Archive for the ‘Real Estate Technology’ Category

Hiring the right company to build the right website is very effective in generating more business

The National Association of Realtors 2010 member survey suggest that their agents are becoming more tech savvy, and for those who are increasing their spend on their websites are getting returns!

56% of agents are now using a smart phone daily compared to 42% in 2009,  of which 66% were agents who had been in the business 2 years or less, compared with 48% usage for those with careers 16 years or more.

Social media, (twitter, facebook, etc) and  personal networking in general rocketed up to 51% in 2010 compared with 35% from 2009.

10% of agents reported having a blog (i wondering what % are actively blogging , 63% reported having a website, with a median of 3% of their business being reported coming from it.

Interestingly, agents who spent  $1000 or more to build & maintain on their site said that it generated 19% of their business.

Suggesting that simply ‘having  a website’ misses the mark by a long way. Agents who embrace the web and create a substantial and effective website site get significant returns.

Well there are here, and finally I was able to grab some time on one, albeit via my local apple store, rather than sitting on my couch.

So there has been much written about how the ipad will be a game changer for real estate agents. For that I am not so sure, but like most things apple do, it does change the game nonetheless.

It’s not so much what the ipad does, its more what my current laptop doesn’t, or how comparatively cumbersome my laptop now feels.

I think that the ipad is the best way to read the news online.

The scale of  it feels to me just like holding a magazine, without having to live with the discarded slab of paper until I finally get around to recyling it.

Since playing with one, it just seems silly to be reading the New York Times or the UK’s Guardian, newspaper on my laptop. Ergomically laptops have never fitted the lap at all. The landscape nature of the screen did not fit the portrait nature of the media. The opening of the screen, the constant adjustment of the screen angle as I settle down into my chair. When your done, you just put it down, no closing the lid, which now seems very outdated.

I am not so sure that its a device for doing, all this speak of using it to sign contracts and rewriting the rule book for real estate technology seems quite a reach. I do think though that its a cute device to show clients your presentation on, and you can certainly wow them with your comfort with technology.

"In the red corner, OFFLINE MARKETING, in the blue corner ONLINE MARKETING...

As we trawl the ever expanding sea of real estate marketing information we often see statements such as the title above.

We think this is to misunderstand marketing on a number of levels.

Firstly this statement is simply too adversarial. As if it’s binary, either, or.

Once you have your real estate website, and it has arrived at the first page of a search engine for key words it was designed for, (you did remember to do that bit right?), it can be easy for agents to think that they simply need to sit back and wait for the leads to come in. Hopefully that will happen.

However, these leads will only come in from those people who THINK to go to a search engine to look for this type of information online. We all know people who would not think of doing this as the informational-gathering-starting point. If you visit a home and they still have yellow-pages lying around, that may tell you something about where they look for information.

For those ‘offline people’, (hello  mum), they require offline marketing to tell them that this resource exists. Don’t ignore them.

Vanessa Fox, formerly of google and Zillow says that perhaps as much as 67% of all search comes from offline channels. That means the hard copy you are sending out.

The best results we see are when both offline and online marketing are engaged in an innovative, harmonious and collaborative way. I think if the question is rephrased to:

Traditional offline and online marketing

VS

Innovative offline and online marketing

I think the distinction is clearer.

So what is, Innovative Offline Real Estate Marketing? Our friend Josh Wilton, Manager of Weichert Princeton, is really leading the charge in helping his agents re-imagine what offline marketing should be.

The age of the ‘static’ one dimensional direct mail piece is dead and never to return. By the time your ‘Just Listed’ card or ‘Just Sold’ card hits the neighborhood it is old news. The customer has already received 10 different auto-emails from competing agents and your card is an antique. Instead think of your direct mail as a commercial for your website. If you sending a ‘Just Listed’ card, have your website promoted more heavily than the house itself. For example one 1000 piece mailing that promoted a website generated 4100 ‘requests’ on that website within 10 days! You basically double the impact of your direct mail campaign. Josh Wilton, Weichert Princeton.

We couldn’t agree more.

The “Just Listed” is useful to two people, the agent, who is promoting themselves, and the seller who sees a glossy picture of their home, and doesn’t realize the agent is promoting themselves.

The problem is for other 998 recipients, they could care less about either. They are interested in

1. what’s currently for sale in their town
2. what sold
3. their home’s value,

Did we just let the cat out of the bag?

If your mailing doesn’t address what your audience wants to read you might be better off not simply going through the motions.

We at limeyboy are big BIG fans of the real estate agents we work with blogging. Why? Simple, search engines love them.

However we hear too often, and understand, that real estate agents simply don’t have the time to sit by their computer to write.

With a smart phone and a wordpress app installed you can now do it from anywhere. Like this is being done from my car now!

Real Estate Blogging Schedule.

Having been helping real estate agents with technology for the last 10 years, we know that if we suggest anything too time demanding it simply won’t get done. Actually this is something we are entirely in favor of. Your job is to sell real estate, not become a geek. That’s our job!

