David Sobotta's Blog

Promote your area with a travel guide

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Wed, 01 May 2013 09:39:28 -0700

Many real estate sites hire paid content writers to talk about their areas. Often consumers and those looking at an area distrust the glossy tourist bureau type information that the produced by people with little real local knowledge.

Have a look at our 2013 Emerald Isle Travel Guide during the free download days of May 1 & 2. Envision how you might use something similar to promote your area. It is a very unique travel quide with lots of maps and even a real estate sign in front of a home in one of the virtual tours.

People value real content and this is a beach lover's guide to loving the beaches of Emerald Isle, North Carolina which happen to be one of the great family beach vacation areas.

There is free software to read the book available for almost any platform and the free Windows 8 reader software is one of my favorites when I use my Lenovo Yoga as a tablet.

Getting in Step with Today's Reality & the Speed of Life

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Thu, 12 Jul 2012 15:25:16 -0700

Much has written about the value of social media in real estate. I have written several articles myself and even taught a few classes. I actually feel lucky to have grown children between the ages of 30 and 36. Having family members in their thirties is a good lesson in humility. Working on teams with young colleagues also helps to keep me from leaping to the conclusion that I actually know exactly what is happening.

Interestingly I have gotten a clearer view of the not so subtle changes in our world since I stopped being an active real estate agent. For whatever reason, and I won't pretend to know whether it is a good or a bad thing, most of the real estate agents that I know are far from being in their thirties. They are actually more likely to be in their fifties and even sixties.

Many of the people in my generation, those of us born before 1950, were raised with the idea that quality and craftsmanship were very important parts of life. We also grew up in a time when extended family members were just down the road instead of across the continent. People didn't move very much, and if they did move, it was rare that they moved very far.

People tended to work within the system, and the idea of doing things for themselves without the help of a professional was not a common concept. People trusted authority and rarely challenged it.

Everyone can pretty well see where I'm headed. Life has fundamentally changed. There are a lot of reasons we are in a different world. They don't all really need to be enumerated. Maybe it started in the late sixties and early seventies when my generation was getting out of college. Certainly the Internet accelerated the changes, and Smart-phones put the nail in the coffin of reality as we once knew it.

The point is that we are well past the age when someone asks one of their relatives down the road for a recommendation on where to live or which real estate agent to use. Some of us have had virtual families for years.

Certainly the web has given many people the belief that every answer is just a Google search away. Google has created a world of instant experts that often don't believe that most professionals have much to add to the equation. That doesn't matter if you are a car, computer, or real estate sales person. If people do decide they need professionals, it is sometimes done grudingly and without full trust.

What people do trust today seems to be their instincts and the opinions they form from a variety of interactions. Research has shown that Facebook probably isn't where most people make their buying decisions. There seems to be no good, simple answer of how to reach today's consumers who happen to be getting younger all the time.

One of the factors that we completely ignore is the speed of life. Most people are quickly going to ask, "What in the world is the speed of life?"

Maybe I don't have a good definition for it, and an exact measurement is illusive, but I do know that most people are flying low and fast these days. That seems to happening in everything from changing careers to picking a smart-phone. I have a young friend in his late twenties. He recently changed careers and bought a house. His parents found out about all of it after the fact.

I'm actually not surprised. While family is still important, it doesn't define life like it once did. Younger adults form quick allegiances, and it is not unusual for those loyalities to change. There is a feeling among many consumers including older ones that access to all the information they need is just a few keystrokes or screen taps away.

They also aren't looking for the same things. The idea that they might be in the same house all their lives is pretty foreign. They want the best deal for their money, and if going direct to the builder is how they perceive the best way to get it, that's what they will do even it some negotiating skills could have saved them money.

On top of that many people and some of them are not so young have trouble establishing trust with actual people. If most of your interactions are texting, and email, your social skills are going to lag especially if television is your main recreation. If television, texting, and email define your life, it would be no surprise that you might not be able figure out which people you can trust.

So where are young consumers and not so young adults influenced by this new world going to get their information? Unfortunately the number one thing that we can rule out is the newspaper. Two of my three grown children never pick up a newspaper. Our oldest daughter will read our local newspaper if it is on the table when she doesn't have anything else to occupy her time, but that is it. Newspapers are dying and many are losing credibility.

Printed magazines seem to fall into the same category as newspapers. Even the credibility of what is on the web seems to hang in the balance at times. Too many people have found misleading information on the web so they search for multiple sources of information or look at peer reviews of what is available whether it is a movie, a restaurant, or a neighborhood.

As I was thinking about this challenge it dawned on me that the one thing that seems to be consistent with my thirty year old young adults is that they all have a Kindle and/or a tablet. In fact there are four Kindles and one tablet between my three children. Aside from an occasional home and garden magazine that the girls read in print format, all reading is done with an eReader of some form.

I have come to the conclusion that Kindles, Android tablets, and iPads are communication vehicles of the future. Whether we like it or not, a website will likely function best as a pointer to content that can be downloaded and consumed at the reader's convenience. I have three very different adult children, and they are all hooked on getting their content on these portable devices.

It is interesting that I just figured this out after the most recent visit from our scattered family members. Without knowing their preferences, I just spent the last three months writing my first Kindle book. The book, "A Week at the Beach, An Emerald Isle Travel Guide," was published at the end of June. It is a very detailed look at the Crystal Coast through my eyes. I know the area well, having walked all the miles of beach within the town of Emerald Isle a couple of times last year. I spend any spare time while not walking on the beach in my kayak or boat.

I wrote the book because some people suggested that I take the information that I put on my many blogs and turn it into an easily readable book. I have had so many requests over the years for the information, it seemed like a good use of my time. So far the results have been encouraging even though I'm an unknown author on the Kindle. The book is available for $4.99 so it is pretty inexpensive way to read about the Crystal Coast, its attractions, weather, and the way of life here on the Southern Outer Banks. All the information is in one spot with an index. Amazon makes it easy to read on any electronic device including Smart-phones with their free Kindle reader apps.

Publishing an eBook is not much harder than I thought, but it has enough challenges, that I wouldn't advise trying it unless you are very comfortable with computers. I was not surprised that getting the material re-purposed for the iPad is a non-trivial challenge. Having one document work on all platforms is never easy. Unfortunately even if writing for the iPad is relatively easy, I'm willing to bet getting the document over to the Kindle platform would not be easy, but I should have a better idea in a couple of weeks as I work with Apple's software.

If you have followed my blog, you probably know that I am no longer active in real estate, but that does not keep me from thinking about ways agents and clients can engage in a meaningful way.

With my recent discoveries and experience, I think if I were approaching real estate today, i would do it somewhat differently than I did it in 2006.

While I would not ignore traditional social media like Facebook, I would not put a lot of effort there except to use it as a pointer to my other more significant efforts. I personally think Twitter and Pinterest have much more reach than Facebook.

I would still create a website focused on the area with links to important information. At a minimum the content on the website would need to refreshed with three or four posts per month.

In addition, given what I have recently observed, I would likely publish a short guide or pamphlet about the area in eBook format. It would be important that any guide provide very impartial information about an area.

My personal belief is that it would be better to charge something for the guide than to provide it for free, but I don't have any evidence or research to back up my hunch.

