Mary Pope-Handy's Silicon Valley Real Estate Commentary

With all the grim news on Wall Street lately, the question arises as to whether or not home sales are being adversely affected. My clients all seem to have gone into a holding pattern of wanting things to calm down first.

My seller clients are either waiting to regain some equity or simply waiting until they feel like they won't be getting so beat up in the market. My buyer clients are now unsure about the basics like job security with a looming recession.

Perhaps there will be less insecurity after the election.

Meanwhile, though, are sales in Los Gatos this month adversely impacted by the economic crisis? To see the answer, please read on at my Live in Los Gatos blog: Is The Economic Crisis Impacting Los Gatos Home Sales?

When I started blogging a couple of years ago, my #1 concern was where to get images and graphics. How on earth did people find them without violating copyright????

One simple way is to make them yourself. Frances Flynn Thorsen opened my eyes to the easy, simple and amazing things that can be done with Microsoft Paint. It's not enough by itself, but it becomes awesome when combined with Picnik.

Let's say you want to make a button. For our example, it will be a "contact me now" button.

Go to Paint.

1. First decide what shape your button will be. For our purposes, let's choose the rectangular shape with rounded corners. Pull the mouse across the field to form the basic shape of your button. It does not have to be exact.
2. Then, click on the icon that indicates a paint bucket pouring out its paint.
3. Now you can choose a color. The palette will show up at the bottom of the screen (if the basic colors aren't enough, go to the toolbar above and click on "Colors" and then "Edit Colors" and there will be more choices).
4. After selecting the color, move your mouse into the rectangle and click the button. The color you chose should fill up the space. (If you don't like the color, just go to "edit" and "undo" and try again.)
5. Now save your colored shape. Go to "file" then "save as" and choose the type of file you want it to be. Jpg is easy. Put it somewhere in your pictures file where you can remember it.
6. Close paint.

Go to Picnik.com.

1. On your browser, go to www.Picnik.com
2. Click on the upper right corner, "start picniking".
3. Upload your colored shape. It will have a LOT of white space, but don't worry  - we'll crop that out next.
4. After uploading, go to the "edit" tab and chose the "crop" button. Drag your mouse so that the cropping screen covers what you want to work with, and then click ok.
5. Now you have your basic colored rectangle without all the extra white space around it. Almost done!
6. Click on the tab that says "create".
7. Click on the sub tab that says "text".
8. Now you can select your words, then font, then the color and size of the font. What is good about this (as opposed to paint) is that the words slip over the color as if transparent. If you did this in paint, you'd have a large white space all around your text. Very ugly!
9. More? You can then click on the sub tab for "shapes" and add stuff. Since it's almost Halloween, I'll add a few graphics for the season....
10. Lastly, click on the "save & share" button. It's intuitive from here!

It's not too late to get into the "spirit" of Halloween! Our subtropical, northern California weather could not be nicer and there are lots of reasons to get out and enjoy the spookiest of seasons!

For a good list of fun things to do in Silicon Valley, please visit my Valley of Hearts Delight blog post: Halloween Events in Silicon Valley.

And if you enjoy real ghost stories, please stop by my Haunted Real Estate blog! There you'll find stories of things that go bump in the night - many of them from real estate professionals who report their hair-raising events in the line of work first hand. Enjoy!  Happy Halloween!

When I got my license in early 1993, the market was a little like this. Buyers just weren't buying. It was not nearly so bad, of course, but it was memorable. One young agent simply doorknocked, all day, every day, until she got a client to work with. Her tenacity eventually propelled her to the top of the industry.

Things are far worse now. The number of Realtors and affiliated real estate business professionals has been declining and will continue to do so for the next year or so at least. If you choose to remain in this business, what will you do or are you now doing so that you not only survive, but thrive?

• Will you do what you've always done, but more of it?
• Will you change the way you prospect or qualify your clients?
• Are you marketing and prospecting more, less, or differently?
• If you needed to tell someone else the "top three" things to do or change in this market, what would they be?

Do you use landing pages in your business? If you haven't heard of them, they are pages on your site or blog to which you drive targeted visitors.

For instance, you could want to get first time homebuyer leads in your town or city, so you could create a page intended for that group. It could be any niche or target, from a type of buyer or seller (first time, luxury, move up) or property (view homes, condos, REOs).

I decided that I want to find more Los Gatos home buyers so set out to create a landing page for that purpose. In an effort to make it effective, I've been reading up on how to do it right, listening to webinars, and utilizing some of the techniques I've learned from blogging. There are some things that I read that I should not do, but am doing anyway (putting the page on an interior pages that has links to other sections of the site - the gurus seem to prefer a stand alone page without the usual navigation stuff).

This is a new area for me, but I'm hoping it'll be effective. One of the marketing gurus I have paid attention to is Jennifer Cummings (Potato Chip Marketing) and I have tried to implement her approach, even if it's not really my style. (It will be my style if it works!)

