After building websites and writing software for 16 years as a hobby, I thought I knew what I was doing. Well, I am good at building internal systems, listing agreement wizards, offer to purchase wizards but my SEO skills have gone downhill ever since moving from custom cms to a WordPress system. I used to (still do) rank high for keywords that pertain to my services but the truth is that these high rankings weren't doing much. When a new customer signs up for our flat fee listing service, we ask how they found us. The number #1 answer is friend/family/coworker. Seeing this made me look deeper into our analytics. It's apparent that word of mouth is how our services reach people. This is ironic since real estate is and will always be a referral based business no matter how much technology you are using.
If anyone is interested in doing a little link exchange to test some homepage SEO techniques, hit me up.