Luxury Real Estate

By Michael Marquette
From his blog: Should I Buy a Franchise or Go It Alone?

How much is a brand worth when deciding whether to join a franchise? Throughout Australia there are plenty of agencies willing to sell their letterhead and designs to almost anyone willing to pay the money to get it. Real estate names like LJ Hooker, Ray White, Richardson & Wrench, Laing+Simmons, First National, Hocking Stuart and now McGrath are all competing with many others to get the agent-come-entrepreneur’s buck.

To secure the franchise there are a number of requirements – an office in a prominent position is usually one of them. This, in itself, is cause for alarm in a world where the Internet is a part of life and online searches are an everyday thing. Most of us use Google some or most of the time as an Internet search engine, yet how many of us have been to the Google office? Where is their office?

The answer is probably not one person reading this blog has visited a Google office, yet the Google brand is massive worldwide and is a shining light indicating how business will be run, won and lost in years to come.

As you might be able to tell by now, I am not a fan of outdated business models with high fixed costs that hinder innovation. Real estate is becoming more and more an online industry where agents and brokers visit clients or meet at properties – not the real estate office of old. It’s estimated that spending on newspaper property advertising will decrease by around 18 percent this year and the trend is expected to continue.

Our world is changing quickly and it is essential to look forward to how the world might look in five years time before committing to a franchise that might not allow you to best keep pace with the changes necessary to be successful – one of them is to keep fixed costs low!


Editor’s Note:
Michael Marquette is the co-Founder and Director of Marquette Turner Luxury Homes, a member of Luxury Real Estate in East Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Founded on Australia Day 2007 by Marquette and Simon Turner, Marquette Turner is a property consultancy company covering the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria. Marquette has a background in medicine and a large retail and wholesale business. Michael makes some excellent points about the current market. We definitely need to be flexible as luxury markets change. The photo above is from www.flickr.com/photos/danielbroche/2258988806 and it is the copyright of danielbroche.

By Simon Turner
From his blog: How Google Maps can be used to make solar power decisions for your home

As energy prices continue to climb, the idea of utilizing solar energy is common sense. The process of getting solar panels installed, however, is quite the opposite.

RoofRay, a new Californian business, aims to give homeowners better information to enable them to make more-informed environmental decisions for their luxury home. Using the site’s modeling tools, consumers can estimate how much solar energy a home could capture and how that would affect their monthly bills.

The data provided is based upon historical weather conditions, current power usage charges, the gradient of the property, and the maximum amount of solar paneling the roof can hold. One tool uses Google Maps to let users calculate the size of their roof and build virtual panels. RoofRay then estimates the output potential of the solar panels as well as financial considerations like costs of installation, upkeep and return on investment.

Whilst not yet available in Australia, such a tool would be a welcome addition to our growing eco-conscience and our excessive reliance on fossil fuels. Furthermore, it would be useful for would-be real-estate buyers in making purchase decisions, something that the Marquette Turner team is increasingly finding is a factor in how and where buyers buy.

To find out the latest information available in Australia, a good start is the federal government’s portal www.climatechange.gov.au and Marquette Turner’s Clear the Air site


Editor’s Note:
Simon Turner is the co-Founder and Director of Marquette Turner Luxury Homes, a member of Luxury Real Estate in East Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Founded on Australia Day 2007 by Turner and Michael Marquette, Marquette Turner is a property consultancy company covering the Australian states of New South Wales and Victoria. Born in England, Turner traveled much as a child, finally settling in Australia. He joined the Australian Defence Force Academy and graduated with a degree in Politics and History as an Intelligence Officer in the Royal Australian Air Force. This is a very fascinating topic. Jean-Yves Piton actually wrote a blog entry on “green” luxury real estate a little while ago, too. I just finished writing an article on “green” luxury properties for the winter 2009 issue of LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine.

By Robert Lockard

Thanks in large part to all of the wonderful contributors within the global Who’s Who in Luxury Real Estate network, the Luxury Real Estate Blog is making a tremendous ascent in its ranking on major search engines, including Google, Yahoo and MSN.

www.LuxuryRealEstate.com is the most-viewed luxury real estate Web site in the world and it comes up first on most searches for luxury properties, luxury homes and luxury real estate. But the Luxury Real Estate Blog is fairly new and we’re building it up to the heights of our main Web site. We owe much of our success to Jim Walberg, John Brian Losh and many other bloggers who consistently contribute their fun work

Like my personal written works, I take pride in the writing found on the Luxury Real Estate Blog. As this blog’s editor, I feel particularly responsible for its quality and success. So it pleases me to no end to add so much great content almost daily and to find more comments from our fantastic readers. I also like seeing our blog climb in popularity with a number of search terms.

I’ve thought a lot about how best to organize the information on the Luxury Real Estate Blog’s ranking in the big three search engines. I’ve finally decided to simply put the same search terms in each row for easy comparison purposes and to roughly put them in order, from highest to lowest, in terms of their placement on search engines.

The following search terms and rankings were recorded on the morning of Thursday, July 31, 2008, and they’ll surely change in the coming days and weeks. At least this will give us a good reference for future searches so we can see how they improve, hopefully.

By Robert Lockard

For the past several months I’ve had the pleasure of posting content to the LuxuryRealEstate.com Blog from Jim Walberg, an experienced blogger and the co-Broker/Owner of The Bay Area Team, the most-successful team at Keller Williams Realty-Danville, Calif. Jim’s Caribbean Islands Realty Blog is very well-established and fun to read so I’m always glad to include his work on our blog, with his permission, of course.

