Happy Holidays, everyone!

We here at JacksonFuller want to thank everyone for a wonderful year, and let you know that while we will be around and working over the holidays, we will be focused on some special projects and back-end site stuff… so this will be our last post until 2013.

We will return in January, chock full of 2012 statistics and lots more fresh real estate data, news, and information. If we can be of service before then, don’t hesitate to give us a call or email – otherwise we will see you on the flip side!

Yesterday, on the JacksonFuller FaceBook page I posted a picture of a car full of groceries that Britton and I had picked up during a slow Tuesday tour for donation to the SF Food Bank. It would be awesome to think that a car full of groceries could solve the food poverty that exists in San Francisco, but sadly that isn’t the case.

A Drop in the Bucket of San Francisco Hunger

San Francisco has a reputation for affluence (and for homeless people passed out on the corner near Union Square) so the following statistic may surprise you:

• One in four residents of San Francisco and Marin county is unable to afford all of the food they need.

I don’t know about you, but I find that to be a profoundly sad and mind-boggling statistic. Here are some other facts about the SF Food Bank – this year they will distribute roughly 45 million pounds of food, which is enough for more than 100,000 meals per day. And of the roughly 225,000 people served each year by the food bank, only 17% of those are homeless individuals. Who are the rest?

Seniors, children, and poor people.

America is an incredibly wealthy nation, and San Francisco is a tremendously affluent region. But even with all the wealth, there are still children and elderly that will go hungry tonight. Part of this is driven by the fact that the cost of living in the Bay Area is so much higher than the rest of the country. For example, to qualify for food stamps, an applicant must make less than 130% of the federal poverty level. As of now (Dec 2012), that translates into a yearly income of $24,817 for a family of three. Divide that by 12 and the monthly income is $2,068. Could you live in San Francisco (with two others, as a family of three) on $2,068? And guess what – if that’s your income and you qualify for food stamps (CalFresh), guess how much monthly you’ll be getting? $14. How many meals could you make with $14 in a month?

Please take a moment and consider making a donation to the SF Food Bank.

And to end this on a slightly more positive note – here’s a great article about the efforts taken by the SF Food Bank to ensure that they can provide healthy and fresh fruits and vegetables to those in need.

I usually don’t dedicate blog posts to vendors we use, but Copyblogger is an exception. Copyblogger is run by a great guy named Brian Clark out of Boulder, CO and he makes a bunch of tools that make ‘content marketing’ a lot easier.

The framework we use for running this site – a theme known as AgentPress 2.0 – comes from Copyblogger, and we also use some of their other tools (although, to be fair, probably not as well as we could).

I got an email from them this morning with some new freebies that they are making available at no charge. The first is a PDF that you can download for free titled “The Death of Traditional Real Estate Marketing” and while I’ve downloaded it, I have yet to read it. So I can’t review it yet, but I have a hunch it is good stuff, and if you’ll give me a few weeks you can check back for the book report.

The second is a .mp3 podcast/audio interview that you can download titled “Brian Clark is Returning to Real Estate.” I’m listening to it as I write this blog post, and so far it is all good information, although nothing yet that I’d describe as an incredibly-awesome-holy-cow-I-wish-I-knew-that-five-years-ago nugget of information.

So while I usually write with San Francisco buyers, seller, and investors in mind, this post is dedicated to all my fellow real estate professionals that are looking for good resources for their internet plans. There are a ton of companies and people out there that will promise the world, but in my experience Brian Clark and the folks at CopyBlogger are hard to beat. So go out there and download their resources. It will take a lot of consistent hard-work to actually see the strategies he suggests pay off, but my experience has been that he has a solid grasp of the fundamentals and conveys them in a pretty straightforward way. Game on!