Check out our top 10 real estate blogs

All blogging, like real estate, is local. Not necessarily in a geographical sense, but local in a sense of closely related ideas and common concerns. And while the best blog for one REALTOR® is not necessarily best for the next, there are a few blog sites where everyone can find and contribute REALTOR®-relevant, useful information on any topic you choose. Whether your interest is finding new customers, sharing or finding information on an issue you face, or just figuring out what blogging is all about, these sites are a great way to get started:

1. ActiveRain.com – Join over 60,000 real estate professionals in discussing current happenings and important issues in the real estate industry. Create your own profile and your blog comes with it. The only thing you need to bring are your ideas.
2. AgentGenius.com – No one blogger is at the center of this online meeting of minds. Posts are a community product developed by agents from across the country, including one of Virginia’s own blogstars. Find out who it is by visiting and clicking “G-Spot” and while you’re there, browse around for the newest approaches to real estate, technology product reviews and application of the next generation of the internet, Web 2.o, to the real estate profession.
3. Inman.com – Real estate information and technology meet to produce one of the web’s most accessed real estate blog sites at Inman.com. Viewed 7 million times per month, Inman provides users the opportunity to network while accessing relevant information from 250 newspapers and 50,000 websites daily. Don’t worry, you don’t have to read it all, but you might want to.
4. RealEstateTomato.com – This site’s main goal is to make REALTORS® more successful; and it does just that. Real estate tomato provides everything a new real estate blogger or e-marketer wants to know, in addition to a few things that you hadn’t thought of.
5. Bloodhoundblog.com – Get an insider’s view of the mortgage industry, talk screen-to-screen with investors and read and comment on topics that attract real estate professionals from all over the U.S., all on the provocative Bloodhound Blog.
6. RSSPieces.com – Want to learn to blog? Podcast? Market? Or optimize a search engine? Here’s a site that will teach you for free.
7. MyTechOpinion.com – This blog is a little more focused than some others, but no less useful. Visit this site to get the inside scoop on how technology is enhancing real estate and provide feedback or get information on how these innovations affect you.
8. RealtyBlogging.com – This site doesn’t receive as much traffic as other general real estate blog sites, which makes it easier to navigate in most cases. The big names in real estate blogging can be found here, but without the visual congestion of some other sites.
9. NARblog1.realtors.org/mvtype/narinthenews/ Stay in touch with what’s happening at NAR on this blog. Many other sites will talk about NAR’s position on issues, but this is the site for those that want to go straight to the source.
10. RealBlogging.com – Read more than 40 categories of real estate blogs on any topic from advertising and marketing to specialty services and fraud prevention at this site. This real estate community has resources for everyone, from experts looking to talk to other experts all the way down to novices and prospective professionals in need of a real estate glossary.

A look inside the hard drive of “Real Estate Zebra” Daniel Rothamel

by Valerie Hubbard

If it was 1825, Daniel Rothamel probably would be the guy packing up the wagons and the horses to lead an expedition west. But since it’s 2008, he’s blazing his trails on the internet.

Rothamel, a REALTOR® with Strong Team REALTORS® in the Charlottesville area, began his real estate career in 2003 after graduating from the University of Delaware. In late 2006, he and his wife, Kari, and her mother, Patsy Strong, opened their own real estate brokerage.

Daniel began blogging in 2005 as a way of informing his clients and customers about the Charlottesville area. He eventually combined his passion for real estate with his passion for basketball offi ciating and launched RealEstateZebra.com — the referee’s uniform has black and white stripes. Get it?

Daniel views social media as a powerful tool that serves to strengthen the relationship between real estate agents and their customers and clients. He firmly believes that social media can improve your business and at the same time enhance your profession.

