Indeed!  Congratulations are certainly in order for the GoodLife Team for winning the 2010 Inman News Innovator Award for Most Innovative Brokerage or Franchise.

As you might or might not know, the GoodLife Team (you can check there website over here) is a truly innovative, quick-on-its-feet real estate firm.  They regularly publish   The GoodLife Team places a strong emphasis on utilizing a host of cutting-edge technological tools to enhance user experience when on their site, and they do a great job of it.  One example is their regular publishing of smart, engaging videos about properties they’re listing and provide loads of fresh perspective on current real estate trends. They also provide reams of useful information about neighborhoods and schools in the Austin area, served up with more than a dash of hipness and style.

A simpler way of saying all that?  These guys fairly ooze tech (and marketing) savvy.

The Inman site states,

The GoodLife Team, a boutique real estate firm based in Austin, Texas, takes an agent team approach to its brokerage. The small company has a focus on training and technology and is led by Krisstina Wise, principal and broker. The website features property, neighborhood and school details and information about area activities.

As you’ve likely guessed, another thing the GoodLife Team site features is a Realzi install (found at realestate.goodlifeteam.com; pretty handsome, no?).

Realzi is a perfect add-on to real estate websites of all shapes and sizes.  Nestled on a subdomain (though more than capable of standing on its own), Realzi provides search engine crawlers with exactly what they crave: thousands of pages of dynamic, search engine optimized content.  Realzi does this by generating pages of every property in your local MLS database and updates the listings as the information becomes available.

Our research shows that prospective homebuyers search for properties by using long-tail, address- or neighborhood-specific keyphrases.  With a specific, optimized page for each property, Realzi is specifically designed to capture these searchers.

Dan Price is the first Realzi client to get more than 1,000 unique visitors per day. Congratulations, Dan! Broker and owner at Team Price Real Estate in Austin, Texas, Dan recently sat down with us to chat about his Realzi experience so far…

What made you decide to get Realzi?

Results. I knew another Realtor who was using Realzi, and I noticed that his website ranked extremely high for specific real estate keywords and addresses. I had the opportunity to meet with Realzi June/July of 2009 and understood why their sites rank so high. It was easy to make the decision and transition once I realized that if I didn’t, I would never compete with everyone who was launching a Realzi website.

How many leads were you getting before you got Realzi?

About 5 per month without using PPC (pay per click) and 10 or so per month with a $350 per month PPC campaign. I am no longer using PPC – all incoming leads are generated from organic search results.

How many leads are you getting now?

We’re averaging 7 to 10 leads per week, and about half of those are resulting in appointments. These are the best results I have ever experienced with any other website.

How has Realzi changed your business?

More leads = more business. As a broker, I assign all my website leads to my agents. It has changed their business dramatically. My goal is to assign one to two leads that will result in a closing per agent per month. So far, we are exceeding those goals.

Have you gotten any feedback from clients who searched for a home using your Realzi site? What did they think of it?

I tell all my clients to use my Realzi site, and they love it. The site allows them to save listings and searches, perform map searches, keyword searches, etc. I often see users email listings from my Realzi site to their agents.

Tell us about your daily schedule as a Realtor. How does Realzi fit into your schedule?

One of the nicest things about Realzi is that it’s designed to take care of itself — it updates every evening so when new listings are submitted it will automatically show up next day. When I want to email a client a property, I no longer email them from the MLS — I email them the property URL from my Realzi site. I do this for two reasons: 1. I want them to use my site and hopefully forward that link to their friends and family members. They’re excited about buying a home, so why not have them share a link to my site instead of the MLS listing link which does not drive traffic and visibility to my site? 2. The URL is easy to copy and paste — most Realtor IDX websites will generate a long and meaningless URL, but Realzi does not do that. Realzi generates a URL based on the State/City/Zip and address. It’s a clean URL and easy to email, upload to social networking sites, etc. It’s a URL that people feel comfortable clicking on.

What advice do you have for agents and brokers who are just getting started with Realzi?

Understand that it might take Google a few months to index your site. It took Google about 4 months to “notice and tag” my Realzi site. Not that much happened during that time, but after those 4 months I was very pleased with the number of leads the site started generating. I also make sure to send all my clients and contacts a press release that talks about the new site. Not only is Realzi a search-engine friendly site, but it’s also a great site for consumers and clients. They really like the map search and the keyword search.

Thanks, Dan! We’re thrilled to see just how much Realzi has helped your business.

We can’t wait to see who will be our next user to top 1,000 unique visitors. If you’re an agent or broker who’s ready to start getting more traffic and leads to your real estate website, don’t hesitate to contact us.

There’s a great article over at CNNMoney.com that talks about Obama’s real estate rescue plan. Unveiled last week, Obama’s real estate rescue plan is also known as the $75 billion Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan.

It includes two things, the first being that the government is “aiming to help more homeowners refinance to take advantage of low interest rates.” The second is that the plan will give lenders and servicers incentives to restructure mortgages at more affordable levels.

More information about Obama’s real estate rescue plan is coming early next month. But people are wondering how they can find out about whether they’ll be able to get in on what the plan offers.

CNN points out that there’s help for people looking to refinance — people who have kept current on their mortgages might not have been able to refinance because home prices have fallen. If you owe more than your home’s market value, you won’t qualify for refinancing — you much have at least 20% equity in your home unless you’re using an FHA loan. Homeowners that have a debt that exceeds their home value by 5% may even be eligible, says the article, but the loan has to be owned or backed by Fannie or Freddie.

If your property value has declined severely, as in put you underwater by more than 5%, you won’t be eligible. Also not eligible: homeowners with “jumbo” mortgages. You have to have a “conforming” mortgages, and  you’ll have to prove you have the income necessary to keep up with your payments.

Obama’s real estate rescue plan also brings up mortgage modification help for at-risk borrowers. The CNNMoney.com article notes that homeowners who are at risk of default or in default might qualify for a loan modification — that means it’d restructure the terms of the loan. If you wind up qualifying for this, your lender could reduce your monthly mortgage payments to 31% of your gross income, staying that way for five years before reverting back to the conforming loan rates. There are many people who are not eligible for this, like people who bought homes for investment or those who were irresponsible in their borrowing, for example.

Stay on top of the latest of what’s going on with Obama’s real estate rescue plan, also known as the Homeowner Affordability and Stability Plan, by checking out CNNMoney.com. There should be much more information available about it on March 4.