This week’s worst youtube real estate video is a luxury apartment in Singapore’s Orchard Residences. All in all, not the absolute worst real estate video we have featured. It is short, to the point and thank goodness - whoever shot it took my advice and bought themselves a tripod.

With a mechanical pan facility judging from the incredibly annoying tick, whirr, tick, click of the mechanism which is the only sound on this video. How hard can it be to find and add a suitable soundtrack?

At least it is not a slide show

Now this is a hot subject in real estate marketing, luxury or otherwise. How to generate traffic to your website by using social networking sites. There appear to be more social networking sites than fleas on a dog, so the first thing to do is determine which social networking sites you are going to use and how to best use those sites to generate traffic and links to your own website or blog.

After deciding which sites are appropriate for you, the next thing to do is be active on those sites. And I don’t mean spend 12 hours a day on the ‘net, just some activity. To all those I hear muttering, “But I don’t have time,” - Find some time. There is no rule that says you must have a website, or that you must spend time social networking on these sites, but if you have decided you are going to have a web presence - then have a web presence.

I am constantly amazed at the amount of people I interact with on these sites, and what a waste of time most of this interaction is. I will give a for instance. I am a member of facebook and this is a link to my profile there - Mark Knowles on facebook.

At facebook, I joined a real estate bloggers group, thinking I would find a great group of real estate bloggers to network with After a little wandering through this group’s activities, I slowly came to the conclusuion that there were no bloggers there - the thing is chock-a-block full of advertisements for property for sale and “investment opportunities in Pakistan.”

In frustration, I posted a message to their wall which basically said:

Hellooooooo ! (echo, echo, echo) Are there any actual real estate bloggers here because I want to do some networking with you? I’m a really cool guy and I run a very high quality luxury real estate blog and can send some great links your way. (I am nothing if not modest)

751 members. Guess how many responses?

One!

That is correct - one single, solitary response.

The person who responded is Suzanne Grace, of Grace & Associates, a real estate agent in Thousand Oaks who sells real estate in California. This the welcome message on her website:

We are Grace & Associates, YOUR Real Estate Agents for REAL Life, and we LOVE helping YOU with all of YOUR Real Estate needs… the opportunity to help the first-time buyer buy that first home, the family relocating to their next home or helping a seller get the most money, the quickest sale, all with relative ease, gives us a great deal of satisfaction!

So, if you are wondering how to use social networking sites to drive traffic and links to your real estate blog or website, this is a good example. Just by responding to a simple question and saying hello in a friendly fashion, Suzanne now has a high quality backlink using fantastic anchor text from a high page-rank, authority real estate blog to her website

It may not pay off today, or even tomorrow, but some when in the future, this link will either send a visitor or cause the search engines to rank her page just a little higher when some one is looking for real estate in California and bingo ! Worth the time?

I bet that headline got your attention. I am not sure if the part about being lazy is true, or more the fact that real estate agents in general are still having trouble coming to grips with the crossover between online and offline networking.

I have begged for and been given ten tickets to the upcoming soiree at the Zen Mansion in Denver, Colorado and have offered them to various luxury agents I have an online relationship with.

Only one person has taken me up on the offer so far. This is the flyer for the event. Ignore the recommended cover charge – these are freebies from me.

So, seriously – if there are any luxury real estate agents in the Denver, Colorado area interested in what has to be one of the best networking opportunities in luxury real estate marketing – for free ! Drop me a line, Mark Knowles or call 877-LUX-SOIREE and tell them Mark sent you.

Yet another slide show is this week’s featured worst youtube real estate video. A bad slide show. No editing whatsoever as far as I can tell. Just a quick jump from one out-of-focus photograph to another.

And just a few little details left out – such as where exactly this house is, how much it costs or who is selling it. The kind of details you might think were worth including on a “Treasure Lake Real Estate Homes For Sale,” video. No attempt has been made to do anything with this video. Not even a sound track added.
Which actually brings me to another question about real estate videos posted to youtube. I did find a few recently with what I consider to be good backing music. But then I had a thought – Who owns that music? Did the real estate agent go to the trouble of asking and paying for permission to use a piece of music by Sting, for instance? I wonder if Mr. Sting knows his music is being used to sell a million-dollar plus home? I wonder if he wants a cut? Knowing Sting, I suspect the answer is yes.

I also love these two guys – they are sooooo bad, they are funny. Does sex sell real estate? Silly question really.

The harshening of conditions in the Luxury real estate market has prompted one real estate agent to get off her tush and try doing something about dropping interest in million dollar plus homes in Oregon

Photo Credit - Anthony Dimaano/ The Bulletin

Faced with falling interest in some of the million dollar properties listed, realtor Sophie Bielefeld invited local agents who specialize in houses priced at over a million dollars to join her “luxury property network.”