With his abundant experience and enthusiasm for virtual social networking, we decided to poke around inside his hard drive, so-to-speak, and find out the why, what and how of Daniel Rothamel’s secrets to marketing real estate in 2008 and beyond…

VAR: When and how did you fi rst get involved with social media?
Rothamel: In real estate, I’ve been blogging about a year and a half. I started doing it as a way of connecting the local community, in Fluvanna County. That was my original blog’s purpose. I didn’t really have a good plan for it. I thought it would be a good place for people to come together and share stuff, but it didn’t really take off. So then I thought maybe it would work with real estate, and I started a blog called cvillearearealestate.com. It went well and started taking off after a few months. I was really getting into it, but the name wasn’t catchy enough for me. My wife suggested that I call myself the ‘real estate zebra,’ and I thought that sounded pretty cool. So that’s how I started realestatezebra.com. Once I got into it, I realized that this was really powerful stuff, and I needed to really be utilizing it.

VAR: What types of social media are you employing now as marketing tools and how effective have they been? (more…)

New technologies raise new legal issues

by Blake Hegeman, VAR’s Associate Counsel

The expanded use of online marketing and social media within the REALTOR® community has created new and exciting opportunities. However, its use has raised novel legal issues. Here’s how to protect your business when using these new tools.

The Code of Ethics and online advertising

The internet is a cost-efficient and effective way to market your brokerage services. It is becoming the norm for many REALTORS® to maintain sophisticated and informative websites to reach customers and other agents. While VAR encourages its members to use this medium, we also caution you to adhere strictly to the rules in the Code of Ethics pertaining to advertising.

This year, NAR amended several sections of the Code to account for the increasing use of the Internet. Below are highlights of those additions (found in Articles 9, 12, and 15):

• The name of the REALTOR® firm and state of licensure must be disclosed in a reasonable and readily apparent manner when advertising listed property on its website or a REALTOR® or affiliated non-member licensee’s website.
• Information on REALTOR® websites must be current, and if it is out of date, the information must be removed immediately.
• REALTOR® websites must present a true picture in their advertising, including URLs and domain names. The following are strictly prohibited:
  • Engaging in deceptive or unauthorized framing of real estate brokerage websites;
  • Manipulating (e.g., presenting content developed by others) listing content in any way that produces a deceptive or misleading result; or
  • Deceptively using metatags, keywords or other devices/methods to direct, drive, or divert Internet traffic, or to otherwise mislead consumers.
• REALTORS® intending to share or sell consumer information gathered via the Internet must disclose that possibility in a reasonable and readily apparent manner.
• The duty to avoid making false or misleading statements about competitors’ businesses and practices includes the duty not to knowingly or recklessly repeat, retransmit, or republish false or misleading statements made by others using electronic means.
• When assisting or enabling a client or customer in establishing a contractual relationship (e.g., listing and representation agreements, purchase agreements, leases, etc.) electronically, REALTORS® must make reasonable efforts to explain the nature and disclose the specific terms of the contractual relationship being established.

Using blogs to connect with the community

Blogs raise a number of legal issues that haven’t been thoroughly reviewed by the courts. (more…)

high-tech investment is still paying off

by Valerie Hubbard

Two years ago, Jim Duncan of Century 21 Manley Associates in Charlottesville and Merv Forney of Choice3 Realty Group in Leesburg were on the cutting edge.

As two of the first Virginia REALTORS® to explore web logs or blogs in their real estate practice, the two lauded the marketing and educational benefits just waiting to be tapped with this new technology tool in a feature article on blogging published in the march-april 2006 issue of Commonwealth magazine.

“Technology is moving at an incredible rate,” Duncan was quoted saying.

Indeed. Just like dogs who live at a faster pace than we humans, technology also laps us many times in the span of a year. It’s as if its evolutionary speedometer is set somewhere around “warp.”

so we wanted to know – are Duncan and Forney keeping up? you bet they are.

After only three years in real estate, Forney – a former senior executive with the technology firm EDS – has exponentially increased exposure to his blog askmerv.choice3realty.com. Just Google “Northern Virginia real estate” and see what shows up at the top of the list of results.

“My blog,” Forney says.

