Have you ever Googled yourself? I do it regularly -- mainly to see who's reading Inman News, but it also shows in many cases who is illegally stealing content. It's kind of fun and shocking at the same time. (For instance, I learned once that there's a person named Jessica Swesey who studies theater in New York.)

The world has come to this: I can enter a person's name in the venerable Google search box and voila, I have a sense of who they are, where they work, what they like to do in their spare time (OK, so this doesn't work quite so well with people named Bob or Mary Smith). Googling my name also turns up my Twitter page, my Jaiku page, my wedding and fundraising sites, and tons of stories I wrote for Inman several years ago.

All of this is not so bad to my reputation. But I got a call this week from a real estate broker I sourced in a story four years ago about mortgage fraud. She was the good gal in the story, explaining how she'd been asked by others in the industry to participate in fraudulent deals but turned them down. Though I haven't talked to her since then, she called because she's now opening her own brokerage and recently discovered that when she Googles herself, the headline "Mortgage fraud: Real estate's white-collar epidemic" shows up, with no context of why her name is associated.

She quickly realized this could look bad to potential clients so she called me to ask what to do. Unfortunately, we can't control how Google indexes things, so I told her she may want to think about beefing up her Web presence with other things like a blog. I also told her to go ahead and post the full story on her Web site so people can see that she's not a fraudster, but more of a whistleblower.

With all the new social apps out there enabling people to post pics, blogs, text messages, whatever, many are saying this is going to be become more of an issue -- especially for business folks.

This incident of a source calling me because the first link on Google under their name is an Inman News story has happened before. It's kind of interesting that while the Internet has enabled a certain level of anonymity, it's also enabled people to know a lot more about each other. Taken out of context, this could be disastrous for some.

See recent Inman Blog posts on this topic:

Guest post: Agent review sites and reputation management
Eat my words
Please, please review me

(Title credit is from an Ani Difranco song lyric.)

The housing downturn continues to keep the gavel falling at Hudson & Marshall auctions around the nation. When we last checked in, the Dallas-based auctioneer had six auctions scheduled for May and June, with more than 500 homes up for grabs in Michigan alone.

At the moment, Hudson & Marshall has 400 homes in northern California up for sale at a half dozen auctions. Up next is Ohio and Pennsylvania (more than 350 homes beginning July 24) followed by Colorado and Nevada (250 homes to be auctioned off in the first week of August) and then Indiana and Illinois (more than 400 homes on the auction block for grabs between Aug. 14-19).

All told more than 1,400 homes could change hands, in many cases without the assistance of real estate brokers (Hudson and Marshall says it "encourages buyer-broker participation" but that it's not a requirement).

The company says it sells more than 90 percent of properties that are put up for bid. While you might think properties find buyers at auctions because their owners are desperate to unload them and willing to take a price cut, Hudson and Marshall says auctions are as much about giving a property better exposure as slashing prices.

"Often times we find that the price is not the reason why a property doesn't sell. The primary cause often is it has not been marketed effectively and, therefore, the property has experienced insufficient exposure," the company's Web site claims. "The auction process is the best way to revive interest in the property and obtain offers at current market value."

Wait. Isn't marketing a property and obtaining offers at current market value a real estate agent's job description?

For anyone looking for some pragmatic reading to jolt your online marketing methods, Marketing Pilgrim has released a free Internet marketing e-book. Follow this link to download: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/free-internet-marketing-ebook.pdf. The PDF includes 68 essays on improving search engine optimization, search engine advertising and social media optimization. I admit, I haven't read it yet, but the bloggers at MP usually churn out good stuff.

Bran Castle, the 630-year-old structure that is now more popularly known as Dracula's Castle, is on the market.

The structure was put up for sale by Archduke Dominic Habsburg and his family and is reportedly expected to sell for $135 million or more. Baytree Capital, a New York investment firm, is handling the sale.

