I want you to try 2 things.

1. Go to Google and type in real estate technology and look to see where this site ranks: http://realestatetoolbox.com

2. Then go to Google and type in: free real estate advice and see where this site of ours ranks: http://freerealestateadvice.com

For this site, we are typically in the top 6 results, but look around and see who I am competing with. Huge sites like realtor.com and others, the same with the other site I mentioned in # 2 where we are typically the top organic result.

How is it that little ole’ me ranks ahead of most huge companies like Realtor.com, Trulia, Homegain, Top Producer, Zillow and all of the other big boys in the industry?

Well, the secret is now released publicly for the first time. I do it by using a specific backlinking and SEO strategy that has been proven to work for real estate related keywords every single time. So, if you have any kind of real estate related website that you want to rank well in Google for a specific keyword, simply go to real estate backlinks to discover my secret!!

Now, there are many services added in a home inspection and often these are for additional fees. However, there are several items that a professional home inspector just can’t do. These include building code or zoning ordinance violations, among others. So how can you, as a home buyer, find out if whether or not the professional home inspector is doing something he should be doing?

The following are the rules by which the professional home inspector abides:

Rules Aren’t Made To Be Broken

Like any other specialist working for a profession, the professional home inspector in Hutchinson, KS is bound by the rules of his profession. One of these rules is to never do anything that is contrary to any law or code. A professional home inspector should do any work requiring an occupational license that he does not have. So when you hire a professional home inspector, make sure that he has all the proper accreditation and occupational license to do the work you require him to do.

You should also try to do your part as well. Now that you know a professional home inspector is not trained to analyze building codes, you should not be asking him any questions that pertain to that regard. A professional home inspector should not say that something is a code violation unless he is certified in that field. This is because code inspections are municipal inspections and the people who do these are working with government oversight.

Misplaced Advice

The professional home inspector in Hutchinson, KS is not an engineer. So unless he is a certified professional engineer with specific experience, he should be giving any comments on the geological stability or soils condition of the property. Neither should he give any advice on soil stability or provide an engineering analysis of a home.

While the professional home inspector is expected to notice any damage or rot caused by insect settlement, his advice should not be taken in the place of a proper pest inspection. He is no professional pest control technician, and therefore, he should not be doing any inspections for termites, pests, and other wood destroying organisms. Likewise, the professional home inspector is not trained to analyze asbestos, radon, formaldehyde, lead, water or air quality, electromagnetic radiation, and other environmental hazards.

No Value, No Gain

The professional home inspector should not provide building value appraisal. Neither should he give you any repair cost estimates. This job falls under the functions of appraisers who are trained specifically in the process of real estate valuation. At best, the professional home inspector can only answer you according to his own personal opinion and should not be taken as the final word. For repair estimates, your best contacts are contractors and trade professionals.

There is a lot of free information available to you about buying, selling or investing in Hutchinson, KS real estate. For complete information about the Hutchinson, KS real estate market including current homes for sale, property values and more please visit the most complete website online dedicated to everything Hutchinson, KS real estate. So please feel free to contact me with any of your mortgage questions and I will me more than glad to answer your queries. Call me on my cell at 800-339-8841 or email me at brian@brseminars.com.

Right now mortgage interest rates can be obtained for less than 4%. If you choose a 15 year mortgage, which reduces the term of your home loan in half, or an ARM, your mortgage rates are even better; sometimes approaching 3%.

Consider this, since mortgage rate statistics began the average mortgage loan rate has averaged around 8-9%. During the early eighties, mortgage rates peaked in the high teens. Current home loan rates are around the rate of inflation. Assuming that inflation remains at historic levels, the appreciation of your home value will be almost equivalent as the portion of the mortgage payment that goes towards interest.

A $100,000 mortgage loan for Sacramento luxury homes would have an interest payment of only $467.38 each month. In comparison, at 8% interest, the same real estate loan amount would be $733 each month. Each month you would save $265, not because you bought a less expensive house, but because mortgage rates are at these record lows.

