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photo credit: Matthew Oliphant

Anyone who is interested in real estate investment knows that the most important thing you can have in this business (besides money) is good timing. Being able to get in a good bid on a house that just went on the market can make a big difference in the quality of the real estate that you’ll buy. In order to be able to have that good timing, the investor needs to be able to use the right tools to find real estate on an ongoing basis. (more…)

Upside down, in a shoe or up a tree. There’s no end to what an inventive mind can do when it comes to building.

House of the future

Futuro house

The Futuro house was designed in 1968 by Finnish architect Matti Suuronen, who designed it as a vacation house for a friend. After the first house was built, Polykem approached the architect about designing a prefabricated model and it became an overnight sensation.

The house came in 16 pieces of fiberglass and plastic. A hatch door in its lower half opened down to reveal steps, like an airplane, and led into a room outfitted with six plastic bed-chair combinations, a fireplace, a kitchenette and a bathroom. The house sold for between $12,000 and $14,000 in the US before the energy crisis of the 1970s and changing tastes led the manufacturer to stop production.
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credit: jerryfletcher

If you’re new to property investment, you might be hesitant to jump into the market at this stage in the game. Real estate risks just seem too high for those people who don’t have a good grasp on how the housing market works for and against them. But what if you could try out different home building and home buying options in a no-risk manner? That’s the purpose of a highly popular computer game called Build-A-Lot.

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credit: Michael248

When it’s time to move to a new home, you have two options. You can hire a moving company to transport all of your boxes and furnishings to the new home or you can roll up your sleeves and get ready for some hard work yourself.

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credit: TheMuuj
The last thing you need if you’re pulling up stakes is for your mover to hijack your belongings. But it happens. A lot.

Each year, thousands of of people are bilked by movers or have their belongings lost or destroyed due to incompetence. Don’t become one of them.
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credit: mrhayata
Forbes Magazine has come out with its top cities for couples by looking at some of the top metropolitan regions in the country, examining their divorce and marriage rates, the price of first time homes, income disparity between the sexes and the availability of marriage counselors. So, if you’re in a relationship and looking to get married, and stay married, you may want to consider a move to one of the following couple-friendly cities.
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If you’re facing a move you already know how stressful it can be, even before you begin the packing process. Use the following tips to help you make the move a bit less harrowing.

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So - here’s the latest on April 2007 searches (most popular listed first) on the allpropertymanagement website. As usual, SF home or condo (<$300K) was the most popular search in terms of the type of property needing to be managed. Also as usual, California, Florida and Texas led in terms of geographic location. Finally, the prize for the most popular zip code goes to: 95926 - Chico, California. Property managers in Chico - if you’re looking for properties, we should chat! (more…)

It’s been a long haul trying to get www.allpropertymanagement.com to appear at the top of the search engines for our keyterm “property management”. Finally, we can say we have arrived - we’re #1 on Google for this term.

Since we’ve been at #1 on google for a few months, I decided to check my old friend Alexa and see just how much our rank had improved on that site.

So, given our ever improving organic listings I was surprised that Alexa says our rank is getting worse. The last time I checked in late 2006 we were right on the cusp of the top 100,000. Now with much improved traffic they place us around 180,000. I decided to take a look at Compete. Low and behold they have our rank at 26,193 and improving. Now that’s a little better. But why the difference?

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