Maine is well know for it dramatic oceanfront.  When it comes to real estate along the coast you have many options - from the northern most regions which are fairly remote (and less expensive), to the southern coast which is much more urban and decidedly more expensive.

Our most recent newsletter featured an article on Maine Waterfront real estate, especially homes along the oceanfront.  If you are interested in what has sold, and at what prices, details can be found here - Maine Waterfront Homes.

Like other parts of the county sales and prices for oceanfront (and lakefront) homes have declined, yet sales are still occurring.

If you are thinking about property along the ocean and need detailed market statistics, let us know and we can prepare a comprehensive report for you.

The syndication of listings on websites like Google Base, Oodle, Hot Pads, FrontDoor, Cyberhomes, CL etc is time consuming and I really question just how valuable.  There will always be a lead here and there, but I believe the number of people searching for homes on these sites is few and far between.

We have been mannually posting to sites that allow - like Google Base and Oodle.  We have also been using VFlyer and Postlets on sites that does not allow for individual agents to post lisitngs.  When you post your own information you can obviously control the data presented and the links therein.  However, do the links back to your site actually provide any significant link juice to your website?  I believe when posted through Postlets and VFlyer there is none - but perhaps when posted yourself there might be?

Maybe we can generate a discussion on this topic?

Also, if you have your own single property website - created through your own website - can you simply syndicate this in some way?

We have just updated our 2008 full year sales results for southern Maine, and as expected sales in nearly every town and community are below 2007 levels. Prices, contrary to what you might have been led to believe, have not fallen as sharply. Complete sales results and market statistics are available online at our website at: Maine Real Estate Sales – 2008.

Complete reports for 2008, 2007, 2006 and 2005 are also available for download.

Maine Real Estate Sales ReportsBut, all thing being equal, price continues to be a significant issue and fundamental to the success of every property transaction during the last six months and no doubt the foreseeable future.

According to the Maine Real Estate Information System total homes sold in Maine for 2008 were 9,502 compared to 12,014 in 2007, resulting in a decline of 20.9%. The median sales price for those homes decreased by 7.2% percent for all of 2008. Of course, the results by each city and town vary considerably, as our report reflects.

With fewer homes selling in Maine, those involved in the real estate industry - agents, mortgage lenders, home inspectors and appraisers - are all feeling the affects.

Through December of 2008, the number of people licensed to sell real estate in Maine declined 13.5% in the past year, and the number of people obtaining entry-level licenses fell 70%. The number of mortgage lenders is also dwindling. As of year end there were 60% fewer licensed lending office, and the number of licensed loan brokers is down 25 %. These statistics are kept by the state’s Office of Licensing and Registration.

As with many industries, especially those where the threshold to join is relatively low – but the formulation to achieve real success can be elusive, difficult economic times have a way of weeding out the weak. And today is that time.

Although many buyers have been sitting on sidelines because of the economic uncertainty, there is still optimism that the new administration will create the environment that will lead to a market turnaround later this year.

When that time comes, those who have survived, and flourished, in this difficult market will be in a position to reap the rewards and provide clients with an even higher, more sophisticated level of service. The Maine Real Estate business sector deserves strong agents who have a grasp of new technologies and improved methods of doing business.

I am hoping to generate a few opinions on this subject.  I know many agents use both VFlyer and Postlets.  Both are good services and allow you to post listings to many national portals.

However, in doing this, I can't help but think that you are compromising your own website.  Both of these are services about promoting themselves - the listings show up on the portals as either Postlets or Vflyer in the URL.  You do have a clickable feature to your site in the body of the flyer, but its still not the emphasis.

On many of these portals you can directly load your listings and customize how you want the information to look.  Many allow you to direcly add HTML tags, and I would believe this will only increase as time goes on.  It is clearly more work to do this....but aren't the results better for the exposure of our own websites?

ListHub is also available - but this does not in ANY WAY provide support to indivdual agent websites - it all about the agency only.

At the end of the day I don't really think potential buyers are searching all these portals for homes - oodle, doogle, boodle, woodle, whatever!  They are sticking with the big guns - or more importantly searching Google, Yahoo and MAYBE MSN for local real estate website (and listings).  If you really do any searching online for homes, and test these different sites, they really are not that good and the so called neighborhood information they provide is pretty vanilla - and all the same.  It is my believe as local agents we can create a better online experience for buyers. Can anyone really identify any leads coming from any of these secondary portals - my guess is that it is pretty limited.

Just image what would would happen if we stopped suporting all these real estate portals.

On Monday the Portland City Council held a workshop to discuss the future development of the Maine State Pier.  The result was an informal decision to re-open negotiations with Portsmouth-based Ocean Properties.