"Dracula" author Bram Stoker is said to have based Dracula's Castle on Bran Castle, and to have based Dracula on Vlad III the Impaler, a former prince for a region called Wallachia that is now part of Romania. But the ties between Bran Castle and Vlad the Impaler (also known as Vlad Ţepeş and Vlad Drăculea) are fairly loose. A history of Bran Castle states that Vlad in 1459 attacked a nearby city "through Bran, burning the suburbs and the old church of Bartholomew," and "Bran was also the pass used" by armies of a prince loyal to Vlad during Vlad's second reign in 1456-1462.

The castle, which has been one of the most popular tourist attractions in Romania, was reportedly seized from the archduke's family during communist rule in Romania and converted into a museum in the 1950s.

Vlad is more closely associated with Poienari Castle, a now-ruined Romanian castle that was repaired and became one of his main fortresses. His nickname as "the impaler" reportedly relates to his tendency to impale his enemies.

The archduke had reportedly tried to sell the castle to local authorities in Romania for about $80 million in 2006, though that offer was rejected, the Associated Press reported. The Romanian government had returned the castle to his family last year.

News about the sale of Dracula's castle has touched off a flurry of Internet gossip, from Yelp.com to the Shadowed Realm Medieval History Community to the Ghost Mysteries Community Discussion Forums and everything in between.

Kijiji is a site you may not have heard about before - it's online marketplace eBay's community based classifieds service. The site has been operating in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, and Taiwan since February 2005, and has now just launched in the US.

Much like craigslist, it aims to help people post and find advertisements in a number of categories including automobiles, jobs, personals, and, of course, housing.

For Realtors looking to market their listings online, Kijiji (whose name means  "village" in Swahili) is just another option in a growing number of Web 2.0 sites looking to aggregate real estate listings; Google Base, Yahoo! Classifieds, Microsoft’s Live Expo, Edgeio (see Edgeio on InmanTV) to name just a few.

Jay Thompson, a Realtor who blogs at the The Phoenix Real Estate Guy, has given it a try and calls it "a snap".

Keeping track of all these options can be overwhelming however. Web services like vFlyer and Postlets help agents by syndicating their listings to all of the sites in one shot and if you need some help sorting through all the options, read this post Craigslist Alternatives Compared from the site Mashable.com.

Podcasts are quickly becoming a popular way for real estate professionals to broadcast their expertise to a wider audience.

The Rory, Steve and Dave podcast is a good example of this and Morgan Brown from the Blown Mortgage blog has been doing a regular series of interviews with other real estate bloggers. (Check out his interviews with Brad Inman, Publisher Inman News; Dustin Luther of Move.com; Pat Kitano, Transparent Real Estate; and myself, Joel Burslem, Future of Real Estate Marketing, just to name a few.)

Podcasts are an easy way to create and quick market report or even bring together a group of individuals to talk about a particular market area or investment strategies.

So how can you create your own podcast?

Many podcast producers are using Skype to connect to callers; using Skype to call computer to computer means your conversations remain digital so they are easily recorded.

Audacity is a great free program that lets you record live audio and then edit the final result. Mac users should look at Übercaster, a fantastic piece of software that allow you to record and create multiple parties on a call.

If you need a place to put your podcast take a look at libsyn, which offers very reasonable hosting of individual shows. Odeo or Hipcast will also host your podcasts for you. Finally, if you have a blog based on the Wordpress platform, check out the PodPress plugin which allows you to easily embed your podcast into a blog post.

For an even simpler solution, take a look at TalkShoe (an Inman Innovator Award finalist) -  a website that allows you to host and record your own talk show. Talkshoe makes it incredibly easy to record a podcast from a traditional conference call. Our recent Real Estate Blogging audio conference was recorded using Talkshoe.

Those are just a few of the options out there for you - anyone else doing real estate podcasts right now? Post a link to your show in the comments below...

The Google model of paying per click has influenced all types of advertising models. It has made a significant dent in the old Real Estate Advertising 1.0 - "pay per line and hope model" of the newspapers or the "pay per page and hope model" of the magazines.

The future of real estate advertising suggests that someone gets paid only for results. I advertise something for you and you pay me based on what I do for you to get leads. If that is the case, the day will come soon when even the brokers figure out how to make that work for their own Web sites. When aggregated, local broker Web site traffic reaches the tens if not hundreds of millions of visitors now annually.

