November 18, 2008
Say hello to BloodhoundBlog.net, free WordPress Multi-user weblogs for real estate professionals.
We talked about doing this in Orlando, at the scenius on Swallow Hill Road. Where we started was with the idea of WordPress blogs for the CyberProfessionals to practice on.
We saw that the right system could serve the same function for any novice bloggers — including all of the folks on Active Rain looking to make the leap to WordPress weblogging.
And BloodhoundBlog.net can also be a space for BloodhoundBlog Unchained instructors to help their students get their homework together before coming to Phoenix.
Will this be your last word in real estate weblogging? It can be, but that strikes me as a poor idea. What we’re offering is a free weblogging platform where real estate professionals can learn and grow, ultimately to go off and set up their own WordPress.org weblogs.
And you had better know this is an Unchained weblogging world: You can import content from a host of blogging platforms, and everything you do on BloodhoundBlog.net is easily exported when you’re ready to move on.
If you want to go ahead and get started, just go to BloodhoundBlog.net and set up a new blog. It’s fast, easy and fun.
Still here? Who should set up a BloodhoundBlog.net weblog?
- Stone newbies. If you want to learn to weblog, you might as well start with the best software, among people who can help you develop the best possible practices.
- Intermediate bloggers. If you’ve been toying with Active Rain or with real estate forums, it might be time to put away childish things. The work you do with us will transfer easily to a full-blown WordPress.org weblog.
- Kindred spirits. If you want to build a community of like minds, the price of doing so here can’t be beat.
- Adhocracy activists. A weblog is the perfect means of coordinating, for example, the Wine-Tasting Realtors of Biloxi.
- Teachers of lessons profound and arcane — starting with the slave-drivers of BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix.
How can we do this? We have the horsepower — dawgpower — that’s how. Even so, we’re not letting you all the way off the leash. There are plug-ins, but only at the macro level. You won’t be able to install you own, although I’ll listen to appeals for good plug-ins that work well in the WP-Mu environment. Same for themes. We have about 15 to start with, but you should feel free to recommend more. They’re not risk-free — Brian Brady has already crashed one — but they’re less risky than plug-ins. In a BloodhoundBlog.net weblog, you’re limited to naming your posts Bloodhound-style, with numbers. When you move your content, you can do what you want, and keyword-based naming should help you beat your old posts in the search engines. Finally, you’ll be constrained by our Terms of Service, which basically say, “Don’t be a jackass.”
We’ve talked about starting a forum, and this is something we may do, eventually. But a weblog creates its own management structure — “for each one spot shall prove Beloved over all” — plus we think it is the best kind of social media marketing most real estate professionals can do. BloodhoundBlog.net is a place where you can learn to do it for free.
Technorati Tags: blogging, BloodhoundBlog Unchained, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
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November 18, 2008
This is pure spam, as far as I know, completely unsolicited. I read it and loved and now I’m sharing it with you:
Here’s a web-based version, if you’re having trouble reading it.
I read this as Harrah’s-style database marketing at its best: I’m offering you an incentive to sign up to be touched at your natural buying points. That’s a mutually-reinforcing loyalty, with the merchant, of course, taking care of the up-keep for the relationship.
The issue: How to translate it to real estate. It’s not enough to have an offer. Free moving boxes are a one-off freemium, and what you want are regular reasons to touch your people.
Richard Riccelli has a great idea for synergistic offers, but you’ll have to use your imagination to retool it for real estate. He suggests giving a free magazine subscription as a freemium. For us, it might be Dwell or Cottages. In your market, it might be your local city mag. The challenge is turning the offer into natural, organic touch points. One solution might be to feature something from the magazine in your monthly newsletter. Another might be simply to call your subscriber clients to talk about issues raised in the latest issue.
A comps search is a way to stay in touch with past buyers. These were a lot more fun when prices were going up, but it’s still a nice way to stay in contact. I’m assuming everyone knows what this is: An MLS-based search of stone comps to the buyer’s home, with email alerts going to them and to you every time something changes. They get to see what’s going on in their hyper-hyper-hyper-local market, and you get a golden opportunity to talk them every time a comp is listed or sold.
What else? I wish we could have a couponable event every four to six weeks, like SuperCuts, but what other things can we do to create pull-based relationships that give us natural, organic opportunities to stay in front of our clients?
