Searching For Real Estate In Santa Barbara County

I was having a hard time coming up with a blog topic today. Then I thought maybe some people are interested in a quick review of what comes up when you search for real estate in Santa Barbara County. So I decided to use google and typed in "Santa Barbara Real Estate", next "Montecito Real Estate", "Goleta Real Estate", "Carpinteria Real Estate", "Lompoc Real Estate", and finally "Santa Maria Real Estate". If you just look at the non sponsored links that come up you have to give credit to Gary and Laury Woods for being listed in the top 10 in all the South County areas. Other observations were that Homes and Land Magazine shows up pretty frequently. Realtor.com shows up as well as Trulia on a number of pages. Yahoo was probably one of the more recognizable sites that showed up in most of the searches. Other than that there are a number of agents doing a good job of getting in the top 10. One thing I did notice was that there are not any Association Websites showing up. Now on to the sponsored links. I'm sure I'm going to leave someone out. That is why I put in the links above so you can see for yourself who is making the top 10. Many of the sponsored links are real estate sites like home gain, or home finder. There are also a number of larger real estate companies like, Coldwell Banker, Village Properties, Sotheby's, and CAmoves.com. It was surprising to find some agents like Suzanne Perkins, Kevin Schmidtchen, and Dana O'Neill spending money to be a sponsored link. One local office that was certainly noticeable was Distinctive Real Estate.

California Association of Realtors Legal Blog

I just read about this on the Inman News http://blog.inman.com/ blog. What a great service Neil Kalin has started. He has begun a legal blog www.car.org/blogs/category.php?cid=5 giving examples of legal issues and then asking agents to comment on them. He has begun this under the premise that he can learn what is truly going on in the market today. I spent about 15 minutes this morning reviewing some of the issues and I found it very informative. If I'm not mistaken he started his blog during September and has posted about 6 topics for discussion. They range from foreclosure vs. short sale, to firpta and how withholding is handled. It was very interesting reading some of the comments and follow up questions that real estate agents had. One issue this brings up for me is do I go to his website every day and look to see if he has posted anything new? I don't have to, because I have recently discovered a new tool called a reader. I'm a bit late to this game I know, so forgive me if you already knew about this tool. Google has provided me with an online reader that scans my favorite blogs to let me know if anything new has been posted. So I just have one place to look for my news. Here is a link http://reader.google.com to that handy tool. All you need is a Google Account. See You In Escrow!

August Dataquick Single Family Residence Statistics

Dataquick has released it's sales statistics for Southern California, and I have to tell you the price changes were surprising to me. Los Angeles County showed 9.1% increase in the Single Family Residence median price for August 2007 vs. 2006. The condominium median price also showed an increase of 4.3%. I really expected a county like Los Angeles to be getting regular price decreases. The Counties that are having a hard time maintaining their median prices are Ventura, Santa Bernadino, Riverside, while San Diego and Orange were pretty flat. Santa Barbara showed no change in the single family home price while the condo market was down 2.44%. I am including the chart for Santa Barbara that Dataquick has. I would really suggest clicking on the chart to see all the variations in the different markets within our county. They are pretty large in some cases. For the entire Southern California market click here.