NAHB released a report today about the purchase of FDIC banks negatively affecting the housing market. At one point in the release, it touches on the homebuilders in Texas who have been mostly insulated from the slowdown. Click here to read the release. Are the recent bailout actions impacting your construction loans, and/or business?

When times are tough, there’s a saying that companies should focus on marketing even more so than before. This is sometimes easier said than done. When companies have to weigh where to lot their valuable dollars, in most cases marketing is left off the table. But, with the new internet age, there are many marketing tools that are free. Taking advantage of these online marketing tools might be just what companies need to get through the next few months. What online tools, if any, are you using?

Our RSS Feeds are now working! Take advantage of the usefulness of RSS. You can subscribe to RSS feeds of this blog by clicking on the RSS bug on the left side of the page, or check out www.rdbmagazine.com/rss to see a list of pages you can subscribe to within the RD&B website.

For those of you who use RSS, why do you like it? For those of you who don’t use it, will you consider using it in the future?

Hi readers…

Welcome to the new and improved blog. We hope to update this regularly with news, discussion, tips, ideas and more. And we hope that you feel comfortable enough to reply with your thoughts. While we’re at it, we’d like to point out that last week we started a group on LinkedIn for RD&B magazine readers. Check out the group on linkedin.com. It’s a great place for networking and discussion - as well as referrals from your peers. If you’re not familiar with this site, there’s a great blog on its homepage about the top 10 ways to utilize LinkedIn.

In addition to the group on LinkedIn, we’re in the process of fixing our RSS Feeds. By having this feature on our site, readers can use an RSS Reader to get notifications when content is posted on RDBmagazine.com  - almost as quickly as it’s posted. Google and Yahoo offer RSS Readers with great guides for those who aren’t familiar with RSS.

 That’s the news for now - but we’ll be back soon.

 -Maureen