If you are real estate investing, or deciding whether to purchase a house for the first time, It’s important to examine the basics of the mortgage payment. The interest portion of the payment, as well as property taxes are essentially money you are wasting. This portion of your mortgage payment is essentially “rent money.” When your interest is going to be more expensive than “rent” for a rental, then the financial advantages of home owners aren’t there. The current, record low mortgage rates make home buying less expensive than renting for an equivalent property.

It’s not just a good time to buy because home loan rates are low, in addition, real estate prices are also down. In some areas home prices are down to the levels they were in the nineties. There are some incredible deals out there, especially if you purchase short sale and foreclosure properties.

Overall, the real estate economy makes right now a great time to purchase properties.

The exciting news with the coaching program is the addition of long time real estate agent and entrepreneur Brandon Patrick. The Program is called The B2 Coaching program and is a two-on-one coaching program with both myself and Brandon Patrick working directly with you personally. I am quite certain this is the only real estate coaching program in the world where you will be “personally” coached by not one but two of the top, most well rounded real estate agents in the country having combined for over 3,500 total properties sold totaling over 1 “B”illion dollars in real estate sales. The question you should always ask yourself before hiring any real estate coach is whether or not this person can truly relate to your business and if they are basing their program on actual experience and fact or just crazy theories or what they “heard” online works.

The B2 Coaching program follows a very specific format that entails developing a seamless online and offline marketing and business plan including all of the tools needed to implement the plan. If you are looking to truly take your business to the next level and want a true “evergreen” coaching program that is based on truth, facts and science, not hype and trends, The B2 Coaching Program is for you.

Be on the lookout for further information in the coming weeks or visit http://brianrodgers.com

Yes, I strongly believe in staying ahead of the technology curve and more importantly ahead of the competition in your local market, however, you must sacrifice somewhere if you actually want to sell some real estate along the way. Also, one thing to consider, if you are of the “I have to keep up with the Johnson’s mentality” just keep in mind while the Jones’s are dumping last years model of their “Sells Homes For You In Your Sleep Gadget” and are trying to learn how to use this years “Sells Homes For You In Your Sleep Gadget” you could have 3 properties in escrow, just something to think about.

How to avoid this? Well, I came up with a solution back in 2003, BAP Evolve. Bap Evolve is an evergreen system that delivers to your desktop exactly the tools, technology, training and systems to keep up with the Jones, only you don’t have the learning curve and don’t have the R & D time. I pay 3 full time people to o nothing but not only keep up with the current technology and trends in the industry but also to innovate and be ahead of the curve, it makes total sense!

Check it out: http://busyagentpro.com

Facebook has confirmed to us this morning that it did indeed acquire the Baltmore-based software firm WhoGlue earlier this month. WhoGlue builds social networking software for membership organizations (like college alumni networks, for example) and apparently had the fortuity to file a patent on something called “Distributed personal relationship information management system and methods” in 2001, three years before Facebook existed.

The two went to court over the patent in 2009 and the case ended in a “very positive way“ for WhoGlue in March 2010. According to WhoGlue founder Jason D. Hardebeck, the ongoing post-litigation conversations between the two companies were what eventually led to the sale.

A Facebook representative gave us the following statement, “We can confirm that we acquired some technology developed by WhoGlue. The WhoGlue team isn’t joining Facebook and instead will continue working on its own social networking software for organizations.”

According to other reports Facebook also acquired the stakes of WhoGlue’s shareholders, including Siemens, but Facebook would not give any further details on the veracity of those reports.

In a move uncharacteristic of the talent-hungry Facebook, the WhoGlue team was not part of the acquisition, and in fact Hardeback plans on forming a new company, WhoGlue LLC, that will basically continue in the same space.

The WhoGlue technology allows a group to privately network within a larger network, and can be applied to subnetwork functions like integrating Facebook Groups content more widely throughout Facebook without violating user privacy.

Our resident Facebook expert Josh Constine also had this quite interesting theory, “If it were ever to launch in China, the technology could also help Facebook operate a cordoned-off sub-network for the country that wouldn’t violate the Great Firewall.”

