After about 2 years of economic turmoil around the world, only the brave or the stupid would dare to try to forecast what the future holds. I am usually pretty brave, but neither brave enough or stupid enough to go out on a limb to make predictive statements at present.

Over the past few months there has been reasonably pleasing activity in the property market both here & around Australia. It has not been strong enough to make agents think about buying a Ferrari, but strong enough to keep them from panic attacks.

Our local market has held up quite well since the middle of 2009. The First Home Buyers Grant helped sustain the lower end of the market until September, but we feared that changes to the grant would remove first home buyers from this locality when they were introduced because of the skew towards new homes. Demand did slow down, but not as much as feared & we are pleased to report that there are still first home buyers purchasing homes on Tamborine Mountain.

There is not a great deal of activity in the lower levels of the vacant land market. It seems that sellers of vacant residential blocks are still pricing above what the market considers realistic. When a residential block suddenly drops price substantially, there always seems to be a buyer ready to pounce. Buyers are indicating that they can can afford to wait until “the price is right”.

The real strength in the market seems to be in the middle levels. The last couple of months’ sales by Lane Realty indicate that there are a fair number of buyers active in the $500,000 plus range, looking for both homes & vacant land. Views & privacy seem to be the main attributes buyers in this price range are seeking.

Overall, the market appears to be steady, without any obvious up or down movement in values. Small interest rate rises are definitely influencing the level of demand. When the buying public feels confident that interest rates have levelled off, we may begin to see some upward pressure on prices.

During the months of January & February 2010, lanerealty.com.au generated 17,694 views of homes & vacant land listed for sale with Lane Realty.

In addition, we generated a further 8,148 page views of listed homes & land via our use of the ReNet national site & its Gold Coast mirror site.

A total of 25,842 page views of our for sale properties generated between a busy month when many people were holidaying & then getting kids back to school, while February was a very wet month when visitors to the Mountain were down substantially, indicates the power of our integrated print & cyberspace marketing programme.

Lane Realty is the only agency on Tamborine Mountain with a non-template web site. Our site does not rely on any other site to provide its property information, search facilities or search engine placement. As any person doing a Google search can see, we promote our site via Google using Google AdWords - not the cheapest option but the best.

Using Google AdWords allows us to have our site prominently promoted on Google searches, Google Maps & many other sites that carry real estate & Tamborine Mountain information throughout Australia & New Zealand. In fact, our web site ad can appear on the same page as another local agentŐs property ad because some of the sites used by other agents have an advertising agreement with Google, & we do actually get visitors coming to our site from these ads.

Lane Realty uses an on-line web flyer service in the USA which automatically posts our electronic flyers to many international sites including one that has an Australian portal. Stats show it to be quite an effective way of directing web viewers to our site.

We heavily promote lanerealty.com.au in many other ways, including our advertising in both colour magazines & other print advertising.

We obtain very detailed statistics from one of the most respected on-line companies in the USA, so we can get a clear picture of how people find our site, what pages they view & if they are return visitors or not.

All agents do a little boasting, it comes with the profession! However, Lane Realty takes exception to agents who knowingly make claims that can be disproved easily. Let me give you some examples from a couple of sheets of paper headed. “10 GOOD REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD LIST WITH US”, dropped into a friend’s letter box recently.

The most glaring distortion is the words: “STATE OF THE ART WEB SITE”. That agency’s web site is very far from being “state-of-the-art”. A quick HTML validation check of the agent’s Home Page via the industry standard markup validation service (http://validator.w3.org/ or see the link at the bottom of this page) revealed 69 coding errors. It is a small template web site lacking slideshows, virtual tours, Google mapping facilities & option for RSS feed. Today, even those features do not make for a truly state-of-the-art web site, although sites with those features are far ahead of that agent’s site.

Then they make the inexplicable claim to be “THE MOST ESTABLISHED AGENCY ON THE MOUNTAIN” (whatever that is intended to mean!). Somehow the history of that agent’s business does not stack up too well against Lane Realty’s history of having been established in 1983 and still operating under the same name & in the same position.

That is followed shortly later in the blurb by: “LOCATED IN A PRIME POSITION WITH HIGH EXPOSURE”. Far off the beaten tourist track hardly qualifies as either “prime position” or “high exposure”.

The next outlandish claim: “LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND UNRIVALLED EXPERIENCE SELLING ON THE MOUNTAIN”. That statement can not stand up when compared to the long experience & accumulated local knowledge of people like Helen South, Marilyn McPhail, Barry Chick & Elizabeth Stirling, not to mention people in other agencies such as Peter Kendall & Ed Dalton.

The agency had a stapled on brochure touting that they were: #1 in SALES - #1 in RESULTS. Sorry! Lane Realty would dispute that claim & I am sure there are a few other agencies here can also put up a challenge based on sales numbers & dollar value that could destroy that claim too!

NO! YOU ARE NOT ENTITLED TO YOUR OWN “FACTS”!