Author Archives: Dustin Luther

About Dustin Luther

Founder and original blogger on Rain City Guide, Dustin has since started #InterestedIn Marketing where his team provides content and social media services that helps industry experts earn recognition as thought leaders. You can find me on Twitter (@tyr) and LinkedIn (/DustinLuther)

Linkation, Linkation, Linkation

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(I enjoyed writing my previous article on the reasons that real estate agents should blog, and it got me thinking about all the other bits of advice I’d like to share with real estate agents… I have a bunch of ideas, many of which are still only half-baked, so I’m looking toward your comments and suggestions to see where I should take this mini-series on blogging basics for real estate agents.)

What are the three most important factors in determining the value of real estate?

  1. Location
  2. Location
  3. Location

grow-a-brainWhile this well worn mantra forms a fundamental building block of real estate value, the concept of location is nearly irrelevant in the on-line world. I’m located in Seattle, WA, the servers hosting this site are in Santa Monica, CA, and you could be reading this from anywhere in the world.

If you’re an agent thinking of moving on-line, there are a bunch of real estate fundamentals that you’re going to want to relearn if you are going to be successful. I’ll start be revising the well-worn mantra to make it relevant on-line…

What are the three most important factors in determining the value of your real estate site?

  1. Links
  2. Links
  3. Links

And just as all locations are not created equal, not all links are created equal.

If you’re looking to build up a website that ranks well with search engines, then you’re number one focus should be on getting high quality inbound links (i.e. other sites linking to your site!). In particular, you want to build up as many inbound links from popular blogs and websites as you can. It’s common knowledge that 3 high-quality inbound links are more valuable than 1000 links from lame link farms… You want links into your site, but more importantly, you want quality links into your site!

Note that you do not get any search engine benefits from outbound links (links from your site to other sites). At best, outbound links won’t affect your ranking and at worst, they can seriously damage your ranking should you link to spam sites. In other words, if you’re linking to quality sites, you’re fine… If you’re linking to spam sites, you can expect the search engines to label you as spam.

Since there’s no benefit to outbound links, does this mean that you should not link to other sites?

No Way! Quite the contrary! Linking to other sites is critical to building up your site’s credibility with other bloggers. Join in some of the wonderful conversations that makes up the web and you’ll likely find that more and more people begin to link to your site. Find a blog you really like and then write articles about their articles! Link back to them and you’ll be surprised how quickly they start linking back to you! It’s actually a lot of fun to be part of this process.

There are very few sites that can build up credibility without linking to other sites and if you’re reading this blog looking for advice, you are probably not one of them. My advice to new bloggers: link… link… link… and link some more. Link to a blog saying something nice about their site, and there’s a pretty good chance they’ll link back to you!

So why are links so important

Links are the lifeblood of the web. The search engines rely heavily on links to determine how to rank your site. And more than any other factor, the rank of your site on search engines determines the value of your site. Granted, if you’re writing a blog for personal reasons, then you might not care how many people reach your site via search engines, but if you’re blogging to get clients, then you’re sites success depends on your how you are ranked by Google. Ranking high on Google searches generates web-traffic which generates leads which generate sales.

There are other ways to generate web-traffic, but none of them are as cheap and/or effective as generating leads through searches. (This site has a nice overview of how of how search engines work!)

So, all of this leads to an obvious question… How do you generate inbound links? Check back in a few days. I’ve got a bunch of ideas/thoughts on this subject. I’ll try to gather my thoughts and turn them into a post!

On a related note, I get asked by other bloggers on a regular basis if it is okay if they link to Rain City Guide. My answer is always “Yes”. I love links! Any business blogger who refused a link would be nuts.

