Dave's Sonoma County Real Estate Blog

REO Agent Appreciation

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 09:03:59 -0600

REO leaders thrive even though it's been hard to fatten up for the winter this year. The market is in turmoil, sales volumes are down all across the board. Still, in spite of tough conditions, there are always winners. In our market, like everywhere else in the country, the reo specialists have had a decent year. The real winners among the REO group are those who spent years plowing the relatively vacant fields of the REO world before the current meltdown. Their volumes have soared into the stratosphere while more traditional agents see listing numbers plummet and incomes drying up.

So, today I tip my hat to the agents who knew what an REO was five years ago. You paid your dues. Enjoy your time at the top of the heap.

The photo above is of some California quail enjoing an early morning stroll (waddle). They've had a good enough year they can barely fly. By springtime they'll be lean again...and there will most likely be a new crop of agents following them around.

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Web Site 101- Steal this SEO-rich HTML Source Code

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:43:33 -0600

I normally don't advise anyone to steal. I suppose a more accurate word would have been "use", but I wanted to make a point. The internet is build on the great ideas of other people. Every innovation worth copying, is copied. Going back to the earliest days of HTML 1.0 with gray pages and monocolor text, people have been grabbing the best ideas and using them on their own sites. That's one of the main reasons the internet has made such fast progress. So, put aside your notions of right and wrong for a minute. This is my code and my page, and I give you permission to "steal" it.

We're going to use the "View Source" command I taught you about in the last lesson. The first step is to open a new tab or new window in your browser so you can toggle back and forth between this page and the SEO-rich HTML page I built for you. If you haven't opened a second tab before, look under the File Menu or right click with your mouse on the link below and choose "Open Link in New Tab".

1. Navigate to http://wikiupgreens.com/anywhere.html

This is a very simple page with minimal graphics. It is designed for one purpose only, and that's to create the best possible SEO page for your own farm that we have been working on for the last three lessons. Ideally you already have registered a domain name, but if not, this page will fit into any site you have access to and we'll be able to guide Google to it for indexing.

2. Use the View Source command we learned about in a previous lesson.

That will open the source code for the HTML in a new window. It should look identical to this. I'll show the graphic in a larger format later, but for now you just want to check that it looks the same as this. Save this where you can find it in the next step.

3. Open the file in a simple text editor.

On the PC it might be Notepad or Wordpad. Use your textedit.app on the Macintosh. The reason we want a simple editor is that more complex programs like Microsoft Word sometimes introduce extra HTML code that isn't needed. We want something to keep this page intact except for our actual writing and editing changes.

4. Change all the "anywhere subdivision" names.

Change "anywhere subdivision" wherever you find it to the name of your farm, city, neighborhood, subdivision, or whatever geographic range you chose during the first lesson. Depending on the tool you are using, you might be able to do a search and replace command. Otherwise, and it's not a bad way to get used to the code, you can go through line by line and replace "anywhere subdivision" with your farm name.

5. Update the header section

a. Let's start with the title. Your farm name should come first in the title text. Then you can add a bigger city or state reference. Get rid of the HOA Docs and Real Estate News. If you are cool, add your name instead so you end up with "Farm name - city, State - Cool Agent". Remember, this is the bold line Google will return as the top line of their search results for your page. Make sure it makes sense to people who will be looking for your content.

b. meta description. This will be the body copy Google uses underneath the top line of their search results. As a reminder, you can Google "anywhere subdivision" and see how the meta description content shows up. Once again, what you write here should make people want to visit your site. It should also accurately reflect what is on the page.

c. meta keywords. I've got a lot of starter text that you can change to reflect what you are going to write about. You should already have gone through an exercise in the first lesson where you had to write down place names both formal and informal as well as school names and other content about your farm. This is where those words and short phrases can go. Separate them with commas. You may want to come back and edit this after you finish writing the body copy.

That's it for the header section. We did title, meta description, and meta keywords. When you clone this page to make new pages, you should update all three of these to reflect the new content. Now it's on to the body copy.

6. Update every line in the body copy to make sense to you

I wrote this page to be generic, so it's not all going to fit your situation. I'll be disappointed if some of the dumb things I said on this page make it into your site. For instance, this is not a great sentence for humans:

Anywhere was founded in some year and is famous for something

I'm sure you can write an updated sentence for that spot that does indeed use your farm name at the start of the sentence, but then says something useful. There are other places where I used the phrase:

turnover in homes is low/fast/other

Clearly I meant for the writer, you, to put something sensible instead of low/fast/other.

