A lot of the searches that land on this weblog take the form of general real estate questions. “What is an earnest deposit?” “How long is a typical escrow?” “What is dual agency?” But search engines don’t answer answer questions, they simply shuffle up web pages that have have a high degree of keyword correspondence. Those pages may answer the question — or they may be totally off base.
So: It occurred to me that I could make asking questions easy. If those questions happen to be blogable, so much the better. If you ask a question about a confidential matter, I will answer it privately — and I will keep your name and email address confidential in any case. But if you have a real estate question of general interest, I would be honored to answer it here on the weblog, so we can all kick it around. In the long run, I might build a FAQ out of the questions — a monument more lasting than bronze.
Got a real estate question? Click on the button in the sidebar to the right and ask away. I’ll get to your question as quickly as I can.
Caveats: I am not an attorney, an accountant or a trust, financial or tax adviser, and my body of real estate knowledge is in many ways limited by my real estate experience, all of it in Arizona. But there are a lot of people who visit here who can help me fill in the gaps, and, together, we can pursue a fuller understanding of the art, the science, the business and the passion that is real estate…
Technorati Tags: blogging, real estate, real estate marketing
CJ, Broker in L A, CA says:
Greg,
(This is a Web-Tech question, not really Real Estate) Recently, I created a fill-in form and put it on my blog, and within 45 minutes, it had pulled in so much spam garbage, that I removed it. (I knew it was from the form, since I had set a separate email address to receive form inputs) Are you seeing that? What’s the fix? Maybe I should try again and set some kind of IP blocking? Thanks!
September 13, 2006 — 3:53 am
Greg Swann says:
> Are you seeing that? What’s the fix?
I’m not seeing, but I know it’s possible. I vet forms pretty hard, and it’s possible to do it even harder. The next step would be to add somethng like a captcha. It’s crazy that you have to jump through these hoops, but the upside is that the overall quality of our form responses will improve.
September 13, 2006 — 6:50 am