From PRWEB:

Yahoo! Founding CEO Tim Koogle combines business with pleasure in his latest endeavor, luxury real estate in Mexico. The first seven Beach Villas at El Banco, Koogle’s premium 100-acre, low-density community near Punta de Mita, Mexico, are now for sale for over $6,200,000 each.

Each one-of-a-kind luxurious home offers expansive views of the Bay of Banderas, Marietas Islands, Sierra Madre Mountains, and El Banco’s long stretch of white-sand beach. The Beach Villas bring El Banco’s signature style to life – casual indoor-outdoor living that takes advantage of the area’s nearly perfect year-round weather combined with the elegance of Old World Mexico. The features of the Beach Villas include: a minimum of four bedroom suites, gourmet kitchens, elegant pools, spa-like bathrooms, multiple outdoor living spaces, high-tech amenities, and caretaker apartments.

“Having worked on great technology brands for much of my career, building something as tangible as a luxury real estate development is terrifically satisfying. My love of design, training as an engineer, and history as a businessman have all come into play in developing El Banco. It is my intention to create a place that others will, hopefully, enjoy for years to come,” said Koogle.

The first phase of the Beach Villas includes seven homes, two are completed and fully-furnished, and the additional five are ready for construction.

A new website called 96short.com was launched today. The website is aimed at providing assistance to overextended homeowners in Virginia, Maryland and Washington DC. If you live in one of these areas and have fallen behind on your mortgage payment and are facing a foreclosure make sure to visit the website.

Matt Marting the confounder of 96short.com explains in today’s press release:

A short sale means selling your home for less than what is owed on the mortgage. Short sales can be a good deal for many borrowers – those with piggy-back mortgages, mortgages that exceed the current market value of the property and other overextended homeowners – provided the lender agrees to accept the proceeds of these short sales as payment in full

Matt Maritn, who is also the president of Matt Martin Real Estate, claims that his short sale team has closed on 10,000 of such transactions in the past fourteen years, effectively saving about $1,000,000,000 to customers.

Martin also quoted a real life example of how the short sale can help individual homeowners:

We met a great couple who had purchased a home in Bristow, VA, $630,000 at the height of the market in late 2004.They had taken a Pay Option or Negative Amortizing loan for the property and, when they contacted us, they owed close to $700,000 because of the negative amortization. The biggest problem was that the property was only worth $550,000 and, after fees and commissions, they would only be left with around $510,000 to pay towards the mortgage. We negotiated a short sale with the lender to write off the $190,000. The lender only asked for $5,000 in return for the write-down. The couple was then able to buy a new home in the same neighborhood for $200,000 less than what they were stuck with in their old home.

Realty Lifeline- agent-to-agent free referral network was announced today at PRWeb. Website is aimed at providing real estate agents to share the referrals. Any agent can submit and bid on referrals for free. However every referral will expire in 90 days. When submitting a bid no personally identifiable info of your seller or buyer is required. After another agent successfully accepts the bid, you finalize your bid with that agent:

What are Bids?
When a referring agent posts a Rerrral on our site, it is available for all other agents to view. If you would like to get that lead (or Referral), you must place a “Bid” on it. When you place a Bid on a Referral, the referring agent can review your profile and reviews from past Realty Lifeline transactions.

How do I bid on Referrals?
You create a Bid by clicking on the Bid on this Referral button on the Referral Details page. The referring agent will review all of the Bids that he or she gets, then choose an agent that they want to work with. Who is selected is entirely dependent on the referring agent.

What are Active Bids?
A Bid is active on a Referral unless you withdraw it, or unless the Referral expires.

I’ve submitted my Bid… what’s next?
The Referring Agent will review Bids as they come in and make a decision on will get the Referral. When a Referral is awarded to you, you will see a message on the Home page and the Referral will appear under the Pending Transactions section.

This website indeed can become very popular among the real estate agents because it’s free and no third party is involved in the referral process.

