Yes is it true. You can get a great deal on a short sale. For those that aren’t sure what a short sale is a brief explanation is the bank or investor is willing to take less than what is owed on the property and can most likely, write the loss off their taxes.

Many times if you can be patient, you can get a much better deal on a short sale than a bank owned or foreclosed property. The key is to be patient and keep looking. If you are working with an agent make sure they are willing to show you short sale property. Here are a few questions your agent should ask the listing realtor to find out if they have done their homework or know what they are doing.

•Is the sale approved by the bank or investor?

•Has all the required paperwork been submitted to the loss mitigation department? (i.e., hardship letter from the seller, financials substantiating why they are in trouble with the mortgage payments.)

•Have there been any offers on the property?

•If so, have any been accepted?

•If not, why? (You have to have someone willing to dig deeply and be bold about asking questions of the listing agent or you could be in for a long process.)

•If yes, do you know the banks’ “net amount” they are willing to take for the property?

•If you know the net amount, you know the purchase price and what the bank is willing to take for the property. All your agent has to do is put in all the numbers, like realtor commissions, taxes, any liens against the property - sometimes the water has been turned off and the power is off. You know what I mean.

I have done numerous short sales and some additional tips to keep in mind are things like, is the seller willing to sign at escrow? I have only had this happen once and the seller was angry he was losing the home and wouldn’t sign the closing documents because the buyer was able to purchase the home at a huge discount and the bank wouldn’t work with him to refinance into an affordable rate. He eventually signed but what a tense situation! If you are offering on a sale that has had no offers and yours is the first, be patient and set your expectations as such. It could take a while. Sometimes it pays off BIG. You get a great home at a great value and the seller gets to move on with their life and the bank saves the cost of foreclosure and holding costs on the property. It really can be a win-win for all parties.

Robert is a real estate agent in Auburn, CA and has done numerous short sale and REO or bank owned foreclosure transactions. For more information please visit http://seebobnow.com or email at seebob@seebobnow.com.

It is not advisable to use  free “hosted” blogging system as your sole real estate blogging platform. It is okay, if you use it for personal blogging or secondary realty blog.

The reason is you are putting all your hard-work in someone else’s server, domain name and control.The free blogging service can shut down your blog without any reason. To ensure that your hard work, branding and credibility are under your total control, you need a self-hosted Wordpress blog with your own domain name.

For those who have already started Realty Blogging using Wordpress. Bravo! But apart from just posting about your property listings, your Wordpress blog is capable of having more powerful real estate functions.

With Realty Blogging, you can:

• Enhance your overall business
• Generate leads
• Supplement your current marketing efforts
• Position you as an expert in your selected niche
• Share real estate information and tips with your clients and visitors
• Brand building for competitive advantage
• Expose your property listing to a wider audience
• Communicate directly with your customers online.
• Differentiate your business from your competitor,
• Enhance and build long-lasting relationship with your customers,
• Exploit and dominate your niche market.
• Get media attention and for public relations

You may have read about realty blogging and the ‘how-to’s. But are you able to put the theories into practice? It is easier said than done. Now you can … You can get practical step-by-step instructions (easily to follow even if you are a newbie) and a Wordpress plug-in.

Do you want your  blog to be a lead generation machine? Do you want property search functions? Google map on your blog. Do you want to capture both buyer and seller leads? Do you want higher return traffic? Do you want to drive more traffic to your blog? Search engine optimize your bog? Build your branding?

Realty Wordpress plugin is a plugin that converts your blog into a full-featured real estate blog.

Find out how you can move your realty blogging up a notch.

Click here: Realty Blogging Profits.

When you have a blog posting, which have a URL link to your property details on a real estate portal, the visitor will click on the link and land on the portal. The good news is that the visitors get all the relevant details and map of the property. But the BAD news is that, the visitor can also view other similar properties by your competitors. And sorry, the VERY BAD news is with the vast listing of available properties right before their eyes, the prospect may not return to your blog,

It is best to have a one-way link from the real estate portal to you and NOT the other way round.

So what you need is a full-featured real estate blog that allows you to store and search for the property listing and details on your Wordpress blog, without relying on external sites.  It should also have a back link feature that sends your property listing automatically to the real estate portals, to increase visibility of your listing.