See what you think - I appreciate your feedback.

Buy a Los Gatos Home!

I think I have found a new low for what Google likes. Just a moment ago I did a Google search for "Saratoga Homes for Sale" to see what the nearby agents were doing.

There on the bottom of page 1 was a site I'd never heard of before. I thought maybe it was for one of the other Saratogas - the famous one in New York, Saratoga Springs, or maybe the little one in Wyoming. But no, this gobbleygook was showing up for my nearby Saratoga of Silicon Valley. Have a look:

Saratoga Homes For Sale We wish to build our rate by wanting to two natural devastation scenario, that hurricane. A single person through their era out of ten knows approximately Katrina plus how it did in order to The big easy, Louisiana. Simply one couple months ago, Tcat was physically appraising that progress such a city had carried on being. Drastic characteristics exists all of us cleaned on together with seem covet nothing happened. Saratoga Homes

This mess was found at the bottom of the page in an article prefaced by the phrase "Read this article, we are only working with knowledgeable agents". The article is several paragraphs long, none of them making any sense but all begun and ended with keywords. 

Edited ending to post:  This was from kbsdirect.com.  (I removed the link because as my friend Carl, who works for G, mentioned in a comment below, it was giving that goofy site the benefit of an incoming link.) Only a robot could have written that.

I wondered if G had lost it, but perhaps it was a translation machine. Maybe. . . .

Los Gatos has got a funny shape. Our borders zig in and out. It seems like when builders were building, some wanted to be in Los Gatos and some preferred to remain county land or whatever the nearest city was - San Jose, Monte Sereno, or Campbell. And so the borders are pretty odd. This will give you a taste of it:


But actually it's even odder than that! The actual edges of town weave in and out like a jigsaw puzzle after half of it was thrown to the ground. To see images with borders detailed, please continue reading here.

This is a trick I learned only a few months ago, which may cause the vast majority of AR bloggers to have a chuckle on my account. But if you don't yet know how to get a PDF file turned into an image file, let me clue you in on an easy way. This will give you many more options when it comes to digging up pictures to populate into your blogs.

Needed upfront: MS Paint, which is available in most PCs, usually under "Accessories". (Start - Programs - Accessories - Paint.)

Go to the PDF where you want to do a conversion to a jpg or other image file. I'm not sure how it works in ALL PCs but with mine it's as follows:

Tools - Select and Zoom - Snapshot Tool

The snapshot tool enables you to drag the cursor over an area and "take a snapshot", which goes to the clipboard.  Now you can open Paint and simply "paste".

Once you've pasted whatever image into paint, just "save as" and choose the image type you want.

Google's PageRank system is a great way to see how websites or blogsites are doing. It's on a scale of 1 to 10.

One way to discover a site's page rank is to download the Google toolbar. This works easily but there are some issues. The biggest for me was not privacy (the toolbar, when showing page rank, also tells Google some of what you're doing online) but the fact that my tablet computer kept crashing. (My tablet doesn't like toolbars, period. The California Association of Realtors has a fabulous toolbar but it, too, caused my tablet to writhe and crash.)

For a less invasive way to learn your PR or that of your competitors, just visit Page Rank checker:  http://www.prchecker.info/check_page_rank.php

Active Rain is a huge, active site, and it's PR score is 6. So too does the Keller Williams site (KW.com) enjoy a 6/10. That's running with the big dogs.

My local MLS provider, MLSListings.com, gets a strong 5. Laurie Manny's impressive site, www.LongBeachRealEstateHome.com, merits a 4. That's still a really great score and no small feat to acheive.

My site, PopeHandy.com, and my ValleyOfHeartsDelight.com blog are both at a 3. Here's the interesting thing - I only started the latter about 6 months ago, but started the former nearly a decade ago. There's the power of blogging for you. (I have enhanced my templated website a lot. Friends of mine with the same basic template have a 1 or 2 PR for theirs.)

A friend of mine told me that his blog seems to not be seen by Google. I checked it out and sure enough, his blog, which is on Wordpress, is a PR 0. He was right. With a score so low, and with all his writing, I would probably want to consult with an SEO guru to get it fixed.

What about your blog?

San Jose has one of the very few remaining "Japan Towns" in the United States. There are just a few local Japanese gardens, too. Have you ever visited one? They are serene, tranquil, artistic places. Perhaps the best known in our area is the San Jose Japanese Friendship Garden in Kelly Park.

But out on the west side of Silicon Valley or Santa Clara County, there are three more Japanese Gardens, and they are historic to boot. Located in the Saratoga- Monte Sereno - Los Gatos corridor, you may have been to one of them and not recognized it.

Curious? To read more, continue reading here: Three Historic Japanese Gardens in the Saratoga, Los Gatos, Monte Sereno Area