Business and Technology

RealManage HOA Management Delivers Poor Customer Service

August 7, 2009

Occassionally I like to use my blog as a bully pulpit. I’m especially grateful that Google likes our blog and thus pushes blog articles that contain company names and keywords to the front page of search results, such as when we became the Number 1 search result for searches for a mortgage company name after [...]

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I Need to Get Stupider so my Website will rank Higher

June 19, 2009

I’ve been doing some housekeeping lately on the Crossland Team website. This involves looking at website stats to see how people find us, re-evauating page titles and other “on page” aspects of search engine optimization, as well as “off site” aspects such as where our inbound links come from and how many we have, and [...]

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What if Owning a Home was Like Owning Quicken Software?

May 24, 2009

I opened up my Quicken 2006 Software today to catch up on reconciling some bank statements, and downloading credit card charges and stock account info. I was greeted with this message: After April 30, you will no longer be able to access the following through Quicken 2006: – Downloads of your bank, credit card, credit [...]

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Craigslist – I am thinking of firing you!

March 27, 2009

For about 4 years now I’ve been posting all of our listings in Austin Craigslist. It seems like once upon a time, a long, long time ago, I received a call or two, and even a bonafide lead from one of our Craigslist property listing ads. I honestly can’t remember the last time it’s happened [...]

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Protecting Your Business Name and Reputation via Google Alerts

March 18, 2009

There is an article in the Sept/Oct edition of the Austin Apartment Association magazine “Window on Rental Housing”, written by Austin Attorney Bill Warren, which addresses the growing problem in the apartment industry of rouge reviews and rants about apartment complexes and the management.  As a renter moving to Austin, you can go online and [...]

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Using Twitter as a Focusing and Productivity Tool

November 21, 2008

I wrote recently about Social Media tools and whether they can aid and assist Realtors in selling homes and acquiring leads. I am skeptical of whether these tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, provide a sufficient return relative to the time invested in using them. Well, I had enough feedback and counter-points offered to me in [...]

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Redfin Abandoning Failed Model and Moving Toward Traditional Services

November 15, 2008

The discount Broker Redfin, which I follow with interest even though it doesn’t serve Austin, looks like it’s making yet another move toward traditional real estate services. Rather than facilitating the wholesale disintermediation of the traditional Realtor, Redfin instead continues to adopt more and more of the traditional Realtor approach and offer smaller rebates to [...]

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Social Media and the Real Estate Business

November 5, 2008

I was surpised this morning to see “Steve and Linda Crossland” featured as “Blogging Agents” on the Business front page of today’s Austin American Statesman. I’ll be calling Sylvia “Linda” for the next few days, until she has enough of it and threatens me with disaffection. We were not contacted for the article, which is [...]

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View Austin Real Estate Listings from your iPhone

September 28, 2008

Realtor.com has a nice iPhone specific url that allows you to view real estate listings from your iPhone. I’m not sure what percentage of U.S. listings are fed into Realtor.com, but I would be suprised if it isn’t most of the major metro area MLS listings. And they are all at your finger tips with [...]

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Austin MLXChange MLS Software Still Falls Short

April 20, 2008

I just finished running my stats for my Austin Rental Market update. This month I only had to report three listings to the Austin Board of Realtors which had bogus and incorrect data. Check the screen shot above to see the sort of thing Austin Realtors deal with on a regular basis. Hopefully if you [...]

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