Feel free to throw out whole chunks of the code that starts after the first <H2> you see. About the only thing I want you to pay close attention to is the header tags. You can add as many <H3> or <H4> tags as you want to include. Appropriate topics could include schools, medical care, parks, hikes, shopping, or other elements of living that you want to write about. Many of those deserve a page of their own, so at the most you want to introduce the topic using keywords and your farm name often. If you want to just stick with the rough outline I have provided for now, that's fine. Just update every line to make sense and to use the correct place names.

The entire section where I have the list of important information can be deleted. It starts with a <UL> and ends with a </UL>. If you want to keep it, fine. It could easily be a list of contractors or insurance agents or school contact information.

7. Update the links at the bottom

I provided a space for you to promote yourself in the line that starts with:

This site is designed and maintained by(and then some html) your localrealtor.

That's where you type your name in place of "your localrealtor" and update the "me.html to point to your page either on your personal web site or your active rain bio page.

On the next line down there is a place for you to insert your email address and put your name in where it says "me" twice.

8. Save your work as farm.html for now.

Whew, that's a lot of work going through the page and making updates. I need a nap. But wait. You still have a browser window open since you're reading these instructions. Go to the file menu and choose Open File. Navigate to your farm.html page and open it. The graphic will be missing, but you should see your page in all its glory including a good title and clean reading content.

Congratulations. On Friday we'll load this puppy onto your site and make a graphic that works for you.

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Hard Frost Hits Home

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 09:29:59 -0600

Warm weather wimp. That's what I am these days. I used to be a cold weather tough guy, but 40 years of California living have made me forget what ice and frost look like. We knew cold weather was coming for a few days, so I was able to build a makeshift greenhouse for the hibiscus and orchids that I value more than my annuals. I left them to fend for themselves. They weren't happy. The petunia on the right might come back, but the cylcamen and impatiens are going to die a slimy, stem-dissolving-into-mush death. It's a messy part of gardening, cleaning up after nature's little tantrums, but it gives me a chance to redo some planters that were getting a little long in the tooth.

Our flying friends are probably feeling it this morning as well. Most of the hummingbirds are in Mexico for the winter, but we have our share of Anna's that winter here. For them, the finches, robins, and other birds that have been enjoying our garden, we can offer them a very cold bath this morning...after the ice melts. We've had thin ice before, but I don't recall the rippled, ridged ice that reminds me of the Arctic.

Damn, it's cold. Not Minnesota cold or anything harsh like that, but cold for here. Just ask my petunias and birds.

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Web Site 101 - Five Tips to an SEO Optimized Page

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 12:43:55 -0600

SEO optimization doesn't have to be confusing. I started with a long and complicated post earlier this morning, but I decided to start from scratch. Almost everyone on ActiveRain already has a life and they don't need to become web gurus to sell real estate. On the other hand, a little knowledge can make the difference between an okay site and a great site, so here are my Five Tips to an SEO Optimized Page...after one quick detour.

The two images on the left and right hold the key to looking underneath the hood at pages online. The View-->Page Source in Firefox on the left and the View-->Source for Internet Explorer on the right both do the same thing. They show the HTML of any page on the Internet. You can use them to look at competitors ranking higher than you and you can look at your own sites to see if your webmaster knows what he or she is doing with SEO.

What I would like you to do right now, in the middle of reading this post, is to go to your own web site and do a "View Source". It will be useful for our discussion if you have something to compare to the optimized site we're going to be talking about today and putting into practice later this week.

Every web page starts with a declaration about what flavor of HTML it is using. The top line will always start with a !DOCTYPE declaration. Ignore it.

SEO Tip #1 is the Title. This is where you create the content that shows up at the top of the window. It's also the bold, linked text Google uses when they return search results. Open up a new broswer tab, call up a Google search window, and type in "Anywhere Subdivision". The page generated by the source code below will show up at the top of the list. Check out how the title is displayed. Everything that is in the title is what Google has on their link and bold display. Leave your Google results page open for now.

SEO Tip #2 is Meta Name = Description. This is in the section called "meta header" or "meta content". Some people feel this isn't as important as it was five years ago, but I think it still matters to your SEO and helps you think about your content. If you refer back to the Google search you just did, the text underneath the bold link is taken directly from the meta description. This is a great way to have Google index what you think is the best copy to bring visitors to your page even if you can't lead off with that text on the page itself. If you don't use a meta description, Google will just take the first 25 words (more or less) from your opening text.