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
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November 18, 2008
This is the second in an ongoing series of posts sharing some of the gold I found at the Unchained Orlando Conference on Social Media Marketing for Real Estate. In the first post: An Outsider’s View from Inside the Hound Pound, I talked a little about the theme that emerged through all the speakers. In this, the second post, the theme reveals its philosophy.
Imagine someone handing you a list with ten actions you could use right now to improve your marketing. Now imagine not only being given the list, but an understanding of the “why” behind the actions on the list. You would go from an agent that is hungry, to an agent eating a fish, to an agent who knows how to fish in rapid order. That is what Greg Swann, our first speaker, accomplished when he shared his Unchained Epiphany.
Greg pointed out that most civilizations will do just what is needed to survive and no more. When faced with a new problem they will do just enough to overcome it but again, no more. He did not come right out and say it, but I couldn’t help myself thinking of us as a civilization. All of us involved in the real estate business. We have our own language, our own goals, our own methods for determining hierarchy and possibly most important, we have our own culture. We also suffer from the same problems Greg was describing: often doing just what is needed to get by; just enough to solve a problem, pay the bills and move on to the next thing. Not all cultures operate this way.
The Greeks, as Mr. Swann pointed out, were the first culture to come along and reach for more than just surviving; to become, as Greg said: “a doer for the sake of having done, a thinker for the sake of having thought, a poet for poetry’s own sake.” We, each and every one of us, has that opportunity. We are free to succeed and we are free to fail. We are free to control our business and we are free to believe others control it. The point Greg was driving home was this: we are not free from making the choice. Either you choose to recognize and more importantly acknowledge that you alone are responsible for your thoughts, actions and results or by definition you cede control of them to someone else. The only true wealth in the world, Greg shared, is intellectual capital.
The fluid nature of this “intellectual capital” did not really hit me until a week later. I attended an economic summit a few days ago hosted by the local Princeton Alumni chapter. There was a lot of terrific information on the stock market and what investments might make sense, but the most interesting thing I heard came from this fellow sitting next to me. Isn’t that always the way? He had worked for one of the largest Real Estate Agent training companies in the world (based right here in San Diego) until earlier this year when his position was eliminated. He said “They are no longer the powerhouse they once were. They have suffered in this downturn just like everyone else.” But I recognized that for the BS it was. The philosophy of the Greeks - the Unchained Epiphany - is the real reason this company is going down. The corollary to the philosophy of the Greeks so forcefully revealed by Greg is one of flexibility and agility. To “do for the sake of having done” and “think for the sake of having thought” requires an open mind that can accept and adapt to continuous change. The big firms remind me of aircraft carriers: they are powerful in their immediacy, but ultimately limited by their inability to easily change course.
Our intellectual capital is our wealth and we increase it every time we decide to embrace the power shift that is happening all around us. The customer controls the flow of information now. Social Media Marketing acknowledges this new freedom we have all attained and like the Greeks, implores us to take action beyond our immediate needs.
I have written more about Greg’s Unchained Epiphany - along with the List of Ten Actions you can take right now - at Real Estate Marketing is Greek to Me. In the nest installment of Unchained Notes, I’ll take on Brian Brady’s Marketing Ninjas!
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November 18, 2008
The Web Marketing Association has an annual competition in 96 industries to recognize what they believe are the best websites. In the real estate section, they list 7 criteria they look for:
- Design
- Ease of use
- Copywriting
- Interactivity
- Use of technology
- Innovation
- Content
All seven are subjective, which is fine: the organization giving the award gets to set the criteria. But looking at the winner last year, their award is doing a great disservice to any real estate agent who uses that site as their inspiration. Here is a link to the site.
Now I don’t know the people who built the site, and I don’t know those agents or their company. Nor do I have anything against them, or the award.
Personally, I think the site is fine but not spectacular in execution for what it is: a nice-looking website.
But there’s not one mention in seven criteria of results. My assumption is that most businesses want a website that is going to help them get results (i.e. generate visitors and turn them into leads). And here’s why this site is at a severe disadvantage.
It is invisible to search engines.
To you, me, and anyone else with a Flash plugin, this is what the site looks like to human eyes:
What does this site look like to Google? Here’s a visual of the actual page using a text-based browser:
It looks like nothing. Want proof?
One entry. Name. Rank. Serial Number.
A site exists. Beyond that? No information.
