Thursday, September 20, 2007

Google to profit by Real Estate mess and Zillow gets 30 Mil

We've been watching the Internet Real Estate space lately, frankly because we put small home in the Northern Poconos on the market just before the sub-prime mortgage bomb ... and the media hype that followed.

It made the average person think the world was coming to an end?. Could OJ have rescued the Real Estate market?? :)

Certainly there were some very real factors here with many jobs lost and undetermined effects on the overall economy but we feel the media overplayed the reality, especially with the fed cut.

Very,simply, if you look at 'historic' interest rates, we're still at some of the lowest rates in 25 years?!

So the Real Estate market briefly drops dead (yes, I said briefly!) ... the 'smart guys' are out there in markets that are still JUST FINE buying stuff.

Back to the 'techie' side. An informal survey here (by us yesterday) in various parts of Pennsylvania, showed more Real Estate agents and brokers buying higher spots on Google, Yahoo, MSN, ASK and more terms and phrases than they have at any time in the past 6 years.

Proof - Your ROI is right here on the Net IF you know what you're doing. Buying keywords is an art, just like SEO. Do it right and you win. You don't need megabucks to compete with the 'big budget guys'.

Techcrunch reported today another heavy-duty round of financing for Seattle-based Real Estate start-up Zillow. We were impressed by some of Zillow's roll-out and recruiting early on.

When we began re-exploring the Real Estate Internet landscape last month, we found Zillow to be sleek, well executed and easy to use. They also had a vehicle that ensured the home you were selling was yours. Makes sense to us?.

We took both the conventional and not-so-conventional-approach to selling the house, enlisting the services of a prominant local realtor, while reserving the right to sell ourselves. We found the realtor already marketing the house on our other Real Estate website-to-watch Trulia.com (I was impressed), along with a slew of the established names (Realtor.com, etc.).

The house was NOT on Zillow, so we put it there (A little shameless self promotion, take a peek here ). We also launched a webpage (with a little very-clean White Hat SEO), which to our surprise, Google picked up in a heartbeat in a fairly competive market (Thanks Google?!).

PROOF POSITIVE of one of our earlier posts that, Google is, in fact, dynamically indexing. No more waiting for Big Daddy in a lot of cases.

Hey, if you're in a crappy market, you're going to wait. There's just no two ways about it. The search engines will make A LOT of money on Real Estate in the coming weeks.

If you're out there in a stable market, the fed just sold your house ... or soon will.

Market guru Jim Cramer predicted on CNBC.com that interest rates are coming down even more. He also had Google as No. 2 on his list of stocks that would benefit from the fed rate cut.

Say no more?

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