Earlier this week The New York Times launched a new, free iPhone app catered to apartment hunters.  It allows users to search for listings and view various information about the apartment.

Scan2PDF Mobile is an app that could be useful to agents.  This app will scan documents using your phone’s camera to convert one or more pages into a PDF.  It is like having a scanner/photocopier/fax machine in your pocket.

Spreadsheet is a professional spreadsheet program for Android, supporting the XLS format. It is compatible with Excel and other XLS-based programs.

WpToGo allows you to blog while mobile! So you can update your real estate blog while waiting in the doctor’s office, or in carpool or anywhere else you have an extra minute or two.  Features include creating and editing existing posts using text, images, tags and categories to multiple WordPress accounts, as well as viewing comments and post previews.

There are dozens more, but these are some of the best I’ve found thus far. Have fun!

If you use Office on your mobile, then you may like the changes.  The smartphone with Windows Mobile operating system has a version of Office designed just for you.  It can be downloaded from the Windows Marketplace for Mobile website.  If you routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint files, you’ll like this.

If you use a Blackberry, I-Phone, Palm Pre or any other phone that does not have Windows Mobile, you still can take advantage of these changes.  Microsoft is releasing applications for your phone.

Microsoft is currently offering this in beta, until April 2010.  That means free viewing and editing of Excel, Word, Powerpoint, OneNote, and other documents.  Outlook Mobile 2010 provides new features for organizing your email.

So if you want to try this out and do not mind little bugs here and there while it is still in beta, go download it for free!

This video explains the credit in a way we all can understand.

Fannie Mae is gobbling up most of the homes that are being sold at sheriff sale here in Las Vegas. They normally purchase the property and then hand it over to a real estate brokerage to manage it. In some cases they do not evict the home owner – instead they send out a form letter asking if there is a renter in the home and if they renter wants to keep on renting they have the option to do so.  I have seen this form letter about ten times this past week.

Normally when a home goes into default, the owner is presented with a Notice of Sale, and the property is sold on the steps of the courthouse where the property is located.  At the sale, the property is auctioned in public with an opening bid equal to the outstanding loan balance, interest accrued, and any additional fees. If there are no bids higher than the opening bid, the property will be purchased by the lender. Most times the lender will contract a real estate agent to sell the home, also known as an REO or bank owned home.

Another real estate agent in Vegas stated Fannie seems to have interest in the appliance industry as well.  After a recent appraisal of a home he represents the buyer for, he wrote

Appraisal conditions required a few repairs like a window, toilet leak, and a working range.  We went back to the seller letting them know that the buyer will buy the range from a big box company like Sears and have it installed by them ASAP.  Fannie Mae would have nothing of it.  They sent a list of appliances to choose from and said that my buyer needs to get one of those.

Is Frannie the owner or insurer of these properties and ‘sitting’ on them until the properties are worth more? Or are they investing in foreclosed homes owned by other banks? The government owns the loans, the banks and now the houses.  And using TARP money to help buy back their assets at a very cheap price. Where does this leave the homeowner? The one that I thought was supposed to benefit from the stimulus.

Unique Global Estates recently sent their newsletter stating foreclosures were now advantageous to the banks and posted Indymac Bank’s shared loss agreement.  An excellent question was asked in their recent blog,

…millions of American homeowners are being forced out of their homes through foreclosure, only to have the banks put them up for auction for pennies on the dollar. Why weren’t these homeowners offered the same opportunity?

What To Do With Multiple Real Estate Domains

Can’t I just forward all of my domains to my homepage?

Not too long ago website owners and even search marketing professionals were buying a ton of domain names and simply pointing them back to one destination. They would then submit these domain names to the search engines in hopes of having all of their domain names indexed and ranked, in the hopes of creating a mass populated search results page of their domain names. Over time the search engines picked up on this, and realized that some people may not have the most relevant content; rather they just have a ton of domain names pointing back to the same content. Search engines fixed this by not allowing those multiple domain names to be seen at any significant position, and in some cases not allowing for the primary domain name to be as successful as it possibly could be within the results.

What should I do with all of these domain names I own?

The most ideal scenario for using multiple domain names is to have a website on each one of the domains that you own. Each website should be at least 2-3 pages and, like any other site you want to get ranked, they each should have a lot of really resourceful, unique content. By creating this portfolio of specific websites targeting certain aspects of your business or areas that you farm, your websites and their domains will receive much more value and recognition from the search engines than forwarding all of your domains to one site ever could.

What if I don’t have the time, money or technical knowledge to create more websites?

Unfortunately, not everyone has the ability to create a website for every domain name that they own. So, one useful technique is to take your great real estate domain names and direct them to specific internal pages of content that are relevant to that actual domain name.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

Sounds like some work, huh! We own a few domain sites ourselves, so we will have to consider doing something along these lines for our other domains as well. Currently our second domain, real-estate-virtual-assistance.com simply links to our main site. What creative use could we come up with for that? Hmm…

–Kim, virtual assistant with REVATS

Anyway, with the multiple variations of logins, as well as the many websites you probably belong to, imagine what would happen if you lost the sheet of paper that has all of this information written on it? All of my passwords are written on the back of a notepad, the same notepad that has had soda spilled on it, ripped by a 15 month old, and thrown away accidently….twice. Every time I refer to it (which would be daily), I tell myself I am going to transpose the logins into a word document. It is ironic really. I spend every day helping real estate agents become organized, maintaining their database and websites, keeping track of their logins, but I cannot seem to take the time to organize myself.

Which is why when I ran across this new website called OpenID, I was thrilled! Their website states:

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple usernames across different websites, simplifying your online experience.  You can use your OpenID on any one of a growing number of sites which support OpenID.

They also explain how to request a site recognize OpenID if they do not already. And if you have a Google ID, you can use that login as your OpenID. So any website that says it recognizes OpenID will log you in with that Google login. I love it! So easy, so simple, and no more emails to reset my password.

—Stephanie, virtual assistant with REVATS

REVATS is a team of independent virtual assistants working together to bring comprehensive virtual services to real estate agents around the USA. Contact us today for more information!