David Barr's Sarasota and Venice Real Estate Blog

Hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving! I just created a stripped down Sarasota MLS search page on my site, designed for easier navigation on a tablet device or a mobile phone, which you can view here:   www.davidbarrhomes.com/mobilesearch I also have a mobile app for the iPad, which you can download here:   www.davidbarrhomes.com/mobile

As a follow up to my blog post yesterday, I received this article from Inman News in my inbox this morning. The indicators continue to show that demand will put price pressure on home prices nationally.  This is already the case here in the Sarasota area and the state of Florida as well. If you're serious about getting in the Sarasota real estate market, you can still take advantages of relatively low prices compared to the height of our market back in 2005 and 2006. This leads me to think about what Zillow and Trulia are telling buyers about prices in local markets.  Read my update on my debunking Zillow page on my website.

I know this may come as a shock to many potential Sarasota real estate buyers, especially those from Canada.  Here's the bad news: we are experiencing the beginning of a shortage in real estate listings and available housing.  Read more here  about Tampa Bay and the Sarasota area, and here about South Florida and the Miami area. About a year and a half ago, we had well over 1500 bank owned foreclosure listings for sale in Sarasota, Manatee, and Charlotte Counties.  As of this writing, there are a total of 521. I could give a lot of statistics about how many months inventory of homes we have now versus a year ago, but in the real world, working with buyers, the situation is frustrating.  The hot properties are receiving multiple offers, from first time buyers and real estate investors looking to get into the market now.  Cash buyers are beating out those that are getting a mortgage. We haven't quite experienced the full swing to a seller's mark...

My real estate website, davidbarrhomes.com, has been a popular destination for buyers and sellers of Sarasota real estate for over 10 years.  Unfortunately, because of this I get frequent calls from SEO sales people telling me I could be doing better with Google search results.  They say my site should appear in organic search (the unpaid links) more frequently on the first page of results. One of these recent calls, combined with an equally recent Google consultation, really distilled the issues facing individual real estate agents trying to promote their websites. Devoting resources to SEO is a mistake, in my humble opinion.  Google has recently implemented a lot of changes on how it ranks sites (search for "Google Panda update"), and a lot of SEO tactics are no longer effective.  Google's changes favor sites with original content (like davidbarrhomes.com) that provide the information being searched for. The first page results on Google for real estate in an...