This site leaves money on the table. For my real estate site, according to Google Analytics, 73.4% of my 150-250 visitors per day come from search engines.
But the only way to find their site from Google is by its own name, “Elizabeth Lofts”, and if one goal of marketing is to get people who don’t already know your name to contact you, then this site had failed by that criteria.
And as of today, you won’t find it under “Pearl District” or “Pearl District Condominiums” (until the purgatory of page 5) so it wouldn’t have generated leads from people who express interest in that district.
Worse, this site has plenty of information on floor plans, but if you search as of today specifically for “Elizabeth Lofts floor plans” the site is nowhere to be found.
Why not?
The site was built completely using Flash, the industry standard for creating web animations. Search engines can’t read most Flash animations, and those that can be read won’t be indexed in a way that’s useful for your marketing. Flash has its uses, but if you build a completely Flash site, you’ve put yourself at a disadvantage for lead generation.
And the designers of the site should have explicitly mentioned this.
Contrast this total search engine invisibility with the strong Google profile of their top competitor, which ranks #1 for all of the terms I mentioned above — and incidentally, uses Flash correctly.
The irony of the award-winning site is that it might be nice-looking, but wouldn’t have generated the same results as its search engine optimized competitor. Yes, design is important for establishing credibility with visitors, but you need to get visitors to your site in the first place. With better goal setting and planning, they could have had both looks and search engine effectiveness.
And the award wouldn’t have been given to a site that is a perfect example of exactly what not do if you’re a real estate agent looking for results.
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November 18, 2008
Setting goals: whatever gets measured gets improved. So, if we want to get after it, live a life of splendor, we want to track some of our inputs, the 2.0 way.
It’s lightweight, it’s custom, and it utterly rocks.
We want to track stuff so we live in reality. Ask failure agents and they always never know quite how much business they’ve done. They always rounded up, and I call that agent math. This takes that excuse away and lets you create the reality you will live in.
We’ll soon know what pace we are on. This one’s short, the next one is longer. It’s recorded on viddler at 800×600 res, and i think you can pop it out without leaving the site. Thanks to SnapZ pro for making the video:
The way to do it in the cell is =SUM(OTHERSHEET!C2:C200) where ‘other sheet,’ is the other sheet you are messing with by name. I rename them because of minor glitches across browsers.
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November 17, 2008
This is choice, from the San Francisco Chronicle:
To qualify, you must be at least 90 days delinquent and live in the home as your primary residence. You must owe at least 90 percent of the home’s value. It’s fine if you owe more than it’s worth.
Your mortgage must be owned or guaranteed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac or held by one of the participating loan companies.
If you meet these requirements and can document your income, your servicer will reduce your monthly mortgage payment - including property taxes, insurance and association dues - to 38 percent of your gross income.
The reduction can be accomplished in one or more ways:
– Reducing the interest rate, but not below 3 percent. (The new rate, if below market, goes back to a market rate after five years.)
– Extending the term of the loan up to 40 years.
– Reducing the principal on which monthly payments are calculated. Unpaid principal is added to the loan balance and due when the homeowner sells or refinances. The reduced interest payments never have to be repaid.
If you owe more than the home is worth, the plan will only reduce principal down to 100 percent of market value, according to an official for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which supervises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
If all three of these maneuvers can’t reduce your payments to 38 percent of income, you won’t get a fast-track modification but could still request a customized deal, says the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The streamlined process looks only at income, not assets. If you refinanced your home to buy a Mercedes or own another home, you won’t be expected to sell them to pay your mortgage.
Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital, predicts that many homeowners who have little or no equity will stop paying their mortgage and then reduce their income to get the biggest payment cut possible. They could stop working overtime or, if two spouses work, one could quit. After the modification, they could try to boost their income again.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” Schiff says. “People are going to feel like complete morons if they don’t participate. The people getting punished are the ones who never made an irresponsible decision to buy a house they couldn’t afford.”
The government is offering loan servicers $800 for every homeowner they get into the plan.
Schiff predicts that loan agents “will be cold-calling people trying to get them into it. Just like they encouraged people to overstate their income to get a bigger loan in the first place, now they will encourage them to understate their income to qualify for a smaller loan.”
To prevent fraud, the government says a borrower “must certify that he or she experienced a hardship or change in financial circumstances, and did not purposely default to obtain a modification.”
The housing agency official doubts that people will stop paying just to get a modification because it will hurt their credit record, and that will make it harder to get a loan and possibly a job.
