Archive for February, 2008
Friday, February 29th, 2008
Chris Anderson, the author of "The Long Tail", discusses that soon, everything on the web will be free. He shows that the internet has enabled companies the ability to offer free services that were once expensive to make. He says the marginal cost of creating something on the web has ...
Posted in Business Tips | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Narpm (National Association of Residential Property Managers) released their February national report.
Total Members: 2,421
Professional Members: 2,167
International Members: 5
Honorary Member: 1
Life Members: 18
Support Staff: 107
Affiliates: 123
Who is #1?
Here are the NARPM® chapters that have 50 or more members:
#1 – Oahu, HI – 122 members
#2 - Orlando/Central ...
Posted in narpm | No Comments »
Wednesday, February 27th, 2008
I have never seen the show "Flip this House" on A&E but one of the stars, Armando Montelongo faces up to 2 years in jail if he is convicted of not paying the appraiser.
On you tube you can learn how to make money the "montelongo" way. One advice though. Pay ...
Posted in Real Estate Investing, Real Estate News | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Avenue A Razorfish released their 2008 Digital Outlook report. Guy Kawasaki first released this on his blog.
The report is long but very informative. One finding relevant to the real estate readers is that vertical search engines and vertical content properties are the biggest beneficiaries of the marketing spend. Verticals grew ...
Posted in Apartment Marketer, Rent Marketer, Rental Advertising, Rental Marketing | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, February 26th, 2008
Just like Coke protects its secret formula, Google does the same when it comes to Google's algorithm. While I was at Google, they took every measure to protect secrets from entering or leaving the company. After all, another search engine is just one click away.
Hal Varian, Google's chief economist, was ...
Posted in Search Engines | 1 Comment »
Monday, February 25th, 2008
Blog Rush, the widget we have on the side of our blog, recently released their blog search product called Traffic Jam. It aims to make sense of the millions of blogs out there.
As the consumer traffic to this site, I think this could be another great way to increase traffic ...
Posted in Real Estate Tips | No Comments »
Monday, February 25th, 2008
We will be launching rentBits.com within the coming weeks but we wanted to thank everyone who has been reading this blog. We have been experiencing massive traffic growth and we haven't even launched rentBits yet.
Compete.com data has us at 65,000 uniques per month. Quantcast.com data has us close to 30,000 ...
Posted in RentBits | 8 Comments »
Sunday, February 24th, 2008
A clear headline. – Each site allows for a headline. It is best to not use the address in the headline but rather phrases like Townhome For Rent in Denver – Granite Countertops or Three Bedroom Home For Rent in Atlanta.
A detailed Description – 1 bd 2 bth, fireplace is ...
Posted in Rental Advertising, Rental Marketing | 2 Comments »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
Rentals.com is giving away free ads to select customers in the phoenix area until the end of February. They are calling it the BOGO offer (Buy-One-Get-One Free).
Here is the email that was sent to us:
For each ad that you place between now and the end of February, you will receive ...
Posted in Rentals.com | 4 Comments »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
I found this link on the MyNewPlace Blog and I wanted to share more of the data with you.
Pop quiz: Which properties have more renters in them? Single Family homes and structures with 2 - 4 units or Apartment Properties with 5 or more units?
Answer: Single Family homes and structures ...
Posted in MyNewPlace, Rental Market, Rental Prices | No Comments »
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
There are about 2 million homeowners that hold $600 billion of subprime adjustable-rate mortgage loans, known as ARMs, that are due to reset at much higher amounts during the next eight months
We are constantly speaking with property managers throughout the United States and we asked them how the foreclosure situation ...
Posted in Property Managers, Real Estate Investing, Real Estate News | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 22nd, 2008
Seth Godin recently gave a presentation to real estate agents and he told them "to quit selling real estate." He states:
"The agents who built their business on low interest rates, easy money and speculation (the order takers) have left the building.......In fact, I think this is an extraordinary opportunity for ...
Posted in Business Tips, Real Estate Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Although this is primarily a rental blog, we occasionally discuss business and business strategy. Many of the companies we write about are real estate related companies that have received funding.
There is one company all VCs should invest in.
It is not real estate related but there is HUGE opportunity in this ...
Posted in Business Tips | No Comments »
Thursday, February 21st, 2008
Scribd.com, a start-up in Silicon Valley is making finding, uploading and viewing documents online extremely easy. They recently raised close to $5 million from Red Point Ventures and according to compete.com has over 2 million uniques per month.
