In this declining market of mortgage interest rates, it is very important to keep a close eye on where the markets are heading. Interest rates change daily and lately they have been changing multiple times per day. The national average for mortgage rates are below 6%. This is awesome! Whether you are that buyer who is sitting on the fence waiting (which I don’t recommend) or looking to refinance, now may be the time. How can you fathom that there will be a better time in the future to buy a home? The markets can only go up and many of them already are. Agents, if you have clients on the fence, now is the time to hit them with the facts and the possibilities.

We have hit rock bottom a while ago in my opinion. If you take out Florida, Nevada, and California out of the picture, the real estate market really never really looked that bad. I am seriously thinking about refinancing some of my property and I am currently keeping a close eye on mortgage rates. I use bankrate.com to track interest rates. Click here to use a great tool by Bankrate to check rates anywhere in the country.

The coolest feature allows you to set up an email alert when the rates hit your target level. This means that you do not have to worry about looking on the internet everyday trying to track rates. This site seems to have the rates from the largest of lenders. This is a great tool for agents who (1) want an excuse to contact some leads that have been on the fence and (2) to have great info to provide in emails, calls and mailings to current leads in your pipeline.

I will let you know how I make out in my quest to lower the amount of interest that I am paying.

We’ve established that blogs are a great way to keep your name and services in front of potential customers, but after you start a blog, how do you promote the fact that you have one?

There are a variety of websites out there with the specific purpose of promoting your blog. The best part is, the sites we link to below will promote your blog FOR FREE! All you have to do is tell these sites where to find your content by submitting a link to your blog, or your blog’s RSS feed, aka Real Simple Syndication. (For an explanation of RSS, check out this link from RSSPad)

Below is a list of our favorite blog networks, with examples of the type of FREE exposure they can provide your blog.

• Register for a free account at PRWeb, and gain access to a FREE RSS feed from RSSPad (check out GetMyHomesValue.com on RSSPad).
• BlogCatalog proclaims itself to be the “blogger social network,” and submitting your blog into their free feed is actually part of the registration process (see a BlogCatalog page example).
• Copy and paste your personal blog through your ActiveRain profile (check out the profile and blog of Mark Boyd, a GetMyHomesValue.com real estate coach)

Does anyone out there have any other sites to share with FREE blog syndication for real estate agents? Feel free to share in the comments and we will add them to our list.

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it 1000 times - if you want to boost your real estate business, make sure you have a STRONG presence on the Internet. As much as old-school agents may want to deny it, the majority of your prospective clients are going online to get real estate information nowadays.

The question is, are they finding YOU when they do it? Or is it your competitor that catches their eye? Luckily, more and more agents ARE getting on the web and attempting to make themselves known on the ‘Net…but we’ve still got a ways to go.

We get it, you’re a real estate agent, not a web designer, nor an Internet marketer. But just because you don’t have experience with something, doesn’t mean you can’t learn, especially with all the resources on the web. We found a great online guide to real estate marketing made easy that is perfect for beginners or those slightly more advanced. Read over it, then compare your site to some of the common problems listed - if you do still have a ton of Internet marketing “no-nos” it’s time to make some changes.

Sorry people, as exciting as frames, moving text and ridiculously flashy graphics are, they’re just NOT user OR search engine friendly. And if you want to be adding hundreds or thousands of new leads to your pipeline year after year, you need to make sure it is!

So, I found this page where you can actually download a free mortgage calculator for your website. There are so many times when one of our remarkableagents.com customers wants a mortgage calculator and we usually refer them to a site where you actually have to pay for the calculator… so this is a welcome surprise.

Try out the mortgage calculator here.

Get the code for the free mortgage calculator here.