There are many mis-conceptions about making money through websites and the internet. The first of which is that making money online is easy and is a ‘no brainer’. To eradicate this thought just take a moment to consider how many websites are out there trying to take a piece of the internet ‘pie’. At a rough guess you are looking at around about 100 million websites, all competing for exposure and business. The odds of winning the lottery are usually only about 14 million to one, so you start to get some idea of the competition!

If you are serious and want to make money online, a good place is to start by reading sites about how to make money online . You will start to learn the intracies of new terms and expressions such as traffic and conversions and begin to get an understanding of how to make money online through the same old addage that applies to making money through any medium….good old fashioned hard work!

With the credit crisis showing no signs of abating and gas prices continueing to rise, the number of defaulting mortgages and foreclosures continues to rise. There is also increasing evidence that mortgage companies, many of whom outsourced their administration to third party operators are finding that the administrators are cracking under the sheer volume of paperwork that the credit crisis has thrown up.

At the time of outsoucing the loan administration most of the third party companies had no idea that they would be inundated with problem cases on the scale that has now arisen. caught short these companies are unable to provide the numbers of staff or training that is needed to cope.

A case recently highlighted by the NBC Dateline show, in which a familys home was put into foreclosure due to a computer error is becoming all to familiar a story with calls from some politicians for a moritorium period to be installed so that errors can be minimized.

Usually, a property will have to be at least three months in arrears before a foreclosure notice is made. What is currently happening that errors are taking up to 90 days or longer to be rectified meaning that properties are automatically placed in foreclosure before the errors are corrected. Once in foreclosure expenses and fees can amount to thousands of additional dollars in costs.

Complaints against mortgage companies administration departments are at record levels.

During such a time of turmoil in the market, there is hope at the end of the tunnel. The Federal Reserve rate cuts which dropped base rates to a low of 2.5% are slowly beginning to trickle into the market. The delay in cheaper mortgage deals has been attributed to mortgage providers wanting to increase margins to help cope with the number of defaulting clients.

The lack of cheaper mortgages, which was the primary goal of the federal reserve when it slashed rates has had a double negative effect of the US economy. Not only have the rate cuts not benefitted the housing market, but the effect of weakening the US dollar in international money markets is one of the primary reasons that oil, which is priced around the world in Dollars per barrell, has risen in price so dramatically.

Despite the doom and gloom, there are now historically low rate opportunities for homebuyers. Combine this with the ‘buyers market’ and the ability to negotiate over price and the opportunities available to those looking at investing in property for the long term are extremely good.

A sign of this can be seen in the rise of the auction market, which is reporting record numbers of sales in quality homes. Once thought to be used for more commercial properties, auctions are now being inundated with investors looking for quality investments.

As you can see there is an awful lot to consider before effecting a purchase. to avoid the pitfalls and find the best deal it is always recommended that you get professional advice on the best deals available in the market. With thousands of deals available under differing terms and conditions, mortgage shopping and advice is a must.

Author

For mortgage quotes, the lowest mortgage rates and jumbo loan rates go to the Loan Network

A recent article in eyeonspain.com prompted me to write this article as reading the aforemetioned piece highlighted many of the mis-conception that have grown up in Europe regarding Multiple Listing and the inherent benefits to both clients and agents.

The first mis conception is what MLS actually is. Multiple Listing is a form of Agency contract. The most common agency contracts that you may have come across in the UK are sole agency and open agency, where the vendor, (seller) enters into a contract with an agent to sell their property under various terms and conditions. In the same way, a Multiple Listing Agency contract gives the listing agent the right to market the property through other co-operating agents as well as to the public in general.

A listing contract is a form of employment contract between the owner and the listing agent. The terms and conditions of the contract relate solely between the two parties. This includes the commission that the vendor, (seller) is willing to pay the agent for producing a buyer for the property.

“Some MLS systems effectively add over 9% to the desired selling price of a property in Spain. That’s just outrageous. If I want 200,000 Euros for my property then on an MLS system it could effectively be listed at 218,000. 18,000 Euros in commission seems an awful lot of money!”

In the above quotation from the eyeonspain article, any organisation that imposes a commission outside the terms of the listing agency contract is acting as an agent and not as an MLS. The MLS service provider may charge a fee to the agent for use of its database and allowing them to list their properties on it, but does not charge any additional cost to any member of the public using the service. Any website or service provider that does this is acting in the capacity of an agent and should not be considered an MLS.

