In a study released earlier this week by the Earth Advantage Institute demonstrated that homes in the Portland, Oregon market actually sold for 3 to 10% higher than average if they were green certified. It is very encouraging to see that consumers are starting to appreciate the value of green homes and reflecting it in the purchase price and ultimate the sales commission for the agent. This investigative study is part of a larger regional effort conducted by nonprofit and local government organizations. These efforts have involved some of the leading green building organizations in the Pacific Northwest, including Built [...]

I ran across this terrific post from Dennis Miloseski, Founder and CEO of Milobox, a new real estate web development company.  He talks about ten reasons why agent websites fail. He hits on a lot of great points here. Enjoy. 10. There is more emphasis on you, rather than your listings. Most agents are paying way too much for web sites that stroke their egos, building the “look at me bio sites” rather than leveraging open services of the web to give their properties the most exposure online – the real job of any agent site. Remember that most visitors are [...]

Perhaps this is not perfect, but it is a dandy start and I applaud ARMLS for this important first step.  It will allow thier rules committee to call a goat a goat and a pig a pig as they see fit. I am thinking that the weakness to these rules comes by way of establishing definations that can lead to legal interpretations that do not impede any self proclaimed "Search Engine" to scrape/index data.  Under this description, I think that it would be difficult to prevent Trulia, Zillow, Century 21 and other search engines from Scraping/Indexing data - afterall, they [...]