SEO Tip#3 is Meta Name = Keywords. On this source code example, the meta name=keywords is directly beneath the Meta Name=description. As long as it shows up somewhere in the header section of the page, it will work fine. This is a similarly discounted field from years ago, but it is still used by search engines and is a great way for you to organize your thoughts. Choose keywords you are going to use when you are writing the page. If this page is about golf or restaurants, use those keywords and synonyms. Don't leave golf keywords on your restaurant page. Most canned web sites don't do a good job of making their keywords unique on each page. You can check your site to see if the keywords reflect your actual content. If not, that's a good place to start fixing your SEO.

SEO Tip#4 is Header Tags. Look for the circled H2 in front of the words Anywhere Subdivision. That's a header tag. An H1 is the highest tag and they go all the way to H6. In this short page I just use H2 and H3 tags. They help Google and browsers understand priority. We don't have time or space to discuss semantic content in detail. What you need to know is that using the header tags helps Google understand what is important to you. It also helps with displaying your content on multiple devices like mobile phones. Separating the display from the content is part of the future, and header tags help with that.If you want to see how well this works in practice, steer your cell phone to http://wikiupgreens.com/anywhere.html.

SEO Tip #5 is keyword density. I have underlined the phrase "Anywhere Subdivision" in the image above. As you can see, it's repeated many times. This page is probably overkill, but your important words should be used for between 2% and 4% of the total words on the page. This ties back into the SEO tip#3 about meta keywords. The words you chose in your meta keyword section should be the words repeated as part of your effort to increase you keyword density.

On December 9, we're going to take the template behind the page I am talking about here and make it yours for the site and domain name you are generating for your neighborhood farm. Your assignment is to choose two or three keywords from the list we worked on in the first lesson. If you recall, those keywords were for the ways people refer to the area including formal names, nicknames, schools, etc. Start writing some copy about schools, neighborhood history, types of housing, etc. using those keywords. Start thinking about your title and your 25 word meta description.

Your Google-dominating neighborhood site will be up by the end of this week.

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Speechless Sunday - Persimmon

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 11:12:01 -0600

Persimmons were a mystery to me when I first saw them. Orange fruits on trees after Thanksgiving just seemed too improbable to a youngster from Minnesota. They hang, gloriously brilliant, long after the rest of the tree is bare. If you had to invent a tree covered with Christmas ornaments, you couldn't do better than the persimmon. Add deliciousness to their beauty and you have a tree that everyone should plant...if they can.

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Windsor California Median House Prices in 2009

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 14:14:42 -0600

Windsor California has been through some tough times. Windsor is one of the newer cities in Sonoma County, at least in terms of the housing stock. A lot of Windsor's homes were built just in time to take part in the housing boom. As a consequence, whole neighborhoods paid top prices for their new homes. By now, most of those Windsor neighborhoods have changed hands completely as the original owners lost the homes through foreclosure and default. Windsor prices are still soft, but sales continue brisk for entry level homes.

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Sebastopol Median Home Prices 2009

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:27:58 -0600

Sebastopol median prices for single family homes are still falling. My feeling is that Sebastopol remained an attractive location for home buyers and maintained a higher median price all through 2008. Home prices in Healdsburg and Sonoma were falling far faster than in Sebastopol last year. What we are seeing now is a classic case of the Sebastopol market finally catching up to what the rest of Sonoma County has seen.

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Santa Rosa Median Home Prices

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:52:04 -0600

Santa Rosa is the biggest city in Sonoma County. Single family home sales dominate the volume of all transactions. Santa Rosa has seen modest appreciation across all quartiles of the housing market. The bottom two quartiles haven't budged much from their low points earlier this year, but they have maintained solid performance. The entry level homes have been dominated by multiple-offer competition as first time buyers compete with investors for these properties.

I could pack this page with more detailed charts of all of Santa Rosa's zipcodes, but it's simpler and probably easier for everyone to just have the charts automatically sent to you each week. Just sign up for my no-spam, easy-to-unsubscribe service and you're on your way to mastering market trends for your city.

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Healdsburg Median Home Prices in 2009

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:38:20 -0600

The Healdsburg real estate market is still on the quiet side. The numbers represented by these charts reflect a very modest volume of transactions in Sonoma County's wine country gateway. The two middle quartiles show modest improvements in value over the course of 2009 for Healdsburg housing. Both the top and bottom quartiles have had slight declines. Almost everyone would prefer a more robust housing market, but a slow and tentative recovery is better than the alternative.

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Sonoma County 18 acres of Land at Riverfront Regional Park

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 16:04:12 -0600

Sonoma County's Riverfront Regional Park is a 300 acre gem. Hiking trails, horeback riding, two fishable ponds, and frontage on the Russian River are just a few of the amenties here. "What could be better than a wonderful park?" you ask. How about owning 18 acres overlooking the park with access to all the park's features. I don't know about you, but I like the idea of 300 acres paid for and maintained by someone else.

My broker, Eric Drew, just got the listing for this 18 acre Healdsburg wine country view property. The views wrap the property from the hills on the east side of the Santa Rosa plains to the western view in this photo. We are looking over the Lake and the Russian River (hidden by trees in the middle ground) to the vineyards and hills along Westside Road in the Russian River Valley.It's hard to overstate how beautiful the views are here.

The site is relatively unimproved, so new owners can build a better road, install a septic system in the already proven perc areas, and plan their dream home. The site includes primarily forested land and hillsides, but there is an ample building pad area with plenty of rooms for gardens, outbuildings, and the other improvements that are appropriate for a luxury wine country compound.

It's an easy drive to Healdsburg, Windsor, Santa Rosa, and Highway 101. This part of Eastside Road is especially convenient for people who want access to the Charles Schultz Airport and the daily flights to Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Seattle, etc. on Horizon Air.

More details about 18 acres of view property in Healdsburg are available on my IDX website. Call or email me for more information including Google Earth files showing property lines.

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Wordless Wednesday - Azaleas

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 13:04:30 -0600

We see lots of homes on the market with tired landscaping these days. Forlorn REO properties sit next to exhausted short sale properties. It was refreshing to come across a beautifully landscaped front entryway that featured some magnificent azaleas in full bloom. These durable winter perennials provided a brilliant accent and welcoming feel to the large, newer Petaluma home we were touring.

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Web Site 101 - Registering a Domain Name with Hosting

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 09:12:37 -0600

Domain names need to be memorable. Most of the really great geographic names were taken in the first year or two of the World Wide Web in the mid nineties. Try getting Chicago.com or newyork.com and you'll see what I mean.

Fortunately your challenge to find a name for your farm that is short and memorable shouldn't be that hard. Subdivision and neighborhood names are often available and there are growing Top Level Domains like ".us" that still have a lot of names available. A few years ago I would have advised against going with a name that wasn't a ".com", but I now think it makes less difference. If you can find your "neighborhood.us" or "subdivision.us", I would recommend that you take it.

Searching for domain names is a fun exercise and may expand your thinking with ideas of new names you could use. One Domain name lookup and suggestion site I use is domaintools.com. Enter your first domain name choice in the search box on the suggestion part of their site to see what is available.

Once you find a name that is short, informative, and unregistered, you need to find a site to register the name on your behalf. Given the deals available online, you might as well get a combination hosting and domain registration account. I found them ranging from $3.49 per month to $9.99 a month and up, but choosing where to go can be tough. Registering and hosting companies litter the landscape. There are big players like register.com, godadddy.com, and networksolutions.com and hundreds of small players like justhost.com and cheap-register.com. I'm not going to give you advice since every company I could name has screwed up at least once.

People who have already been through this process can leave their thoughts about specific hosting companies in the comments. I welcome comments about hosting sites you have used and loved...or not. The decision about who to use isn't going to make or break your new site. Domain names you register are yours to keep as long as you pay your bills. They belong to you and can be transferred to other hosts.

Your assignment is to choose your domain name and register it with a hosting site before Monday, Dec. 7 so we can move to the next step.

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Web Site 101 - Choosing SEO Rich Farm Names

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 03:12:39 -0600

Google can't find you in a crowd...unless you spend a fortune.

Spending money on Search Engine Marketing is not what this series is about. Our goal is to produce excellent organic search results through search engine optimization and smart site building.

Organic search results are the free, natural, unsponsored Google search results.

Most of you have already thought abut the local areas or "farms" you want to target. For most real estate agents it's an area with less than 1,000 homes, often only a few hundred homes. For loan brokers or insurance agents, the target audience might be slightly larger, but the principles are going to be the same.

The first step in our process is to think about names for the area we are targeting for our farm. What we want is a list of all the things that make this area stand out and all the formal and casual names people have for the area. Place names are great. Nicknames or other short hand ways to refer to it are also relevant. These terms don't all get plugged into the domain name or even the first pages you will build. However, the more different and unique ways you can use to refer to this area, the more likely you are to find everyone who is looking for it using different terms of their own.

In search engine optimization the use of very specific and local terms is referred to as the long tail.

Here are some long tail suggestions:

Formal Town Name
Subdivision Name
Geographic nickname like "lower river" or "west county"
Former owner's name like "Jones Ranch" or "Smitty's Corner"
School names like "Twin Hills" or "Adobe Elementary"
Shopping center names like "Valley Oaks Shopping Center" or "west of Costco"

The second step is to test these terms in Google. Let's say we want to start with a suburb like Rincon Valley near my town of Santa Rosa, CA. With a population of 150,000, Santa Rosa is going to have a lot of real estate agents online . In fact, there are millions of hits for Santa Rosa Real Estate. When I expand my search term to include the Rincon Valley neighborhood I am targeting, there are only 30,000 results.It's good to have fewer results. It's much easier to find you in a small pond.

Searching for Santa Rosa Real Estate: 2,100,000 pages

Searching for Rincon Valley Santa Rosa Real Estate: 31,000 pages

One of the front page search results using the second term happens to be a blog post I wrote on ActiveRain just ten days ago, but that's a different story that we'll get to in a later step. The point is that creating long tail searches with more keywords is one of the best ways to improve your findability. The exercise today is to get you thinking creatively both in writing and thinking about your farm. If you can call it Formal Farm today and Nickname Farm tomorrow and Local Reference Farm the next day it adds variety and creativity to your site.

Using the local terms for your farm helps keep your writing friendly and casual.

Your final step for today is to rank the two or three terms that you think are most likely to be used by people searching for the farm area you have chosen. Feel free to ask co-workers or family members what they think. It's likely that everyone will agree on one or two as best, but you may have some strong supporters for other terms. If you do, make sure to keep all that get argued for on the list. We'll use them later.

What should your homework looks like?

1. rincon valley santa rosa real estate

2. rincon valley real estate

3. northeast santa rosa real estate

4. Rincon Valley Christian Academy

5. Rincon Valley Elementary School

We'll pick up on Thursday, Dec. 3 with a discussion of domain names and hosting and a call to action to get your domain name registered...now.

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Eight Steps to a Farming Web Site - Web Site 101

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:44:22 -0600

I'm going to make your next web site a Google Success.

During the month of December I'm going to walk you through the building of a simple web site to promote you as the right real estate agent for a neighborhood or subdivision you work in. I can't guarantee that you will be Number 1 in Google search results. On the other hand, if you work along with me you should succeed in getting a top page result for your site.

This is a hands-on, doing it now project.

This is not about reinventing your corporate web site, your IDX feed, or your ActiveRain blog. This project is to create a tightly crafted and specific web site for one purpose; to make you the most visible agent when people search for information about a specific neighborhood. From now on, I'm just going to call it your "farm", but it can refer to a small town, a neighborhood of a big city, or a complete subdivision. What you choose to focus on is up to you, but start thinking of it as your web farm.

You will be building a real web site...yourself

Here's what we're going to do:

Step 1. Pick a farm

Step 2. Register a domain name with hosting

Step 3. Build an SEO optimized small site

Step 4. Creating optimized HTML (cookie cutter templates make it easy)
Step 5. Adding Pictures
Step 6. Links to your other sites

Step 7. Announce your site on ActiveRain

Then we sit back and check your Google ranking. You can also have fun and check your site on an iPhone or other mobile web browser. It will be one of the cleanest web sites you'll find on your mobile device.

There are a lot more bits and pieces we'll look at along the way.

Photo editing software
File Transfer software
HTML editors

There are many tools in each category. I will make some recommendations for free software that you can use, but if you have commercial software or other favorite packages, by all means use them. This is going to be a process that assumes you have few tools at your disposal.

So, I want the brave and willing to step up in comments and commit to building a simple web site for themselves. This is going to cost you less than $20 and will be your tool for as long as you want to pay for hosting. For those who are in their second or third or fourth agency, think about the power of having your own site to take with you wherever you go. For everyone who has been intimidated by HTML and SEO and the web, this is your chance to dip your toe in the water in a highly supportive environment. All you have to lose are your mental chains. So sign up and start thinking about your farm. We start with Step 1 on December 1.

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Speechless Sunday - Hawthorn

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 10:15:12 -0600

This hawthorn tree is the birds' best friend. The massive thorns keep four legged predators from climbing the tree so it's a great nesting tree. The open branches are equally adept at holding hummingbirds, finches, and larger birds. In the spring the nectar-drinkers share the flowers with the bees. In the winter the hawthorn berries shown here will make a feast.

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Stop and Smell the Flowers

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 09:59:04 -0600

The saying "stop and smell the flowers" isn't really about flowers. It's shorthand to remind us that life's savory times are all around us. In our haste, we may miss special times without appreciating how wonderful those moments are. Even more sadly, rushing past today, we may not get another chance to hug someone, call someone, or tell somebody, "thanks".