The group meets once a month to discuss ways of creating interest in their listings, and although no sales have resulted from the network just yet, Ms. Bielefeld, who is also a property developer seems hopeful. “The Bend Bulletin,” a central-Oregon-based online newspaper reports:

The number of luxury homes or properties worth $1 million or more has increased in Central Oregon in the past decade due to rising property values, rising construction costs and demand from new residents and second-home owners, Bielefeld said.

It’s not just sprawling homes or 10-acre properties with spectacular mountain views that are rising in value, however. Bielefeld said the cost of land in some areas has risen so much that even large homes without luxury upgrades may reach $1 million in valuation by the time construction concludes.

Bielefeld said there are approximately 165 properties on the Central Oregon Multiple Listing Service for homes, or homes with acreage, worth $1 million or more. Sales of those homes jumped in 2004 during the housing boom and reached a high of 95 last year, according to the Central Oregon Association of Realtors.

According to a report published by the Bratton Appraisal Group, based in Bend, there are currently 104 single family homes priced at more than $1 million in Bend. Based on sales over the previous year, this equates to a thirty month supply. Six months’ supply is considered normal.

The Luxury Property Network has a blog here. It’s just a pity they are not based in Arkansas. The Luxury property in Arkansas domain name is still available.

Demonstrating the effect of a weak Dollar and a strong Euro, one of Manhattan’s long time iconic buildings has just been sold to a foreign purchaser. The Flatiron building.

Italian businessman, Valter Mainetti has confirmed that his company, the Sorgente Group, has acquired a majority share of Manhattan’s historic Flatiron building (53% I understand.)

The Flatiron Building was designed by Chicago’s Daniel Burnham in the Beaux-Arts style and was one of the tallest buildings in New York when it was completed in 1902. Originally called the Fuller building, its limestone and glazed terra-cotta façade is separated into three parts horizontally. Since it was one of the first buildings to use a steel skeleton, the building could be constructed to 285 feet (87 m), which would have been very difficult with other construction methods of that time.

At the rounded tip, the triangular tower is only 6.5 feet (2 meters) wide. The 22-story building, with a height of 285 ft (87 meters), is often considered the oldest surviving skyscraper in Manhattan, though in fact the Park Row Building (1899) is both older and taller.

New York’s Flatiron Building is not the first building of its type. It is the third building in the flatiron shape, with the first being the Gooderham Building of Toronto, built in 1892, and the second in Atlanta in 1897. Both of which are smaller than their New York counterpart. If it’s in NY it better be big.

We certainly wonder how much of the top-end U.S. real estate will remain in American hands with the current state of the dollar. Foreign purchases of iconic U.S. buildings over the last few years include the Rockefeller center and Essex House. According to “Real Estate Alert,” foreign companies were the buyers in four of the top 13 U.S. commercial real estate deals in 2007.

It certainly makes sense to market properties to buyers with money to spend and the only real question is whether you should be learning to speak Arabic, Russian or Italian first?

Every one knows you “have to have a blog to get ahead in real estate marketing.” At least, that is what many of the gurus tell you. And it’s true – sometimes.

So, let us assume you have decided you need a blog, and have also decided that you wish to host it yourself on your own domain name. This actually makes the most sense. It is a little more work than one of the free options I wrote about last time:

You need a blog to get ahead in real estate marketing

So why would you choose to host your own blog rather than use a free one and what is the best way to go about doing so?

It offers almost total control and much more importantly – allows you to carefully select some of the keywords you will want to target. This site for instance-

Luxury Property .com

Any guesses as to some of the keywords we wish to attract? Silly question but when considering a domain name for your blog, vital. So, let’s say you are a luxury property agent in Little Rock, Arkansas.

A quick search at who.is.com tells me that the domain name luxurypropertyarkansas.com is available. You can take it from me that if you are wanting to target the keyphrase “Luxury Property in Arkansas,” this is a good starting point, and if I was a luxury real estate agent in Arkansas, I would be snapping up this domain at the bargain price of $5.99

Luxuryrealestatearkansas is taken by the way. But it is a dead site and I suspect for sale if anyone is interested.

Do not be persuaded to buy any of the other domains such as .biz, .net, .org, .anythingbutcom. They are available for a reason. Only buy them to prevent others from doing so or to redirect to your main .com domain.

So, let us now assume you have decided on a domain name and it is available. The next step is to buy the domain. Nothing could be easier. I usually use godaddy and it is a matter of a few mouse clicks and giving them your details and credit card.

Now you have your domain and the next step is to buy some hosting. I use bluehost.com for my own domains, but there are no shortage of hosting companies.

The other thing I recommend is to buy the domain from one supplier, but host it at a different company. That is why I buy them from godaddy but host them at bluehost. Just in case.

Next step is to transfer the domain to your hosting company. This varies from company to company, but is, once again a matter of a few mouse clicks. Instructions will be found on whichever hosting company you have chosen’s FAQ page.

Now the fun starts……… to be continued. And if anyone wants to buy luxurypropertyarkansas, I will happily talk you through the process. Leave me a comment.