Real Estate Internet Technology

If you hadn't noticed, Goggle Maps now has Real Estate Listings. To see what listings they have in the area your interested, go to http://maps.google.com and double click the map repeatedly to zoom in to the area your interested in. Next, click on the button titled "more". There should be a check box there that says "Real Estate" that you can check.



And here's a live link to this
Southern Michigan Google Real Estate Map

Here's how it looks as an iframe on your site:

View Larger Map

I know IFRAMES gets used alot in Real Estate to display MLS listings, but I opted for a direct data feed with mine, so I never used IFRAMES for Real Estate Listings. Another opportunity came up for one of my other websites when a local paper asked if there was a way they could display trivia quizzes from another site that Innovative Ambitions owns. I thought of IFRAMES and went to work to see what I could come up with. This is just a rough first pass test, but let's see what it looks like. Here's a try at displaying one of our recent popular quizzes: Autumn Songs.

Well, as I posted previously, my clients Real Estate website was dropped from the Google index early in 2008. The site had been hacked and had some blackhat SEO stuff added. I didn't catch it for a month or 2, then spent a couple more fixing and requesting reconsideration with Google. The pages went back into the index, and all was well. The clients site started coming up 1st for searches on "Remerica Somerset Realty". Case closed. Or so I thought.

Then late last year, or early this year, I noted something else. All the images at remericasomersetrealty.com had been dropped from the google image search index. Or at least thats all I can figure. Prior to the hack last spring the images from the site could be found in Google image search.

My assumption is that its not an issue with the Google algorythym, but rather with the Google re-inclusion process. I can't be sure, but when you have a site whose url is remericasomersetrealty.com, and it says "Remerica Somerset Realty" in the page title of the front page, and the upper left corner of every page on the site has an image whose filename is "remerica_somerset_realty.jpg" and the alt tag says "Remerica Somerset Realty" and the text on the actual image says "Remerica Somerset Realty", and the image shows up nowhere in Goggle image search results, but the site still shows up #1 for "Remerica Somerset Realty" in Google standard search, then I'd say that there's a relavency issue with this image search result, especially when you look at the other image search results that come up. And alot of them page 1 are nothing to write home about.

To be fair though, the Google system is extremely huge and dynamic, and everything can't possibly be fixed manually so I don't really fault Google. I just wish I could find a way to get my images back in the Google image search index. There's a process, and I've written them twice in the last 4 months, and been given no timeframe on how fast these requests get considered. :)

There's an article on Zillow that includes a map and shows the year over year housing value change using colored diamonds to allow you to get a really clear picture nation wide. No surprise to anyone keeping up. Florida, California, and the east coast appear hit the hardest (I.e values down) with a few down pockets around Detroit, Chicago, Green Bay and Minneapolis also down 13 to 20%, and Ann Arbor Michigan being hit especially hard. Prices across the heartland and mid south appear to have held value pretty well. How does that expression go? Our strength is in the heartland, or something like that.

I just finished refinnancing my house and it turned out quite well. The main reason that I did it was that I was on a 7 year ballloon that was coming up next year. For those of you that are as lacking in knowledge of mortgages and financing as myself that basically means that I took a lower interest rate but agreed that the rate could change after 7 years. So I wanted to redo the loan so I wouldn't be surprised by any shocking new interest rate next year.

In any event I found out that refinancing produced quite a few benefits for me and was probably worth doing at this point even if I hadn't felt the need to because of the balloon:

- It slightly lowered my monthly payment
- I get to skip a payment for the month of April
- It reduced the length of my remaining loan from 24 to 20 years
- I received an extra $1,500 or so back in the mail

Now in my case my banker said that part of the problem was that my taxes had been increased significantly, forcing the escrow to get a little messy, and that was costing me money. Additionally, I had others tell me it was because my "new loan" was for less money, but it was for the same amount of money that my old loan left off on, and I was paying a higher percentage amount on the principal for the old loan, so I'm still having a hard time swallowing that one.

Whatever the reasons, when you consider that the refinance charges were significant, it seems amazing to me that I could add to my debt but still come away in better shape.

The real shocker is that the interest went up, from 4.75% to over 5%, so the next time your shoping for loans and the focus has an over emphasis on the interest rate, be sure to check the monthly payment amount and the number of payments. Those are the numbers that hit your pocketbook in the end.

I heard someone talking the other day about numbers he's been tracking for quite a while on the cost of owning a home versus the cost of renting. He said that for the first time his numbers were showing the cost of owning a house going down enough to be comparable to the cost of renting. So for those of you who've saved a nest egg and are looking to go from renting to buying, now might be a great time to do it. Sellers have started to acknowledge the drop in market values and listing prices have come down as a result.