“Credit bureau reports are checked by employers. They’re taking a big risk missing three payments just to get a lower rate,” she says. An existing lender who sees your credit score deteriorate could also cut back on your credit and possibly raise your rate.
Don’t cry. There’s plenty more.
Technorati Tags: real estate, real estate marketing
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November 17, 2008
I watch him, through the French terrace doors in the living room, as he ambles across the sidewalk and up the limestone steps of my still unsold 1.5 million dollar McMansion. He double parked his Escalade next to my X3 without bothering to put on his flashers, its mere shadow swallowing my embarrassingly sensible Bimmer. He’s wearing an Urlacher jersey, number 54, size XXL would be my guess. It’s tight. Squirrels scatter and birds empty the barren trees into the charcoal, cloudless drape that’s been hanging for a year over this soon to be expired listing. For some reason I immediately re-calculate my own net worth like I always do when this guy shows up. It only takes a few seconds.
“Still got this Moose?” he asks, smiling. Our inside joke. The ‘Talking Moose,’ my unsold 6 bedroom Behemoth jammed shoulder to shoulder into a block of Chicago brick bungalows.
“Last day,” I tell him. “If Jesus Christ doesn’t walk through the door in the next half hour the Builder is moving his family and all his in-laws in.”
He looks at me as if to ask ‘hey, what am I, chopped…?’ I’ve written about this guy before, a derivatives trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He calls me Dino. He thinks I’m Greek. He knows a lot of Greeks down at the Merc, he tells me again although I’m quite certain he’s probably never read one.
“So,” I begin. “A lot has gone apeshit since the last time we spoke.” And it has. In the past month the whole world economy has been thrown off its axis. This we all know.
“Body bags, dude,” he says. “Go long on body bags.” I know he’s kidding but I still ponder the notion as I imagine turning my Wachovia water into wildcat wine in one frenzied trading session. I think back over the last 500 days on this Open House assignment and wonder if he hasn’t been leaving me obtuse investment tips all along.
“I’m just a sniper,” he continues. “I’m a sniper in a grassy knoll…”
“Nice ride,” I say, motioning to his Escalade, changing the subject; lowering the conversational bar to a subject of under six-figure commodities, like cars and lottery tickets. Things I can more easily relate to. “Kind of a Moose in its own right,” I add.
“It’s a hybrid,” he says quickly. He’s a last word guy, this derivatives trader. “New toy.”
I think back to a Christmas morning when I was four or five. At the time, I was an only child and both of my parents worked full-time jobs. I spent most of my waking hours being shuffled back and forth between the families of my less financially fortunate aunts and uncles who took turns getting paid to babysit me during the weekdays. Each had a dozen or so kids of their own, my cousins; Vatican I casting its own indelible shadow in the form of more hungry mouths to feed.
On this particular morning my own small, birth controlled family unit stopped by one of the houses for some Christmas cheer. Under their tree were just two toys– one doll for the girls, and one toy airplane for the boys. The airplane was already broken. “First one up gets the prize,” I remember my uncle saying. He was a security guard at a steel mill.
They had a cramped house already full of broken toys. Cars with no wheels. Dolls with no arms. Guns with no handles. Broken toys and kids everywhere.
I figure my trader friend comes from such a family. I don’t know why, I just do. He’s standing in front of me now…
“Hybrid,” I say nodding my head in approval. “Good choice. Nice toy.”
“I just came in to use the head. Do you mind?” He brushes past me and into the powder room. “Locked myself out of the house again and my teeth are floating,” he calls back without closing the door. I brace myself for the sounds that are about to follow…
One time in the early 1960s, my favorite cousin stayed over at our house for the weekend. He was bigger and tougher than anyone I had ever met during my first years on this earth and I always felt safe when he was around; although thinking back, he himself was only six or seven. We’d walk through my working class neighborhood and he would just glare at the same Irish kids who would normally crack me in the head when I was alone. And being an only child in a tribe of Catholics, I was always alone. (Two sisters would come a few years later, their own destinies not yet downloaded into the parochial rhythm queue.)
At the end of that long ago weekend, when it was time for my cousin to go home, my uncle stopped him cold with a backhand as they were exiting our front door. I froze in the hallway looking up at my father’s oldest brother, the biggest Petro of us all.
“Okay Slick,” he said. “Empty your pockets.”
