Real Estate Information, Articles & News

Craigslist Ghosting

Nov01
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Zitrof

Has anyone else had problems posting ads on Craigslist? Craigslist Ghosting apparently is the label given to the situation which occurs when you post an ad on craigslist, the ads shows on your profile pages as posted, but is not found on the search list.

Recently I had posted a few ads and noticed that I had was not receiving any response from the ads – I normally do. So I was wondering what was going on with the ads and did a little research. When I did a search for my ad I could not find, yet my craigslist account said the ads were “live”.

Apparently what happens is that when you create an ad and click post, to make your ad go “Live” you are not aware and are given no indication that your ad is going to be ghosted by craigslist. You go through the normal posting process like you normally would for posting any ad. In fact you are given an URL as if it did go live, but it never shows up on the main page of Craigslist. The problem is that under certain circumstances the staff at Craigslist and/or the algorithm they have created, decides that there is something wrong with your post and your post will never go really live.

I have read several post, blogs, and forums and apparently very few people if any know how to get around the craigslist ghosting problem. Sure there are a few people out that claim to have ways to beat the ghosting system, but they want to charge. The best I could find were some tips on how to avoid your craigslist ads from being ghosted, and here they are:

  • Don’t post more that once a week.
  • Use a Proxy (changes your IP address location) and/or use several accounts with each different IP address.
  • Change the wording on each post.
  • Don’t Use HTML and/or links
  • Don’t use images hosted on certain site….(don’t know which)

Most of these tips really made no sense to me, but they were what I found.

My suggestion – Craigslist became popular because were able to post free ads, and search the ads that were posted – So, post your ads elsewhere. Here are a few other Classifieds website that are still free:

You can post of thesee too, but I had problems with them also filtering ads:

And then there are obviously several other niche classifieds websites depending on what kind of ads you are looking to post – but you will have to find those by searching for your niche.

I know everyone likes craigslist due to it’s traffic, but like many others, they got big and forgot where they came from – they are now killing the people who made them who they are today – the same people who can bring them back down.

So my suggestion, if your are having problems with Craigslist Ghosting – use another classifieds website!

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Massachusetts Court Ruling on REO Properties could cause problems to those who Bought

Oct21
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Zitrof

I know I am not in MA, but the recent Massachusetts Court Ruling on REO Properties could cause problems to those who bought Bank Owned Properties in other states if they adopt a similar law.

Basically the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that a homeowner who had purchased a home in foreclosure did not have legal ownership of the property and therefore could not resell it. The reason: The bank failed to properly process the title when foreclosing on it.

This decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court could casts a cloud over the legal ownership of any properties in Massachusetts (and could filter elsewhere) where banks didn’t properly convey title when foreclosing. It really all comes down to the broken chains of title on foreclosures. If you don’t know what that is, well, that the reason why you have title insurance, and a attorney or title company that ensure you are receiving a “clear title” when buying a home. Without a clear title, the owner of the property could not be the rightful owner…

The MA court’s ruling follows an earlier court decision that voided a foreclosure after banks couldn’t prove they owned the mortgage when it started the process.

The most recent “ruling took that decision one step further by finding that sales of bank-owned properties with clouded title were invalid, even after an unwitting third-party buyer later bought the bank-owned property,” The Wall Street Journal notes.

This is going to get really hairy, and not just in Massachusetts, this court ruling could be used as a guideline for other states, and cause a lot of homeowners to either loose the property or make a claim in the title insurance – but what if the title insurer closes down? Remember back a little while ago when the Title Insurance companies did not want to insure any Bank Owned Properties that was for sale?

I have no idea how this is going to play out in the real estate market, but I do know one thing, this Massachusetts court ruling on Bank Owned Properties is going to definitely impact the Banks, REO’s and Real Estate in general….

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Realtors disrespecting the MLS

Oct19
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Zitrof

Today I was looking up and calling for showing instructions on some properties from the MLS for one of the agents in our office, I was disapointed with the apparent disrespect that realtors have for their most valuable tool – the MLS! Yes, this is one of those venting posts….