If you are a real estate firm in this market for the long haul, I believe this could be a winning strategy. An eBook has permanence, credibility, portability, and convenience that is hard to match. An eBook also fits the speed of life that seems to be overtaking us all. You can read a chapter with your morning coffee, and pick it up again when you sit down to relax in the evening. You don't have to be hooked to the Internet or hunched over a computer.

Even if you have to hire someone to write a guide, I suspect the money spent there would be a better investment than most print media. if you charge for the ebook, you can probably recoup your expenses if the guide is well written.

I have three other book projects almost finished, or I would take it on myself to write a guide for living in the SW county portion of Roanoke County. I have answered many similar requests for area information from readers of my View from the Mountain blog. It is a neat area to raise a family, and a guide with all the secrets of the area might help sell my home that I have on the market there.

Going Beyond Selling Homes

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 15:06:32 -0700

I have always found something very satisfying about helping people find an area which meets their needs. Perhaps some of that pleasure is related to having had careers which allowed me to choose where I wanted to live. Going to a new place and finding what we needed to have a good life there seemed to fit my personality.

I even enjoyed going back to my home in Mount Airy, NC many years after we had moved away. For a few years my wife and I owned our family home in Mt. Airy before we sold it to the folks who now run it as a bed and breakfast.

There is also a great deal of work, pride, and enjoyment involved in getting a home like the one pictured in the post on the market. That particular home is one where our family lived for 23 years in Roanoke, VA. As we have gone through the process of selling it, I have written some about our experiences in Roanoke.

There is no surprise in that since we picked Roanoke as a place to raise our family. We stayed there because it ended up being a great place to live.

Our Realtor® in Roanoke commented about how effective some of my writing was in providing a good picture of living in Roanoke. Many of the people with whom he works are not only looking for a home but also shopping an area to live. Often the home and the area are just part of the equation which includes a job. It take the right combination of all the elements to end up attracting a family to one area over another.

Realtors® are no strangers to this. When I was selling homes, there were times when I felt like a combination tour guide and Chamber of Commerce spokesperson. I saw families where the husband would love the area and the wife could not imagine living in the same spot. When both loved the area, sometimes you got to focus on the houses.

The world of real estate will likely change greatly over the next five to ten years. When I bought my first property in Nova Scotia in 1971, the only way to really find out about the property was through letters, phone calls, and an actual trip. As anyone connected to real estate knows today, many buyers come to area with a list of homes that interest them. When my wife and I were buying on the Southern Outer Banks several years ago, we spent a lot of time looking at properties on-line.

Buyers also come to the area with opinions about the area. Many of those opinions have been formed online. Sometimes people make their decision about where to live in an area solely based on what they read on the web.

However, today's home buyer has had marketing messages in increasing volume and sophistication thrown at them for their whole lives. Most people today are quickly able to ignore the fluff in marketing. That is one of the reasons that they have often turned to the world of blogs and forums to get answers they trust. I cannot count the number of times over the nearly eight years that I have been blogging that someone has written me asking for advice about moving to an area.

My one rule of blogging has always been to tell the story as I see it with both the positive and the negative. If you do that for a lot of years and over thousands of posts, people come to trust your opinion and seek it out. While I love the Roanoke Valley where we lived for many years, Interstate 81 is a traffic challenge for those living there. To gloss over that problem would make my blog marketing fluff instead of something authentic that people can believe.

Similarly as I write about NC's Crystal Coast, the thought of hiding the story of Hurricane Irene has never occurred to me. Talking about hurricanes on our Crystal Coast site is no different than me questioning whether or not Apple has become the technological equivalent of a sugary soft-drink. No place, product, or company is without faults.

The web is a wonderful place to find and provide information. However, to be one of the voices on the web which actually matters, you have to believe what you say and be prepared to back it up with facts, pictures, and credible stories. When I write an article about wading in ocean water in March, I can only write it if I have actually done that. You cannot talk credibly about hiking on the beach if you have not been hiking on the beach.

For years it has been popular for real estate firms to hire web development companies to create content for them. It is easy, fast, and produces lots of words with search terms. Some of the content is obviously marketing fluff. Obviously some of it is good. Also some firms have dabbled with blogs, and I actually wrote one for a company for a couple of years. The trouble with good content is measuring the impact it has compared to poor content. No one has figured out the equation.

Your heart and mind tell you that quality writing is worth the effort, but it is harder to prove.

Very few people make a decision about where to live solely based on what they read, so it is very easy to push away and say the sale would happen without making sure the story you tell about an area is authentic. However, I am willing to bet as people become even more engrossed in the Internet, good content will matter more and more. Many people no longer have family or friends close to where they need to live. They have to find other ways of figuring out their decision. A Google search is often the default first step.

I firmly believe that all sorts of Internet content are now influencing people's decisions. Very smart large companies now monitor what is said on Twitter, Facebook, and through influential blogs. Surprisingly there is software to do that from companies like Radian6 which watches and flags conversations on the Internet. There are already colleges using the software to improve their image.

With real estate marketing struggling to figure out what works in this economy, I doubt any real estate firms are going to be tackling something like monitoring the Internet conversation about their area or firm. However, area governments and tourist boards which want to market their areas need to be paying attention and considering software to help them understand what turns people toward their area or away from it.

In the meantime, I think it is wise for both buyers, sellers, and agents to pay attention to what is being said on the Internet. Do a Google search and see what is being said. If you cannot figure out what to search try, "Southern Outer Banks" or "Crystal Coast Life" and see what is being said about the area where I live.

When you figure out where the discussion about your area is taking place, join the conversation in an authentic way or hire someone to do it. Ignoring the Internet's discussion of your world is not a good business strategy.

A Cautionary Tale for Real Estate Buyers and Agents

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Sat, 03 Mar 2012 19:34:14 -0800

My view of the real estate world comes both from having been an active agent until December 2011 and from being the current seller of a home. My wife and I also bought a new vacation home in the summer of 2006.

A little over a year and a half ago we decided to put the home where we raised our children on the market. It is a home that we have taken great pride in owning for the last twenty three years since we moved in as the first owners in 1989. Before a "for sale" sign went up in the yard, we made sure the home was in move-in condition.

I took some pride in the fact that our Realtor® told us that our home was one of the few that he would personally move into in a heartbeat. Since he lived on our street for a while, I took him at his word.

We have been lucky to have a reasonable number of showings since the house has been on the market. We even made the short list for three sets of buyers before we finally got an offer on the home. With some back and forth negotiating, we finally came to terms that both parties could tolerate.

The big challenge was that our buyer wanted a closing on our home a little more than three weeks after the closing on their own home. It was a big stretch for my wife and I, but with the help of our grown children who were willing to take some vacation time, we thought we could handle it.

However, we had to move forward at full speed for a couple of weeks before we could be absolutely certain that our deal was going to happen. We decided to clean out things that needed cleaning out anyway, but to delay moving or selling any furniture until our deal was certain.

Of course we also had to get through some inspections and an appraisal. Over the years I have attended a number of inspections with my own clients. Often I felt that I was needed and ended up staying for the whole inspection. Most of the inspections that I witnessed took under three hours.

Our home is a large home, and I felt the inspection might take a few minutes longer, but I was confident that only minor issues would show since we have been very good at maintaining our home. Also I can normally fix many of the small things that go wrong in a home. I generally tackle any issues as soon as they are discovered.

