Sandy Keller, ABR, CNRS, e-PRO, Realtor

Today is Saturday, June 13, 2009 and Myrtle Beach is booming with vacationers. They seemed a bit slow coming to town this year but during the past few days they must have decided this was the place where they wanted to come for some R & R.

Myrtle Beach is a place where we have visitors, snowbirds, golfers, and second home owners all year long but there is an increase in traffic during the summer months.

One helpful tip if you are planning to visit Myrtle Beach in the summer and do not like to wait in line at a restaurant or you have children with you when it is dinner time. Be at the door by 5:00 P.M. or 4:30 P.M. if they happen to open early.

Less then a year ago I took some clients to a housing community being built by a large national home building company in the coastal southeastern area of North Carolina. The on-site salesperson told me that there were discounts available for standing inventory plus the builder gave additional upgrades at no cost to the Buyer when they were represented by their own Realtor because it was good PR and that Realtor would probably bring more Buyers. My clients insisted on making an offer much less then the "Asking Price". I had to hide my surprize when it was accepted.

Last week I talked to the same salesperson and told her that within a few days I would be bringing some potential buyers to her development. She said the builder probably wouldn't approve a deal as great as my former clients had received but she would put together a packet of standing inventory homes that had some potential for price negotiation because she was going to be out of the office when we were scheduled to visit.

Yesterday I took my clients to the development and there was no packet. Another very nice salesperson took us to see the standing investory homes. After looking at a few other developments my clients wanted to go back to the first one and make an offer on one of the standing inventory homes. They had decided on an offer amount based on resent sales data I had provided. The response from the builder was "NO, we're not accepting anything less than the posted Asking Price." That was it, period, no counter, no make a better offer, nothing. I was embarrassed and do not plan to include that neighborhood in what I show my clients unless they specifically ask to see their homes.

PS - We found a house in another new development tonight and our offer was accepted by the builder.

Todays buyer clients found my website Myrtle Beach Real Estate after looking on ActiveRain.

The News today is that the NAACP is trying to block the ACC Baseball conference from coming to Myrtle Beach because they have a problem with the State of South Carolina. They say there is an ongoing boycott by the NAACP against the State based on the Confederate Flag at the capital. That boycott has evidently been in place for years but has not been mentioned since its inception. Blocking college baseball in Myrtle Beach when nothing has been said by the NAACP to participants coming to the Atlantic Beach Bike Rally that is held annually caused me to be confused. Boycotting a few days of baseball or having the games moved to another State is not going to hurt the Capital it's going to hurt the people.

BB&T Coastal Field in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina will host the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) five day baseball tournament annually on Wednesday through Sunday during the Memorial Day weekend each May of 2011, 2012 and 2013. The games usually draw over 70,000 fans and will be a great benefit to the local economy.

In 2009 the tournament location is Durham, North Carolina and 2010 the location is Greensboro, North Carolina then Myrtle Beach is set for the following three years.

Myrtle Beach Real Estate

If you happen to have a website and you are in control of the content you will understand my flustration with Google ranking. I have taught myself how to enter every bit of information, how to link, and what's important while working to improve my site on a daily basis. I receive numerous compliments on the content and work hard to make it user friendly but even though I rank high with other search engines Google seems to pass me bye. I do the Google Webmaster thing, have submitted my sitemap, have hundreds of my URLs indexed, have tried to include the key search words but can't seem to make much headway with my Google ranking.

I know there are thousands of companies that promise to improve you ranking and I actually know someone who can get you to #1 of just about any search term. I've seen people I know personally shoot to the top positions on page 1 of the prime search term after they paid that someone. Is that fair?

Part of the ability for regular real estate sites to win Google top honors is they are indexing IDX feeds from the Association of Realtors' multiple listing service (MLS) which gives the site thousands of indexed URLs. That may be coming to an end as more cases like the one involving the Indianapolis Board of Realtors are supported by the National Association of Realtors. In that case MIBOR classified Google as a scraper site based on Section 15.2.2 that states that participants (web site owners) must protect IDX information from misappropriation by employing reasonable efforts to monitor and prevent "scraping" or other unauthorized accessing, reproduction, or use of the BLC database.

I have an IDX live feed directly from our local Association of Realtors and the URL is a link to their data base which does not help my site. I'm trying to decide if I should pay the money and switch to an indexable IDX or wait and see if Google stops indexing MLS listings.