2010, we are having difficultly getting our high temperatures to reach our average lows.

I joined the world of real estate a little over four years ago after a search for a second home that lasted nearly three years and covered the coast from Assateague Island on the Eastern Shore of Virginia to Oak Island just south of Wilmington, NC.  I will not pretent that we knew exactly what we wanted when we started looking, but we figured out the general location a lot quicker than the specific house.

Assateague and Ocracoke were quickly elimated as too isolated.  Hatteras Island's connection to the rest of the world, Route 12, was a road we often traveled so we knew well that it had a tendency to disappear.  Southport at the time had too few restaurants and did not appear to be a community as active as we wanted.  Duck and Nags Head were just too crowded in the summer and too dead in the winter.

We loved Beaufort, NC, but we really wanted to be able to see water, and eventually I decided I wanted personal access to the water.  Getting on the water inside the historic district of Beaufort just was too expensive, and water access homes outside of Beaufort just did not click with us. 

During our explorations, we were lucky to have the services of some very good real estate agents.

In fact the best of the agents is now my broker in charge.  She listened to our needs very carefully and expertly helped us weigh the critical choices that you have to make in what I think is a very complex real estate market. Would you rather pay $400K for a 1100 square ft. beach cottage or the same amount for a newer, much larger home on the mainland?  She was the first agent we had used to view a new area which we thought might have some potential. Within a week, she had helped us find our new home.

I seriously doubt we would have found our home that we love without the services of a very good local Realtor®.  We have added a boat lift, and our palms have matured nicely in the last four years. Even after viewing hundreds of homes since we bought, I am still sold on our home.

When I am not doing real estate, writing, or photography, I am in my boat so I know the area waters well. I often make the ten minute run to Swansboro and the ICW or one of the local boat accessible beaches. I even had my boat in the water this weekend.

I recently got contacted by email by someone from out of state.  They wanted to see a waterfront listing that I have.  I immediately asked if they were working with a real estate agent, and I got a pretty quick brush off that the lady was a former real estate agent and was just contacting listing agents to see homes that were of interest to them.  I got the feeling she thought she did not need a real estate agent.

While I always want to show homes that I might have listed, I find this kind of inquiry to be the most difficult and usally the least productive for both sellers and buyers.

We went ahead with the showing, and I was not surprised that the "potential" buyers were somewhat nervous and afraid they were going to give away any information.  While I certainly did not need know their situation, it was very clear that they were like ducks out of water looking at my waterfront listing.  I had prepared a packet for them with MLS flyer, a customized flyer that I do, tax information, and GIS maps of the lot including a flood zone map.

They seemed very surprised with the quality of the home and the beautiful setting, but they expressed some surprise at the price of the home. I asked them if the home was in their price range, and the wife replied that it was at the upper end of their price range.  She went on to state that from what she had read in the newspapers the real estate market in our area had collapsed.

I went on to explain to her that our area unlike many areas has very few foreclosures, and the home they were viewing happened to be in a very good subdivision where the market had not collapsed. In fact I pointed out that the home five lots away had sold this summer at $585,000. Her immediate response was, "You mean this summer?"

I told her the home had sold in June 2010, and that while it was a bigger home, its water access was not even comparable to the home they were viewing. I went on to explain that whether or not homes had dropped in price depended on their location.  I used an example of a beach home that I sold recently for $375,000. It had been listed in May of 2006 at $695,000. I mentioned that she could might be able to get a foreclosed waterfront lot in Cannonsgate in the low $100Ks but that she would not be able to have a dock or a boat lift on her lot.

My explantation continued with an example of a water view home that I sold in 2008 for $260,000.  The new owner eventually put it back on the market. He recently reduced the price to $230,000 even though he had completely furnished the house and spent significant money on the home. I explained there was a very nice waterfront home in that same subdivision which had gone on the market at $499,000 and after over a year was now down to $389,900. I told them that the difference was location along with supply and demand.  The subdivision with the waterfront home that had dropped in price has not seen a home sell since the one that I sold in 2008.

On the other hand the subdivision with my listing has seen four sales just in the last year including the one for $585K, and there are also two new homes being built by homeowners. Bluewater Cove, the location for the listing, also has a pool, a clubhouse, a better boat ramp, more consistent architectural guidelines, better shelter from storms, and is closer to services by about ten minutes.  It is also nearer by water to the ICW and Bogue Inlet.

My lookers were like deer in headlights. None of this was on their radar.  They had no local knowledge and were obviously afraid to engage anyone with local knowledge.  They had read a generic piece in a newspaper, and thought that they could show up with some money and get a great waterfront property for thousands less than the asking price.  I shared with them that I lived next door, and that they were in one of my two favorite homes on the Crystal Coast.  The other favorite is of course my own.

I suggested that I could show them waterfront properties for less money, but that there would be a reason why they were less money.  I talked about one nice waterfront place on Broad Creek where they could be on the water but would have a view of a line of boat lifts, and have a challenge getting a boat of much size out into Bogue Inlet.

I could have gone through a list of properties, but it was pretty obvious that the information that I had already given them was even as we spoke causing them to re-evaluate the possibilities, and their wants and needs.

I offered that I would be glad to help them and did suggest that I would appreciate some feedback on the showing that I could share with the owner.  The wife promised to send me an email that night.  I knew that I would never see it.

Probably the worst way of figuring out a real estate market is to go in and just look at homes that you have chosen.  A good Realtor® can put some context around an individual listing, but it is a whole lot easier if I can put you in a car and show you four or five examples so that you can then draw some reasonable conclusions on your own as to the value of the homes you are seeing.