On top of that we did a major remodeling in 2001. At that time we replaced the roof, did a granite kitchen, new appliances, a new deck and a new sun-room along with an additional main-floor bedroom with its own cooling and heating systems.

We were a little surprised when our inspection took five and one half hours. However, all of the inspector-identified issues were minor. The radon test did not require any action, and after some discussion with our real estate agent, we agreed to fix all of the issues including a set of cloudy dual pane windows where the seals had broken. One other issue was a buzzing ground fault circuit breaker. We actually got an electrician out the next day to fix that issue.

However there were a few additions to the inspection addendum from the potential purchasers that were unusual to say the least.

One request was that we have a contractor verify that the 12X12 ceramic tile installed in the bathroom we added during the remodeling was actually waterproof. Another request was for a contractor to verify that a couple of moisture stains at the corner of a window were not moisture problems. This was after their inspector had checked them and found no moisture.

The most bizarre issue was that our purchaser was convinced that our outside gas line was plastic. The natural gas line runs under a covered deck to my outside grill and eventually back into the house to the new gas stove in our remodeled kitchen. The gas line is CSS (corrugated stainless steel) coated with plastic. It is not hard to determine that it is metal because of the fittings. We offered to have the line inspected and to bring it up to current code if necessary just to try to make our buyer comfortable. Our buyer also didn't like the way our gas fireplaces lighted.

I went down to the shop which sold and installed our gas logs and talked to their service people who recommended that I replace the sand. I bought the special and expensive sand needed for natural gas logs and replaced the old sand. As far as I could tell that fixed the problem, but we went ahead with an appointment to have a gas log technician check both sets of logs as soon as possible.

We did have the gas line inspected and were told that it met current code not only in Roanoke County, but in all of Virginia.

Because of the short time-line, we moved quickly to address the remaining issues and within two days of receiving the request for corrections, we had managed to resolve almost everything including a contractor who indeed agreed that our tiles were waterproof. The only exception was the actual installation of the new windows.

Unfortunately none of this seemed to matter with our buyers. The wife had decided that she would not feel safe living in our home. Perhaps it was the imagined plastic gas line. We heard she worried that our basement radon reading might someday change and that she might eventually have to replace some additional windows.

It wasn't long before we got a request for a release of earnest money back to the buyers. My wife and I only had to think ten seconds before telling our agent that we would not sign any release where the full earnest money did not come back to us.

Twenty four hours later, we got a request that we split the earnest money with them. I responded that they had twenty four hours to agree to pay us all the earnest money or they would be hearing from our lawyer. Shortly after that we got the release signed with the money coming back to us.

Of course we would have preferred to see the sale go through, but we certainly did not want to go to court to enforce the contract. However upon hearing that the lady of the couple did not want to live in our house, my wife sagely observed that living in our house was not in the contract, the buyers had only agreed to purchase the house. They didn't have to live in it.

Still we have tried to figure out what went wrong. These buyers had a long term attraction to our home. The first time we heard from them was 8:30 AM on the day before Thanksgiving. They wanted to see the house at 11:00 AM. When we received the call my wife was just getting ready to go into full Thanksgiving cooking mode since our family was expected to arrive just after noon that day. With a good deal of restraint, she managed to shift gears, and we got the house in shape for a showing that day.

We didn't hear anything further from the buyers until 8:30 AM on the morning after Christmas day. They wanted to see our house at 9 AM. We were just sitting down to a family breakfast so I told the real estate agent that if they wanted to see the house, it would have to be in the afternoon. We did hear back that they liked the house, but that was it.

Then once again on the day after New Year's day, they called early in the morning for another morning showing. We put them off for a couple of hours and my wife gave up on putting away our Christmas decorations as we got ready for the showing. My wife joked that they had seen the house decorated for Thanksgiving and Christmas along with one time when there were no seasonal decorations except those waiting on the pool table to be boxed and stored.

Shortly after the third showing we got on the road, and a few days later we got a low-ball offer from our buyers late one night. We countered that same evening and heard nothing back from them. Our agent determined that they were back out looking at houses the next week.

We figured they were gone, but in another week or so they came back with a higher offer. Once again I countered in a matter of hours. Again I heard nothing for several days. Finally they made another higher offer, and I made a final counter to which they agreed. From the first showing until when we had a signed contract took nearly ten weeks. It took another three weeks and five days for the deal to fall apart.

It is hard to even speculate what happened to our buyers. I can only guess that the inspector by trying to earn his money had somehow awakened a fear in our buyer of gas logs when he noted that they needed inspecting. However, even that doesn't seem to explain someone wanting proof that ceramic tile is waterproof.

It is a shame that real estate transactions have become so adversarial. I want someone to buy our home who will love it as much as we have. I have no interest in our home being in anything but top condition while we continue to live in it. It will be in that same great condition when it is sold. I am too old to change how I care for our home.

I have fantasized about buyers offering us a reasonable price and asking for me to give them a tour of the house and explain how everything works and what maintenance we do on a regular basis. This transition to new owners would be instead of yet another inspection where the inspector has to struggle to find something wrong with the home.

My wife's favorite part of the last inspection was the inspector declaring that our roof was the original roof. When he came to pick up the radon test box, she took the opportunity to educate him that a number of homes in our subdivision do have the original shake roofs complete with lichens, but that our fifty-year shingle roof was installed in 2001 which he could have determined if he looked at the extra bundles of shingles in my shop.

This is a buyers market as any agent or seller will tell you. However, that does not mean that buyers can completely run rough shod over sellers especially when a contract has been signed.

I actually prefer North Carolina's option period for a fee as opposed to Virginia's inspection and negotiation. However, I cannot move my Virginia house to North Carolina so when the next offer comes I will actually be looking for better qualified buyers and even a little more earnest money.

Signing a contract to buy a home should not be done lightly especially if it is already obvious that the home is in great shape and priced agressively. We all have buyer's remorse sometimes, but it can be an expensive proposition when you lose all your earnest money.

I might need some time on the water to help me forget this transaction. Some beach walks in our Coastal Paradise will renew my soul. North Carolina's coast can make you forget lots of stuff including the horrendous traffic that tied me in knots as we were trying to clean up from our almost move.

Beyond that I would like to get back a few cans of paint that I regularly used for touch up. My wife and son took all our paint and chemicals to a hazardous waste disposal the Saturday before our sale fell apart. Oh well, the sunrise is still beautiful from our deck so I can't complain too much.

Every area is in a continual contest for attention

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:11:26 -0800

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.

The changing technology landscape for real estate

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 00:22:02 -0800

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.

The best website advice that you will get

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 11:00:11 -0700

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.

Looking for marketing feedback

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Sat, 25 Jun 2011 09:54:35 -0700

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,

Do you want a REALTOR® who walks the beaches?

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 06:29:05 -0700

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.

The Value of Authenticity

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 22:32:05 -0700

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.

Relying on real local expertise for your decisions

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:01:05 -0800

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.

Trying not to be lost in the crowd

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 18:46:00 -0800

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®.

Trying to get a picture of a different market on your own is challenging

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 12:10:56 -0800

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.

Year End Thoughts for Agents, Buyers, and Sellers

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 22:01:27 -0800

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.

A basic law of the Internet that is important to buyers, sellers, and agents

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 22:23:03 -0800

The Internet has a tremendous amount of information. It does not take long to figure out that some of it is helpful and some of it is worthless.

