Every business owner who has a web based business has at some point had the following thought:

“Why am I giving away all my hard-earned wisdom for free when my competition could easily snap it up and use it against me?”

Competition is a scary thing. We all hope we’ll be the only person with this particular business innovation or that particular moment of genius, and that our idea is what launches us into greatness. Sometimes we’re right, sometimes we’re wrong, but the point is that it doesn’t do to blog about the unique ideas that makes you different and special.

Except sometimes it does. Here are four reasons to love that the competition reads your blog.

1. You’re a leader, not a follower

When you’re the first person to do something, you establish yourself as the person who has ideas. So every blog in the hemisphere has the same exact idea in place four weeks later – so what? You’re still going to be the one who launched it, and people will refer back to you years later as the innovator of that new fantastic idea – you know, the one that was so fantastic that everyone in the world absolutely had to jump on the bandwagon.

It doesn’t matter if your competition does the exact same thing as you did. You did it first, which very often means you did it best. By “best”, I mean that you profited from it.

Don’t be afraid of putting your ideas on the table. You’re the one who isn’t a copycat. You’re the one blazing new trails. You’re the one going where no one has gone before.

2. Competition inspires you to create new things

Without competition, we’d still be listening to 8-tracks. That’s not a joke; media players have expanded by leaps and bounds because someone is always ready to jump in there with a new idea. A better quality of music, one that never skips or sounds fuzzy, for example. What about a player that’s easy and fun to use? What about digital audio?

Without competition, these ideas would never have become reality, because there would be no one out there creating something better than 8-tracks.

When you have competition, you have to improve. You can’t rest on your laurels because there’s someone doing what you do with a new gadget tacked on that makes it even better. Someone’s going to come up with a brand new game changer. And that’s a good thing, because it means two things:

Life will never be boring. And your business will never be stagnant.

I love my vancouver real estate business and this is why we thrive at what we do – We are innovative, and consequently followed and copied….

3. Competition means differentiation.

Let’s suppose you and your competitor both market homes for sale on the internet. It has the exact same content.
It has almost the exact same words, in fact. So what makes yours better than the next guy’s?

Competition means you have to figure out why a customer should prefer your product to anyone else’s. Maybe yours comes with an extra value added tool to the client. Maybe you have real SEO techniques which competitors are just scrambling to catch up to.
You see, differentiation means you can offer a TRUE EDGE to your clients… and you simply rule the roast in your market.

We get excited about our product – our marketing expertise in vancouver real estate – and this is why we are followed…

4. Competition makes you confident.

When you’re the only person doing what you do, you’re not always certain you’re doing it right. Heck, you’re not even sure that you do it the best. You’re just the person who does it. That’s all you can say about yourself. You can’t say you do it better than anyone else, either, because no one else does it. You’re just there.

That’s . . . not very exciting.

When you have competition, you have a motivation to improve your product, promotion etc… We can gain track and see just exactly how to beat the competition and meanwhile benefiting YOU through our unparalleled web marketing.

Being able to say that you’re better for whatever reason gives you confidence in your business and in your product. You feel capable of taking on someone else because you can see that what you’ve done is superior to what they’ve done.

Now… THAT’S a good feeling!

And it’s going to translate into a confidence that affects your sales, your demeanor, and ultimately the success of your business.

Why do you love your competition? Leave me a note below…

vancouver-skyline_2671_600x450.jpg”>

B.C. home sales rose nearly nine per cent in September compared to the same month last year, with the average price increasing six per cent to $524,000, the B.C. real estate Association said Friday.

The BCREA reports that multiple listing service sales in the province rose 8.8 per cent to 5,995 units and that sales edged up three per cent in September compared to August on a seasonally adjusted basis. A total of 55,616 homes were listed on the multiple listing service at the end of September.

For individual markets, Metro vancouver saw an average price increase of 10.5 per cent to $751,000 in September compared to September 2010. That compares to Kamloops, which saw an increase of 11 per cent over the same period to $286,000, and Okanagan Mainline, which saw the average price drop 6.6 per cent to $376,000.

“Housing demand last month was bolstered by persistent low mortgage interest rates and a surge in employment,” BCREA chief economist Cameron Muir said in a statement.

Source: Brian Morton, vancouver Sun

Metro vancouver’s housing starts are on the upswing, rising to 1,783 in September over 1,644 in the same month last year, with most activity in the multi-family category, according to Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.

