rcjordan - 10:06 pm on May 31, 2000 (gmt 0)

re: just a little about the real estate

Me, too. I own a small residential (sales) real estate firm and a commercial one (strip center construction and lease management). My "travel" website provides ALL of the web contacts the residential firm can handle, yet it doesn't say jack about the traditional real estate info you'd think they'd be searching to find. When we couldn't handle the volume, we gave up and started leasing sponsorships to our competitors.... that's how I was drug -kicking & screaming- into this web business in the first place. In fact, we database very detailed, voluntarily submitted information requests on the fly --about 60,000 requests on file for the last 3 years. Two separate studies of that database, commissioned by state economic development groups, have confirmed that fully 8% of our traffic (5+ million total pageviews in 1999 --estimate 750k uniques) are researching "retirement and/or relocation." Trust me, travel and real estate are Siameese twins under destination research, and travel has most of the vital organs.

Here's another way of looking at it; take the major reasons to travel to a place, add schools and taxes, and you've covered real estate pretty well.

I didn't arrive at this conclusion because I knew what I was doing. At first, travel request emails were a nuisance item that kept cropping up every time I did a community background page or two. But, I kept getting more and more of them and I started wondering why the attraction to the site(s). Then, I began wondering if the converse was true --that travel sites have a hidden vein of hard-core real estate. So, one day when I was particularly bored with subdivisions and '3 BR brick ranch -new construction', I flipped the content over to history and attractions and WHAM! they bit so hard it nearly jerked the keyboard off the desk.