I have always found this to be a basic law of the Internet. It is something that people looking for homes, selling homes, and those helping them should keep in the forefront of their minds.

The first thing that is important to me when I look at Internet information is the site itself. Why is the site there? How to they make their money. Are they trying to get something from me without my knowledge, or perhaps they just want my email address?

If the owners of the site are invisible or hard to find, I am immediately suspicious. If the site wants something from me and is promising something that seems to good to be true. It is likely that it is too good to be true.

While anonymity can be a good thing on the Internet, it also lets people say or do things that are often not what you would expect.

If a site lets people hide behind "Internet handles," you might want to search on someone's assumed name to see if there is any public information. They might be hiding for a good reason. You have to ask yourself, if the information is supposedly reliable why would the person not use their real name or why would the site not let you know who the person is.

There is plenty of good public information on the Internet, tax records and deeds for starters. Beyond that you have to careful. If the information is coming from an unknown source that you cannot verify, you should be cautious. The person providing the information might have motives that are beyond strange. Some of the battles that take place between Internet personalities are just plain weird. You don't want to be collateral damage in one of those battles.

For producers of content, those of us who have sites on the web, it is important to understand that where you say something can almost be as important as what you say.

If you are contributing to a site and the next post on the site is someone with phony content trying to sell sex pills, your potential clients will probably ignore you.

If you provide great information, and someone who has lost their mind completely contradicts you, you might end up in a no-win debate with a crazy person.

Good content is valuable. Few people take the time to write information that is valuable. If you give away your best content to a site which is just selling ads to attract people and which doesn't properly value your content, you might as well print the content, wad it up, and throw it in a trash can.

People who lurk on Internet sites where they are encouraged to have anonymous handles are unlikely to fall into the category of serious clients.

Your efforts are almost always most effective on a site where you have the most control. I learned long ago that moderated comments are well worth the effort. There are people on the Internet who have nothing better to do than post offensive, stupid, or misleading comments. If you can manage it, owning your domain and managing your content for yourself is the most effective strategy.

While a good site has controls to prevent offensive posts or spam comments, it has been my experience that "moderated" sites with volunteer moderators are almost worse than nothing. Users' content can be modified deleted or blocked by rogue moderators. There is generally no way to appeal the verdict from a moderator. There is nothing worse than being banned from a site for a reason that isn't clear to anyone but a moderator who is focused on showing you how powerful they are.

The best course of action is to keep your best content for your own sites. Good content is valuable. It brings people to your site, and in the end serious clients will find you.

Sites like ActiveRain let you have access to an audience that is serious about real estate. Your good content is put in front of an audience that has an identity and a true interest in your topics.

One of the best analogies that I can think of is comparing the Internet to doing business with a large company online. You can buy a product online from one of these companies like I recently did when I updated some of my web authoring software. If you have a problem, that online experience can quickly become a nightmare.

You can descend quickly into a morass of support phone trees and people who aren't really authorized to help you. While these folks have names, they disappear just as fast as they appear. They rarely feel responsible for the problems they create. Almost never do they solve a problem that caused.

Throwing your good content on a website where you have no control is like handing over your money on the Internet for product that may or may not work.

On the Internet if you depend on sites where anonymity is the byword, there is no resolution to issues. If you work with sites where someone owns the information, carefully screens the information, and is personally responsible for the information, then they will stand behind that information. It will be information that you can and your clients can trust.

No one should be afraid of good information which is helping someone understand what is for sale, where it is for sale, and what the area around it is like.

I am proud of the information that I provide about North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks. My Crystal Coast Life Blog and Saltwater on my Feet Blog both attempt to provide an inside look at living on NC coast. I make several posts a month on our CrystalCoast.us site.

On top of that I try very hard to do just as good a job on providing information on an inexpensive retirment home as I do on a much more expensive waterfront home.

If I am going to this much trouble to do quality content why would I want to let someone else use it to build traffic to their site when I have no guarantee that their site traffic will ever benefit me? It doesn't make business sense. As a result even when I post somewhere else, I make sure to take some of the traffic back to mind own sites.

I used to do a paid blog for our real estate first. I had to be very careful not to siphon off any traffic that might bring a lead directly to me. The real estate firm decided they no longer wanted to the blog. I removed all my links to their sites, and focused the traffic that I was drawing to them to my sites instead.

It was the best thing that I have ever done. In the last month I have gotten a number of leads including two who called my cell phone just looking for our real estate firm. When I asked how they got my number, it was from an Internet search.

Having the Internet focused on my own sites has been the best solution for me.

The changing landscape of buying a home

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 08:12:51 -0700

I recently presented a class on social networking to some members of our local MLS in Carteret County, NC. As is my tradition in making presentations, I did not rely upon my own thoughts and conclusions. I gathered information from contacts on ActiveRain and from those on LinkIn.

I had well over thirty people respond before I did my presentation, and some who have sent me notes since then. My presentation tried to draw some conclusions from a very broad spectrum of comments.

My credentials for doing a social networking presentation are solid. I started blogging six years ago, and I have written thousands of posts. I have used pictures, movies, and websites to connect with people for years before that. I even got a job as VP of marketing for an email company through social networking.

I worked at Apple Computer for nearly twenty years, I was instrumental in creating and bringing up an online store to connect with Federal employees and of course sell them computers. I also decided sometime before 2000 that email did not have the kind of permanence that I needed to communicate with my team spread across the United States.

With that thought I created and maintained an internal website for my federal sales team. It was at the core of how we operated. Each year we worked to create a top ten list of what we needed to be successful. It was posted on the website along with sales data, presentations done by the team, and presentations that I did for the corporate folks in Cupertino.

Our internal website was the heart of our accountability. With presentations online for years they took on a different meaning than ones that often disappeared immediately into corporate black holes. What that meant for all of us was that if you said something, you needed to stand behind it and deliver.

We also kept our best presentations that we did to customers online for comment, review, and improvement. On top of that we pioneered delivering customer movies to corporate. We video taped high level customers who had critical needs that we believed were important to Apple's success in the federal space.

As a measure of the effectiveness of our top ten list, I recently talked to one the employees still on the team. He attributed their recent success to items finally being checked off that were on our list as early 2001.

So what does all this have to do with buying and selling homes and social networking? Actually it turns out that there are a number of very similar themes which I uncovered with my questions about social networking and how people go about finding homes in our Internet based world.

As I mentioned in my presentation, no one who responded said that the first thing they did was to pick up a phone and call a Realtor®. Almost all started with some type of Internet search. The more Internet savvy they were, the more likely they were to rely on their Google abilities.

People did everything from depend on Google Street View to eliminate houses to have relatives assist them in purchasing homes they never actually saw except online.

There were a number of comments from people about eliminating sites which had poor user interfaces or content that seemed dated or had few pictures or poor pictures. There were positive comments on sites that provided movies of homes and valuable local information.

Three or four people commented that they would not trust anything on Facebook unless they actually knew the person doing the posting.

From the number of mentions, it was obvious that people were attracted to sites with high quality media and information. Sites that integrated mapping, larger pictures, and ease of searching got high marks.

Once people got the basics of the search out of the way, they started looking for more localized information. Forums like City-Data and local blogs were mentioned as information sources.

