I just finished some ready-to-use forms and displays in Zoho Creator for lead capture, current inventory statistics display, and absorption rates display. I set them up as a free application you can use once you set up a free Zoho Creator account.

Here's a short three segment tutorial, and you'll find that it will be really easy to follow and to get the embed code for your site. I even tell you what you need to get for numbers from your MLS to fill in the forms about once a week for a perpetual display record of what's happening in your market.

If you've been wanting to differentiate your website or blog in your market, this is a way to do that and position yourself as a market expert. Once the embed code is on the site, you just go to your form and slam in a few numbers, and the site updates. Click on the image for an example display.

I have local appraisers and even an international vacation area real estate consulting firm who watch these stats on my site. You'll only invest a couple of hours in getting this set up, then maybe 20 minutes a week to display stats that will set you apart in your market.

The new FHFA Index numbers are out for the third quarter.  For the first time since the second quarter of 2007, the Composite is positive, though only by 0.23%. Of the nine census divisions tracked, four are negative and five positive. The area of the country faring the best is dead-center, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Iowa.

The full report is below, and you can use the >> in the corner to enlarge and print it. There are some interesting charts and graphs this time around.

I have a search in Hootsuite for tweets with "twitter" and "real estate" in them. Mostly I see a lot of people trying to sell the latest hot tip or service to Realtors in how to make money with Twitter. But, this morning there was a tweet with this: "Silly twitter. I tweeted a band called Real Estate and now I have realtor followers."

One of the reasons I don't follow a huge number of people on Twitter is that I actually like to at least skim their tweets for useful information. I can't possibly do that following hundreds. Here we obviously have real estate people who have set up automated following mechanisms for the words "real estate." There's a big difference in a search and following. This person was interested in music, and picked up Realtors. She doesn't care, as they are following her, not the other way around.

I believe that Twitter is already a useful tool in the business of real estate. And, I think it will get more valuable over time. But, it will be valuable only to those who learn that it's not about 10,000 followers if only 5 of them even know what you do, where, and care.

Added note: I had to edit this to apologize to any Realtors who followed this young lady in San Francisco because they play in a band.

There are a number of resources to insert html signatures in Gmail.  But, since I want more than one to handle multiple email addresses I'm sending to Gmail, it was difficult to find one that would allow me to choose a signature based on which entity I was emailing as.  Well, there's a solution using bookmarklets.

Go to this site, and you can set up multiple html email signatures as bookmarklets.  Then you just drag the bookmarklet to the brower toolbar, and you have what you need.  I have four signatures done this way, and just click on the right one when I'm in the body of the Gmail.

One little weird thing, though.  The checkbox to "Insert signature above reply," seems to do just the opposite.  It could just be that I'm thinking backwards though.  Try it first without that box checked, as that's the way I found worked best for me.