San Antonio Real Estate

The Right Time to Buy a Home

Jim Johnson (Century 21 Smith & Associates) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 08:55:04 -0500

The confusion caused by the way the media has reported the issues affecting the housing and credit markets has resulted in far too many people who want to buy a home deciding to wait. Others are sitting it out because they believe their credit rating is too low. Most could not be making a more egregious mistake. Those who live in markets beset by declining home values may have been justified in waiting, but market values are beginning to stabilize, and other factors that make waiting at this time a mistake are rapidly approaching their deadline.

There may never be a better time to buy than now. Among the greatest advantages to home buyers currently is the fact that it's a buyer's market. Increasingly, home sellers are agreeing to pay a buyer's closing costs, or shaving higher percentages of the price from the top. Interest rates are still low as well, but the Federal Reserve is straining to keep them low to stimulate activity in the real estate market. Just how long the Fed can keep it up remains to be seen.

What you have heard about the availability of financing has nothing to do with the availability of funds for home loans, and you don't need sterling credit to borrow for a home loan. The fact is that prospective buyers with FICO scores of 580 or higher can obtain financing. For that matter, a buyer with a score of 560 or lower may be able to obtain financing if they can demonstrate that they have been able to manage their finances over the past year.

One deadline has in fact already passed. As of October 1, 2008, the up-front FHA Mortgage Insurance Premium for FHA loans with the minimum down payment has risen from 1.5% to 1.75%, and the monthly premium has gone up from .5% to .55%. These are marginal increases that amount to pennies per month, literally, compared to what follows.

The next deadline that will affect those who wait are the new HUD regulations affecting buyer contributions for FHA loans. On January 1, 2009, the amount of the sales price that a buyer will need to pay from their saved funds, usually as a down payment, will increase from 3% to 3.5%.

Finally, the $7,500 first time home buyer tax credit will only be available until July 1, 2009. Don't wait until June 1! To take advantage of this one, a buyer will need to have closed the sale by July 1. If a buyer does not have a working contract by May 15 or so, and is not pre-approved for the loan, they are risking loosing out on this.

Waiting now could not only result in loosing significant bargaining power, lower cost to buy and lower payments, and the opportunity to take advantage of $7,500 of interest free money over 15 years—with a built in mechanism to make sure your can repay it, the tax advantages of home ownership—it could also postpone many another vehicle available to assure a secure financial future.

What are you waiting for?

Avoiding Taxes on Short Sales

Jim Johnson (Century 21 Smith & Associates) — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:54:16 -0500

I was just reminded about a fact , and began wondering whether it was well known. Since so many homes are being foreclosed on, I have my doubts about consumer awareness of the fact. Whether you are a pro or a consumer, you should be aware that the provisions of the Mortgage Forgiveness and Debt Relief Act of 2007 are not automatic.

Since I cannot say it better, I sugest that everyone read the following article:

What You Need to Know About Short Sales and Loan Forgiveness

Seeking Others Who Take SEO Seriously

Jim Johnson (Century 21 Smith & Associates) — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 08:58:56 -0600

Hello, I'm new to this group, and hope to contribute as much as I gain from participation in it. I have six years experience in SEO with some amazing successes.

I will engage in directory<--->directory reciprocal links (link farming), but want most to partner with others who appreciate how contextual links function, and have the means and will to take advantage of their preeminent value.

A Self-Fulfilling Prophesy: How Not To Think

Jim Johnson (Century 21 Smith & Associates) — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 09:56:40 -0600

The power of positive thinking can't turn away the the tsunami created by the plunge taken by lenders when the sub-prime fiasco imploded on them. But, ask yourself, "who does this really affect?"

"Well, "yourself should answer, "it primarily affects lenders who held on to their own loans, and investors in the secondary market who bought those loans from the originating lenders."

The fact of the matter is that the effect on most people who are not invested in the secondary mortgage market is a result of their reaction to news that really does not affect them. This mistake is due in part to the irresponsible reporting on the fiasco by the media, and the failure of the public-at-large to pay close attention to the details when the media glanced over them, while focusing on the down-side of the matter.

In part, the problem is also due to the collapse in values in a few local markets that immediately preceded the sub-prime fiasco. Then too, that pervasive trend in corporate America to outsource everything is gnawing away at us, and makes headlines when it kills another job market in the US. There seems to have been a subsequent wave of fear that swept the national market due to a kind of generalization about the market that has nothing to do with most local markets.

Home buyers especially, but home sellers too, are actually creating a general malaise in the market as a consequence. For the most part, it's not especially problematic for the overall industry, but it is negatively affecting those who have fallen under the shadow of doom-and-gloom cast by that wave.