Then as people narrowed their search, they started looking for trusted information which they either found by evaluating content or contacting people in their social network. Most said they would check with friends by email but a few said they would ask for feedback from a few of their trusted Facebook friends.

Based on what I found from the responses, I went on to recommend in my presentation that Realtors® need to work on establishing four things online, visibility, credibility, trust, value, and accessibility.

While trying to go through all those items would essentially be cramming a 50 minute presentation into a few more lines, there are some basic suggestions that will help everyone.

Number one, pay attention to your website on a monthly basis. Old content which has little relevance will attract no one. If you don't understand websites and search rankings, hire someone who does.

Number two, do not put something online which will not stand the test of time. If you say it online, be prepared to stand behind it or lose all your credibility. Participate in the online world. if you don't want to write, at least make useful comments on what others write. Get an online profile, ActiveRain is a good spot, but if you can do a LinkedIn profile with recommendations from others, do it.

Number three, the online world makes some harsh and quick judgments. You are judged by what you say online and what others say about you. If you want to be trusted, you have to appear as someone who can be trusted. If your Facebook friends are posting pictures of you in compromising situations in college, you have a problem.

Number four, your online presence is your résumé. The content that you write or have written for you, reflects upon you. If it is useful, high quality content, it will draw interest. Also balance is important. If you oversell something, you will likely pay for that.

Number five, if they cannot find you, they will not contact you. Be online someplace besides Facebook. ActiveRain is a good place to start. Google yourself and act on what you find. Know how to use a smart phone, and if you don't already know how, have your kids show you how to do text messages.

Finally, remember the online community is a lot like the community you live in today. You build a reputation, and you have to live with it.

Keep one more thing in mind, the Internet has essentially replaced newspapers. In doing so the Internet has segmented itself into places that resemble some of the sections of newspapers. You want to be very careful that your online presence isn't in the comics section if you plan on your business being successful over the next five years.

If you want to check out what I consider rich content, have a look at this link.

Looking for comments on the value of social media

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 15:57:52 -0700

I am doing an educational presentationon social networking this week to Realtors® from the Carteret County MLS.

Obviously I believe strongly in the value of social networking. It actually is the core of my business strategy. I will be sharing some of my personal experiences including the story of a house that I sold to a couple who listed and sold their home in Pennsylvania, put their large possessions in storage and moved to the Crystal Coast.

They would not be unique except they came to the area, never having visited except through the words and pictures of my Southern Outer Banks website and the local blogs, like Crystal Coast Life, that I write.

While experience has shown me the power of local written content, I also know that pictures like the ones that I shot at the beach on Emerald Isle last evening can also be extremely important.

I have gotten some interesting feedback from former business colleagues whom I have asked about the value of social media and websites in making a moving or real estate decision. That group of people, since I spent over twenty years working in the world of high tech, is more comfortable with technology than other groups. Most of them know what Twitter is, some of them use it, and there would users of Foursquare and many other new technologies among their number.

i would love to hear some thoughts from Active-Rain users and visitors as to the value that social media and networking have provided them personally and to their clients. If you have recently made a move, what online resources did you use. What was of value? What turned out to be worthless.

While I am a strong believer in social media, as a sales person who depended on face to face to contact forsuccess during my career, I know you cannot depend on the web to do your work. You have to work the web and all the live people you can touch to be successful in these challenging times.

Thanks in advance for sharing any thoughts on the subject.

When technology works, it is pure magic

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Fri, 08 Oct 2010 21:58:54 -0700

This morning while I was at my home office desk, I got a phone call from two ladies who were headed south on Interstate 95. One was the wife of someone who worked closely with me at Apple Computer. He and I remain very good friends. The other was her sister, and they were exploring places for the sister and her husband to retire.

They wanted a place within driving distance of Washington, DC that had enough to offer that their grown children would want to come visit. Once they told me where they were headed, I explained that I thought that they might not find what they were looking for in that location, but I suggested they needed to have a look for themselves.

All they knew was that I was a Realtor® along the North Carolina coast. In the short phone conversation, I mentioned a couple of properties that might interest the sister who was looking to retire. I was pretty sure that the wife of my technologically advanced friend was carrying a smartphone.

I put together a short email with links to two properties and travel guides for Beaufor t and Emerald Isle that I have written. I sent the email within five minutes of our call ending. In less than ten minutes, I got a return phone call explaining that one of the listings had really caught their eye. They really wanted to have a look at it this weekend.

Since one of the ladies husband and I are such good friends, and we met a few years ago while I was visiting them, I invited the two ladies to come spend the weekend with us.

We have hosted so many former associates that I once thought we should name our place the Sobotta B&B, but I did not want to confuse folks who were looking for our former home which actually is the Sobotta Manor B&B in Mount Airy, NC. It was recently featured in a Washington Post article.

The two ladies called back later this afternoon to say that long weekend traffic coming out of Washington was so bad that they would not be able to get here until Saturday, but I told them that was fine. All that is on our calendar tomorrow is an Episcopalian Lobster Lunch that we attend each October, and the possibility of an afternoon fishing trip.

Even I, who worked at Apple for nearly twenty years, find it amazing that I have a potential client looking at listings while they are stuck in holiday traffic on I95 south.

This caps what has been a good week for technology in my world. I have been working hard on a project that makes it easier for buyers to visualize a home and its floor plan. While I intend to use it now to help my sellers in marketing their homes, I hope it will turn into a business where I can sell the service to other Realtors®. After lots of computer time, I finally got a finished product for a live listing up and on the web. It also displays well on iPhones and Droids so I am pleased with that.

I have also gotten two leads recently from blog posts. One came from my Crystal Coast Life site and the other from my Saltwater on my feet blog. It has only been ten days since I showed property to some other clients who found me through my ActiveRain posts.

While technology is definitely becoming more important, you have to use everything at your disposal. In this market you cannot give up on some more traditional tools. One of the first things that I did after getting my most recent listing and putting a sign in the yard was to hold a Realtor® open house. The promise of some of my homemade pimento cheese sandwiches and my wife's cumcumber cream cheese sandwiches netted us 21 Realtors®. When those were added to the 12 Realtors® that we had on caravan the previous week, I was able to show my new client that he got maximum exposure with local Realtors®. He is obviously well covered on the web. Now if we can just find the right buyer and sell his home.

I am even more convinced than ever that technology will eventually make a huge difference in my business. My web expertise and photography skills certainly helped me land that latest listing.

As I was putting his waterfront home on our hyper-local website, I thought back to my first real estate purchase in 1971 where I had to write letters before I got information about that first property. It took weeks not minutes. That was also back when it took a few days to get photos developed unless you used a Polaroid camera.

Times have certainly changed. I have a new I5 iMac on order so I am looking forward to seeing where it and its four computing cores along with my Droid can take me in the next five or six years.

No matter no much technology we end up using, it will be worthless unless we remain focused on creating better buying and selling experiences.

Looking for something more than just a house

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 23:51:36 -0700

It helps to think back to your own experiences when trying to help others find that right spot to live.

We have been through a number of significant moves in our lives. The ones that I remember the most were when we went from Halifax, NS to Columbia, Maryland and from Columbia to Roanoke, Va.

Our moves were focused around our three children. We left Canada so our children could spend more time with their grandparents, and so they would have a better chance at finding good jobs. We could have gone to Toronto or Alberta for the jobs, but the grandparents were firmly entrenched in North Carolina.