I think one of the things that I have learned to do the best is to pick a series of homes for clients to see which help them establish their own idea of value.  Then once they see a home that they like, they are able to make a reasonable offer which will likely be accepted.  Making a low-ball offer that will be rejected is easy to do.  Making a reasonable offer that will be accepted on a great property is much more challenging.

Trying to figure out area values on your own is a little like trying to figure out the weather from observing how the hole in the ice behind our home has changed in the last couple of days.

It is a shame that even someone who was once in real estate cannot figure out how much time and aggravation they might save just by working with any of a number of competent local Realtors®.

For Realtors® viewing this post, make certain that you click on some of the photos of the waterfront listing. Clicking on the photo will let you see if full size.  The value that I got out of the showing was that I took the opportunity to take some new photos with my new Tokina 11-16mm wide angle lens.  So far I am very pleased with the combination of that lens and my Nikon 3100. While it is an expensive lens, the great interior shots make it worth it,  and it can also deliver some spectacular outside shots.

While my four years in real estate does not qualify me as an old timer, I have been through enough reinventions to smell change.  My favorite quotation comes from the motivational speaker, Dennis Waitley.  It goes something like this.

"Crisis is an opportunity riding a dangerous wind."

To me that comes close to describing today's real estate world from a number perspectives.

First and foremost, if you are buyer in today's market, you have almost limitless opportunies to find a wonderful property at a great price, but there are still plenty of dangers where you need to tread carefully.

Second, if you are a seller, more than ever you are riding a dangerous wind.  In some areas, perhaps many areas, there are few buyers.  You can get in a mode where you continualy drop  your price in hopes of attracting a buyer.  Incremental price drops can be a deadly trap. The opportunity to sell your property is there but you have to exercise much care in navigating this complex market.

As for continual small pricing changes, they are usually not the answer. There was a lesson I learned well in corporate American, if you are going to do layoffs, do not string them out.  Get the pain over quickly.  I think the same holds for price reductions.  If you are going to reduce your price, make it significant and make it right.  Reducing your price $5K at a time is water torture.

If you are a real estate agent, I really don't have to tell you how important it is for you to stay on top of your market.  Getting the right house for someone is more complex than ever because there are more choices and more complexity in some of the choices. Selling someone's home is a complex and time consuming process these days. It requires all your talents and expertise.

So going forward what change do I see for our industry? 

Number one for me is that a high percentage of my buyers are coming to me with specific properties already in mind.  While sometimes these properties might be off target, the mere fact that they have been found indicates that we should expect a different kind of customer once the market returns.

Our clients will come to us with more information and more questions.  I am convinced that information about homes is a little like building superhighways.  The more highways you build, the more people will drive, and the faster the roads seem to fill up.

Providing information about homes is a lot like that.  The more information that we provide, the more people want.  I have focused on creating home information sites with everything from slide shows to floorplans. I feel strongly that by putting a tremendous amount of information at the finger tips of potential clients, I am doing them a service which migh make it easier for them to decide on me as agent.

In today's world, providing the best possible information to clients is the best way to serve their interests and your own.

There was a great Dilbert cartoon today. It basically shows a team being carted off because they have not figured out social networks, games, and phones.  While we could argue over whether games of some type are relevant to real estate agents.  I suspect that few would argue against social networks and smartphones being an important part of real estate life.  I would add one other key element, Internet search engines.

If someone searches for "Bluewater Real Estate, Cape Carteret, NC," I want my name to come up.  If someone searches for "Southern Outer Banks Real Estate," I depend on my SOBX site coming up at the top of the list.

Beyond coming up first on those searches, I count on travel guides that I have written for Beaufort, Emerald Isle, and Swansboro being close to the top of the search rankings.  This winter while the market is slow, I plan a major effort to update my travel guides.  It is worth my time and effort.

Beyond travel guides, my strategy also requires providing good localized information about making the decision to live in our area.  I have a blog, The Crystal Coast Saltwater on Feet, which focus on the moving decision.

I also provide two sites which have localized information about what it is like to live on the Crystal Coast.  One, CrystalCoastNorthCarolina.us, also has real estate listings and focuses a little more on daily life close to where I live on the White Oak River.  My other site Crystal Coast Life takes a little broader view of the area.

And to make it easier on people who don't read a lot of blogs, I post a synopsis once a month at my CostalNC.org site.  If you are looking for information on life along the Crystal Coast on the Internet, there is a good chance you will run into me at some time or other.  I also do modified print copies which I leave at area tourist bureaus.

While putting information on the Internet is important, both buyers and sellers need to be Internet savvy, and many are these days.  If you are seller, you need to be able to determine if your property is getting proper Internet exposure. It you are a buyer, you need to understand Internet search, its strengths and weaknesses, and the differences between real estate websites.

There is no question that today's buyers, sellers, and agents need to be technologically literate.  I find more and more clients doing business with computers and/or smart phones.  If you are a buyer or a seller, you will make your life infinitely easier if you buy yourself one of the all in one, printer, scanner, and fax machines.  One of these AIO machines can make life much easier.

Being able to print, sign, scan, and email back a document which has been emailed to you can take days off a transaction.

And if you haven't already figured it out, smartphones are nearly indispensable for buying and selling real estate.  These days, I never know how a client will communicate with me.  It could be a text message, an email or a phone call.  A smart phone catches all of those.

We are at a time when clients armed with great information can make timely decisions quickly, and get into their new home as fast as possible given today's financial challenges.

While I truly believe we are in the midst of a crisis, I know in my heart that by working hard, providing the best information possible, and my treating my clients, both buyers and sellers in the most professional manner possible that I will survive the dangerous wind and turn it into an opportunity that will drive success in my business over the next ten years.

Now if I could just find some warm weather to get me over this cold month of December.