Thanksgiving week coming up on Christmas is a good time to remind ourselves that family matters twelve months out of the year, not two. It's a good time to celebrate your spouse, praise your child, and tell your fellow workers how much they mean to you. It might even be a great time for you to break your routine and go help out in a food bank, a shelter, or make any other effort where you can step outside your routine and reflect on life's lottery. Sometimes things are great; sometimes they're not. Most likely for the majority of us, life goes on with wins and losses, but it does go on.

Since there's truth at the heart of every saying, my personal reminder to stop and smell the flowers is a six inch flower pot filled with something fragrant right at my nose level. Coming or going, as I take a few steps outside my front door I am rewarded with cinnamon-sweet stock's heady fragrance, but there's also some alyssum and petunias nearby that add their scent to the mix. I'm lucky to have a small wall to hold my planters, but a window box or hanging planter would work just as well. It's tougher to do this in the hard winter climates, but a fragrant potpourri from summer's roses might be a good substitute for an outdoors annual. No matter what your growing situation, choose something you love to smell, so you're always tempted to stop and inhale and remember the real reason you're stopping to smell the flowers.

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Conservation Easement As Selling Tool

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:06:13 -0600

Land conservation matters to many of my buyers in west Sonoma County and Healdsburg. They are looking for the beautiful scenery we are famous for, and many of them want to be farmers. At the same time, they understand that if we remove all the natural cover, we are destroying habitat that is essential for the survival of a healthy diversity of creatures. On the day before Thanksgiving I was investigating country land with some families looking for fields for row crops. The presence of animals nearby would have been an indicator of healthy soils and water to maintain a wild animal population, and our junior farmer/scientist on the right was investigating the acorns abundantly available underfoot.

We did find a nice parcel ourside Sebastopol and had about an hour hike around the property. One of the features of this 20 acre west Sonoma County farm was a ten acre conservation easement that had been granted to the state as part of an earlier land split. The broker touring with us mentioned that he had mixed results with talking about the conservation portion of the property. Some buyers were upset that they wouldn't have control over every square inch of the land they had purchased. Others saw the value of having a private park (no public access) maintained by the state.

The easement is completely accessible to the owners of the main property; they just can't build on it, clear it, or otherwise change it from being a natural portion of the landscape. For the California Department Fish & Game, it's an important wildlife corridor that allows creatures to move along a major watershed under cover. For the group I was with it meant that some of the land they were looking at couldn't be farmed, but I think their overall feeling was delight that their kids could grow up sharing the land with the local fauna.

The broker had priced the property excluding land value for the ten acres in the conservation easement. There was just an allowance in the price for a park-like amenity neighboring the main acreage. I thought that was a fair way to set a price on something that is of no value to some buyers, but significant to others.

It's clear this junior buyer was on board with the wild land.

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Giving Thanks for Dairies

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:47:00 -0600

Not everybody loves dairy products, but butter, cheese, and yogurt are all foods I enjoy. They may not be heart healthy, but taken in moderation, they add interest, nutrition, and wonderful tastes to my diet. One of the fringe benefits of dairy operations in northern California (and elsewhere, of course) is the free views we get from the farmer's hard work at maintaining pastures for grazing. Our area is so scenic that lots of milk commericals featuring "Happy California Cows" get filmed here.

I toured a property adjacent to a dairy yesterday and we saw some very contented grass eaters at work. The fall rains have already turned the pastures a lush green and our bovine friends were hard at work on it.

Dairy is such an important part of our landscape that in Marin County extensive efforts have been taken to help maintain the family dairies that still have large acreage parcels in open space. The Marin Agricultural Land Trust is the main vehicle for conservation. It enjoys broad support from a majority of the residents and the farm community. In Sonoma County we have the Sonoma Land Trust, but they don't focus as much on agricultural land preservation as Marin.

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Thanks to a Great Sebastopol Real Estate Agent

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 17:03:18 -0600

I met a great real estate agent from Sebastopol today. His name is David Mark-Raymond and he impressed me and my clients with his property knowledge, his candor, and his gentle approach to the art of real estate.

We get to meet new people all the time in this business. I blogged about how thankful I am to get to meet new buyers just a few days ago. That's why it was so special for me to meet an agent who I instantly trusted to do the best thing not just for his client, the seller, but for my clients as well. It's an often forgotten part of the agency relationship, but both the listing and selling agents have duties to their clients that include honesty, integrity, and fair play. I got the strong sense, walking and talking with David, that he holds these principles deep in his being.

I can't tell you much about David Mark-Raymond. I know he's very active in Rotary, a former educator, and a consistent top sales person in his area. I learned that he's thoughtful with how he prepares openings in barbed wire fences in advance. I watched him be considerate and thoughtful of our touring group and the multiple babies in our midst. Last, but by no means least I observed him avoiding the boasts and puffery that too many in our industry treat as standard practice. He left the clients with just the right taste of uncertainty and an urging to check details with the county.