Three options were presented by the city manager's office for moving forward with the redevelopment of the pier and in the end they chose to move ahead with Ocean Properties, who last year lost the bid for the development project to local competitor The Olympia Cos. The city council scheduled a formal vote on the matter next month. At this time there is still no final decision on whether the city will sue the state over the disputed land beneath the pier.

About a month ago the City Council voted to discontinue negotiations with Olympia who were unwilling to move forward with due diligence work on their $100 million project until a dispute over ownership of the land beneath the pier was settled between the state and city. Ocean Properties says the dispute will not hinder its development plans for the pier, which include a luxury hotel, office building, underground parking garage, public park, a fish and produce co-op and a cruise ship terminal.

The other options the council considered included holding a second round of competitive bidding from developers and having the city draw up its own plans for the pier and then find a developer to build it. However, given changes in the council, the current economic climate and the willingness of Ocean Properties to move forward, tit appears that there is finally a path forward to get things done – and the council seems to be ready to take advantage. A vote is scheduled for January, so we'll see!

Welcome to Portland, Maine

The above video was created using Vimeo. It is an alternative to YouTube.

Competition among national real estate sites is very competitive, to say the least. Keeping track of the top 10 visited each month is an obsession, since it has such a direct bearing on advertising revenue. According to Hitwise, a national tracking service, the sites with the highest market shares in the month of November 2008 were:

1. Realtor.com
2. Yahoo Real Estate
3. Zillow.com
4. ZipRealty.com
5. Rent.com
6. RE/MAX.com
7. HomeGain.com
8. Service Magic.com
9. US Dept of Housing and Urban Development
10. RealtyTrac.com

The interesting thing about these results, however, is that most people who eventually are ready to buy a home do local searches. For example, someone searching in southern Maine will start with a key word search like "Portland Maine Real Estate". That is why we have devoted ourselves to search engine optimization (SEO) on a local and regional level. Any search of important key words will result in you finding our website MaineHomeConnection near the top of the organic search results.

When it comes to national real estate websites, one thing to keep in mind is that it is all about advertising. That is essentially their only revenue stream. Local real estate websites do not focus on advertising, but rather on providing information that people need and want when making home buying and selling decisions.

For example, we have devoted countless hours creating rich content that helps potential buyers understand the Maine real estate market. Although this may sound self-serving, special features such as Relocation Services, Community Profiles and Maine Waterfront Real Estate are customer centric first and foremost.

I have always been against Realtor.com and the other real estate portals - Trulia, Zillow, etc.  Our believe is in building the best website we can and them compete for local online marketing space.  Supporting my competition is only a business model that appears to work in the real estate industry.

I was just notifed that our bill for Realtor.com enhanced listings was up - and was I excited - knowing that more listings in 2008 will now cost me more for 2009!  But what really gets me is how shamlessly Realtor.com tries to promote their own products, with one of the best being the Featured Tour. 

If you don't want to use the Featured Tour, you can upload video - which is good.  However, when you look at your statistics, you only get information on how many people viewed Featured Tours - not videos.  (and featured listings, etc).  Now why would I want to sent that listing info to a client with all these NA's reported.  It just causes more questions. 

First, you can't even created a good PDF of the stats, second its filled with all kinds of NA's if your not using Realtor.com products and third we get to pay more for it.

What a deal!

For September 2008 and Q3 2008 National foreclosure filings were reported on 265,968 properties representing a 12% decrease from the previous month but still a 21% increase from September 2007. One in every 475 U.S. housing units received a foreclosure filing in September.

In its most recent report completed by RealtyTrac, Maine ranked 41st in the country in total foreclosures, with one in every 2,996 homes receiving a foreclosure filing. Filings are down 4.1% for the Q3 vs Q2, but up over 1,000% compared to last year. Percentage increases can often sound startling, but in reality be somewhat misleading. 102 foreclosures in York County represent 1 in every 1,006 housing units. 42 foreclosures in Cumberland County represent 1 in every 3.137 housing units.

Percentage increases can often sound startling, but in reality be somewhat misleading. 102 foreclosures in York County represent 1 in every 1,006 housing units. 42 foreclosures in Cumberland County represent 1 in every 3.137 housing units.

Foreclosre information is based collected by RealtyTrac, which publishes the largest and most comprehensive national database of foreclosure and bank-owned properties, with over 1.5 million properties from over 2,200 counties across the country, and is the foreclosure data provider to MSN Real Estate, Yahoo! Real Estate and The Wall Street Journal’s Real Estate Journal.