What: Wine 101 This is the class that will thrust you on the path of becoming a connoisseur. Join Don as he discusses the fundamentals of wine and wine tasting. In addition to a brief overview of winemaking and major wine growing regions, this class will provide you with the basic tools to taste and evaluate wine [...] 404 377 4005

When: Tuesday, December 1, 2009 7:00 PM

Where: The Cook's Warehouse-Decatur 180 West Ponce de Leon Avenue Decatur, Georgia 30030 United States

Dunwoody Georgia will be one year old on December 1. This is going to be interesting to watch. The AJC article quotes Mayor Ken Wright as saying "The people who started Dunwoody want it run like a business." It also states that "He expects the city to have built up $3 million in reserves by the end of this year". Reserves? A city with reserves? Maybe Dunwoody is on to something here.

Lee Odden knows how to get a blog read. He published an article on the Online Marketing Blog called "25 Link Building Tactics to Improve Blog Search Engine Rankings". It scares me to think about all the things that I am not yet doing but as many posters have commented "this is just all part of the job". Some of his suggestions are pretty easy while others will take some time.

I was reading an article at RealTown by Matthew Ferrara. It's a good read. Underneath his insights, though, is a nagging question about how much benefit there is to being a member of an association.

The percent of members who belong (versus those who do not) to a trade associations is a bit hard to track. In my home state, I can go to any local association and find out how many members they have. But the state does not publish how many licensees there are. We also know that most local associations have lost between 20% to 50% of their membership in the past 2 years. Did they get out of the business or just choose to not be a member of a trade association? I think the best guess might be that only 50% of agents are members of either their local, state or national associations. And it's not just non-productive agents who are not members!

I recently came across some numbers that seemed to indicate that the number of physicians who are members of the American Medical Association was about 30%. While I haven't been able to find any numbers on the American Bar Association, it is clear from information I've found online that they also are struggling with attracting and maintaining membership.

I rather suspect that the reason that agents have a higher percentage of membership in their association is because, in most cases, they don't have a choice to do otherwise. What would NAR's numbers look like if agents really had the choice to be a member or not? Does that average agent actually perceive enough value in membership to actually join?

Your thoughts?

(FYI: Buddy has been a Director for the State Association for the past two years and at present serves on 7 different state and local committees.)

I just don't like the looks of this graph. For nearly 18 months we've experience fewer new listings every month. I know there are economists out their that are talking turnaround but there are fewer homes on the market and at the same time the average sales price continues to decline. That doesn't spell turnaround to me. There was an interesting article in Bloomberg today that indicates that much of the uptick last month in home sales was due to the tax credit but Congress can't keep handing out the money forever. Hmmmm.....

There seems to be this mantra in business that social media has got meet some test of ROI. Fine, then. Watch this latest video from Erik Qualman over at Socialnomics. I particularly like the quote from JetBlue: "Think of Titter as the canary in the coal mine." It's not if we are going to learn how to use social media; it's when.

I love mashups. I don't know how much good it does but I do like to embed them in my sites. I just came across SpotCrime and they have done a really cool job of geolocating crimes on Google maps. This app could easily be a winner but I think it's still pretty new. I tried going back 1 year to see what an area looked like and when I refreshed the map it displayed the one month data that was already there and nothing new. Either their db isn't old enough or there search is buggy. Still, I think this one is a keeper.

It does require registration for which you get automatic alerts for any crime events within 2 miles of your home.

Rarely do I hear people talk about "affordability" as a key component of the real estate market. By affordability, I mean the number of people who can actually afford to buy a home. We focus on inventory, days on market, averages and the like. But the number of people in the pool who can actually buy a home is the bottom line.

When jobs go away, the number of people in that pool gets smaller and smaller.

Michael Kanell with the AJC writes that "It may be 2012 or 2013 before we get back to where we were," Ouch. And if you are an agent in the metro area, do not read the very last sentence of this article. I'm not one to be pessimistic, but until people can get back to work things can't change.

I've been thinking for several weeks about how the headline or title of a post effects whether a blog post gets read or not. So, this morning I get my email from CopyBlogger.com and it's about writing good titles. This article is part of a series that is free and it's turning out to be one of the best free subscriptions I've ever signed up for. Be sure to check out the link to the 21 headlines from trashy tabloids where you will find things like "Rub the famous magic fish ... and get anything you want!". Not that I think exploding heads are what we need in real estate but surely we can do better than "Please Check Out My New Website". However, given the current market melt down, perhaps there is a place for exploding heads.

WSJ and Lore are reporting the Top 400 (it's actually 4 lists of the Top 100) agents/teams in the U.S. Here is a link to the individual agents ranked by closed sides. Funny thing: the local folks who advertise the heaviest (generally with the claim of being "number 1") aren't on that list. The numbers in the list are so impressive that it really gives one a sense of pride about what we do and something to shoot for.