Santa's Hide-A-Way Hollow in Middlefield Township, Ohio, a getaway spot for terminally ill children, may be getting some financial support from a Cleveland-area title insurer.

The motivation for a possible "donation" from Tower City Title Agency isn't entirely charitable. Santa's Hide-A-Way stands to get 20 percent of any unclaimed money from the settlement of a class action lawsuit that accuses Tower City of paying illegal kickbacks to brokers for business, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reports. Two-thirds of the $900,000 settlement will go to buyers and sellers involved in 3,100 transactions; the rest goes to lawyers. Most of any unclaimed money will go to two nonprofits that provide affordable housing and work on neighborhood issues.

Single Property web sites are definitely a growing trend among web savvy Realtors - and when done properly they can become the linchpin in a truly integrated marketing effort. Inman News has been running a four part series this week on advanced marketing strategies that focused on this trend, among others.

As mentioned in the piece, there are a lots of vendors out there that can help - but perhaps one of the easiest ways to accomplish this (well, for the technologically minded anyway) is to use the open source blog platform Wordpress.

Realivent Real Estate Technology Blog has some greats post on how to do this, as well as providing some custom real estate widgets, plugins and themes to help you build your site. And if you really want to get your hands dirty and customize the look and feel of your pages, check out the new Wordpress Theme Generator.

For a great example of how a Wordpress site can turn out, check out Realtor Kevin Boer's single property site he launched for a loft in San Francisco's Potrero Hill Neighborhood. Other neat features he included were an instant message widget, click to call buttons and a custom video tour. Pretty cool stuff.

In Manhattan, no matter where you look, there are signs and advertisements. Any space can become a billboard for your brand if the price is right. Mega real estate brokerages such as Corcoran and Prudential Douglas Elliman have their logos strategically placed throughout Manhattan. So how do the smaller firms compete with the huge advertising and marketing budgets of the big dogs?

Foxtons real estate, previously YHD "Your Home Direct", is one of the newer firms in Manhattan. A few years ago, they had a mega blitz campaign that plastered their logo everywhere - buses, bus stops, billboards etc. They promoted their 2% real estate commissions, which were sort of popular in New Jersey, and hoped it would catch on in New York City. It never really did.

The other day, I saw the Foxtons branded Mini Cooper in NOHO and whipped out my camera and snapped a few shots. The agent in the car refused to look my way no matter how hard I tried to get her attention. The car surely did it's job by getting my attention on a busy NYC street but for whatever reason, the agent, if it was an agent, did not. What if I was a seller looking for a real estate agent? She just made a bad first impression on me and lost a potential client. You can't be shy in Manhattan if you want to survive. Pay attention, there are clients everywhere.

Anywho, it got me thinking. Does having your vehicle custom branded with your company logo actually help you generate business? Has anyone had any success promoting themselves or their business in this manner? If you have branded your vehicle with your company logo, please let us know your experiences. Heck, send us a photo and we'll put it up along with your story.

--sellsius° real estate

The Wall St. Journal's RealEstateJournal writes today about Taking Home Photos That Will Draw Buyers and gives some great pointers on how to make your property photos shine.

Likewise, Athol Kay, an agent with Prudential Connecticut Realty, writes a great post on his blog RE Agent in CT on how Editing Real Estate Photos For Virtual Tour.

Still images are just one marketing tool available to agents these days. Inman News reports today on companies and agents that are breaking into real estate video but BlueRoof.com's Greg Tracy says using video to sell homes is not worth the effort.

If you're going to go to all the extra effort to properly stage, shoot and process your still images; why not take that extra step and go to video? Or do still images suffice in this day and age? Is there some hybrid of the two approaches that could work?

The "experienceology" blog -- a blog about "how to turn businesses into great customer experiences" -- dissects the design of real estate signs.

"While a great deal of energy is devoted to making the front of the house look appealing, what about the Realtor's sign itself?" asks Stephanie Weaver, the San Diego-based author of the blog.

She critiques designs pictured in a sequence of photos: One of the photos shows a real estate sign on the other side of a metal-barred fence (not good, she says); another sign has a rider that doesn't match the main sign; and another features a type style that is difficult to read.