Pretty cool, right?

Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original idea for the term…

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Online commerce giant eBay this morning ran a Cyber Monday deal for a white Apple iPad 2 WiFi 16GB, selling the popular tablet for $449 or exactly $50 off the MSRP (+ free shipping). Turns out a lot of people figured that was a great deal.

And they were right, too. After all, Apple only discounted the iPad 2 16GB with $41 on Black Friday, so you would indeed have been better off waiting until today and buying it on eBay … if you could get your hands on it quickly enough.

An eBay rep tells me that the iPad 2 was on sale for a mere two hours before it was sold out. At that price, people picked up four iPad 2 tablets per minute (or about 480 in total) during that time.

There were other deals on eBay that were worth breaking out your wallet for. The company sold a Microsoft Xbox 360 250GB Kinect Bundle for $259.99 – all 1,500 of those on sale were gone in 20 minutes (or 75 bundles sold per minute).

eBay also sold a HP 3105m laptop for $199.99, and sold nearly three units per minute to sell out the notebook PC in just over three hours.

It also knocked a whopping 58 percent off a RIM BlackBerry PlayBook 32GB ($249), but it hasn’t sold out yet today – which I guess says a lot more about the tablet than it does about eBay.

Founded in 1995 in San Jose, CA, eBay connects millions of buyers and sellers globally in the world’s largest online marketplace, utilizing PayPal to ensure secure transactions. The company also operates specialized marketplaces such as StubHub, the world’s largest ticket marketplace, and eBay Classifieds sites, which together have a presence in more than 1,000 cities around the world. eBay items can be sold either via a silent auction, in which users input the maximum price they are willing to…

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The iPad 2 which will launch in March 2011. It is one third thinner than the original ipad, has a front and rear camera and is 2 x faster than the original with its 1GHZ Dual Core A5 Chip.

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Hyperlocal is all the rage these days, and content companies, deal sites, and everyone in between are trying to find better ways to access (and advertise to) local markets. Over the last decade, the majority of media companies have attempted to launch internal or on-site outlets that cover local news, but most have met with middling success.

NearSay, a New York City-based startup that launched six months ago, began by asking a simple question: “Where do we get our neighborhood news?” NearSay’s founders, Trevor Sumner and David Pachter, were startled by the lackluster and confusing responses to that question and, in turn, the dearth of valuable neighborhood outlets for local news. So, for their answer, they started a platform that began as a realtime business newswire to allow local businesses in New York City to publish announcements (on events, deals, etc.) to the NearSay platform.

Now an aggressive publisher of neighborhood lifestyle news, the startup has partnered with small, local publications (where they exist) to allow local businesses to target their content to the people who can actually benefit from — and want to hear about — local news. To add to their platform, the startup launched LocalVox, which is (among other things) a white label advertorial publishing tool that allows niche publishers to syndicate their clients’ content across the startup’s network and blast that content out to social media outlets.

The idea was to create a Yellow Pages 3.0, which not only serves as a tool to help readers or searchers find telephone numbers or addresses of local merchants, but to actually help those merchants optimize their placement in search results and get found by the people who need them.

Today, the company is now calling itself LocalVox Media, and NearSay, its contextual newswire service, has become a feature of the platform. As a part of this rebranding, the startup is launching LocalVox 2.0, with which it is hoping to become a full, multichannel marketing tool for local businesses and publishers. The white label tool it launched initially was aimed at larger publishers which already had sales and customer service teams, but Version 2.0 makes the company a full-service solution for all publishers and local businesses.

To date, the platform has attracted 270 clients which are using the service to publish company events, promotions, and community programs through NearSay’s network; so, with LocalVox 2.0, the startup is looking to become a full-service tool for its clients by integrating Google Local optimization and social media management services.

Leveraging Google Places and Google Plus, social media, email marketing and more to create a simple way for their clients to generate news and target new and existing customers, LocalVox wants to enable community businesses to attain optimized Google placements — all through an all-in-one marketing solution characterized by a user-friendly interface. This last bit has become increasingly important, as local marketing solutions are realizing that products that sound technical or rely too heavily on self-service models are failing to see the adoption among small merchants that many hoped they would have.