While Columbia was a beautiful place and had many advantages, it did not fit our family. Columbia was planned to create real neighborhoods, but many of the kids in our neighborhood went to private schools. The local news was Washington, DC. On top of that the grandparents were still six hours away.

It was late summer 1987 when the family finally caught up with me in Columbia. We had gone there because I was working for Apple and had found a job in the US with Apple in Columbia. Within just a few months we realized that Columbia was probably a mistake for us.

By the summer of 1988 I was moving into another job at Apple which had me traveling to Va. Tech in Southwest Virginia for extended periods of time. I had the luxury of investigating the area thoroughly. It was also less than two hours away from our home turf of Mount Airy, NC.

It did not take me long to figure out that Roanoke might be a really good fit for our family. It was cheaper for Apple to move me than to pay travel expenses. I took the proposed move to the family, and we all sat down and made lists of the positives and negatives of the move. If we went ahead with the move, it would be the third one in five years. Finally we all agreed that moving was a sound idea.

I made one promise to our children. I would do everything in my power to keep us from having to move again until they were all out of high school.

While the deliberations had been going on, my trips to the Roanoke area had continued. Finally in May of 1989, we listed our home on Sweet Hours Way in Columbia and celebrated with a family trip to the Roanoke area. It was Festival in the Park weekend. We managed to hit some area high spot like the Mountain Lake Hotel, the Roanoke Farmer's Market, and the Mill Mountain Star.

Once we got to Roanoke, our children gave me a hard time because I kept talking about the importance of being in a real neighborhood.

They might not have appreciated the value of a neighborhood then, but they all do now. Being out on their own makes it a little easier to see things.

Yesterday as I was driving a client around and showing him different areas, he immediately picked up on one of my favorite ways of telling a real neighborhood. I look for people outside their home talking to each or at least walking or biking the streets near where they live.

Most people want to be able to live in a place where they can connect with other people. There are people who want to live where no one will bother them, but I think they are in the minority. They tend to live in spots where there is little to draw people together.

I can still remember our Roanoke neighborhood when we moved to the area. We had subdivision holiday parties complete with caroling. There were plenty of cul de sac parties, and everyone watched out for the children of the neighbor. The children knew it too. I can still remember being called by the daughter of someone we knew. She couldn't find her parents and her car had died on her on a lonely road. I immediately got in the car and rescued her.

My wife used to talk about the mommy network which she claimed to be one of the world pre-emminent intelligence gathering networks. It must have worked fairly well, because all our children survived to their 21st birthdays.

Our home in Roanoke on the side of Twelve O'Clock Knob mountain will always have a lot of memories for us. It is a great house. From the master bedroom we could see the sun rise over the mountains behind downtown Roanoke. Over our 21 years there, I took thousands of sunrise pictures.

I also wrote a few thousand blog posts. I managed to keep my promise to the kids, but it meant that I have a lot of miles on me. My job for many years required me to leave on Monday morning and drive to Northern Virginia.

So as I drive clients around here along NC's Crystal Coast, I am always looking for that clue that makes a particular neighborhood special. Over time I have formed my own opinions, but I like for my clients to come to their own conclusions. I might present the evidence, but I try to let them make up their own minds.

Twenty one years after moving to Roanoke, we have decided to cut our ties and move on to the next adventure. Just a couple of weeks ago we listed our home which rightfully can claim the title of being the home base of my longest running blog, View from the Mountain.

We picked the base for our next adventure in 2006 and have been splitting time between the two places since then. We went through the selection process with the same care that we did when we moved to Roanoke.

Our move to Bluewater Cove on the banks of the White Oak River has been a very positive one. We wanted it to be a place where we could make some new memories with our children.

As you can see from the attached photo of our two year old granddaughter walking into the sunset on the beach at Emerald Isle, that seems to be working. I am looking forward to many more Crystal Coast kind of days which will let our family continue to grow closer together.

My goal with every buyer client is to help them find their own special spot where their roots will grow as deep and strong as ours did in Roanoke. Since we have just finish three months of work to get our house on the market, I suspect that I might be able to relate a little better to sellers after that intense experience.

The limits of technology

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Wed, 26 May 2010 23:32:17 -0700

There is no question that technology provides us with some fantastic tools that few people could have predicted twenty years ago.

As real estate agents, we are right in the middle of a revolution. Buyers and sellers also have options that allow them to come to a property search or listing meeting far more informed than ever before.

I just downloaded the Zillow Droid application to my Droid this afternoon. The idea that someone can drive around and check prices and details of listings from their cell phone is just amazing.

However, there are limits to the technology. Just as I have found with Google maps, it all depends on when your area was mapped and how accurately the algorithms calculate addresses. I have seen the same challenges with GPS systems.

Sometimes it is easy to figure out these errors if you are in a fairly simple area, but if you are in an area with a lot of homes for sale and complex streets, mapping errors can be deadly.

Now I suspect that this will all get better over time, but right now it is far from perfect at least here on the edges of civilization on the Southern Outer Banks.

When I used my Droid to check one of my listings that is on Zillow through syndication, I was surprised to see where it was mapped. The Zillow map shows it in the wrong place. When I go to the listing website, the map is correct. It is a small detail, and I reported it to Zillow, but as more and more consumers start depending on this electronic information, it becomes a challenge to manage and error check all these websites.

I was involved in the development of a hyper-local real estate site designed to have local content and information. We actually had maps in the initial version, but eventually gave up because of all the mapping errors we were finding. We decided to pull the maps until we could put in a version where the listing agent could manually adjust the location.

This technology of aerial mapping is rapidly accelerating. I know that Carteret County now has an inhouse system that gives the county very accurate measurements of buildings from the air. Because the mapping is done on a regular basis, it is very good and does not have many of the problems found in some other aerial maps.

I have enjoyed watching my own home change on the maps over the last few years. We have been living in the home for almost four years. It is only recently that it has shown up as a house on aerial photos. Before it was a lot with some early construction. Even now the aerial picture is at least five years old since there is no dock behind the house. Of course when you map the address in Google, it isn't even close to where my house really is. We are on the water, and the Google map has us well up into the subdivision.

We have seen progress since until about a year or so ago, the subdivision did not even exist on the aerial photos.

None of this means the technology is bad. What we are seeing is that the uses of the technology are outstripping the quality of the data that is available. We all know what happens to computer results when bad data goes into the system.

One of the new roles of a real estate agent is to make sure that his clients are seeing the correct information. I spend a fair amount of time capturing images and using tools like SnagIt or Photoshop to correctly point out the locations of homes.

There is a tremendous amount value in much of this new technology, we just need to make certain that everyone uses it with the knowledge that feet on the ground can make all the difference in the information be useful or misleading. It is one of the areas that we as agents can really make a difference.

I will look forward to the day when the technology reaches the point that those homes on my Droid are all in the right location.

Of course it could be worse, at least most of our houses are not in an area where the land is actually changing. I love being on the beach, and the Point at Emerald Isle is one of my favorite spots. Even someone like myself who visits it regularly has a hard time keeping up with the changes from the tides and winds. Sometimes the access road even disappears.

Looking at the aerial photos of the area is a waste of time. Currently they bear little resemblance to the beach that is actually there. There is much more land there than indicated in the aerial photo beside the photo that I took last year.