Let's get out into the sunlight and look around. Lenders are still making loans, and the rates are still low. Lenders, especially those hurt by their own greed, can't sit back and stop making loans. Lending is how they make their living. People who should never have gotten their sub-prime loans in the first place will find it a lot harder to find loans, or pay more for less, but people who qualify for loans are still getting them at about the same rate as before the fiasco.

It's also a buyer's market, and existing homes can often be bought with sizable reductions on price or terms that provide assistance to cash-strapped buyers. New home builders have been offering huge incentives--upgrades and even cash at closing--to reduce excess inventory due to speculative over-building during the fiasco. We are getting close to the end of this though, because builder inventories are declining.

Sellers and would-be sellers should not be put off by the buyer's market either. The difference in their net would be nominal with the right agent representing them. The right marketing strategy and an agent with good negotiating skills can do the job. It's a matter of pricing your home right and offering the incentives that will make your home appealing to buyers, and using these to make the best possible deal.

Buyers and sellers who have been holding back because they are uncertain about the market, are only delaying what they could enjoy now--and it's possible that real market conditions may make buying or selling a home a truly difficult proposition in the not too distant future.

________

Notes:

1 Though the real estate market in some states has suffered real set backs, the impact of the reported downturns, their effect on existing home sales and the forecast for the San Antonio market are bright.

2 Two articles in ReaEstateJournal.com address the short-sighted greed involved in the sub-prime mortgage fiasco: "Fraud Seen as a Driver In Wave of Foreclosures" and "Lender Lobbying Blitz Abetted Mortgage Mess"

Optimizing Reciprocal Links: A Synthesis

Jim Johnson (Century 21 Smith & Associates) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 22:59:52 -0600

We should all be agreed that links with link partners have value, albeit not as much value as some believe. Getting them is worthwhile, but they rank significantly lower than links within content, which even the more valuable links from published posts to blogs and online zines do not provide.

The problem with reciprocal link exchanges is that everybody we compete with does it. Most of the sites with which we compete are not likely to be bumped from their position in the search engine rankings (realtor.com, yourlocalnewsconglomerate.com, trulia.com and a few others), and the other real estate agency sites have professional SEO people managing their site promo and thousands of inbound links from link partners. Some also have inbound links from yourlocalnewsconglomerate.com, because they made the news.

Part of the reason for the rank of sites like realtor.com and trulia.com are due to the content grabbed by and links from the agency sites on pages not disallowed by the robots.txt or a robots meta tag. In doing so, they shaved room off of the top of the first page of the search engine hits for everyone.

A little strategy I developed can help overcome the drawbacks inherent in getting more inbound links than the competition and the difficulty we may have getting links to our sites from top rated blog and zine posts. I developed it when I noticed that top ranked pages within academia had only one kind of inbound link, other than the links within the professor's own pages. They were links from within the content of pages maintained by other academics who pointed their students and the public to contextual content, often with commentary. The strategy employs this aspect, and is outside the conventional reciprocal link box. I'll add that it requires a bit more work, because it cannot effectively be automated, like a link exchange--but it is a link exchange. It also requires that teh partners be capable of editing their won site and the "optimized" link pages. That's where the similarity ends though:

Optimizing Your Link Exchange

One important aspect of this strategy is that the link pages not look like link pages to the googlebot and others. As simple as this is, almost no one seems to understand this. The search engine bots recognize links on link pages as links on link pages, because of the structure of most (all?) link pages, and the link does not score as highly as a link from a content page. To make a link page look like a content page in the algorithms:

The page name and title need to be something other that "links" or "resources"
It needs keyword and description meta tags
And the links need to be structured like content, ie:

Mike Homeseller's Web site, <a href="URL1">REALTORsite</a>, offers access to the<a href="URL2">MLS listings</a> throughout Home City and the US.

In the example above, URL1 would point to the link partner's default URL, and URL2 would point to the URL of the page on his site where you will find his MLS access.

The next important part of this strategy is to create your "special" links pages in addition to your current page for link partners. One such page might be mls_access.html, where you would list those link partners who cooperate with you in implementing this strategy. On this page, you would dedicate an entire paragraph or two to describing the content of each link partner's site--with links to authoritative sites related contextually to the content being addressed on that page. Ideally, your link partner should provide this for you, and you should likewise provide a content rich description of your site for the partner. In example, the listing for Mike Homeseller's site might look like:

Mike Homeseller's Web site <a href="URL1">REALTORsite</a> offers access to the<a href="URL2">MLS listings</a> throughout Home City and the US. He is able to provide this access through his membership in the <a href="URL3">Hometown Board of REALTORS</a> and the <a href="URL4">Multiple Listing Service</a>. Mike is a real estate agent with <a href="URL5">His Brokerage Name</a>, and serves (the locations he serves).