Thus, LocalVox sees itself as a long-term marketing partner for its clients, not a quick fix. So, in contrast with Groupon’s model, which creates episodic bursts of activity and exposure for small businesses, LocalVox provides a searchable history of news content that lives on each business’ web page that is optimized for search engine placement and social media integration — all of which is intended to create additional exposure over time.

Or looking at LocalVox in juxtaposition with Aol’s hyperlocal news outlet Patch, for example, LocalVox sees its value not as a destination site, but in leveraging programs that engage consumers across multiple channels and take the pain of managing search engine placement, social media, and multichannel marketing strategies out of the hands of the merchants themselves.

What’s more, local businesses often find difficulties in updating and maintaining their websites with relevant content, and making their sites into workable, valuable communication platforms. So LocalVox wants to help them, say, upload customer lists and avoid going to a third-party source to upload a newsletter.

According to LocalVox Co-founder Trevor Sumner, it’s this approach that has led the startup to a 95 percent retention rate among participating businesses — compared to Groupon’s retention rate at 18 percent.

To date, the startup has raised a small angel round, but it is in the process of raising a series A round, Sumner says. Currently, LocalVox is only available in New York City, but the startup plans to expand into new markets beginning in early 2012.

And, for TechCrunch readers interested in testing LocalVox 2.0, the company is offering five local NYC businesses a free month of social media strategy and implementation as well as a free month of Google Places optimization. The startup will select the businesses from those who send emails to LocalSales@LocalVox.com with “TechCrunch” in the subject line.

For more, check the startup out at home here.

LocalVox Media Inc (NearSay) is a digital content hub that provides local neighborhood lifestyle news and editorial content. We provide a platform for merchants to have a single online marketing / promotion solution. Merchants can effectively create awareness, drive transactions and manage communication with clients and prospects with simple, integrated tools. Our clients reach a large local audience across social media, Google organic search, partner networks, email and our HuffPo-style consumer content site that blends local lifestyle info, news stories from…

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SlideShare, the content sharing platform for business documents, videos, and presentations, has grown into a sizable platform. In 2008, SlideShare was but a simple app launched on LinkedIn to allow professionals to share slides and documents with their network. As SlideShare is designed as a sharing platform for the professional community, its collaboration with LinkedIn has made perfect sense from a strategy standpoint — and has helped it grow into the juggernaut it is today. The startup has continued to work with LinkedIn to add deeper integration into its platform, which Leena covered in depth back in June.

Today, SlideShare is apparently a force to be reckoned with, as the startup has created its first-ever infographic with the help of ColumnFive, which details its exponential growth. In fact, the graphic goes so far as to call SlideShare “The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing”. What’s more, according to none other than SlideShare, SlideShare is now the largest professional content sharing community in the world. At 60 million unique visitors a month and 3 billion slides viewed per month, it has certainly attracted some traffic, and the hockeystick growth to be found in its visitors chart is impressive. LinkedIn, what say you?

But we think the most important take-away here is that 78 percent of SlideShare’s slideshows (PowerPoint presentations, slideshows, etc.) are under 30 slides, and the average number of slides is 19. So, when you’re building your next presentation that you want to go viral and to be shared with the world via SlideShare, make sure you keep it short. Otherwise, it’s a snooze fest, and we’ll all be throwing rotten vegetables at your slides.

Content marketing is growing, and SlideShare is certainly aiming to be a significant player in that growth. But is it worthy of being called “The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing”? You tell us.

Infographic below:

SlideShare is a community for sharing presentations. Individuals or organizations can upload and share PowerPoint, PDF, or OpenOffice presentations. Anyone can find presentations on their topic of interest. Users can tag presentation, and download or embed them into their own websites or blogs. Users can also share their documents privately. SlideShare lets its users to join groups to connect with SlideShare members who share similar interests. Business presentations make the most of…

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