The Features include:

• Create a full featured Real Estate Wordpress blog
• Add property details onto a form attached to your Wordpress post.
• Add Google Map, unlimited photos and video to your property listing.
• Have a Real Estate Property Search form that allows your visitors to search by property type, location, price range, transaction type and keywords.
• Add your customized Listing option to the blog’s sub-menu. Can list by property type, area, city and keyword.
• Automatically display Google map in property detail page.
• Can insert Google map in any posting.
• Automatically display a Mortgage Calculator in the detail page for properties.
• Display multiple properties on a Google map.
• Option to switch to Map View, Grid View and List View.
• Can display a slide-show of Featured or Latest properties on the sidebar.
• Lead generation by allowing buyers and sellers to submit properties wanted/for sale/rent.
• View and maintain property listing on the RealtyWP Admin panel.
• Increase your listing visibility by submitting XML data feed to Zillow.com and Trulia.com
• Home valuation form submission.
• Easily add an Opt-in Form for subscribers to sign-up for newsletter or free reports. Requires an external auto responder service.
• Automatically display Related Properties listing on property details page.
• Maintain Open-House details.

To download the Real Estate Plugin, please click HERE.

http://www.squidoo.com/building-your-branding-with-a-real-estate-blog

Once you have your real estate blog up and running, the next step is to drive traffic to your blog. An effective way to get traffic and back links is to use Social Bookmarking sites. Among the top social bookmarking sites are  Digg.com, Del.icio.us, Technorati.com, Propeller.com, StumbleUpon.com, Reddit.com and Mixx.com.

Identify your keywords, sign-up and tag your site or posting with the keywords.

To help you to quickly submit to 48 best social bookmarking sites, check out the following link:

http://www.socialmarker.com

From experience, it is very easy to get blogs indexed by search engines such as Google. There is no doubt that search engine just love blogs, which are updated more frequently with fresh contents, compared to static websites.

Blog postings are also easier to get on the first and second pages of search engine results, provided you know which keywords to target. Initially, I used to create static website coded in PHP. It takes longer time to create and longer time to get them indexed and ranked on Google. With a Wordpress blog, I do not have to be concerned with  PHP/HTML coding for each new page or posting. Now, I just have to concentrate on writing unique keyword-rich content and then click the “Publish” button.

Wordpress is the blogging system of choice because it has many features not available on Blogger and other free hosted blogs. You can setup Wordpress to automatically ping all RSS and blog feed directories everytime you add a new post. This is a very powerful feature which can drive traffic to your blog very quickly. You can also add new real estate data files to the Wordpress database, thereby allowing you to key in your property listing. There is no way you can access the Blogger database. Another feature of Wordpress is the ability to add functionality by adding plugins such as the RealtyWordpress plugin.

The 10 Steps To A Money Making Real Estate Blog are as follows:

1. Keyword Research on Your Niche market.
2. Get a Domain Name (with your selected keyphrase) and a Hosting Account.
3. Install Wordpress from CPanel.
4. Install and setup Realty Wordpress (RealtyWP) Plugin & Theme.
5. Install recommended  plugins.
6. Write Your Real Estate Content. At least 3 postings a week.
7. Add your property listings with RealtyWP Add Property Form.
8. SEO your blog.
9. Drive traffic to your blog.
10. Implement Real Estate Blogging Profits Tactics.

Good luck!

In this competitive marketplace, by just having a real estate blog is not good enough, You have to provide a benefit to your visitor in order for them to come back for more.

1. Information Rich Content. People visit a website to look for information to find a solution to their current problems, worries and concern. Yes, content is king. Give them the information they want and they will stay and return for more. The key is to provide information, which they cannot get anywhere else. Write about current market conditions, price trends, hot properties and investment tips, to name a few.

2. Property Search & Listing. Most real estate blogger add their property listing to a post. However, it is difficult for the visitors to scan through the posting. Make it difficult for them, and they will click away to another site. The visitors want to quickly search for properties matching their criteria. Provide a Property Search form and they will come back regularly.

3. Build relationships. A blog is a good tool to build relationship with your visitors. You can create trust, goodwill and appreciation by providing useful tips and quality contents. Write interesting and thought provoking postings and encourage people to submit comments and feedbacks on your posting. When a reader submits a query, go all out to provide a credible and useful response. Make them feel comfortable with you, and when they are comfortable, they will contact you when they are ready to do business with you.

4. Blog stickiness. One of your blog’s goals is to get your target market to visit your site often and then getting them to stay for a while to view other pages. You want the visitors to feel that they are a part of your online community. You can create “stickness” by having a daily or weekly featured property, daily or weekly real estate related advice or tips.

5. Provide interactivity and ease of  navigation. Make it easy for your visitors to move around your blog and get the information that they want quickly.  By having a pull-down listing  by property groups, the visitors can quickly scan through available properties.

Click here for more information on how the Realty Wordpress plugin can easily allow you to have a full-featured real estate blog.