I think I will just enjoy the beaches and save my worry for listings that are misplaced on maps.

We just need some of Apple's customers to start buying real estate

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:42:26 -0700

How would you like to have thousands of clients who will place orders for your products without even touching a real one? They will fight to be the first to stand in line to buy products which are likely to have some snags since they are new products and first off the lines.

The customers do not even care about trying the product or inspecting it before they buy it. There also is a reasonable expectation that the price of the product will go down after they buy it. They are happy just to have their hands on the product.

It is safe to say that we do not have any clients like Apple's customers in my real estate world.

When I have a smooth closing like the one I had last week, all my efforts seem worthwhile. My recent first time home buyers required over a year of contact. They made three offers before they finally got a home.

Still we really enjoyed working with them. They were very technology saavy. Communicating with them was easy, and I could count on a quick response. When everything was done, I think they got a great deal on their home, and I believe they will have some instant equity. Their patience was rewarded.

Of course houses and technology are very different products, still there are some lessons for the real estate world in Apple's success. I worked at Apple for nearly twenty years so I got a good education in the way that Apple does business.

Lots of Apple's ways would not translate well to real estate, and there is some reason to be happy over that. However, I do have some thoughts on what of Apple tactics might help.

First and foremost, you need a great product that meets clients needs. I do not think there is much doubt that Apple makes products which are very easy to use, and does more than the average customer needs.

To me having a great product means being fussy when taking a listing and being careful when showing a listing that you think might not be right for your clients. I am not a pushy salesperson, but I am not afraid to tell clients that I think a certain property is not worth taking the time to look at it. I am also not afraid to tell someone with an overpriced listing to go somewhere else. That is a hard lesson when you are new to real estate and looking for your first listing.

Second, you cannot be everything to everyone. You have to pick your area of expertise and become the best at it. Apple does not even attempt to market to large customers. They sell mostly to inidividual users. I like to sell along the White Oak River. I live on the river and frequently boat on the river. This weekend I took a client by boat to see the docking facilities in a subdivision they were considering. Yet, I would probably leave selling boating properties on Harker's Island to another of our agents even though the trip takes only forty five minutes.

Third you have to manage your message. If you are advertising a home with full access to a boat ramp, you should make sure you that the boat ramp is usable besides on a tidal surge. You should not over commit to a property. Make sure you deliver what you promise.

Fourth you should make your clients feel special about their new home.

Apple is doing some things which might make its loyal customers a little uncomfortable. You can see an article about this in today's NYT.

If you would like a former insider's view of Apple, check out my "Applepeels Blog."

It is good to have our warm weather back. We had a nearly perfect beach day on Saturday. I ended up knee-deep in saltwater.

Making some intelligent choices in technology for real estate

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:53:09 -0800

I have been seriously involved in technology for twenty eight years. I was at Apple Computer for nearly twenty of those years so I have seen technology both from the perspective of a manufacturer and a consumer. One of the things I learned long ago is to not become married to a particular technology to the point that you have no options.

Many computer users will tell you that they have felt like they had no option over the years but to stick to a particular vendor. The truth is that the web and many new technologies have made it easier than ever for you to set up your data so that you own it instead of it being owned by a particular technology or product.

With my history and that lead-in, you might expect this to be a commercial for Apple and its products. That turns out not to be the case, though I do use Apple's computer products alongside with Windows and Linux products.

But focusing on the hardware layer is not the way to give your self the most freedom and protection. The first thing I tell most people is that they need to clean up their email choice. While I have nothing against free email programs, I think you need to make intelligent decisions and consider it carefully if you are going to trust your critical client communications to a free service.

First off while you probably have never heard of POP and IMAP, what you really need to know is that in a world where your email might well be accessed from a home machine, your laptop, and your smartphone, you really need to get a service which supports IMAP.

IMAP is a more modern protocol designed to support multiple computers. Your mail resides both on a server and on your computer. When you switch to a new computer and have IMAP, there is no complex migration unless you have created some local folder. If you leave all you IMAP mail on the servers, once you have entered some basic information, including username and password, your email will be downloaded to you computer.

A few years ago I worked for an email services company Webmail.us. I actually started using their product before I went to work for them. I needed reliable email that could be used across several computers without a problem. Their IMAP mail has continued to work flawlessly for me even after the company became part of Rackspace. You will spend about $120 a year for their email plus a fee for your domain. That $120 can get you enough email accounts for a small workgroup.

Rackspace email is very good email. If you are interested in more about business class email, check out this article I wrote a few years ago. If you are serious about your making certain that your email reaches your clients, you might want to consider using email that is run by people whose only business is email.

I also use Google Standard edition for your domain which includes Gmail. Mostly I use Gmail for my personal correspondence and its chat capability. I also use Google documents though not as much as I once did. I do use the Google Calendar for my scheduling. As note, Gmail can be set up as an IMAP mail account.

Our company, Bluewater GMAC Real Estate, also happens to use a company for email which is a reseller of Rackspace Email. That makes my life easier, and I much prefer that situation to our company IT people running their own email server. I have been there and done that. It is not a good use of resources for a small business.

I use my company email address for internal communication. I use my personal Rackspace account for client communication, and my Gmail account for friends and other communications which are not business critical.

All are IMAP and work with practically any email client and also through browser based access on the web.

I have all the accounts running on eight computers spread across three locations plus my new Droid smartphone. All the email is syncronized across all the devices. The computers include one running Vista, one running Windows 7, one running Ubuntu Linux, another running Windows XP and four Macs running a variety of OSX releases.

I use Thunderbird as my email client in the Windows world. I have Outlook on one machine, but I am not a fan. I stick with Apple's Mail program on the Macs, and on Linux I typically only access my mail by browser though I have used their mail programs at times.

How did this all work when I chose a Droid for my smart cellphone? Actually it worked quite well since Gmail is tightly integrated with the Droid. I got my contacts and Gmail loaded within less than one minute of being handed the phone. When the salesman turned around to take my phone so he could migrate my contacts, I got to tell him that there was no need since I already had it going.

The IMAP based Rackspace email was also a piece of cake to get on my Droid.

Outside of the world of email, I try to save all my documents in rtf format or rich text format. That way it is very easy to use them on any platform where I have access.

Deciding on what computer to buy can be a matter of budget or personal taste. I convinced my daughter to buy an Imac at Christmas. A few weeks later I bought my wife and myself two Windows 7 laptops, but there are reasons that I will still use Macs even after getting a very fast i-7 laptop.

The Droid has proved very useful both at working real estate and at handling our continuing family obligations.

For me getting the Droid was driven mostly by AT&Ts continuing poor reception in our Southern Outer Banks location. With devices like the Droid it is easy to stay on top of your email and messages.

So far, Windows 7 has yet to crash on me, and the Droid is doing well. Both are helping me keep my data free from some seriously proprietary software.

I used the Droid at lunch the other day to forward a counter offer to a client.

All that is good since I don't want to be fooling around with technology as the beach season opens, and we get our first taste of spring.

Still choppy waters out there

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:53:54 -0800

While we have noticed some increased interest in properties, the sailing is still far from smooth.

We still have plenty of inventory on the market, and there is a subset of the inventory that is still significantly over priced. Sellers in this category seem to be hoping that one particularly dumb buyer with a clueless real estate agent will fall into their lap.