Scribd makes it easy to search for real estate documents like rental applications ...
Posted in Real Estate Technology | 5 Comments »
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
The rental industry needs more Lisa Trosien's. Lisa Trosien, the owner of ApartmentExpert and is part of the Apartment Marketing All-Stars, offers Multi-Family training and consulting. Lisa also writes on the Apartment Marketing Blog and offers great advice for property managers.
I wish the single family home market had a Lisa ...
Posted in Apartment Marketer, Rental Advertising, Rental Marketing | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, February 20th, 2008
I was bored and wanted to see how many patents have been issued related to Apartments. There are 2625 patents that have "apartment" within their patent text. Some of my favorites:
Method for Preparing Leasing Arrangements:
Abstract:
A method and apparatus are provided for presenting leasing arrangements for ...
Posted in Real Estate Technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 19th, 2008
Dominion Enterprises, the owner of sites like ForRent.com, Homes.com, CorporateHousing.com and many other sites, announced that they may be looking to sell. They have hired J.P Morgan and Lehman to help in the process if they decide to sell.
In September 2006, Dominion Enterprises was established following a division of assets ...
Posted in ForRent, Real Estate News | 2 Comments »
Monday, February 18th, 2008
I am going to vent a little bit about advertising platforms or mediums that refuse to give the advertiser the ability to track conversions or where their users just don't convert. At the end of the day, I can care less if 3 million people saw my ad. In fact, ...
Posted in Rental Advertising | 2 Comments »
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
I wanted to add a list of rental sites that have a blog. I think all sites should increase their presence with a blog. It helps the rental industry if more of us speak out and share information.
If there are more, comment and I will add.
RentVine Blog
MyNewPlace Blog
Hotpads Blog
ForRent Blog
TenantMarket ...
Posted in Real Estate Tips | 6 Comments »
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
In 2006, AOL released information of over 20 million search queries collected from 650,000 users over a 3 month period. AOL released the information and stated, "The goal of this collection is to provide real query log data that is based on real users. It could be used for personalization, ...
Posted in Real Estate Technology, Real Estate Tips | No Comments »
Sunday, February 17th, 2008
Trump University, the real estate investing program designed by Donald Trump is not doing too well in terms of traffic. According to compete.com data, the sites traffic is down 66.3% for the last year.
Is there a correlation with visits to a site and revenue? Since Trump Entertainment Resorts, Inc, (TRMP) ...
Posted in Real Estate Investing | 7 Comments »
Saturday, February 16th, 2008
I have written before on steps that need to be taken to be successful. If there was only 1 step I could use to be successful it would be to Set Goals and Quantify Everything of Significance.
I have always wanted to keep track of my goals online and now there ...
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
Thursday, February 14th, 2008
Google trends shows that houses for rent searches has been larger than apartments for rent searches in many top cities within the United States.
The below Google Trends data has houses for rent searches in blue and apartments for rent searches in red.
Posted in Rental Prices, Rental Tips, Rental Tricks, rental sites | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Compete.com released their most recent traffic data for January and we are excited to say that the traffic on Rent Marketer's network of sites was up nearly 75% from the month of Dec to the month of Jan. Rent Marketer's network of sites consists of over 60 different rental and ...
Posted in Rent Marketer | 1 Comment »
Tuesday, February 5th, 2008
I have had some time to chew on the Yahoo / Microsoft deal a little bit. Google has their own concerns but I wanted to break this down more from a consumer and business decision at the real estate vertical level.
From a real estate vertical, would the Yahoo / ...
Posted in Real Estate News | 3 Comments »
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
Answer. Fire your entire board and replace them with individuals who are internet experts.
Marc Andreessen's post on the New York Times says it all.
Well, given that the Internet is the central force dismantling the company's [The New York Times] business, I'm sure that by now they've stocked their board with ...
Posted in Business Tips, Real Estate News | 3 Comments »
Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
I had a great time doing a radio show with ForRentByOwner.com yesterday in Castle Rock. It was live radio and once I receive the recording I will post it.
Dave Watts the founder of ForRentByowner, Jay Jacobson a real estate investor who owns over 2000 units in Texas and Colorado and ...
Posted in ForRentByOwner | 4 Comments »