7 Reasons for Real Estate Agents to Blog

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A recent conversation on Tribe got me thinking about my experiences with being a real estate blogger. Here are my seven reasons real estate agents should consider blogging:

  1. Fun. I really enjoy the many conversations that I’ve had with real estate professionals from all over the world that would never had taken place had I not started this blog!
  2. Expertise. By simply writing about real estate and your local community in a public forum (like this!) you become an expert. Anna gets emails and calls from people on a regular basis asking for her opinion on real estate issues. I’m a transportation engineer, but even my opinion on real estate issues holds some weight! For example, someone from my wife’s corporate office recently called to get advice on how to better use technology in real estate.
  3. Trust. A client recently told my wife that he completely trusted her advice because of the honesty in her writing! That’s darn near impossible to get with a regular website.
  4. Knowledge. I follow local news, national news, local blogs, real estate blogs, tech blogs, etc, because I feel a responsibility to my readers. Maybe you won’t feel that internal pressure, but it definitely drives me to ensure that I’m up-to-date on real estate news.
  5. Ranking. Because of all the unique content, we get hits on all kinds of unusual real estate searches. In addition, because we’ve gotten some links from some high-ranked websites (mostly other blogs), her site ranks really well when compared to most real estate sites. Additionally, on typical real estate searches like “Seattle real estate”, we’re ranked very high (#7 on Google) for such a new site and I know that we’re beating out sites that are spending $1000s a year on marketing their site.
  6. Cost. Compared to most marketing techniques that agents are using, blogging might as well be free. I pay $100 a year to host this site. That’s it! The cost of blogging is measured in time, not money!

    7. [photopress:Sasha_Drawing_1.jpg,thumb,alignright]

  7. Potential. Rain City Guide is not even 10 months old yet. Give us two or three years of blogging, and we’ll easily be the most popular real estate site in Seattle. Ideally, the site will continue to grow as the web technologies evolve and more perspectives are added. I’d love to do more podcasting and videoblogging. I’d love to have someone document the building or remodeling of their home. I’d love to have some more real estate agents blogging about their local areas (Seattle, Bellevue, Redmond, etc. neighborhoods). I’d love to have someone take on some more analytical issues (Tom?). There are so many interesting ways that Rain City Guide can evolve that I feel like we’re only touching the surface of it’s potential.

When I look into my crystal ball to see the future of real estate blogging, I see one or two real estate blogs in each major city that have really captured the local market by having a group of prolific real estate professionals (agents, brokers, lawyers, etc) writing about local issues. I see people turning to these blogs to get unique and personal perspectives on issues like moving, building, buying and listing. I don’t think you’ll be surprised to hear that that is where I plan on taking Rain City Guide!

What's in a Name?

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[photopress:thor.jpg,thumb,alignright] I like to think that Rain City Guide is constantly growing and evolving… Along those lines, Anna has been doing some growing (and evolving?) of her own lately. (She’s going to kill me for saying that!)

For those that don’t already know, Anna is expecting to have our second child in a little over a month.

So, let’s get down to business… What should we name the child?

Some ground rules:

  1. Boy or Girl: We don’t know if it is a boy or girl, so you’ve got twice as many names to suggest…
  2. Bilingual: Like her big sister, this child will grow up to be fluent in two languages (it is a must since one set of grandparents speak only Russian and the other only speaks English!). While I encourage you to suggest all types of names, if the Russians can’t pronounce it, I’m pretty sure that it won’t end up flying with Anna
  3. Outrageous: I love unusual names. Anna hates them. While I might be able to sneak past a name like Thor or Tyr, you can be pretty sure that we wont’ be naming our child after a major corporation.

Beyond that, I just look forward to reading your suggestions!

iGenHome…

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iGenHomeAn article from the Silicon Beat says that iGenHome is attempting to add a strong technology backend to the standard real estate agency. I’d imagine that just about anyone reading this blog knows that the real estate industry is set for some major technological changes in the near future and that I enjoy watching where the different players take it. I’ll be following this site and maybe have a full review in the near future… (Thanks Venture Blog for point out this article!)

It may sound too techy, but the first thing I look for in a new tech site is their support of RSS. (Scobleizer would understand!) So, I was disappointed to see no obvious RSS feeds available on their site. Even if you don’t know what they are, I’m of the opinion that you will be using them in the near future!

Here’s one example of how RSS feeds could be useful… I’ve begun presenting the “Latest Seattle Listings” here on my sidebar (if you’re reading this via a reader software, come check it out on the site!). This is just a little test of some RSS feed technology that I’ve been working on with Robbie Paplin of Caffeinated Software. We’ve got some other things up our sleeves that I find real interesting and I look forward to presenting more in the near future! By the way, is there a feed of Seattle home-data that you’d be interested in subscribing to? Let me know and I can probably make it happen for you!

