Are you getting questions about mortgage refinancing from your real estate clients?  I am, and I recently found a good consumer’s guide to home loan refinancing by the Federal Reserve Board.  One of the reasons I like it is that it  seems to clearly explain some mortgage topics that people commonly get confused about, including:

• Comparing home loan refinance options
• Understanding ‘no cost’ refinances
• Calculating when you recoup the expense of refinancing a mortgage
• Home mortgage prepayment penalties

There’s also a glossary of home loan refinance terms that’s highly useful.

The pamphlet dates from 2008 and is 29 pages, it opens up in just a few seconds via pdf – here’s the link at the Federal Citizen Information Center:

A Consumer’s Guide to Mortgage Refinancings

Yesterday I had to call ValueWeb to help out a client who needed his domain name pointed to a different server.  During my over half an hour on hold (starting out as caller number 44 – the horror!)  I was reminded of how important it is to choose a reliable company for domain names and hosting.  Here are the companies I use:

Buying Domain Names

Godaddy is where I buy all my domain names.  It’s easy to search for them, and at around $10 per year per domain name it’s a good deal.  More importantly, they make it easy for you to manage your own domains.

(Yesterday I was calling ValueWeb because we were not able to change the domain settings ourselves, and the request we submitted 4 days previously had not been carried out.  This cost me an additional 45 minutes on the phone.)  If the domain name had been held by GoDaddy I could have done it myself in about 2 minutes.

Tip:  You can often find discount codes for GoDaddy by simply Googling ‘GoDaddy coupon codes’, or if you just click on the graphic above you should get a domain name for $7.49.

Real Estate Website Hosting

I’ve tried a number of different companies, and I really like Hostgator.  They’re big, reliable, they have good pricing, and their technical support has always been able to help me without being snarky.

One of the main reasons I choose them?  They have phone support!  Many hosting companies these days only allow you to submit support tickets by email or online chat.  If you’re shopping around for website hosting as a real estate agent, I HIGHLY recommend you go with a service that allows you to also call in, like Hostgator.  Unless you’re in the top 5% to 7% of techie agents, you’ll end up wanting this option.

(For the record, I have one website hosted with GoDaddy and have never had a problem with them either.)

Tip:  When you’re setting up hosting you’re usually asked if you want Windows or Linux hosting.  Linux is usually a good default choice unless you know for sure your site runs on ASP.

And…  Hostgator often runs a special via a coupon code shown on their home page.

Looking for a nice way to reconnect with your real estate clients?  At this morning’s office meeting I heard from some agents who are popping by their clients’ homes to say hello and drop off a Hot/Cold thermal bag as a gift.  These bags keep items hot or cold for up to 3 hours, and are great for summer get-togethers and picnics.

Personally I’d be pleased if someone dropped one of these off on my doorstep - I don’t have any, and they look really handy.  You can currently get Hot/Cold thermal bags for just $2.38 each ($119 per case of 50) at the American Bag Company.

If you’ve been in real estate any length of time you know what a pain it can be to have to change the dimensions of a large batch of listing photos so that they’re the right size to use online.

Shrink-O-Matic is a free program that you can download to your computer and use to re-size multiple photos at one time simply by setting a maximum height and width.

Here’s a short video explaining where to get Shrink-O-Matic and how to use it.

Download Shrink-O-Matic Here

Think you need to spend a lot to market yourself effectively online?  Think again!

This video shows how one smart agent, Yuno Marioni, is using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Biznik and Active Rain to create a strong online presence.  (Without a fancy website, and virtually for free!)

Important Social Media Links from the Video:

www.Biznik.com

www.LinkedIn.com

www.Twitter.com

www.Facebook.com

www.ActiveRain.com

Here’s  a short video showing how to search for FHA-approved condominium complexes on the HUD list, with some tips that will help you pull up the correct search results.

The number of U.S. Twitter users more than doubled in March 2009, jumping to 9.3 million users.  What’s really interesting is this demographic tidbit reported by the internet measurement firm comScore in the Puget Sound Business Journal:

“…45- to 54-year-olds are the most likely to use the service at 36 percent above the average. They are followed by 25- to 34-year-olds, who are 30 percent more likely.”

In other words, these are your past and current clients, and their first time buyer aged children.

If you’re not familiar with Twitter, it’s a micro-blogging service that lets you instantly create a free page and post short blurbs of 140 characters or less.  This makes it easy to quickly share a link or fact, without having to compose an entire article (like this one.)

Check out our Twitter feed here, and be sure follow us too.

Bottom line?  Twitter can work well for business because it’s highly functional.  Don’t  get distracted by the people who feel the need to Tweet every time their dog sneezes, there are plenty of others using it to share useful information about real estate.

Tip:  If you often feel like sharing a quick bit of information with your clients but you’re intimidated by the time and energy it takes to blog,  you might be surprised – Twitter could be right up your alley.

Just a reminder that if you have condominium buyer clients using FHA financing, the condo building will need to be FHA-approved in order for the loan to go through.

You can look up condo complexes on the HUD website using their FHA-approved condominium complex search tool.

I found a good recent post on how to prevent your Wordpress blog from being hackedover on the Velvet Blues blog.  It’s worth taking a look, and/or passing the info on to your web designer if they’re managing a Wordpress blog for you.

Just a note, for the table prefix rename I like a Wordpress plugin by SEO Eggheads that is really easy to use, called, well, the Table Prefix Rename Plugin.

We like to keep things simple…

Well I’m happy to say after my outraged post about Google Street Views that it really IS a joke, as was kindly pointed out to me by Kim Brown on Active Rain.  Phew!

I could just delete the post, but since I’m always making a big deal about double-checking sources to make sure information is correct before you publish it I’ll just leave it up as a reminder to myself and anyone else to actually do that.