Working in the Austin Market for the last 10 years has been fun. Things are changing fast with the new toll roads going in. This is changing the Austin, Texas real estate market as land farther out from downtown is becoming more valuable and easier to access. (more…)
The city of Austin has been a popular spot the last few years, and we are enjoying record appreciation even as the rest of the country is seeing a slow down. Just in the first quarter of this year Austin has seen more than 10% appreciation in housing costs according to the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. We had been a little behind the rest of the US market in our appreciation rates the last few years, and now we seem to be catching up in 2007.
The unemployment rate is Austin is very low and the job growth has been robust. This seems to be giving the Austin real estate market a real boost. The city is also a hot spot for out of state investors. We have seen lots of investment activity in all areas of town.
If you are thinking about starting a real estate website and want to have a blog with it, I 
recommend that you use WordPress for the whole site. WordPress is a great Content Management System and you can use it to build your whole site. You can see an example of this Brentwood Real Estate site that I built all with WordPress. WordPress now lets you set a specific page for your home page and it is really easy to learn how to use.
There are some great Real Estate plugins by realivent.com that you can download. I used their Featured listings plugin, CMA request, and the property watch form. Realivent.com
also offers some great marketing tools and you can get single property websites from them as well. If you have any questions about using wordpress for your site stop by the forums and ask them in there.
There is a great worldwide vacation rentals site Goin2Travel.com that just rolled out a real estate channel on their site. They allow real estate agents to list homes for sale for Free. They are planning on keeping it free too!
They are getting about 50,00 page views per day to their vacation rentals section. Many times people traveling are also looking to pick up a second home for invetments / or when people are house hunting they like staying in vacation rentals. Their real estate home page is already ranking for terms. (more…)