Social Media blogger, twitterer and Realtor Frank LL0SA tries to use all of the Social Media tricks to get NVAR Realtor to vote for him for the NVAR Board of Directors race. So far he is 2nd to last place!

You may have noticed that NAR recently announced that the position of Social Media Manager has been filled (an announcement made in VA, by the way). Since that time, people have made some guesses as to the identity of the new hire.

Fellow Twitterer DJ Waldow (@djwaldow) is using the viral marketing of the social media application to sell his home in Durham, NC.

While he is not the first to try this, he is quickly becoming a media sensation with the story being picked up by CNN and other news sources.

Here’s an interesting piece by economist Barry Ritholtz on how not understanding things like annual home-sales cycles keeps the media confused about the housing market.

It’s interesting how many real estate professionals haven’t made the leap to social and business networking on the Web, especially considering how ingrained the old styles of networking are in their business plans.

I am so proud of the real estate industry. You've come so far!

In the latter half of the 90's decade, as the Internet promised to be a modern gold rush, curiously, Realtors showed little interest. It wasn't until just recently that the Realtor's personal website was accepted as an obligatory expense. The irony is that now it has little chance of being effective.

But today, I actually have faith in the real estate agent's embrace of the Internet as an effective marketing tool.

2007 was the year of the Blog....2008 was the year of Social Media....and 2009 will be the year of the Video in the world or Real Estate 2.0.

Travel agents... gone.
Stock brokers... gone.
Real estate brokers... in trouble. Photographer's agents, too.
Literary agents?

Housing Starts came in much better than expected, on the surface. We saw a reading of 532,000 on housing starts on an annual basis. This is a gain of 17.2% and we were only expecting a 7% gain from the Dow Jones consensus. This sounds huge on the surface, but the number is not exactly what it sounds like on the headline data.