The Long Winter

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I just started reading the 5th book in the Little House on the Prairie series (to my daughter!) and appropriately enough, it is called The Long Winter. Interestingly, it begins in the fall with Pa speculating that it is going to be a long winter because the Geese are flying fast and furious to the south (and least faster and more furious than usual).

Playing in SnowOn a related note, all signs are pointing to a long winter here in Seattle. From my office in Downtown, I could see the snow come down pretty furiously this past week, although there wasn’t much sticking in Seattle (yet!) until you got into the hills. And there is speculation that the real estate market is in for a long winter, but considering the usual slowdown in this time of year, we won’t really know the extent of the slowdown (if there is one) until Spring.

All of this makes me think that we’re going to need a lot of good blog reading to get us through this winter… So I decided to start with Chris Parillo’s list of Seattle real estate blogs and update it with some of the new sites that have been added since July.

My idea is to create a comprehensive list of Seattle blogs that cover real estate issues. I’m vigilant about following real estate news and websites here in Seattle and I’d be surprised if there was a real estate blog that has slipped passed me. However, that is definitely possible, but begs an obvious question. If you’re running a Seattle real estate blog that I don’t know about, why are you keeping such a low profile?

But before I give the list of active blogs, I first wanted to note that I was completely disappointed to hear that Tom had stopped posting on Seattle Property News. I thought he had one of the best real estate blogs around and he definitely encouraged me to take on some more analytical topics…

Without further ado, here are the Seattle sites that are actively covering real estate issues:

And here are the blogs I know of that are covering real estate related issues…

If you know of another site that should be included in this list, let us know by leaving a comment!

Reading Seattle

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Flying Santa CoverThe Restless Reader’s recent post on Seattle’s literary scene gives just one great reason for living in Seattle. I was fascinated (but not too surprised) to learn that 80% of Seattlites have a library card. (It was also fun to read that Seattle was rated the country’s most literate city.)

What’s my favorite bookstore in Seattle?

I’m partial to Ballard’s Secret Garden Bookshop. It’s definitely not the city’s largest book store, but it is a wonderful place to find a meaningful gift for kids. Just tonight, we stopped by this bookshop and had a wonderful conversation with Joe and Paula McHugh about their newest Children’s book called The Flying Santa. It seems that there is always something wonderful going on at the Secret Garden…

Major Upgrade Completed

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I’ve wanted to make some improvements to the layout of Rain City Guide for quite some time, and I finally found some time this weekend to get the changes made and tested.

For those who are curious, here is what I did…

I took a wonderful wordpress theme and started hacking at it in the following ways:

  • Added another column on the right to display my del.icio.us links, called “Worth Noting” (more on this in a minute).
  • Changed the colors around a bit.
  • Added recent comments and recent posts to the sidebar
  • Moved all the buttons down to the footer where they are less distracting (but still useful!)

I also made some more changes to the backend of the system, such as:

  • Upgrading to the latest version of WordPress, and
  • Changing the linking structure on the site so that all the pages get a direct link (instead of the “?p=xyz”).

Of all the changes, the one that I like best is the new “worth noting” feature. You might have noticed that a couple of weeks ago I started posting a set of links with a tiny bit of commentary (They always had the title “links for 2005-11-xy”). I REALLY enjoyed putting these collection of links together because it took almost no effort and yet it let me cover a whole lot of ground. However, the feedback that I got from these posts was that they looked ugly and showed that it took no effort to post! 🙂 Hence, I’ve been looking for a better way to display this links… and I’m hoping that the “worth noting” column is the answer.

The links from the Worth Noting column will not show up on the main feed from this site, so if you tend to read Rain City Guide using a feed reader (YEAH!), I also recommend subscribing to my “worth noting” feed. Not sure what a feed reader is? Here’s some background.

And one more last thing about the “worth noting” column that I think is worth noting… I’ve set it up to be a true community-based resource. If you want to post an item with a little bit of commentary to the “worth noting” column, all you have to do is to tag an item using del.icio.us with the phrase “raincityguide”. The link won’t immediately show up because I cache the feed for about an hour, but I assure you that the link and commentary that you write will show up on the site sooner than later. Now, I realize that this method has the potential to be abused, but I think that the readers of rain city guide are generally considerate people, so I’m not too worried. As a matter of fact, I look forward to seeing what links you bring to my attention!