Consumers going to broker Web sites to search for listings. In the not too distant future brokers could advertise their own listings in each other's searches and pay each other the Google way - pay per click to a listing detail page. I see this as the evolving Advertising 2.0 model -- consumers going to a broker's site to see their listings and then being linked directly to another broker's site to see that brokers listings. Makes good sense to me and to every other consumer that wants detailed and accurate information on a specific listing.  Sure beats sketchy and incomplete IDX data.

And what about the traditional broker-to-broker referral fees in this new age of Advertising 2.0? Good question, what about them?

--Ken Jenny, TranCen

The National Association of Exclusive Buyer Agents, a group of real estate professionals who only represent buyers in real estate transactions, has released the results of a member survey that highlights pet peeves with the condition of for-sale homes.

Broken door locks that prevent access to the house, "pet deposits" in the back yard or a dirty cat litter box, missing light bulbs in the basement, "sellers that ask you to remove shoes and then have wet carpet or dirty floors," and loose stairs or missing banisters on a stairway top the list, according to the report by the group, which has about 500 members nationwide.

Jon Boyd, NAEBA president, offered a personal experience in the survey announcement: "Once I was previewing a fairly expensive home by myself. I go into the huge basement and I can't find the light switch. As I'm reaching around a corner I catch a light switch and turn it on. About eight feet in front of me is a life-sized model of the alien monster looking right at me! My heart starts beating again in a few minutes when I figure out what the stupid thing is, but whose idea was it to leave the thing there while the home is on the market?"

Other gripes by buyer's agents include: low-hanging dining room light fixtures, dead cars in the driveway or yard, graffiti, and dead birds or animals "in or around the home."

Agents: Any personal experiences you care to share about a visit to an unwelcoming home?

The duPont Registry today annouced that wrestler/actor/reality TV star Hulk Hogan's 17,145-square foot home in Belleair, Fla., is still for sale and will be featured in its latest print issue. Luxist.com reported last year that the home was originally listed for sale at $25 million. The duPont Registry Web site states that the home is listed for sale by Coldwell Banker Previews International. No price is listed at the Registry's Web site.

"Styled like a Burgundy hunting lodge, the six-bedroom estate offers more than 17,000 square feet of exquisitely detailed, exceptionally crafted living space, featuring a separate pool house and guest quarters. The finest materials and finishes, imported from around the world, as well as a gracious floor plan make this one-of-a-kind estate feel castle like. Outdoors, the estate is its own kind of Florida paradise with centuries-old oak trees, manicured grounds, courtyards, and entertaining areas," according to the Web site description. It also has a gym, a floating dock, and is 90 minutes from Disney World.

The ad is simply titled, "Hulk Hogan's Palatial Estate."

Online Reputation Management is a buzzword you're going to be hearing a lot these days. Especially now that Google has just announced that it has added reviews to businesses on Google Maps.

(For more on online reputation management, read The Rise of the User Review or The Need for a Cohesive Identity Strategy)

Over the past few years, Citysearch, Yahoo! Local, YellowPages and many other local search sites have also all added user reviews to their listings. Amazon.com is generally considered the responsible party behind this trend, when they started added user reviews on each of their products.

Pat Kitano, in a post last week, spoke of the need to monitor agent review sites - and I agree wholeheartedly. (There's a business model in there somewhere too. Someone who can aggregate and track reviews on third party sites or conduct an ego search on my behalf and let me know when a new review has been posted. MerchantCircle is the only company currently doing this, as far as I know.)

But monitoring the Net for negative comments is only half the battle really; generating positive reviews is equally as important.

When I was last in San Francisco, I went for lunch at a little Moroccan restaurant and I noticed, in the small print on the back of the menu, a request for patrons to post about their visit on the restaurant review site Yelp. Presumably, the goal was to generate more positive reviews and hopefully attract more customers.

It struck me that this is a perfect application in real estate as well. Going forward, you're going to want as many positive reviews out there as possible. So who's going be the first to put "Review me on Google" on their business cards?

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