I looked up 20 properties that looked like good candidates for the client, since I like to do things old school, I call! I don’t really care what show assist says, I call. I want to talk to you, make sure we are not wasting our time and you have 10 offers, or be surprised when we get to the property. Can you believe that out of the 20 properties I called on only one (1) was actually available!

Most of the properties were already under contract, could not be seen due to having problems with a tenant, the property was off the market, or some other lame reason. To me that is not just disrespectful to other agents, but unethical.

I say unethical because I know what these realtors were doing, they are using these properties as marketing techniques. Since the properties are listed on the MLS they are looking to receive calls from buyers for the properties, properties that are no longer available!

The client was looking for a property under 60k. The Agents left these “off the market” properties on the MLS so that they can show on all the IDX websites including realtor.com, and get leads.

I think those Realtors are disrespecting the MLS – one of our greatest tools. Why would you have to resort to these cheap tactics to get clients, all they are doing is ruining the MLS, and the little respect clients have for realtors.

I say they are causing clients to loose respect because now when they call another Broker that person has to tell that client that those properties are not available – that sounds just like a used car salesman! We are supposed to be professionals, not con-artists!

I was kind enough to let these agents know that if the property is off the market they should change the listing status to “off the market” or “temporarily off the market”. I mean, does that not make sense? Why would they cause extra work for other agents and cause clients to loose trust in our profession?

Point of the story, if you need clients work for them, and earn them through your professionalism and hard work – not unethical practices! Please respect the MLS, your profession and our Clients.

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Beware of Rental Home Scams

Oct18
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Zitrof

If you are in the market to rent a home, you need to beware of rental home scams that are going around. In too many cases it has been reported that scammers are posting rental home ads online, specially on places such as Craigslist and other rental home classifieds.

The unsuspecting renter contacts the fake owner, and since too often the offer is a great deal (remember if it’s too good to be true, it normally is) the renter gives the scammer a deposit check.

Now there are several variations of this rental home scam:

In some cases the scammer just walks away with the security deposit from several victimized renters, and in other case the scammer actually rents the property to the renter and collects rent until the scam is discovered.

Vacant home and Foreclosed properties are the prime candidates for this rental scam. In some cases it has even been reported that the scammer cleans up the house, and does some landscaping – or provides a discount for the renter to do the clean up.

Police and Realtors are encouraging renters to work with a licensed real estate professional or property management firms to make sure they’re renting a property that is indeed for rent by a legitimate landlord.

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Search Engine Optimization for Realtors

Oct17
2011 Leave a Comment Written by Zitrof

In this tough real estate market, every realtor is trying to increase their search engine presence in order to attract a larger percentage of the few buyers that are out there. Search Engine Optimization for Realtors pretty much like any other type of SEO technique, aside from the inbound links.

Because real estate is considered a niche market, you should generate inbound links from other real estate related websites. This will increase your ranking for keywords oriented around “Real Estate”, and ultimately that is the major keyword we are all trying to gain results from.

So how do you SEO your real estate website to gain better results? It’s really not that complicated, make sure your home page is optimized with the keywords that you would like to attract results from. For example, use keywords for your local demographical area such as the city and county.

One of the best things to do is to write articles/blogs about your local area, city, communities, or HOA’s. Being that your are linking back to your website from a page that contains information on that area, it should increase the results of your real estate website’s search engine optimization.

Now let’s talk about how to write that content

Whether you are writing content for your website, or submit an article on this website, your content should be optimized to match some of the criteria set by search engines. They are not difficult, and the specifics change constantly, but we are going to address the basics of writing search engine optimized content.

The content you write should have one main keyword, and another one or two secondary keywords.

The title of your post/article should include the main “keyword” of your post. The title should be no longer that 50 characters.

The Content/Body should contain the main keyword within the first 15-20 words of the body. The main keyword, along with the secondary keywords should be scattered in the body and should take up 2/3% of the entire content of the article. The article should contain the main keyword within the last 30 words.

The Tags should be just your keywords, with a maximum of 5 tags per post.

The tags will be converted to the meta keywords when you post on this website and normally the first 120 characters will become the meta description on the header of the page. If you are posting on your own website then you would have to include these manually.

If you have any questions about Search Engine Optimization, please leave us a comment below.

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