Then we have a few foreclosures which continue to put pressure on prices but only manage to satisfy a small percentage of the buyers who are looking for a "deal." Just to make life interesting we have a few buyers who believe that any offer, no matter how low, needs to be accepted.

However, my number one problem is a backlog of clients who cannot sell their properties in distant states so they can move to our coastal area.

While our winter has been colder than normal, so has the winter in Florida. The interest in our area is still strong, but I believe the target property has come down in price and size.

As spring comes, and there are already signs of it already, we will get more people who are interested in buying homes. It would be nice to skip the month of March since many of our visitors are still shoveling snow but doing so would mean missing a couple of great area events, The annual Swansboro Oyster Roast and Emerald Isle's Saint Patrick's Day Festival.

In a lot of ways those events kick off the beginning of our visitor season. While I believe North Carolina's Crystal Coast or what I like to call the Southern Outer Banks did really well in trying economic times last year, this year the times are just as tough if not more so.

I have modified my practices a little, I will take a potential client on a short tour of the area and show them a house or two. I tell them up front if they want me to work for them after that point, I require an exclusive agency agreement. So far I have not had a problem with this.

The other thing that I am doing is a contiinuous evaluation of where I put my content. Some places have proved very fruitful and others have delivered almost nothing.

My intention is to provide such complelling but balanced information about the area, that I am hard to ignore if you are really serious about living in the area. So far it is working with a reasonable nummber of leads trickling in each month.

I continue to enjoy working with clients looking to relocate here on the coast and those aera faimilies looking for a new to them home. I am hoping this year that my real estate efforts will finally be rewarded. I am hoping that my expertise in social media, photography, and publishing brochures will be a perfect storm for success.

I remain cautiously optimistic about our prospects in 2010.

Some really neat inexpensive technology for real estate

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 22:11:08 -0800

As our industry continues to struggle, I am certain that we need all the innovation and effective technology that we can find. I have built a very strong Internet presence through lots of hard work and late nights.

Perhaps because of that, I hear from many people who have never visited our area but are interested in comparing it to their needs. I have tried a variety of methods to help people understand the area. The Crystal Coast Living blog that I write is a good start for people, and my Crystal Coast, Saltwater on my feet blog digs a little deeper into the moving decision. Then for those who want to see what life is life on a daily basis, The Crystal Coast electronic village is almost a daily journal. I even have a site with lots of photos, information, and an interactive map of the area.

While these are effective at getting information to potential clients, there seemed to be something missing.

I recently found an inexpensive way to add another dimension to my information about the area and place some listings at the same time.

At Christmas my oldest daughter gave me a GPS logger called i-gotU. The device is under $70 and is essentially a GPS device that tracks you and has software to help geo-tag photos that you take and place them on a map which can be a Google earth map.

You can read more about my experience with the device at my View from the Mountain blog.

The easy way to understand the potential of the device is to take one of the 3D trips. I have figured out a number of tricks to make trip creation easier, but it still takes time especially if you are working the trip into your daily routine.

This trip covers Bluewater Cove and Cape Carteret. It show a few listings and many of the services and landmarks of the area. I find the 3D trip, which is the button on the right, the most rewarding. I have gotten some good feedback from potential clients so I have embedded one of the trips in my real estate website.

I have also added to my real estate website a link which provides a MLS view of the properties on the virtual tour.

You can also take the geo-tagged photos and post them to something like Picasa Web Albums. It gives you a very easy and quick way to show someone in another state a location that might impact their buying decision.

I think this technology is a powerful way to let people experience an area without traveling to it.

Recovery will require more than most people think

David Sobotta (No longer active Realtor®) — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:08:54 -0800

I have been fortunate to be involved in a number of endeavors over the years which have taught me some lessons that I will never forget.

One things that I have learned is that when you are in a tough spot, you often have to invent new ways to achieve success. The tougher the spot the more likely it will require significant innovation before you can recover and move forward.

I am completely convinced real estate is in a very challenging period in Carteret County. However, I am also convinced that our challenges are not necessarily the challenges faced by other areas in the country.

For example we have relatively few foreclosures in our market. With the disruption that these few foreclosures cause, I can only imagine how tough it is in areas where foreclosures are the rule rather than exception.

I actually think the problems facing Carteret County are more challenging than foreclosures. Foreclosures eventually get purchased and go away.

For years our market has depended on people coming here to vacation and eventually deciding to retire here or purchase a second home in the area.

Not surprisingly the retirement and second home market is changing. The retirement market is changing because retirment is changing. Many people are less willing to put a large chunk of their retirement money into housing. They are more willing to buy smaller homes, but this market has shown them that they can get a lot of value for their dollar.

Consequently these folks are looking for smaller homes with better designs for retirement living. Just any old house plan will not do these days. I have visited a retirement community near Chapel Hill recently and have been impressed with some of the unique home features designed to attract retirees. It is up to builders to be smart and figure out plans that match the market sooner rather than later. The ones that do not will be punished by the market.

Secondly many of these new retirees are looking for places to live where they can have part time jobs during their retirement. Much of the retirement thinking now is that staying busy is better for your mind and certainly any dollars earned protect your retirement savings.

On top of all this many retirement areas are actively trying to attract retirees. Here in Carteret County we do a really good job getting the word out to people who might want to vacation in the area. However, I have not seen a coordinated push to attract retirees.

The days of word of mouth being enough to promote an area are gone. People search the Internet for everything. If an area is serious about attracting new people especially retirees, they need to go after that market in a professional manner with a long term plan.

In addition to working to attract jobs which might interest retirees, our governments, and real estate companies need to do more have a coordinated voice that can be heard on the Internet.

I have dedicated a lot of hours to a website that talks about what a great place Carteret County is to live. Unfortunately real estate agents are so fearful of losing an advantage by cooperating with other agents that they often cannot see a real opportunity even when it is staring them in the face.

I would like to see the city and county governments work together with interested parties to address any area shortcomings and to put together a strong marketing plan to establish Carteret County as one of the premier retirement communities on the east coast.

I certain think it qualifies as one of the best places to live, but I think relatively few people think of the area as a great retirment location. If we just sit back and wait for the real estate slump to end, we might be very surprised at how much the market has changed and aggressive other areas have become at recruiting retirees.

Today world is far different from the world of 2005 when everything was great in the world of real estate. Thinking that we can get back to those days without coming up with some new ideas that can entice new buyers to the area is just wishful thinking.

We will have to work together to attract buyers and make certain we have what today's buyers want. That includes the right houses, the right job and business climate, the right services, and a reputation that will attract buyers with enough money to buy homes in the area.

Much of our reputation for being a good place to retire has been based on recreational opportunities like fishing. Yet the government ignores the devastation being done by gill nets. Yesterday I heard someone questioning the worth of buying a fishing license. He had fished all morning, caught nothing, and watched as a net was pulled to shore by a tractor. After collecting their catch the "fishermen" threw back in the smaller fish which by that time were dead.

In this new world which values green living, not figuring out how to have a sustainable recreational fishery along side a healthy commercial one could be devastating. Who will want to live in an area where recreational fishing is declining?

We live in a great area, but we need to promote it with one unified voice, protect it, and to make certain the area becomes an even more attractive a place to live.

There are certainly plenty of great reasons to live here.