Yea, right!!! – If that was your first reaction when you saw the headline for this article, do not worry you are not the first one. In fact when I recommended Hittail as must to have tool for every real estate website, I have received somewhat similar reaction by some one from SEO Web Design:

Erm… still requires money? The features work exactly the same as Google Analytics and Webmasters Tools. However, i think Google is far better because it allows us to set goals to track our landing page conversions, shows the query terms that your website appears in, search terms that get you visitors and much more. It is free and has no limits on the number of visitors. Isn’t it better? I don’t know, it is up to our friends here and i am just sharing. Cheerz

I am not going to argue that Hittail is better that Google analytics. However, it was Hittail and not Google who brought me through their “suggestions” to a point when I can say without slightest exaggeration that with Hittail I am better off by about $1,725 each month.

As they say pictures are worth more than words, so I have taken some snapshots from my Hittail Account to demonstrate to you how much Hittail really helped me. The images below are the snapshots from the “Keywords” tab. If you are using Hittail you can find that info just above the list of keywords under the “Keywords” tab. That info changes from day to day depending on the search hits to your website. As you will see from the snapshots below I am currently tracking 5 websites with Hittail. All of them are listed under the “free account”. All of the websites below, had virtually no natural traffic from the search engines wen I started to use Hittail.

It is true, the figures in the above images are calculated on $0.50 per click basis. It is also true that if you optimize your lading pages well you can maintain $0.10 per click. However there are niches, including real estate, where even well optimized PPC campaigns can cost you a $1 or $2 per click. Sometimes even more. So at the end of the day Hittail’s calculation is not that much off after all.

One very important part that Hittail users may miss is that by using Hittail suggestions it is much easier to maintain those coveted $0.10 per click campaigns. Hittail has helped me not only to increase natural search traffic. It also helped me to keep my PPC nice and clean with hundreds of keywords at $0.10 per click.

Am I saying you should abandon Google Analytics? Absolutely not! Hittail and Google Analytics can work with different data providing different analytics and you can benefit greatly from both.

In my next article I getting down and dirty with showing you how to make use of Hittail Suggestions. So please, stay tuned and subscribe to my blog.

If you are a real estate agent or a webmaster working for on a real estate website, you are probably concerned with the traffic generating strategies. You maybe working hard on optimizing your pay per click campaigns as well as trying to bring visitors through natural search results from across search engines. You know how expensive pay per click campaign can become on Google if your landing pages are not optimized well. But you also may know that the traffic resulting from neutral results in the search engines is the best, not only because it’s free but because internet users seem to trust natural results more. You have probably used countless tools to analyze your traffic and its sources. But if you have not tried Hittail yet, it is probably time to give this service another look.

Hittail, developed by a team at Connors Communications, is a peace of software that analyzes the source of the traffic to your website as well as keywords used by the internet users to find your website. In the process Hittial filters out the keywords and offers your suggestions (keywords or key phrases) that if acted upon can bring your website to the top of the natural search results. You can also use the information provided by Hittail to improve your existing pay per click campaigns.

At this time Hittail offers two different membership levels: Basic and Plus. If you are not sure which plan suits you the best, I would recommend to subscribe to Free Basic plan first. This plan will allow you to track and analyze up to 100,000 visits per month. If you think your website receives more than 100,000 visitors a month or you would like to use other advanced feature available with paid plans, you can always update your account at the later time.

Hittail is probably one of the easiest to use solution out there. All you need to do after registering your website is to place one piece of javscript code on each page of your website or in the common file (preferably footer) of your website if the pages your website generated dynamically but every page uses this common file. This will save you time if you have a website with hundreds of pages. After you install the code your job is done (well almost- stay tuned to learn more) and the rest is done by Hittail.

I will be writing more article in the future to show you have you can use Hittail and other marketing tools such as PRWeb, to maximize your results. So please subscribe to this blog. For now I leave you with the following YouTube presentation by Mike Levin: