Monday night I got a call from someone whose area in South Dakota was in the midst of being whacked by a blizzard.  I guess it was the last straw for him.  He was ready to start investigating a move the Southern Outer Banks or SOBX as it is locally known.  Actually the blizzard was not the real reason for wanting to move, but I covered that in a post on the Crystal Coast Living blog.

His call had come just hours after an email from a potential mountain dwelling client who is already scheduled to visit our area this summer.  The same blizzard had just dumped over two feet of snow on her Montana doorstep.  She was desperate for a picture of anything that was not white.  I sent her a link to some spring flower pictures that I took this weekend.

While I know a few folks who love to be snowed in, most are past that when April is on the horizon.

I can certainly appreciate what our friends in the northern plains are enduring right now.  My wife and I lived in Canada for sixteen years.  For over ten of those years, we lived on a farm in a tiny settlement about twenty miles north of Fredericton, New Brunswick. 

We were in a snowbelt, and I was the farmer with the largest tractor along a tough stretch of road.  Many snowy nights someone would knock on our door and asked to be pulled out of the ditch.  When living on the farm, helping your neighbors is just a way of life even if it means putting on a snow suit late at night and rescuing someone who had no business being out on the road.

I never really felt threatened by a blizzard, but we were living in Canada where they would not even bother plowing the roads unless it snowed more than six inches.  We heated with wood and our water was spring fed.  On top of that, it was so cold we could just unplug our freezers for a couple of months in the winter.

Still I can feel sorry for folks who are accidently trapped out in a blizzard.  I am sure it happens, but even twenty five years ago on the farm, we had a pretty good idea when a big blow was on the horizon.

Still most people ride out blizzards with little interruption to their daily lives.  You take a day or two off, drink some hot chocolate, and sit around the fire.  Farmers are among those who do not get the day off.  A big blizzard meant hours of snow blowing before I could reach our cattle herd and give them their daily feed.  We had storms that dumped over three feet on us at a time, and temperatures as cold as minus forty. Still I managed to make the trip out with a big round bale each day.  Fortunately we never had a bad blizzard during calving season.

The seasons have turned, and we are a long way from blizzards here on the Carolina Coast.  We did see some snow this year, but it did not even stick to the driveways so my Canadian heritage allowed me to almost ignore it.

When people in blizzards start calling for a warmer place to live, I usually get found through the Internet.  One of the things that I do to help make sure that I come up in searches is to do some searches myself and see where I rank.  There are often lessons to be learned when you do a search and find someone ranked ahead of you.

I will often look at the page source of a page which is ahead of me.  Sometimes I will actually create a new webpage to go head to head with one that is particularly troubling.  One of the things that I learned long ago is that you cannot expect one webpage to win all the battles.

It helps to have webpages which are customized to certain search terms.  I do really well in Google searches on "SOBX real estate" but not as well on searches for "Cape Carteret real estate."

Today I created a new website to help fix that problem.  It is focused on Cape Carteret real estate and has URLs and keywords built to help move me up in the rankings.

While the Internet continues to lead in bringing in long distance customers, it seems that good old fashioned signs are still most effective in pulling in listings.  I was happy to pick up a nice reasonably priced waterview cottage and a well priced family home in a quiet but convenient neighborhood in the Cape Carteret area.

Now that I think about it, I wish today's real estate market could just be a blizzard that I waited out around the fireplace.  Unfortunately it is not going to be that easy.