Year-to-date, the numbers were even stronger, with the multi-family sector seeing a 39-per-cent increase in starts from January to September compared to the same period in 2010.

The reason for the multifamily strength, according to CMHC’s senior market analyst for Metro vancouver, Robyn Adamache, is two-fold: builders are increasingly confident taking on larger multi-family projects, and buyers are skeptical of higher-priced detached homes because they want to avoid the HST threshold of $525,000.

“On the single-family side, we’re seeing a decline this year,” Adamache said in an interview after the report was released Tuesday. “We think people interested in a single detached home are putting off the decision until the HST tax ramifications are sorted out.

“When the economic recovery was fragile, builders were more comfortable doing single-family starts rather than a large project. It was a more incremental way of getting out of the recession. Since the recovery has taken a better foothold, we’re seeing the multi-family side pick up again.”

Construction hot spots year-todate compared to 2010 included North vancouver, Richmond area and the Tri-Cities area.

According to CMHC, while the total number of starts in Metro vancouver real estate rose eight per cent from August to September to 1,783, they were up 19 per cent year-to-date from 11,137 to 13,260.

Year-to-date, multiples were in a much stronger category, rising 39 per cent from January to September to 10,516, from 7,541 in the same period in 2010.

Single-detached starts fell 24 per cent over the same period, from 3,596 to 2,744.

Adamache – who noted that apartment starts were concentrated in the cities of Vancouver and Richmond real estate, while Surrey led the way in less dense housing types including single detached and townhome starts – said multi-unit construction has been trending higher since 2010 after declining sharply from 2008 to 2009.

She also said, “The City of vancouver had the second highest number of single-family home starts in the region, most of which were replacement housing.”

Greater vancouver Home Builders’ Association president and CEO Peter Simpson agreed in an interview that housing starts – particularly on the multi-family side – are looking up.

“In 2009, we ended the year with 8,339 [total] housing starts. Last year, it was improved to 15,217 for the entire year. This year, so far, we’re at 13,260. That’s not bad. The forecast for the year is about 16,300.”

However, Simpson said, the “fly in the ointment” is buyers avoiding higher-priced homes – particularly more expensive single-detached homes – until they get more clarity on the HST.

Simpson said builders would like the government to remove the provincial portion of the HST to a level that neutralizes the tax’s effect, or reduce the property-transfer tax on new homes to soften the HST’s effect.

Meanwhile, the Abbotsford census metropolitan area recorded 29 housing starts in September, down from the 43 starts recorded in the same month last year, the national housing agency said. So far this year, there were 362 housing starts compared with 351 in the same period last year.

In B.C., September’s seasonally adjusted annual rate of Vancouver urban housing starts moved higher to 27,400 units from 23,100 units in the previous month.

The number of starts in B.C. urban areas increased to 2,399 in September from 2,305 in September 2010.

Source: Brian Morton, vancouver Sun

The value of building permits issued in Metro vancouver dropped 4.9 per cent from July to August to $494 million, and declined almost 10 per cent from $528 million in August 2010, Statistics Canada said Thursday.

The report on permit values, a key indicator of construction activity expected in coming months, also found that the numbers climbed across B.C. from July to August, but dropped year-over-year.

“There is some uncertainty in the marketplace regarding the HST transition rules,” Greater vancouver Home Builders’ Association president and CEO Peter Simpson said, adding that he’d like the provincial government to help neutralize the tax because many buyers are forgoing purchases while it’s still in effect.

Despite that, Simpson said, housing starts are up this year, particularly in the multiple-family sector, a point borne out by StatsCan, which noted the largest increase in the value of building permits for multiple-family dwellings across Canada was in B.C.

(more…)

The vancouver housing market is attracting unusually strong demand but Canada as a whole does not face a housing bubble that requires government action, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Wednesday.

Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney have paid close attention to vancouver housing prices, and they have warned Canadians not to take on so much debt that they will not be able to service it when interest rates rise.

Asked at a news conference in New York what it would take for Canada to act again to cool the market, he said: “It will take clear evidence of a bubble in the housing market in Canada, which we have not seen.”

Given low interest rates, the level of housing demand in Canada is not surprising, Flaherty said. But he added: “We have seen in the past year some softening in the Canadian housing market, in part due to the tightening of the insured mortgage market rules that we did earlier this year… That’s an appropriate result from that tightening.” (more…)