In relation to the two systems quoted, I can state as fact that ‘Infocasa’ does not impose additional fees to potential buyers and as far as I am aware the IN Network is now operating as a single agency.

One of the other points mentioned in the article was that having two agents involved in a single transaction was at the detriment to the buyer. This I would suggest is one of the main benefits to an individual looking to purchase a property in Spain.

Having travelled to Spain to purchase a property under a decidely different legal system I find it a distinct advantage to have an agent acting seperately for the interests of the buyer, rather than relying on the information from an agent who has a contractual obligation to the seller and a financial interest in completing the transaction.

The main source of problems in property transactions in Europe arise due to the direct conflict of interest that a ‘one agent’ transaction occurs. Who’s interests does the agent act for in such a transaction? In a mature MLS property market such as the USA, single agent transactions, whilst rare, do still occur. When they do however, they are governed by much stricter rules to avoid the conflict of interest. In Spain, I would suggest, that having an agent act for your interests, seperate to the agent contractually obligated to the seller helps avoid conflicts and provides avenues of direct responsibility.

Ideally, a prospective purchaser should sign a Buyer Agent Agreement outlining the agents responsibility to the purchaser and the terms under which the purchaser agrees to pay his fee. This fee is usually negated by the sharing of the listing agents commission, but can be seperate.

The agent acting for the buyer then has the responsibilty of finding the most suitable property for the client and negotiating the best possible price for his client seperate from any responsibily or contractual obligation to the seller. Surely this is a much better scenario than being left to the control of a single conflicted agent.

It is not surprising that the article tries to criticize this system. In the UK, property transaction have always been governed under the one agent system with responsibility being thrown onto the buyer, not only in terms of the ‘Caveat Emptor’ rules or ‘Buyer Beware’, leaving sole responsibility on the buyer for determining any defects in the property. But also in terms of determining whether they are purchasing the property at the best possible price.

Another major benfit of a Multiple Listing Service is the ability to make direct comparisons of price against the available property on the market. This helps highlight any single property that may be overpriced as well as providing a choice of altenative comparable properties for a purchaser to choose from.

In conclusion I would say that the problems lay not within the way Multiple Listing Agency works, but in the understanding of what Multiple Listing is and how to decipher what is and what is not a proper Multiple Listing Service. It is also a matter for a prospective purchaser to decide under what conditions he or she wishes to enter into a property transaction and what level of responsibility they want to take themselves, or defer under contract, to an agent.

I believe that the underlying problems to be found in the system however, lie more in the non-regulatory nature of the market than anything else. With European harmonisation of contract law now in force, maybe a European wide directive imposing standard binding agency contracts would go some way to addressing the issues.

Neil Ebsworth is co-founder of AMLASpain . The Spanish Property MLS

Javea on the Costa Blanca is suffering from the same malaise that is prevelant in property markets across the globe. Following the credit and housing slump in the USA, confidence in property markets that had been rising for years came down to earth with a thud.

The problems in the Spanish property market have been further exacerbated by the dependancy on sales on the Uk market which has seen an unprecedented spell of nearly ten years of rising property values. As confidence hits hard in the UK, so it was reflected in the buying habits of those UK citizens looking to buy a property in the Sun.

Javea, nestled at the northern end of the Costa Blanca on the eastern coast of Spain, has long been a popular holiday and retirement resort for UK ex-patriates as well as many other European Nationalities. Its diversity between the Narrow streets of the old town and port and the more conventional holiday atmosphere of the arenal beach has always meant that Javea had a while appeal.

In recent years, development of Apartment Urbanisations between Javea port and the Arenal has created a new holiday village with row upon row of new apartment buildings set to cater for the increasing demand in property investment.

Herein lies the problem. With the sudden downturn in demand for property, javea has been left with an over abundance of new apartments in a market struggling to find buyers. many agents are see-ing buyers come and go without making a commitment to purchase as the majority sit on the fence waiting to see how far the market will fall.

As with most investment vehicles this can be a dangerous game to play. It is only necessary to look at the trading patterns of the individual investor on the stock market to discover that most individual investors waiting for a market to turn get left behind and miss out on the best opportunities.

The reason that institutional investors continue to buy in a falling market is that they buy on the basis of inherent value rather than a simple market trend. For the discerning investor, this should also ring true when considering a property investment.

If the underlying deal on a property purchase is of good solid value then it will buck the short term trend and provide above average returns in the medium to long term.

Whilst apartments in javea are currently in over supply, this should be seen as an opportunity rather than negative. Whilst the need to be discerning is more necessary than ever, those that look to find the value within the market will be tomorrows investment winners.

