Category Archives: Generating & Managing Leads
Going Local for Leads
In a recent guest post, Ryan Hinricher said agents need to define their niche market to stand out in the online marketing game. It’s sound advice when you think about it – finding your niche, and owning it, gives you a much greater chance of becoming the agent who stands out when a buyer hones in on a certain suburb.
So, how do you promote yourself online as the expert in your chosen niche?
4 Essential Building-Blocks for Agents New to Online
propertyadguru.com welcomes a guest post from Ryan Hinricher:
Establishing yourself as a successful real estate professional in 2010 can easily be a daunting task. The real estate market is unrecognizable when compared to just a few short years ago. In 1994 the first online real estate listing was published in an email by Eric Hilding of Coldwell Banker in Morgan Hill, CA which changed real estate forever. Within 1 year ERA launched the first listing portal with over 50,000 listings. Today we have Zillow, Trulia, Twitter, Facebook, iPhones, and thousands of other tools and technologies which power the new real estate economy.
Because of this, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and impossible to stay ahead of the technology curve. I thought I’d put together a shortlist of critical components to your online real estate foundation. These are the building-blocks of any real estate business and most aren’t sustainable without them.
Listing as a Local Business Pays Off
Ever heard of the Google Local Business Centre? No? It could be worth investigating. For one US broker, listing his business with Google paid off in a big way.
Looking for Realtors to Test a New Application – ListGlobally
The team at Classified AdVentures (owners of Property Ad Guru) has been working hard on a new product called ListGlobally. This application allows agents to advertise their listings on market leading property portals around the world.
For example, an agent in the US or Australia can up load a listing and have it appear in the international section of such market leading sites as Rightmove in the UK, Enormo, Immobiliare in Italy, and Immobilienscout24 in Germany. Over the coming months ListGlobally will be adding more partners to its distribution list.
Not only is this a great way to promote your listings to an international audience, it is also a great tool to differentiate yourself from your competitors when marketing to potential sellers.
If you would like to be a guinea pig and help us test the application for free, just go to www.listglobally.com and click the link on the home page to register for a free trial. Once we receive your request, we will be in touch via email with your login details.
Big Changes at zillow.com
We knew something was up at zillow.com when it posted a “site down temporarily” note on its blog on Monday.
The next post confirmed our suspicions: zillow.com was adding the option to list rental properties on its US-based real estate marketplace. By the next morning, zillow.com was already touting the first ten listings to take advantage of the new option, and dealing with a wave of questioning regarding its new pricing strategy: US$9.95 for a 180 day listing.
The comments were relatively quiet on zillow.com’s own blog, but over at 1000watt blog and agentgenius.com things were different, prompting zillow.com’s spokespeople to respond.
Google Real Estate – Should Agents Bank On It?
The news just over a week ago that Google was “entering” the UK/European market has sent the share prices of Rightmove and Seloger into a tailspin. Seloger dropped by 9% while Rightmove has plummeted a whopping 17%. Seloger has since recovered to its pre-news price while Rightmove continues to be significantly down.
So let’s look at what happened, will the property portal landscape change and is this impact on the share prices is justified.
An article by the Financial Times (Dec 2 titled “Google set to enter UK property market”) seems to have set the cat amongst the pigeons. The article stated that Google is in talks with British estate agents and that “experts” say that an entry by them to the market could pose a serious threat to existing property websites. The article didn’t talk about what Google was going to do and Google didn’t comment. So there is really not much to go on. So the only guide we really have as to what Google may do in the UK and Europe is what they have done in Australia.
Rental Search Data from rentbits.com
US rental property search engine rentbits.com has released its first whitepaper: Maximizing the Effectiveness of Marketing in the Single and Multifamily Rental Industry.
The whitepaper covers a range of information on the rental housing market including what type of housing renters are looking for, which marketing sources renters are using, and how rental search varies across demographics.
NAR: Buyers Relying on Referrals
The US National Association of Realtors recently released its 2009 Profile of Homebuyers and Sellers and the results show an even heavier reliance on the Internet to find homes than in 2008.
The often-quoted statistic from the 2008 NAR report had 87 percent of US home buyers looking online for their next home. According to figures posted by Sara Bonert, zillow.com’s director of broker relations, that figure has now risen to 90 percent.
Bonert’s blog post also shows that looking online for properties was the first step taken by both first time and repeat buyers, rather than contacting an agent. Buyers spent an average of two weeks on this initial property search before they decided to find an agent to help them with the buying process.
Tech Trends from the NAR Conference: Part 6 – SMS and Email Yard Signs
Welcome to the sixth in our series of technology trends from the NAR Conference held in San Diego, California from the 13th through 16th November.
In the previous installments, we wrote about realtors having a mobile presence, the continued existence of video and virtual tours, low cost websites being offered to realtors in the US, the use of local information on realtor’s sites, and the rise of listing syndication.
In this second last installment, we look at the rise of businesses offering listing information delivered to your handset after entering a code from a yard sign.
Tech Trends from the NAR Conference: Part 5 – Distribution to Multiple Portals
Welcome to the fifth in our series of technology trends from the NAR Conference held just over a week ago in San Diego, California.
In previous installments we wrote about realtors having a mobile presence, the continued existence of video and virtual tours, low cost websites being offered to realtors in the US, and the use of local information on realtors’ sites.
In this installment, we will look at the rise of intermediaries who syndicate a realtor’s listings to 20 or so different sites.
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