Jim took the time to point out something awesome to me in an email on June 11, 2008. I have read about blogs helping with search-engine optimization, but Jim’s message really drove this idea home to me (The links weren’t in his message originally. I added them):

”You may notice when you use my blog postings that LuxuryRealEstate.com jumps up on the Google search engine. I have “owned” Aruba Fractionals on Google for months! LuxuryRealEstate.com just jumped to the top of page one with the posting of my article on your blog site. It is so fun to see how this blogging game works. It is my pleasure to support LuxuryRealEstate.com in any way I can.”

One other comment Jim made also impressed me: “The power of blogging is based on one’s understanding the ‘rules’ that Google and Yahoo have set up for search-engine optimization. The next is to understand the ‘strategies’. Don’t forget, strategies always beat out rules. What I have found among the blogging world is that all of us are constantly sharing strategies. We all want each other to ‘win’. That is one of the fun cultural experiences you will find in the blogosphere. I am always available to share.”

Thanks for the great message and for all of your help, Jim.

I still feel like I'm learning the ropes when it comes to blogs, trackbacks and all of these inventive ways to provide great content and be rewarded by search engines. I think it’s very important to write about important topics first and worry about good placement and all that other stuff second. It’s nice to know that Jim Walberg, who has found a great balance between the two, is on our side!


Editor’s Note:
Robert Lockard is the Public Relations & Media Specialist with LuxuryRealEstate.com. I am Robert. I create all of Luxury Real Estate’s newsletters, write the editorials in LuxuryRealEstate.com Magazine and much more. You can contact Jim Walberg at jim at jimwalberg.com. I sure put a lot of links in this blog entry. I guess I just had a lot of information to cram into a couple of paragraphs, plus I’m learning how to provide more links for the search engines to find us.

By Joey Pauley

Over the years, people have predicted that the web would eventually go mobile. I was all for it, but, unfortunately, my phone’s capabilities were very thin. Blackberrys did a good job with email, but as for an elevated internet experience, they were barely getting past the ground floor.

Financial Times Google “said it had seen 50 times more searches on Apple‘s iPhone than any other mobile handset.” The results do not surprise me one bit. I have always been a proponent of Apple. Of course, sometimes they are a bit more concerned with form then function – cough, cough, Mac Book Air .

Apple’s user interfaces are unparalleled. The iPhone makes it easy for the average user to search the majority of sites on the Internet in a fashion they are already quite adept at doing. For those of us who create websites, it is very easy for us to create a site that is iPhone-compatible. For the most part, we need to be sure the sites aren’t too large, something we should already be proficient at doing.

Thanks, Apple, for saving us all some time. Now I have enough time to stop by the Apple Store to get a Mac Book Air. Those things look so cool.


Editor’s Note:
As a Technical Account Manager with LuxuryRealEstate.com, Joey Pauley helps members with their web and technology needs. He does a phenomenal job in all of his projects, as you can see by visiting the many websites he has helped design. Joey is definitely an expert on this sort of thing. My cell phone is also a bit less than spectacular when it comes to its online capabilities. But I’m looking forward to what the future holds.

By Joey Pauley

Have you ever heard the expression a picture is worth a thousand words? Google hasn’t, and neither has Yahoo. That’s right — search engines cannot view images. What does that mean?

When you see a picture of Brian Losh at our fabulous European Conference in Salzburg, Austria you see this:









Brian laughs as he prepares to go skiing because he knows that Joey is back at the office.

But what a search engine will see looks much less handsome:

<img width="154" height="115" alt="John Brian Losh in Salzburg"  src="johnBrianLosh.jpg"/>
a> Brian laughs as he prepares to go skiing because he knows that Joey is back at the office.

What search engines find attractive may not be so great for people viewing your site. What can you do to please them both? Make sure you use alt tags that describe the image (i.e. John Brian Losh in Salzburg, Austria). Also, make sure the image name and text around the image is relevant.

Marketing your site for consumers and Search Engines is a balancing act. By adding the proper text around an image you can make them both happy. How happy? ...As happy as Brian is skiing while I am in the office.


Editor’s Note:
As a Technical Account Manager with LuxuryRealEstate.com, Joey Pauley helps members with their Web and technology needs. At last our weeklong wait has come to an end and we have been greatly rewarded with this excellent bit of information from Joey. Amazing! So search engines are like Mr. Magoo: blind, stumbling around and mumbling goofily until they run into exactly what they’re looking for. What a funny image.

By Joey Pauley

After years in the business of creating websites, it still surprises me how uninformed people are about their website and how it attracts customers. I summarize their view as "If you build it, they will come." Well, I’m not Kevin Costner and this is not Iowa.

People are always asking me why they don’t get more traffic on their website. The first question I ask is "How do customers find your site?" There are a multitude of responses to this question, but the one I hear most is silence.

Then I follow up with "How do people find your office?" The answers to this question start before I have a chance to finish asking. The responses include “I advertise in the newspaper,” “We have a wonderful location,” “People we have worked with recommend us to their friends,” and the list goes on and on.

What is ironic is the answer to both questions should be the same.

If you advertise in the newspaper then advertise on the Internet news sites. If you invest in a wonderful brick-and-mortar location, invest in a high-ranking spot on search engines, like Google. If people recommended you to friends in the midst of a conversation then why not invite them to link to you on their website?

Make the same strides you do to advertise outside of the Web on the Web. Then you can expect the same result. Now get out there and play ball!


Editor’s Note:
As a Technical Account Manager with LuxuryRealEstate.com, Joey Pauley helps members with their Web and technology needs. It’s pretty incredible to think that using some of the same tactics and principles you use every day can help you gain more success online. Give it a try! Also, check out Luxury Real Estate’s Web Design services for innovative updates to your Web site.