(If you are wondering if this is the RSS announcement I was planning to make, it’s not! There’s still more to come!)

Of course not everything can go too smoothly… There are two issues that escaped my testing that are yet to be resolved:

  1. The search form does not work when searching from within a post (it works from the main page!)

  2. The site simply won’t load using internet explorer on a mac (I get an error that says “Handler could not be removed” which means nothing to me yet!)

Neither of these issues seems like a show stopper, so I’m not going to role back to the old layout… Can you find any other bugs with the new site? I’d definitely like to know.

Now that I’ve given my opinion on the good and the bad of the new layout, I’d be curious to hear what you think!

UPDATE: Solved the search issue thanks to some help on this wonderfully active post for the Regulus theme.

However, since then I’ve also found out that my footer needs some work… So much to do and so little time!

Is Santa Planning on Moving to Seattle?

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I don’t mean to brag, but I was just checking my log files and I noticed that someone from the North Pole found my site while searching for real estate on Google.

I imagine the street level up there is pretty high this time of year. I wonder if one of the elves is thinking of getting out of manufacturing and into a more high-tech job?

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Also, if you look closely, you’ll notice that my North Pole visitor had cookies enabled 🙂

Real Simple Syndication (RSS) for Real Estate

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Duck Flapping WingsI can tell from some of the questions I got from my past post about RSS feeds that I was going over some people’s heads. As the resident geek here at Rain City Guide, I feel it is my responsibility to explain RSS feeds and why they are so cool… So let’s begin with the big picture…

Who cares about RSS?
Imagine that you could create a newspaper that only included content that you were interested in. Mine definitely would not include tables if yesterday’s stock quotes! But what would it include? My ideal newspaper would be completely personalized to my interests and include this type of information:

  • Current world, local, real estate, transportation, and tech news
  • Commentary from my favorite writers on world news, local news, real estate, transportation and tech issues
  • The latest photos of my friends and family
  • A photo and description of every new home that came on the market in Anna’s market area
  • Upcoming local events
  • Blog articles written by people who are moving to Seattle

But wait! I’ve already got that newspaper and it is delivered (digitally) to one place every day. Even better, it is delivered continuously throughout the day as new articles appear. My newspaper is ALWAYS up-to-date. It includes selected articles from the New York Times, the Seattle Times, the Seattle PI and 4500 other newspapers!. As a matter of fact, I’ve created such an awesome newspaper that I rarely search the web anymore for new content. Just about all the content that I could possible be interested in gets delivered to me! And best of all, this newspaper with articles, commentary, data and photos personalized to my tastes is delivered to me FREE!

How does this work?
Through the magic of RSS.

What is RSS?
RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. The idea behind RSS is that a website (newspaper, blog, photo site, etc) publishes a text file on their site with a very specific (RSS) format so that other sites can “ping” this one text file to find the latest news, information, photos (or home listings!). The text file is pretty ugly to look at (here is Rain City Guide’s RSS feed), but that is beside the point, because users should never be looking at a raw RSS feed. Instead, users (that means you!) should get a feed reader that will parse all the ugly text and reformat it in a nice, easy-to-read package.

Have a lost you yet?
Stick with me, and I hopefully you’ll start to see what makes RSS feeds so cool (at least in a geeky sort of way!).

Ducks at LakeWhy go through all the hassle to get a site’s RSS feed when you can just go to the site whenever you’re interested in reading their content?
The beauty of the RSS feed is that updated information is brought to you! Ever since I’ve started using a feed reader, I find myself searching the web for interesting information a lot less because interesting information is brought to me! To give you an idea of the diversity of feeds available, here are some of the things that are delivered to the inbox of my feed reader every time new information is published:

I mention these items just to give you a picture of the diversity of feeds that are available. In reality, over 100 of my feeds are all from bloggers, but the options for different feeds are massive and growing every day. I’ve really enjoyed being able to read articles and see photos from all of these sources within one place (a feed reader!), which brings me to…