Her advice: "Details count. Consider every aspect of your first impression, as you may only get one chance."

Another blogger, Dan Melson at www.searchlightcrusade.net, offers a critique of real estate renovations that he considers unnecessary.

These "misplaced improvements" are projects that make a property stand out "above the surrounding properties so far that they pull it down. Like having a mansion in a neighborhood of shanties." The author also states, "misplaced improvements are a disaster for the seller, while being a limited opportunity for a certain class of buyer, but they are tough transactions to make happen for a listing agent and there is no glory in them."

These days the mix of varied types of consumers of real estate services demands that you design your marketing to be "inline" with the specific expectations of your consumer. This means that to reach your target market a mix of online and offline marketing strategies should be planned, purchased and executed.

In the new world of "inline" marketing your ad spend should be allocated to the varied audience of Civics, Boomers, Gen Xers and Millenials. "Inline marketing" requires an "inline media" strategy to provide content as desired and demanded by each of these unique buyer and seller consumers.

As an industry we need to stop thinking about online and offline media types as "one or the other" or "we/they" choices. Know your market and add measured amounts of varied media strategies as needed to communicate and reach your potential, diverse and varied customer bases.

--Ken Jenny, TranCen

Brokers and agents -- Help Inman News uncover marketing trends in the real estate sales business by participating in our online survey. We promise it will only take a few minutes and we won't even charge you for it, rather we're willing to give back: Those who leave their name and contact info will be added to a drawing for a FREE handheld GPS or FREE pass to Real Estate Connect! (ooooh aaaaahhh). Go ahead, you know you want to…(Click here to launch the survey.)

Norm Fisher, associate broker for Royal LePage Saskatoon Real Estate in Saskatchewan, Canada, is the creator of "The Unbelievably Bad Real Estate Photos Hall of Fame," a slide show of home photographs that you probably wouldn't find in a local art gallery. Some of the shots are too dark and most of them are unflattering.

Among the images is a leaf-covered roof, an extreme closeup of a hardwood floor that appears to be taken from a mouse's-eye view, and a reflection of the photographer and the camera's flash in a room's mirror. Another photo shows a view of a kitchen and a central window that is barred up on the INSIDE. OK, maybe these could pass as art. But they may not be helpful in selling a home.

The online photo show carries a sales pitch: "Don't let this happen to you. Avoid lousy photos of your beautiful home," and asks the viewer to contact Fisher.

Move.com, a real estate search site operated by Move Inc. (formerly Homestore), climbed to 9th in market share in total visitors among real estate Web sites in March, metrics company Hitwise reported today. Move.com, a sister site to number one site on the list, Realtor.com, is an all-encompassing real estate portal that offers links to searches for existing homes, new homes, rentals, home financing, moving services, and home and garden information.

Move.com moved up in the Hitwise rankings ladder from 17th in market share in December to 12th in January, 10th in February and 9th in March.

VisualTour.com, a company that offers visual tour tools and services to real estate professionals, was new to the top-100 real estate-related sites and ranked 15th on the list in March.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Web site, at HUD.gov, has been sinking on the list -- it ranked 13th in December and 20th in March. (See Inman News article.)

OK all you listing agents and brokers out there - time's up.  If you are currently advertising a property that does not include the address, price and a great photo at the very minimum - give it up.  Most of all - stop it!  A quick study of more than 200 million potential U.S. consumers of real estate properties will no longer tolerate - "call me and I'll tell you" - industry marketing strategies. If you want to be in this business and "inline" with the consumer's true need to know - give-up the information.  No more addresses for listings like "Single Family Property", no more online listing ads with "No Photo Available" and please, "Call for Details" should not include discovering the property's price. Think about it - what's the big secret anyway? There's a For Sale sign in the lawn!!!  Imagine Amazon's success (or lack thereof) if they had launched their business with advertising like - A bunch of great books for sale online, call for prices, cover photos, authors names and related detailed subject matter. Time's up team, because after 30 years in this business, I even know it's just about time.

--Ken Jenny, TranCen