It was a masterful job of introducing someone else's clients to his own listing. I'm not certain if my buyers are the right ones for his property, but I know they got a crystal clear look at the land and explanation of the pros and cons of the infrastructure. I look forward to working with David Mark-Raymond on this or any other listing he brings to the market. He's a professional real estate agent our industry can be proud of.

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Free SEO Advice - Blogging 101 - Real Estate Keywords

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:23:06 -0600

Here's a keyword phrase that should be used multiple times in every post you write:

Real Estate

Along with "real estate" you need to include a location if you are writing about real estate you are trying to sell or buyers you are trying to attract. Otherwise your post will be lost in the 86,000,000 items that turn up under a search for "real estate" in Google. A search for something as simple as "Real Estate San Francisco" is down to only 242,000 pages. Updating that to "Real Estate San Francisco Mission District" get us down to just 7 results for that exact string of words.

A string is just words in sequence.
An exact string is words put together into a phrase or "string".

The central idea for your writing should be to have "exact strings of words" that represent what someone might type into their search engine. For the search above here are some variations:

String Number of Google Results

"San Francisco Mission District Real Estate" 8 pages (221,000 without the quotation mark search)

"Mission District Real Estate San Francisco" 4 pages

"Real Estate in San Francisco Mission District" 2 pages

Most people today don't search using quotation markets to look for specific phrases, but it is increasingly common as searchers try to get more acccurate results. Your job as a keyword-focused writer is to think about a real estate searcher as you are writing your copy. Try to use the words that are most likely to be put into the search bar in Google. Those words that you are choosing because you think they are the most common search terms are called "keywords".

For the search I am talking about here, using all three variations on the San Francisco Mission District makes sense. You would also drop in references to home, house, single family residence, condo, apartment, etc. that help keep your writing interesting and let you vary your keyword combinations. Here's a completed sentence that might start a post about a new listing:

San Francisco Mission District real estate today is driven by young people looking for homes for sale in the trendy neighborhoods of the Mission District in San Francisco.

I got Mission District and San Francisco both in there twice. I got a "homes for sale" and added some descriptive text about trendy and young people. That's a good keyword-driven sentence that you can adapt to your own use for your own area.

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We are Blessed

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:12:16 -0600

Thanksgiving is for feasting, family, and friends...and for many, football. There are few curmudgeons who would be bold enough to speak out against giving thanks, so we are allowed to have this one day in which all of us can feel united in spirit whatever our different beliefs.

Our family, like many, has a tradition around the dinner table of talking about what we are thankful for. I wanted to take a minute with this post to share my thankful thoughts about our industry and the people that make it special.

Buyers are at the heart of our business. If we are lucky, we are privileged to meet new buyers all year. Each brings a unique story of their life and their dreams. This year I was lucky to meet adult children shopping for a house closer to home for their parents living hundreds of miles away. Their support and demonstrated love for their ailing and often grouchy elders encouraged me to work extra hard to find them something quickly in a hot, multiple offer environment. The parents are relocated and still adjusting, but they're close to children, grandchildren, and a loving support system they lacked in their previous location.

I was able to work throughout the year with a disabled, single woman searching for a home and shop where she can continue her woodworking and have access to a bike path. She's challenged, as many buyers are, by shifting economic circumstances and uncertainty about the future. We've seen every fixer from Cotati to Sebastopol and are still looking. There have been a few near things, and more disappointments. She still manages to fight her infirmities and get out of bed to search the internet for her dream property. It's the least I can do to unlock doors and do some legwork to find her a home.

A group of young families are looking for a place to start a farm and put down shared roots. We've seen flood plains, steep hills, and rocky soil reminiscent of New Hampshire more than California. We've also seen green meadows, still ponds, and beautiful old barns. Their bouncing babies and smiling faces remind me of my earlier days and the power of big dreams. I really want to find them something great.

I could go on, but I'm sure you all have your favorite memories of the people you have helped and the lives you have touched. We're lucky to work in an industry where we can make new friends and help people during the course of our daily work. I'm especially thankful that ActiveRain provides such a fantastic community of people who share their stories and ideas with the rest of us. We are all part of the huge AR family in which caring is a central part of what I read about every day.

It wouldn't be fair to talk about the thanks I give for the people I meet without acknowledging that there is also much pain in the world of real estate. I want to warmly embrace and offer hope to everyone losing their home, underwater on their loan, or homeless today. There is always darkness before the dawn and sometimes it seems like things will never get better. They will. My hope is that your next Thanksgiving will have more reasons to be thankful.

