3 Tips for Writing Great Real Estate Blog Posts

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Blogging can be a great way to drive organic traffic to your real estate website. Your blog page can be a great platform to share your industry knowledge, promote upcoming events in the area, updates on the housing market, and so much more. If you want to make your blog page more of a focal point to your real estate website, here are few tips to help get you started.

Create compelling titles

Because headlines are the first thing that readers see, you want to ensure they are both descriptive and engaging. As people are browsing the internet, you want your headlines to catch people’s attention, so they will click on your links. Many real estate businesses today do not put enough stock in their blog titles and make them too generic. Before you post an article to your blog page, take another look at the title and think to yourself whether or not if it is something people would click on.

Include real estate keywords

Keywords are an essential part of search engine optimization. Be sure that in every blog post, you include local real estate keywords. The inclusion of local keywords will help your blogs appear higher on search engines. Not only do you want to include keywords in the blogs themselves, but in your titles, meta descriptions, and image descriptions.

Include images

If you want your readers to remember your blog posts, you should include high-quality photos. Also, blog posts with images are more likely to be shared on social media channels. You can either use free stock photos online or incorporate your own images for an added personal touch.

HUD Foreclosures

HUD foreclosures and VA Foreclosures are some of the best homes to buy when price is part of the equation. As with most Americans, price is always a concern. If not buying the same house for less, why not buy more house for the same dollar invested? When looking for a good deal it is hard to do better than the VA or HUD foreclosures market. The simple truth is that there are just more VA and HUD homes on the market, as they represent such a large number of mortgages that are generated each year. This translates into more foreclosures just by the magnitude of difference between all others comparing to the two largest.

The two largest also being government owned and operated means that they have less time to wait to make money back on the home. The FHA is especially known for selling HUD homes for less than the average sales price in a given area. FHA foreclosures represent a fraction of HUD but they are still a significant number of homes and both should be considered.

VA (Veterans Administration) and HUD (Housing and Urban Development) have different and unique opportunities for the buyer. Both are often forgiven for the local taxes normally associated with the purchase of a home (this is on a county by county basis). Be sure to ask the local title company or escrow company to look into it for you before closing as this is often missed due to their are not used to dealing with the 2 to 3 percent of the market that VA and HUD foreclosures represent.

Foreclosure Listings Increasing

As the market settled after the mortgage meltdown foreclosure listings also settled and fewer homes were on the market with a placard reading “Bank Foreclosure” in big red lettering. This was a good thing for the entire real estate market. Having an abundance of foreclosures brings the entire market down and it makes it harder for home owners, who would like to move, to get the appropriate price for their home as a similar home down the same street was sold for substantially less and the appraiser is using the foreclosure as a comparable sale.

This is just one of the problems when there are too many foreclosure listings in any area. Another issue is the television set that sits in everyone’s living room harping about the price of homes based on the number of foreclosures and this constant barrage of negative information makes most people sit on the sidelines waiting for the market to either implode completely or to correct itself. Meanwhile while they wait, others are buying foreclosure listings and making great investments.

Whatever the reason, a market can only handle so many foreclosure listings at any given time. The more foreclosures, the lower the market gets and this is a lesson the banks that were foreclosing and selling off realized too late. The market and their investments would have been better off if there had not been a rush to divest themselves of the toxic assets made more toxic by their own actions.