And my cousin did. Handfuls of my smallest toys hit the floor. Army men. Plastic farm animals. Marbles. I don’t know why I was the one who started crying but I did. And not because of the toys or the roguish act. Because of the unfairness and gravity of life, period. I tried to explain that I gave the meaningless trinkets to him but my soggy words went unheard, overshadowed. Foreshadowed.
My cousin didn’t cry although everybody in that tiny Levittown vestibule knew what was in store for him when they got back to the car. That particular Petro never cried. Even today, after so many funerals and family heartaches later, he’s still the toughest guy I know, now a security guard, too…of sorts……
I empty my own pockets of the McMansion keys for the last time, leaving them on the granite island countertop in the kitchen. I set the alarm, kill the lights, and pull the locked door shut behind me once and for all. As I pull away from the curb it suddenly occurs to me that I didn’t check the toilet seat in the powder room. I don’t recall if I even heard a flush. I can’t imagine that a sniper would ever take the time to put a toilet seat down in a grassy knoll. Not when there’s so much trump to knock down and so few trading hours in which to do it. Not when his teeth are floating.
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November 17, 2008
Joel Kotkin on the rise and fall of the Golden State:
Twenty-five years ago, along with another young journalist, I coauthored a book called California, Inc. about our adopted home state. The book described “California’s rise to economic, political, and cultural ascendancy.”
As relative newcomers at the time, we saw California as a place of limitless possibility. And over most of the next two decades, my coauthor, Paul Grabowicz, and I could feel comfortable that we were indeed predicting the future.
But much has changed in recent years. And today our Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity.
Since 2000, California’s job growth rate— which in the late 1970s surged at many times the national average—has lagged behind the national average by almost 20 percent. Rapid population growth, once synonymous with the state, has slowed dramatically. Most troubling of all, domestic out-migration, about even in 2001, swelled to over 260,000 in 2007 and now surpasses international immigration. Texas has replaced California as the leading growth center for Hispanics.
Out-migration is a key factor, along with a weak economy, for the collapse of the housing market. Simply put, the population growth expected for many areas has not materialized, nor the new jobs that might attract newcomers. In the past year, four of the top six housing markets in terms of price decline have been in California, including Sacramento, San Diego, Riverside, and Los Angeles. The Central Valley towns of Stockton, Merced, and Modesto have all been awarded the dubious honors of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation during the past year.
Even with prices down, many of the most desirable places in California are also among the most unaffordable in the nation. Less than 15 percent of households earning the local median income can afford a home in L.A. or San Francisco. In Santa Barbara, San Diego, Oxnard, Santa Cruz, or San Jose, it’s less than a third. That’s about half the number who can buy in the big Texas or North Carolina markets. Moreover, state officials warned in October that they might have to seek as much as $7 billion in loans from the U.S. Treasury. This is a disappointing turn for a state that once saw itself as the harbinger of the future.
Not surprisingly, few Californians see a turnaround soon. In the most recent Field Poll in July, a record high 63 percent of Californians said they are financially worse off than they were a year ago, while a record low 14 percent described themselves as better off. Poll director Mark DiCamillo called it “the broadest sentiment of pessimism we’ve ever seen.”
Of course, California can still attract many newcomers, particularly young and ambitious people who dream of a career in Hollywood or Silicon Valley. The problem is that when you grow up and have failed to secure your own dotcom or television series, life in Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, or even Kansas starts looking better. According to real estate analysts, the only thing preventing the current outflow from being worse is that homeowners cannot sell their residences in order to move.
All of this suggests a historic slide of California’s role as a bastion of upward mobility. In 1946, Californians enjoyed the nation’s highest living standards and the third highest per-capita income, noted journalist John Gunther. As recently as the 1980s, Californians generally got richer faster than other Americans did. Now, median household income growth trails the national average while the already large divide between the social classes—often bemoaned by the state’s political left—grows faster than in the rest of the country.
Today, notes a recent Public Policy Institute of California study, California has the 15th highest poverty rate in the nation. Only New York and the District of Columbia fare worse if the cost of living is factored in. Indeed, after accounting for cost of living, L.A., Monterey, and San Francisco counties—all places known for concentrations of wealth—have poverty populations of 20 percent. “San Francisco,” says historian Kevin Starr, a native of the city, “is a cross between Carmel and Calcutta.”
