Lethbridge, AB

Are you shopping for a home on the Lethbridge MLS? Or wanting your home sold on the Lethbridge MLS? Or just curious what MLS is?

What is the MLS^®?

When you want to buy a car, the pressure’s on to make the deal with that salesperson at that car dealership. You won’t hear about what’s being offered at the competing lot down the street.

That’s the exact opposite of the MLS^® used by REALTORS^® across Canada. In fact, MLS^® is all about REALTORS^® cooperating with each other, no matter what company they work for. MLS^® is a complex system that boils down to big advantages for consumers: cooperation and marketing among REALTORS^® mean better chances for you to succeed.

MLS^® was created 50 years ago to help Canadians wanting to buy or sell properties. You’re probably familiar with REALTOR.ca, the online property guide, but what began as reams of paper chock full of listing information and photos has become an online database of properties from across the country.

REALTOR^® members of the local real estate board pay for the MLS^®. That board operates the local system, while the umbrella group – the Canadian Real Estate Association – owns the MLS^® trademark.

Only REALTORS^® can list on the MLS^® and REALTOR.ca, so if you’re selling your property, you’ll benefit from the wide exposure the listing will enjoy. Other REALTORS^® use the database to present the possibilities to their clients, potential buyers for your home.

If you’re in the market to buy or looking to sell, remember that the MLS^®, REALTOR.ca and your REALTOR^® can help make your dream a reality.

You can now search directly on the internet and access ALL MLS listed properties. Go to:

www.LethbridgeRealEstateOnline.com

take your time, search without hassle or pressure.

Lethbridge rental property and houses for rent in Lethbridge are 2 of the things I receive a lot of general questions about. I dug up this blog post I made to my Lethbridge Real Estate Blog about 10 months ago and wanted to repost it becuase it answers several questions that I receive from Lethbridge landlords.

lethbridge mortgage broker lethbridge real estate

For many years, illegal and non-conforming basement suites have been the bane of many real estate transactions and mortgage applications. The City of Lethbridge has tried to deal with the situation several times in the past few decades, at one time allowing suites that were in existence before 1969 to remain in their non-conforming condition and making exceptions onf suites which were constructed after 1969.

As 2008 drew to a close, a new fire code amendment required all existing basement suites to be improved to meet a minimum safety level including smoke and fire detectors, proper egress windows on all bedrooms, free access to exits from the suite, and containing all HVAC systems behind moderately fire retardant walls.

To the bestof my knowledge, most landlords made no effort to comply.

A recent house fire in Calgary this past week is certain to bring this issue to the front page of the newspaper and encourage more discussion in the community and City Council chambers.

Now, a new grant program eliminates all excuses for a landlord to fail to improve the conditions of their properties and comply with the fire code. Here is a recent article which details the grants.

I wanted to make a new Lethbridge real estate website that I could use for doing some testing of some fancy geek technology that I have been messing around with lately. Of course, when you are setting up a website primarily for experimentation and it is in total development, you don't want to spend a ton of money on it. I have other Lethbridge real estate websites, but wanted one specifically for syndicating listings out.

I chose to use a point2 real estate template site, bought a godaddy domain, did a redirect, and spend an hour putting up the following website:

http://www.lethbridgerealestateonline.com

Now I will admit the site isnt pretty and sure wont win any awards the way it looks and functions yet, but it does have a few key components in it that I plan to build upon and see what I can achieve with them. It is about 2am on the 5th of November, 2009 and I am curious how long it will take to get that website spidered into google and ranked. I plan to spend about 2 hours this weekend doing some optimization, and then let the site sit for a week. I figure it should take a month to get it ranked, and about 3 months for it to have decent indexing.

The end of November I will tweak the site and add more content to it and see if I cant push it into the top 20 searches for my local real estate market. That will be quite an accomplishment if I can do that within a month, but it is a great goal and I think I have a plan and the tools to achieve it WITHOUT spending a single dime on marketing.

Testing 1 2 3, lets give this a shot.

I would love feedback from anyone who clicks on it. What parts need work, what parts look okay the way they are. I am a bit of a rookie HTML programmer, but can do enough to clean it up if suggested.

Clearly Lethbridge

Today I had a meeting with Doug, a salesman for Clearly Lethbridge, a new online directory and marketing website that has launched in Lethbridge. The intention of the site seems to be to create an online directory of local businesses and to act as a central hub which will help to increase the search engine optimization and placement of each of the advertisers through the cooperative efforts of all. This is much like many of the online directories which attempt to do the same thing for businesses within specific categories, except that in the case of Clearly Lethbridge, the common thread is that all of the businesses are local to Lethbridge.

The company has some solid backing and is an extension of Clear Sky, who is a media company which operates several local radio stations. This should help Clearly Lethbridge enjoy some longevity while it attempts to build an advertiser base. There have been other Lethbridge business directory websites that have come and gone, some are still sitting dormant on the internet. A few of them have been good ideas, but have not continued due to the constant need to solicit advertisers and to keep content updated. Hopefully Clearly Lethbridge will have better luck.

At this point in time I declined to purchase advertising on the Clearly Lethbridge site, primarily because I accomplish much the same goals through my blog here, in addition to my other websites:

LethbridgeLoans.com

LethbridgeRealEstateBlog.com

LethbridgeRealEstateOnline.com

I also do a substantial amount of social media marketing through twitter, facebook, and other sites. My web content is often syndicated out via over 400 directories and another 400 RSS feeds. Because of the combined reach of these sites and their syndication, the content that I publish reaches thousands of people.

As a simple test, I am writing this blog at 1am, Friday Nov 20th, 2009. I would expect that if you were to search "clearly lethbridge" tomorrow on your favorite search engine that this very post would already be indexed and ranking at or near the very top. Try it out and see if my marketing is as effective as I claim it to be.

I wanted to make a new Lethbridge real estate website that I could use for doing some testing of some fancy geek technology that I have been messing around with lately. Of course, when you are setting up a website primarily for experimentation and it is in total development, you don't want to spend a ton of money on it.

I chose to use a point2 template site, bought a godaddy domain, did a redirect, and spend an hour putting up the following website:

http://www.lethbridgerealestateonline.com

Now I will admit the site isnt pretty and sure wont win any awards the way it looks and functions yet, but it does have a few key components in it that I plan to build upon and see what I can achieve with them. It is about 2am on the 5th of November, 2009 and I am curious how long it will take to get that website spidered into google and ranked. I plan to spend about 2 hours this weekend doing some optimization, and then let the site sit for a week.

The end of November I will tweak the site and add more content to it and see if I cant push it into the top 20 searches for my local real estate market. That will be quite an accomplishment if I can do that within a month, but it is a great goal and I think I have a plan and the tools to achieve it WITHOUT spending a single dime on marketing.

Testing 1 2 3, lets give this a shot.

I would love feedback from anyone who clicks on it. What parts need work, what parts look okay the way they are. I am a bit of a rookie HTML programmer, but can do enough clean it up if suggested.