What I do (I also work on a real estate website):
Short-term (maybe one or two weeks): Leave as is but have a "sold" banner over the listing.
Afterwards: Delete it.

Many people build custom sites and their SEO presence is just fine... it all depends on what you want out of a website.

Couldn't agree more.

Have you looked here?
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/domain-authority

What I'm seeing is the overwhelming primacy of relevance. I've seen sites with links from a mere 10-12 websites get top 4/5 positions (beating sites with 50 times as many links) -- because those few links are deemed highly relevant.

A key metric appears (from what I've seen) the referring sites/pages having part or all of the referring keyword (or a variation of it) in their url.

No, our market is almost exclusively non-Italian. I see where you're coming from with the idea of translating certain pages into Italian, but only something like 0.01% of our clients are Italian, so -- at this stage -- I'm not sure it's worth it.

Similarish-question to Jozef Majda:

I run website about Italian real estate that's written in English (and 99.99% of the links are in English). I have the opportunity to get a link on a partner's Italian-language website, where whatever anchor text she chooses will be in Italian. Is this of any use to me?

Hi, what I meant was whether I should be looking for robot txt at the top of the page or somesuch

Hi Irvnig

Thanks for the response but the issue of adding tags doesn't apply as it's not my site.

The only other place I've seen that is in spam blog comments (as a desperate attempt to override the blog's default "no-follow")....

Yep, that's what I've read as well.

Now he's changed it to rel="dofollow"  (no, me neither) -- which strikes me as even more gobbledegook.

Obviously I'm going to ask him to leave out the attribute altogether. But what other attributes should I be looking for on the page source (CTRL+U) to ensure he hasn't sneakily no-followed all the links on the page?

I've written a guest blog post for a site. In the link back to my site they've put a rel="follow" attribute. Is that valid HTML?

I've Googled it but the answers are inconclusive, to say the least.

All y'all SEO clever men be saying that paid directories (and fo' sho unpaid ones) ain't worth diddly.So how come when I open a can of Open Site Explorer on the a** of my (breathin'-down-my-neck) rivals, their (meant to be worthless) directories be passin' them lots and lots of link love? Riddle me that, people.

FWIW, I had a similar problem, in that one of my internal pages had 1,500 total links -- of which approx 1,425 were internal and had exactly the same three-word exact-match anchor text.

The page was ranking top 5 pre-Penguin for the keyword. Post Penguin, it sunk like a stone. A very heavy stone. As in, not in top #100. I've changed the links but still haven't recovered 10 months on.

Bizarrely, the page still ranks ok for other keywords, which makes me suspect some kind of manual keyword-specific penalty.