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

‘I am heading to the kitchen to cook some mac n cheese because I forgot to grocery shop yet again’ or

‘Getting ready to call the doc because I still am not convinced dog food is harmless to an 18 month old’ or

‘Sitting here trying to think of something entertaining, important and informational to blog about’

However twitter is more than just announcing the mundane aspects of your day. I just learned this and am quite possibly addicted. I decided to log in after being told numerous times that I could get late breaking news from other Tweeps before it is ever on the TV news or internet news sites.  I read up on how to use twitter (more info to come), and logged in. I started searching for hashtags related to my interests. All of a sudden these tweets start popping up with vast amounts of information, including links to the articles. I was in information overload!

So I started reading, re-tweeting some, posting articles of my own. Then in the blink of an eye (well, one week to be more accurate), I had 100 followers! I did not solicit people, or try to obtain followers, but evidently things I tweeted about were interesting to some people, so they followed me. It was then I realized the power of twitter!

Now I log in a couple times per day to read late breaking news that I mainly get from people I follow. In just a month I’ve built up a huge network of people with related interests as mine. Yet every day, I still get at least five more followers. Who would have thought a 10 second blurb and a link to an article or blog I just read would generate the amount of traffic and new contacts that I now have?

How does this relate to your real estate business? I will answer that tomorrow. Right now, I’m going to go tweet.

–Stephanie, virtual assistant with REVATS

Well, to answer the last question, yes, some do use them. (Some of these “ghost-written” posts have even been featured on ActiveRain!)

Should they? Well, that just depends on their purpose in blogging.

If they are blogging simply to bring in and retain clients with community and real estate information or to increase the SEO of their website, then there is really nothing wrong with it. Everyone needs at least a little of this anyway, and let’s face it, some people just have no ability to write or no desire or time while still seeing the value in it.

If a blogger blogs because they love it, because they see their blogs as a tool to be themselves and to touch their readers in a unique way (isn’t that the real purpose of a blog?), and if the blogger is good at maintaining their blog on a regular (daily or even more often) basis, then there is little need for a ghost writer. In that case, a virtual assistant might come in handy to edit for grammar, to research supplementary information, or to take the finished piece and push the necessary buttons to post it on the site.

Should a ghost writer, usually a virtual assistant, pretend to be the person they are writing for and create a false relationship with others on the site? Hmmm…that’s where it gets sticky, huh? I would personally not choose to do that, although I know some who do. I might post a comment now and then in order to increase a client’s network (or to earn them some coveted points on a site like ActiveRain), but it would be rather generic sounding…something like “in MyTown, USA there are x number of houses on the market and the average selling price is…” in response to a blog post about nationwide numbers perhaps. But would I say “Hey Sally, I sure hope to see you around at such-and-such conference. We could hook up for lunch!”? No, to me that would be deceptive in every way. But, at what point is the line between those two crossed?

At REVATS we do offer a blogging package and a social media package for our clients. But we encourage them to do the “personal stuff” themselves. We see our role in ghost-writing as simply a supplement to a real estate professional’s interaction with their online network.

What exactly do we recommend? Well, if budget is no issue, we would recommend that a virtual assistant write and post 2 to 4 blog posts a week on general topics that would be of interest to the online community in one respect or another. At the same time the agent would be encouraged to write their own blog posts and to comment and network. This would be a win-win for the agent. The posts we would write might require a great deal of research, which the agent probably doesn’t have time to do, but it is research that we are doing on a regular basis. So by simply carrying on with the networking and expertise type of items in their blog network, the agent would be enjoying their time, creating connections that would (hopefully) build their business and freeing up a few hours a week to pursue that business!

This can also carry over into the rest of the social media world. A virtual assistant is a good source for regularly scheduled informative Twitter or Facebook posts, which would free up the agent to post their daily happenings while still knowing that their network was getting a regular feed going, even if they happen to have a day where they are just not in the Tweeting mood.

Afterall, your business is selling real estate. Our business is doing the things that increase or support your business, especially when those are things you don’t want to or can’t do.

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!