Within three months, his blog made it to the first page of Google when the phrase "Malibu real estate" was searched. Daily page views started to rise until he was averaging 300 a day. On days when a news aggregator picked up one of his posts, page views soared to as many as 8,000. But clicks aren't commission checks. The first phone call from someone reading the blog arrived within a year, and business soon followed. His most expensive listing or sale came last year from a Malibu resident. "She enjoyed reading my blog and wanted me to list her house at $14 million," Gardner said. The 14,000-square-foot Italian villa sits on 20 ocean-view acres. A Seattle-based blog reader recently gave Gardner the listing on her $8.5 million Malibu house. Another, Mark DiPaola, found an ocean-view home site in Malibu last year through Gardner. "When I started looking for an agent I went to Google and typed in 'Malibu Realtor,'" said DiPaola, the chief executive of CheckPoints, a mobile app that rewards shoppers. "The first or second time I saw the blog it was clear he knew the market."
Tara Lennon on 24 Jun 11almost two-thirds of home buyers said they used other resources, beyond their agents, to identify potential homes, with five of the top six resources being on the Internet, including a real estate website (63 percent), the website of the agent's real estate firm (54 percent), and a search engine (39 percent).