In the preceding example, we used the top keyword phrase for MLS searches, "MLS listings," and text linked it to Mike's MLS search page. We also pointed to two highly ranked authorities and his broker's site, which are contextually related to the keyword phrase, but otherwise unrelated to Mike's site. Other good key words are "real estate agent" and "Multiple Listing Service." The search engine algorithms will read this as content--and that one link to Mike's site will be worth several times more than a reciprocal link. Moreover, as the number of such links increase, my observations indicate that their value has a tendency to compound algebraically. As the link page itself gains in rank, so too does the value of the link and so on.

And the link page will itself gain rank for two reasons: Your site gains rank through the partnership, and the page actually earns points through the one-way links included with each listing.

The menu (index) page where you would have the links to the various pages linking to your partners, could be named: re-pros.html, references.html, referrals.html and you and each of your partners should choose a different name. The various pages for the listings should be named differently to the extent possible, but would include: mls_access.html (for addressing the site's MLS access), realtor_services.html (for info about the brokerage/agent), closing_costs.html (for pages related to info about closing costs), loan_qualification.html (for pages related to loan qualification/calculators), listings.html (for the featured listings pages), area_info.html (for the area info pages).

The link to the main menu page can be on the default index page or within the are info page on your site, or both. Additionally, you should use "deep links" within the content of pages on your site related to the various links pages. Each of these pages must also employ all the SEO features that make content pages shine:

Good <title> tags--In example: <title>Quality Sites With MLS Listings Pages</title>
A <description> tag that compliments the title--In example: Reviews of quality sites with MLS listings pages.
A <keyword> tag with relevant keywords--In example: MLS Listings, homes for sale, National Association of Realtors, MLS, free MLS search. The menu (index) page would need to use each set of keywords for each for the various links pages.
Well developed content (as described above).

Each of the various link partners should also provide significantly different input for each of their partners to avoid looking like a link farm. The search engine algorithms ID link farms by comparing content of each site to those to which it links.

As a suggestion for ways to provide significantly different input to avoid the appearance of a link farm, you could:

Write a half dozen 2-3 sentence-long descriptions for your site and each page for which you want visitors.
Change a few words within each description you have written.
Change the order of the sentences in each paragraph.
Change the order of the paragraphs.
Write a half dozen 2-3 sentence-long descriptions for your "special" links page(s).
Find several highly rated sites with content related to the context for the descriptive matter, and include links to a different one of them within the various different descriptions you are able to write by combining the above to create differentiable "content" for the "special" links pages.

Finally, it may be best to avoid having visitors to your site visit your "special" links pages to the extent possible. The links to them will be in your content pages, so some visits are inevitable. You can however keep visitors who find them in the hits of a Google (etc.) search from going directly to them--and they will find them, because these pages will actually be ranked as content pages.

The problem with having visitors go to these pages is that it will confuse them. Most visitors would likely go to these pages expecting to find information that they will not find, and these pages are intended primarily for the search engines. The pages should not be ordered or arranged by any scheme, and it will be a hodge-podge of references to single features of your partners' pages.

To prevent most visitors from opening the links pages through a search engine, Insert the following JavaScript into the <head> section of your "special" links pages:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE='javascript'>try { if (top == self) {top.location.href='defaultindex.htm'; } } catch(er) { } </SCRIPT>

You can change the href to either your default index page or your 404 page, or create a special page just for search engine hits. I use a page especially created for this that explains why the link did not open the page they requested--I use frames with little context for the pages alone, and use a force frames action. The consequence for me would be that my default index page would open without the expected content. I also use a 30 second delay to redirect anyone hitting my special page, and a link on the page to open my default index page.

This strategy also needs some ground rules:

Most importantly, each partner will need to include all of the above aspects, and pledge to participate fully.
Each partner will need to solicit other participants.
Each partner must agree to cooperate with new participants who are relevant to the partnership.
Good, open communication needs to be established and maintained by each partner.

Now, all you need to do is to create content pages with rich text-link content throughout your site to be sure that they also show up in the search hits. You need it for your overall SEO strategy, because getting your "link partners" to cooperate in this strategy will be like pushing your car up a 15% grade. If you want it badly enough, it's worth the effort to get enough help to push it over the top though.

Anyone out there in the real estate biz? Contact me, and let's get some reciprocal links pointing to one another.

Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Jim Johnson (Century 21 Smith & Associates) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 15:17:59 -0600

I wish I had found Active Rain weeks ago. I feel like I've found what I'm looking for here, and hope to contribute as mush as I gain from our association.

I'm a REALTOR associate with Century 21 Smith & Associates, in San Antonio, Texas, with over six years experience in SEO--and some remarkable successes.

I also have five years experience in real estate, but just started back in the profession.