There’s a lot more — including the possibility of a happy ending.
Technorati Tags: investment, real estate, real estate marketing, technology
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November 17, 2008
This is my column for this week from the Arizona Republic (permanent link).
A workout loan can be a win-win solution to avoiding foreclosure
We talked last week about lender “workout” loans — a scheme lenders have come up to keep homes from falling into foreclosure. The premise is simple: If you can’t pay your mortgage, the lender will write you a new loan that anyone could pay.
I’m not kidding. Let’s say you bought a house in 2005 for $300,000. If you put nothing down, your payment might be $1,500 a month — not counting taxes and insurance. But the market value of the home is now $150,000 — a $750 mortgage payment.
As an investment, your home isn’t performing all that well. You bought at the top of the market, and you probably can’t even sell at a loss.
Worse news: Your hours at work have just been cut back.
You’re not in foreclosure. You’re making your payments. But you are an excellent candidate for what lenders call “jingle mail” — mailing in your keys and your deed. This would wreck your credit — for a while — but you’re looking at wrecked credit anyway.
But wait. Your lender’s workout department wants to speak to you before you do anything rash. If you qualify — which means if you have income — they might suggest something like rolling both of your mortgages into a new interest-only third mortgage at a very low interest rate.
Your existing monthly obligation of $1,500 will accrue month-by-month as new debt by negative amortization. In two or three or five years, you will resume paying on your old debt while you continue to pay down the new debt accrued on the third mortgage.
If this sounds silly, it’s because it is. The lenders are doing everything they can to make bad debt look good — temporarily. But a workout could be a win-win for you. If the market rebounds strongly, you can refinance all three notes. And, if not, you will have lived almost rent-free for the next few years before you lose the home in foreclosure.
P.T. Barnum said there’s a sucker born every minute. But who would ever expect to find suckers running our banks?
Technorati Tags: arizona, arizona real estate, phoenix, phoenix real estate, real estate, real estate marketing
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November 17, 2008
I have a Dead Tree Addiction. Somehow words seem clearer and truer, and their cadence more lovely when I read them on a printed page, rather than a computer screen.
So, when I read a well written blog post, one that addresses an important issue, one that speaks clearly to me, my first inclination is to hit “PRINT”. And all rational reasoning to the contrary, sometimes that urge to PRINT just simply cannot be denied.
Unfortunately many WordPress theme designers neglect to include a print stylesheet in their theme files, and the resultant printer output often contains an endless jumble of sidebar images and unusable navigation link text.
If you’d like to make it easy for your readers to print your posts, add a print stylesheet. Here’s how:
In a plain text editor (Windows Notepad works just fine) create a new file named print.css
Paste this CSS code into your print.css file
#nav {display: none; }
#sidebar {display: none; }
#content {width: 100%; margin: 0; float: none;}
a:link, a:visited {color: #000000}
That’s it, that’s all. The code is saying: “Don’t display the navigation bar, don’t display the sidebar, don’t print the links in fancy colors, and fill the entire width of the page with the post content”.
Save the print.css file, and upload it to your WordPress blog host. Place it in the individual theme’s folder; the most likely path would be something like mysite.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/mytheme.
Now at the WordPress dashboard, go Design -> Theme Editor -> and in the Theme Files - Templates column, click on header.php to open the file.
Paste the code below into your header.php file, right below all the other lines that start with link rel=”stylesheet”
<link type=”text/css” media=”print” rel=”stylesheet” href=”<?php bloginfo(’template_url’); ?>/print.css” />
Make sure it is above the line that reads </head>. Click Update File. This little piece of code is telling the system that if it receives a “print” command, to apply the print stylesheet instead of the “media” styleheet.
To test, click Visit Site, click File -> Print Preview
Notice that I did not remove the Footer. If you’d like all printouts to include your contact information, the footer can be a handy place to insert it.
Open the footer.php file, and you will probably see a line that reads <div id=”footer”> or <p id=”footer”> Right below that line insert something like :
<p>SUSIE Q. AGENT AT MY REAL ESTATE BROKERAGE, INC., 0000 MAIN STREET, LOS ANGELES, CA 90000 — 323.000.0000</p>
You may need to experiment a bit with the placement, but now in addition to appearing on screen, at the bottom of your blog pages, your contact info will appear, as part of the footer, each time someone prints one of your posts. Why let the theme’s designer get all the glory? 
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