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Speechless Sunday - Purple Princess

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:37:10 -0600

Purple princess blue hues.

Santa Rosa, CA November 2009

Taken with iPhone3Gs

I'm a transplanted Minnesotan who loves gardening more than shoveling snow. I also prefer short sleeves to parkas and swimming to ice-fishing. Come visit Sonoma County in the winter and you'll see what I mean. Our Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty office gets traffic from visitors from all the lovely snow-covered parts of the country. Last year was great for Illinois residents visiting Sonoma County. Chicago attorneys really seem to love Healdsburg.

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Being Smart about Land Previews

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 13:19:08 -0600

I'm working with a young family looking for a small farm property to call their own. Farms in the wine country of northern California are different than a farm in the Central Valley or one in Minnesota. We can't count on beautiful flat acreage perfectly suited to tractors. Our vineyards often wind up and down hillsides and they add a scenic quality that visitors love...and farmers cuss as they work around the slopes.

Great farm land in Sonoma County is selling from $50,000 to $75,000 an acre, so even a small farm is a challenge to the pocketbook. Making money from a farm demands a lot of hard work, smart marketing, and a dedication to the land. This is true whether you are a new organic grower, a third generation truck farmer in Salinas, or a traditional corn and soybean farmer in southern Minnesota. Farming is really hard work and I admire anyone who does it for a living. So, with dreams of a new CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) operation running through our heads, we have been looking for months.

In the past few weeks we have shifted our vision to the Potter Valley, a beautiful area north and east of Ukiah in Mendocino County. Land is more affordable there, and farms are more feasible in terms of expected yields relative to the cost of the land. It's actually possible to see a scenario where a farm purchase can pay for itself with crops rather than be subsidized by a day job. We're having fun and have looked at a few interesting possibilities, so overall we're feeling positive about the area.

Yesterday we decided to go up and look at a piece that has been off the market, but which has 11 acres in an irrigation district with low cost water. Normally I preview these properties via Google Earth to get a sense for terrain, but we didn't plan ahead far enough for me to generate the topo maps OR the Google Earth files. The property is listed by a real estate broker I trust who is the most productive lister of good farm land in the area. He's had pear orchards, vineyards, raw land, and other properties on the market in the last year, so he's a very good resource.

Unfortunately, his idea of level and mine didn't match on this property. We pulled up in front of the accurately described old barn and looked up at the hilliest, rockiest, most unsuitable land I could imagine for row cropping. The agent's description in the MLS of "level, gently sloped" must have been written in the dark standing on the level road in front of the property. His further description of "agricultural" is technically correct, but coupled with the "lower 11 acres in irrigation district" implied to me and my buyers a tractorable, farmable piece of land. Instead, agricultural must mean goats or sheep, not lettuce, carrots, and sweet corn.

The real culprit here isn't the listing agent who was using his most positive spin on the property. We're all supposed to paint our listings in the best light. No, the problem was my willingness to spend a half day road trip without a thorough preview. I could have seen the slope and terrain issues from the comfort of my office rather than standing, disappointed, in front of the barn. The trip wasn't a total bust. We got to take a second look at the property I think will end up being a good fit for them, but otherwise we spent a long tine in the car with their baby because I didn't take time to vet the property. My bad.

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Rincon Valley in Santa Rosa

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 11:34:31 -0600

Family friendly and conveniently located, Rincon Valley has long been one of the preferred residential areas in Santa Rosa. The schools are excellent and homes are still affordable here.

I have assembled a custom search already centered on Rincon Valley that will let you jump right into your map-based home search. Whether you want an entry level home or a more elaborate, larger move-up residence, Santa Rosa's Rincon Valley is a great place to search.

Once you are on the site you can choose whatever price range you are looking for or simply view all the properties.

I also want to repeat the news that there is a great new iPhone App that supports active MLS listings and has great built in support for the mapping features. As you drive around Rincon Valley or any other area in the BAREIS MLS territory, you can use your iPhone to see the listings nearby. It's a great tool.

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REO Listings in Rincon Valley

Dave Roberts (Healdsburg Sotheby's International Realty) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 09:54:47 -0600

Rincon Valley is a lousy spot to look for REO property in Sonoma County. Strong neighborhoods and a continued demand for housing have kept bank-owned single family homes to a minimum. Still, there are the occasional listings and the map below will show REO properties in and around Rincon Valley. If you want to look around other parts of Santa Rosa, you can either navigate on the map or visit my reo.sonoma.net site for more maps and information on the foreclosed homes market in Sonoma County.

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