Business Online

I found an article in the UK's Overseas Property Professional that talks about the numbers of units of apartments and land being sold in Dubai, using figures that come from the Dubai Land Department, and showing a very interesting trend with buyers being proximate to the region.

Probably we shouldn't be surprised, very few westerners want to live in the Middle East with the religious extremism and different culture, most preferring to stick to Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and Latin America, but it gave me a chance to think.

Before I go on too much more, let me quickly share the figures for buyers in Dubai. Aside from local buyers from the UAE, who you'd expect would be the biggest group, the top buyers in Dubai were Indians, British, Pakistanis, and followed by Iranians. The British are the anomaly, but interesting to see Indians and Pakistanis so high up in the figures, way more buyers from these two countries than from other Gulf states.

What do I read from this? Quite simply people in both India and Pakistan are securing second homes away from problems at home, not all of it political or religious, and choosing to buy in a thoroughly modern yet comfortably similar city in terms of culture and tradition.

Americans were outside the top 5 buying nationalities after Russia which surprised me given the high number of US forces based in the region and dominance of American engineering personnel. There may be a reason, generally speaking, Americans like to go where there is already a solid expat community and latin America features highly.

British people on the other hand have traditionally been more open to buying property in countries all around the world.

Investing in property isn't something you do just for fun, unless you can afford to lose your capital, so looking to long term saleability is important, as well as who your market is going to be. With this in mind I'd say American investors probably want to look more carefully at Dubai or Middle East real estate than they would US or Latin American property.

If Americans like to stick to places where Americans have traditionally bought, then Dubai might be the wrong place for investing, and by that same logic, anywhere in the Middle East would be a bad choice. I'd be interested in comments about this.

In a previous post I wrote about the top 5 Internet tools for real estate, and in this post I'm going to quickly describe 5 other tools that should be considered mandatory for a realtor who wants to be successful, especially in this depressed market where quickly getting information to your client makes the difference between gaining their trust and selling, or losing them altogether.

First things first, are you connected to the web? Do you already have a website for your property listings? Are you already using mobile Internet for uploading photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, and updating Twitter to let prospects know what's happening in your market? If not, #fail and back to class for you!

So now that you're ready to embark on the next stage, let me tell you there are several different sites you can use to find prospects or market yourself better without having to cold call. What do you need to do? You need to setup Google Alerts for keywords relating to your town and as well as selected phrases like house for sale, buying a new house etc. Google then tracks all mentions of these in forums, blogs, Twitter, even public Facebook posts and serves them to you in an email so you can go add the writer to your follow list.

If you have a smartphone or tablet computer all of the alerts you just setup in the step before can be pushed directly to your device wherever you are, possibly giving you the opportunity to contact the writer while they're hot, that is shortly after they've published their post or comment. To be specific though, go for an iPad or iPhone, or both because... Read More

A couple of days ago I was chatting to a friend in LA about property in general, and she mentioned the prices of homes in LA compared to Denver, which led to me mentioning prices of European property, specifically in Spain and Germany, the two markets I know the best.

The conversation rolled around to short sales, because any investor worth their salt will be looking for short sales if the price is right. Flipping in this market isn't the goal, instead its to build a portfolio of rentable property on the cheap.

In Spain there are some bargains to be had, at least in Spain we think they are bargains, for example pisos (apartments) of 100sqm selling for 60-70k euros that can be rented for a minimum 450 euros per month in the small towns, or as much as 700 in the bigger towns. In the big cities you won't find property at these prices where the rent can be higher.

Contrast this with a recent short sale in Denver, 100sqm condo for US$20,000, and possible rentable income of US$1,000 per month. Wow, for an investor I'd love to be the buyer on that property. Sure taxes and other costs aren't the same between the US and Europe, but it doesn't take a genius investor to know that property in Denver with the right numbers could pay itself inside two years, whereas in Spain you'd be looking at ten+ years.

Cashed up investors complain about the property market going nowhere, but I'm looking for these kinds of opportunities. To get something of an equivalent price in Spain I'd need to look at rural property, what we call fincas here, which will probably be an acre or two with a stone barn that could be converted if the legals work out, and if I hunt around I could pick that up for less than 20,000 euros, but it would be far from useful as a rental, in fact probably too far from town to even bother.

The US economy may look like its tanked, but don't write it off yet, with 300 million people there is always going to be demand for real estate, the secret to working through the current crisis is to invest for the long term, flipping isn't going to work so look at the rent income vs buy price to see which property is going to be an asset to your portfolio.

As a real estate professional you probably recognize the value of your reputation, and maybe on your website you have an about page that tells readers who you are. But do each of your articles mention your name? Could potential clients find articles you've written to assess your expertise?

I guess as a realtor you get most of that trust factor offline, but recent changes to Google mean it is now possible to build an online trust factor by declaring yourself as the author, and best of all, Google will now rank your articles higher because of the trust you've built.

Here's how it works. You write an article on your website, or any website if we want to be truthful, you declare somewhere on the page, perhaps in the author resource box at the bottom, that you're the author, then include a link to your full online profile, add a bit of extra HTML code to the link, and a link from your profile back to the website with your articles.

Now when Google index your article they will automatically recognize you as the author. In their search results they will then list your article along with your profile picture and a link to your profile, AND a link to more articles you've written!

If that doesn't make you sit up and take notice, then let me make this clearer. Google are now putting more emphasis on personal reputations than to SEO from backlinks. This means you can continue to do what real estate agents do best, build relationships, and Google now ranks you on the size and quality of your online network.

I gotta tell you this is the most exciting SEO development since the invention of the internet. The idea of investing time getting other websites to pass a link and part of their 'pagerank' to your website is so alien to the way real relationships work, is it any wonder the only people who succeed are those who somehow have more money to spend.

So looking forward to the future the success of your online ventures will be determined by your expertise, the success you have in getting your network to read your articles, and in managing your reputation. This is fantastic news because we already do this offline, and now we can transfer this skills to our online world.

To read more about declaring your authorship of articles, check out Yoast's rel="author" guide and don't forget to read Graham Hunt's Web Marketing for Real Estate Agents

I like Jim Rogers, he's a bit of a maverick, often misunderstood, but you just know when he opens his mouth about investing that he really has got money on the line because he only talks about investments that he himself has made.

The man believes Europe and the USA are on the one way track downwards to irrelevancy and that the successful countries in the future will be in Asia, but in his most recent interview he seems to believe that farming and food manufacturing are going to be the big profit industries of the future.

Talking about farming he says that most farmers in the developed world are into their 5th decade or more, and that means when they get too old to work most won't be replaced. Actually he makes sense, I know quite a few farming families and the kids really have no interest in slaving away on the kind of uncertainty and low margins that farming provides.

So Jim Rogers is saying that he's noticing that food prices are depressed, but with worldwide shortages coming up prices will have to increase, and so too will political instability and rioting. And when that happens people who invest in agriculture are going to be the people to benefit.

From a real estate point of view that says to me that productive land is going to be a major growth market, particularly if the product, whether it is wheat, or olives, or even oranges, basically any type of food, can be grown in sufficient numbers to make farming profitable.

However, if prices of food increase to the extent Jim Rogers is anticipating, this means the way we value agricultural land will change, simply because the prices fetched on harvest will be higher. Of course access to markets will be important, but even land without easy access may still be profitable, and countries like the USA, Canada, Brazil, even parts of Europe can easily emulate Australia where 'road trains' run.

If you have the money, investing in the agriculture industry could be an excellent move, and if not, well being an agent for farms and tracts of farmland could generate huge commissions in the future.