I have been doing the job of Search Engine Optimization for a number of years now. I started with the goal of placing my first foray into the internet world, a property MLS for Spain, at the top of the search engine rankings. It was a steep learning curve! but was the sort of challenge I enjoy. Opinions on how to best achieve good SERP, (thats Search Engine Ranking Position) or ‘P1G’ as I like to call it, were varied and ranged from the believable to the obviously absurd.

It took seven months to get my first Google ranking. It was August 5 th 2006. I had diligently been adding my site to directories and e-mailing relevant sites to exchange links. I had also been creating as much new content as I could possibly manage. Spain is a big country and covering all the towns and villages to get exposure across the board was no mean feat.

But we did it. I hit my keyword targets one after another and within eighteen months has climbed to the top of nearly every major keyword that I was told, people used to search for properties in Spain.

After a few months at the top I started to muse at the statistics. There was, and still is, a massive gap between what you would expect from the search results and the actual statistics coming through to the site. The biggest discrepancies lay in the major keywords and the traffic they produced.

As a company that needed to market its services to other businesses, this visibilty was necessary, if not essential. What is there better to put in your marketing than independent statistics from ‘the market leaders’, Google, showing the traffic stats for the most competitive keywords and explaining to your potential clients that’ this is where the traffic is’ and ‘here we are at the top’. It’s what the competition does, so do it better.. and you should reap the rewards.

And to a point we did. In terms of commercial success, the site grew as quick as we could grow it and all in the garden was rosy.

It was under my new hat though, as a well seasoned SEO that I began to have doubts.

The fact was, that on analysis of the traffic from the site, the contribution made by major keyword placement amounted to less than 10% of traffic, yet I had been spending some 90% of my time achieving and maintaining it. Something was wrong and I started an exercise to uncover the truth.

My analysis has led me to some conclusions that have dramatically altered my SEO strategies and begs the question as to whether the information statistics that we get from the Search Engines and take, hand in glove as gospel, are entirely true. In fact if you could get at the entire facts, I think it would be more likely a case that the statistics are true but in a world where algorithms have been developed to the extent that they could filter the Polonium out of Russian tea, the statistics we are fed are at best, so bland and unfiltered that they perpetuate myths that frankly are false.

Not wanting to sound too ambiguious, here’s what I mean.

Take a 100 website owners all of whom have sites for dog food. The statistics from the main search engines tells them that the search term ‘dog food’ gets 1200 searches daily and is the top search term for their industry. Avoiding PPC, they diligently go off to optimize their site for the term, writing articles, building links, all the usual SEO suspects. Like me the 100 owners are ultimately curious as to where they are positioned for the term and at intervals through the day click onto search and diligently type in the term to see how their position is progressing.

Now if all of them are avidly watching their position they will pretty soon be making up the majority of the statistical searches recorded by the search engines and be as confused as I was, as to why the actual traffic they receive from the keyword search, nowhere nearly matched the expectations of the traffic their sites actually got from the term.

In my own sites analysis over the previous twelve month period, I found that with a little over 125,000 unique visitors over the period, visitors had found my site through nearly 52,000 different keyword searches and out of the four major keywords that I had spent time and energy optimizing my site for, I had received less than 10% of my traffic.

Whether this ‘anomoly’ is puposely perpetuated by the Search Engines must be true. They are after all, just advertising comapanies hiding beneath the guise of service providers. Their revenue is derived from the perpetuation of competitive keywords gaining ever increasing revenue as we all chase the dragon. If they spent a fraction of that revenue improving the data they put out about search results, filtering repetitive searches or searches from different IP addresses broken down into geographical location. The sort of information they do give out to us in the analytics data we get from our actual visitors.

Then maybe, the face of competitive keywords would become too blurred to facilitate such high bidding from the PPC fraternity and the revenue bubble would burst. More likely though, would be that the goalposts would keep changing, making it more difficult for any keyword to sustain competitive edge long enough to gain the revenue that they currently do. In any event, any blurring of the marketplace would ultimately reduce revenues which is a good enough reason to keep the staistics vague and the revenue flowing.

From an SEO point of view, it seems that to increase your traffic effectively, you should disregard building links to the keyword ‘red herrings’ and concentrate of building as much intuitive content around your subject matter as possible.

Whilst this has always been the premise of good P1G rankings the smoke screen of competitive keyword placement is an awful lot of energy going to waste!

Neil Ebsworth  writes for SEO Services, a SEO Company in Mt Pleasant SC