“For about the past 12 months I’ve been getting 100 percent of my business from the blog, and (more…)

Let’s get digital

It’s time to cozy up to the computer and learn social media. Matthew Rathbun of Century 21 Classic Real Estate in Ruther Glen and Daniel Rothamel of Strong Team REALTORS® in Charlottesville offer these primers to get you started.

Blogging 101

A blog is a “web log.” It is online content that is updated on a regular basis with opinions and information. The best part is that the folks who offer this information so freely also allow you to comment on the material.

A blog is your own personal slice of the internet. On a blog, you can show people who you are and what you can accomplish for them. Use them to share your insights and expertise with people as often as you would like. At the most basic level, a blog gives people a way to meet you in their own environment before they ever meet you face-to-face.

Set aside any preconceived notions and fears about this form of communication and get ready to understand it, because if it hasn’t already, blogging is going to impact your business.

There are lots of blogs out there for REALTORS® to provide new marketing ideas and to keep you current in your everyday practice. Best of all, this information comes at no cost to you.

A great feature of blogs is the ability to subscribe using a “reader.” A reader, which is commonly known as RSS for Really Simple Syndication, is a single webpage that you can use to organize all blogs that you wish to read. This allows you to go to one webpage and see all the new articles of your favorite blogs. For a good instructional video on blogging and RSS go to YouTube.com and search for “RSS in Plain English” and “Blogs in Plain English”.

How to use your blog: Use it to talk with and inform your readers. Your goal should be to share (more…)

How a new way to interact can bring you some real bottom line results

by Daniel Rothamel and Valerie Hubbard

Remember school dances? For many of us, there was a painful awkwardness at some point when we became paralyzed by the fear of having to dance with a classmate, the fear of being rejected or the fear of embarrassment – or all three at once?

Today’s internet environment can be a lot like that.

Let’s face it, if you are a real estate agent who is surveying the current internet landscape and trying to figure out what your next step is going to be, it can be easy to get confused and suffer that same dance-floor paralysis.

The internet provides an overwhelming number of marketing opportunities. Savvy consumers are increasingly taking advantage of new ways to communicate with one another, and REALTORS® must now choose to ignore, co-opt or dive into these new waters of interactivity.

But choose wisely, because consumers, who are growing accustomed to more interactive relationships from service providers, want to feel they are being heard and making an impact.

So sure, you may have your own personal website, complete with all the bells and whistles (content management, user registration, customized property search, lead generation, etc.), but now there are more dynamic ways to capture consumers. It’s no longer enough to have an online presence to move your business forward. But if you want to join the rest on the dance floor, choosing the right partner can be difficult.

Now what?

You’ve heard of YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and blogs, just to name a few. The expansion of social media is the latest and greatest phase of the internet, and many Virginia REALTORS® are already leveraging these outlets to grow their business.

Since the social media options can be so overwhelming, we’ve assembled a basic primer on using some of these business-building sites. There are also strategies for realizing bottom-line benefits from social media.

We’ve even pulled together a list of the best blogs, and the stories of several Virginia REALTORS® who are using social media effectively to grow their business.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive review by any means, but it should be enough to put you on the road to maintaining meaningful relationships with clients, customers, prospects and other professionals you’ve made in the real world. And social media can help you expand your address book and grow your business in ways that were unfathomable even a year ago.

The heart of the internet: communicating

The first thing that you need to understand about the social media movement is that it is built around relationships. Social media sites exist to foster conversation between people. The people who use these sites want to engage with others, not just experience one-way communication.

The majority of traditional real estate marketing is one-way: look at my listings, read about my service, visit my website. Social media sites are different. The expectation of people who use these sites is that they will have a part in the conversation. It’s a good thing. It enables you to cultivate relationships with consumers. Rather than marketing to prospects, you can talk with them and build trust in a more natural and meaningful way.

Traditional internet marketing grabs your hand, drags you on to the floor and says, “dance with me!” Social media sites offer a hand and ask, “shall we dance?”