Real Estate Industry Blog Roundup – Lack of transparency – New tools and Time to look for a new agent?

Real estate blogs are an excellent way of reaching out to a wider audience and there are a number of good ones around offering oodles of advice to agents, industry news and local observations. More so than newspapers, many of these blogs have no ax to grind and no sponsor to satisfy thus can offer genuinely impartial advice and opinion.

Transparent real estate points out one of the upcoming issues with lack of transparency in bank accounting of repossesed homes. Quite rightly, they point out that part of the cause of the current financial issues facing everyone, not just real estate industry was lack of transparency in bank practices.

The Blood Hound Blog has an interesting post on an agent’s responsibility to be honest with sellers and persuade them to be realistic in pricing property for sale. “Your child is ugly.”

The Real Estate Tomato has a list of “8 Things That You Are Not Doing On Your Real Estate Blog, But Should Be.” Top of their list (although I don’t think the list is in order of preference) is “failling to twitter.” And if you are interested in my twits. I can be found here – Mark Knowles on Twitter.

1000 watt has a list of real estate relevant APIs available. All of which are free.

Urban Digs believes transparency is vital if the industry is to recover swiftly, and has a few predictions about the size of the New York Housing bubble, predicting that it will overshoot on the way down.

The Real Estate Bloggers have a reminder of how we got in this mortgage mess, with a quote from 1999. It is fair to say that the government actively encouraged over-lending to poor risks. And this disease then spread far and wide. The multi-million dollar bonuses for repackaging the loans and selling them on didn’t exactly help either.

Soot and Ashes; reinventing America after the crash, wonders at Mr. Obama’s “stimulus plan” and assesses the cost as being $15,000 per home and $1,500 per car. Like myself they question the logic of borrowing more money to get yourself out of a hole you dug by over-borrowing in the first place. The British government is functionally bankrupt and the US government seems headed that way.

The Real Estate Bakery has a list of “The Top Ten Signs You Need a New Real Estate Agent.” Which is worth a read just to make sure………

And, if you are in the Seattle area, 360 digest has a list of real estate agent meetings to share marketing ideas and network.

Image courtesy – Ian Marshall Realty