So where do I get one of these feed readers so that I can create my own on-line newspaper?
There are a ton of feed readers available. Some of them are desktop-based and some are web-based. Most of my experience has been on the following three web-based options, so I’m going to limit my opinion to these three, but feel free to search beyond my experience:

I began using MyYahoo years ago, and then a while back (months? years?) they added the ability to add any RSS feed to a user’s MyYahoo page. I took advantage of this and enjoyed it so much that MyYahoo page became extremely cluttered. I clearly needed a better option which is when I turned to Bloglines. Bloglines allows you to categorize your feeds into an unlimited number of folders and it does a great job of keeping track of which articles you’ve already read, making it extremely popular and easy-to-use program. Plus it is 100% web-based so that if you log into the service and read an article on one computer (let’s say at work) then when you log in from home, your home computer will know that you’ve already read that article… Bloglines is a great way to keep up on your favorite news, blogs, etc.

Ducks PlayingI’ve also been playing around with Google’s new feed reader called GoogleReader. It’s a great option as well and I really like that it has an “relevance” option that brings the things I’m most likely to be interested in to the top of my list of things to read.

What’s next?
My hope is that if you’re new to RSS feeds, then at least you are starting to see that they have a ton of potential. They are everywhere and Scobleizer (over at Microsoft) would even argue that they are essential for new web companies! Feeds are only going to become more popular, so if you want to be a web-savvy individual, it is time to hop on the band wagon and try it out!

And if you’ve made it this far, you’ll start to notice orange RSS “badges” all over the web. These badges are letting you know that you can read this site’s content from your blog reader.

For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to assume you are using GoogleReader… To add Rain City Guide to GoogleReader, here is what you need to do:

  1. Go to GoogleReader
  2. In the search box, type is “Rain City Guide” and click “Search for New Content”.
  3. Where you see “Seattle’s Rain City Real Estate Guide”, click on the Subscribe button. This will add Rain City Guide’s RSS feed to your GoogleReader.

It is that simple to add a feed. In addition, most sites offer an “+ to XYZ” buttons like this one (Add to Google) from Google. There are bunch more feed readers on the market, and I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible to add Rain City Guide, so I’ve added a button for all the ones that I’m aware of on my sidepanel.

Also, if you are interested in real estate feeds, feel free to grab the real estate feeds that I follow by downloading this file to your hard-drive and using the “import” feature within GoogleReader to add these feeds. (To do this you will need to (1) click on “Your Subscriptions” and (2) on the pull down menu that says “more actions”, click on “import”. Then (3) just follow the instructions to import the XML file.)

So why all the big fuss about RSS feeds? And what does this have to do with real estate?
I’ve been playing around with some ideas I have for an RSS feed of real estate listings and before I announce anything, I needed to have a post I could turn to where I could say “This is what an RSS feed is and why you should care!” There’s nothing I’m ready to present yet, but if you’re interested in being an alpha-tester, let me know and I’ll pass along a link soon enough!

Real Estate Search Options (with an Emphasis on Feeds)

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View from a Houseboat in SeattleAs promissed a few weeks ago, I’ve been updating my list of real estate search technologies on a regular basis.

Thanks to your emails (along with a little curiosity on my part) , I’ve been able to add more sites in the list in the past few days. If you know of any other sites, definitely let me know!

One of the more interesting options I’ve seen is CityCrybs. I really like that they’re offering RSS feeds (a topic worthy of another post!), but seeing as how all of their listings are for the East Coast, I can’t really play around with the site much and understand if the results are any good. Can anyone from the East Coast share their opinion on this site?

Along these lines, would anyone in the Seattle area be interested in an RSS feed of homes as they get listed in the MLS? It really wouldn’t be very hard to put together, but I’m not sure who it would appeal to. In other words, for most people, getting a listing of every home that comes on the market would be overkill (even for a small geographic area) unless you just wanted to use the list to “keep up” on your neighborhood. But are there some specialized feeds that would appeal to people? The first example that comes to my mind would be for an investor who would be interested in finding about each home that has a low $/s.f. ratio? Maybe a feed of homes that have been on the market for over 60 days? Hmm… How about each houseboat that comes on the market?

Do you have another idea for a real estate listing feed? I’m definitely interested in hearing about it!