The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) released the latest mortgage data this morning.  Bad news abounded.  As a result of rates moving up over their record lows of around 4.6% a few weeks ago, all leading mortgage indexes fell.  Applications fell by 15.8%,  Refinance fell by 23.3% and purchase applications dropped 3.5%.  This is a significant reversal from the March rise. The raise in rates was triggered by the bond market pushing the yield on the then year note up to 4%. This trend must be reversed immediately for the Fed's recovery plan to work.  This issues is only compounded by [...]

As Real Estate agents divert traditional marketing tactics from showing photos of homes to becoming market experts, they rely heavily on the mining of real estate market data from suppliers like Cyberhomes, Altos Research, Clarus Market Reports and now, new commer 10K Research Marketing.  I checked out their website and their reports look very nice. They plan to be at Inman Connect in San Francisco.  Check out these prices and let me know what you think.  Remember that Cyberhomes is $4 – $10 per report.  Clarus is free if your REALTOR Associaiton picks up the site license.  The prices look [...]

MIBOR - the Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of REALTORS has recently responded to a complaint regarding a violation of their IDX rules and regulations - specifically the "anti-scraping" regulations. MIBOR has correctly responded to the complaint ruling that an IDX property search page which allows data to be copied and re-purposed is in violation of their rules.  I begin this post with this acknowledgement to clarify that MIBOR is in no way behaving badly.  Indeed, they are enforcing their published rules and regulations correctly. This issue has created a very difficult situation for MIBOR, NAR, and the unfortunate member of MIBOR [...]

Microformats in plain english: Microformats is specific website coding standards (called Semantic information) that allows search engines to “read” the addresses and categories of inforamtion on your website, display the information in search results (like google maps), and allow the consumer to quickly download a vcard or address book card directly from the search result using a browser extension like Operator for firefox. As mentioned in the WAV Group White Paper on Localism - Geo Targeting strategies for real estate websites - search engines are often unable to view listings on most IDX Property Search solutions.  Companies like Trulia, Zillow, Loopnet and others real [...]