Therefore, our mantra to our blogging real estate agents is, write a little, and write often..

How little, look at this post. How long did it take. 5 minutes.

Use Google Maps to find houses and apartments currently on the market.

Search for nearby schools, restaurants and public transport, explore the neighborhood in Street View or simply get directions from the property to your favourite places – all from a single map!

Make sure your listings are on googlebase!

So, we’ve committed, we’ve moved the ‘office files’ to the google cloud. The ‘office’ is now wherever we are.

Yesterday, we picked up a new laptop for the office. There was nothing to migrate, no files to move, or back-ups have to be done. We just logged into our cloud account and there it is. Where we left it.

A few years ago there was lots of talk about hot desk-ing, working in an open plan office environment, everyone brings their own laptop, and works somewhere on a large communal table. Cloud storing takes this one step further, in that the ‘your-ness’ of your laptop is no longer important.

…the ‘your-ness’ of your laptop is no longer important.

The other great thing about cloud storing is that as you set permissions for accessing it at the ‘door’, sharing your stuff becomes effortless. OK, so nothing really new there, in an office you can already network a folder, or a even a file, but whenever we did this within the Microsoft Office environment it was very clunky. We could share an individual file in the office, but only one of us could have it open at a time. The other person would close it, and then we could open it and take a look. But, although the files were always locally stored on our computers, there were many times when our computers weren’t in the same office.

With cloud files being assigned as shared with defined users, we can work on the same files simultaneously, see who’s editing what, and no one has to be remotely a). near the office, or b). on our own laptop.

In addition to the sharing through collaboration during the files creation, the cloud also makes it easier to share the final product. We’ve been working on a slide presentation for a meeting, we’ve been able to collaborate on the creation of the file, and then having delivered the presentation we can effortlessly share a link to the presentation online. With programs such as Power Point, sharing the behemoth was almost impossible due the file size limitations in email. Let google do the heavy lifting, and simply share a link to your work, not the whole thing.

Oh, and one more thing. The laptop we bought was an Apple, as our files are created in the cloud’s software, we didnt have to load any programs either…

So a friend stayed over with us the other day. They came with their laptop to do some work to prepare for a presentation. The did that. They left, and went to present. All was well, until they realized that the only part of their computer they took with them was their power cord. Sure enough, there was their laptop by the door.

In a scramble of panic they asked us to email the file to them so they could at least open the file on someone else’s laptop, and then figure out how to get that laptop hooked up to the LCD projector.

As we were trying to attach this enormous file to an email, and send it to multiple email address in the hope that at least one wouldn’t bounce such a monster file we once again thought about google docs. Having all these files, stored in one place, our laptops, our computers continues to seem a ridiculous concept to us know.

We are currently in the process of preparing a large presentation ourselves, which we are using google’s presentation app from google docs. Though everything in their program ‘sweet’ (sic) is very paired down, I have yet to find a function that needed that isn’t there. In a way, there is something refreshing about having less choice.

Do i really need 20 alternative fly-ins for my text to enter the page on each click?

With less gizmo’s, I find myself concentrating more on what I am trying to communicate.

The other joy of google docs is its in-built sharing function. More on that to come.

We strongly endorse google docs for real estate.

We’ve been huge encouragers of our agents blogging. However we always think its imporant to get some level of commitment from the agent, that they will be able to post at least once per week. An empty blog is both an underwhelming experience and potentially undermining of the website that linked to it. 

More would be great, but only if something that merits posting comes up. Blogging, simply for the sake of it, is as painful to read as it is to write.

So we’ve been setting up our agents with blogs for some time now and then following up with both initial training, talking about what makes a good post, and then how to create content thats both compelling from a human and algorythmic perspective.

If the blog’s out of date, how do we know the sold listing data is current?

What we’ve always felt has been lacking somewhat is the visual and link between the blog and the website. This transition can all too often feel somewhat disconnected and clunky. Well, that’s recently changed as we’ve begun to develop our own real estate wordpress themes. Our latest can be seen here.

Look I think it’s time to move on. It’s not about you, it’s about me…(you haven’t grown, I have). I think we are just at different places in our lives, we want different things…

Breaking up is so hard to do, relationships are habits. Some are good, some are bad, they become the norm. But at some moment in time, you look at:

• where you have come from,
• where you are,
• and where you want to go,

It’s just time to start slowly packing things up to transition to your next life, holding off on booking that vacation, and perhaps not repainting the hall just yet.

This is kind of where the office is today when we think about Microsoft. A few months ago we need to replace one of our office computer. With Windows 7 imminent, but not yet launched, it was not as straightforward a decision as it usually is. We knew we’d have to upgrade with a disc that Dell, promised they would said, (we’ve heard that one before), but nonetheless, the new machine was needed. So we bought a Vista machine with a free upgrade eligability at some undefined time in the future.

So the new machine arrived and we starts transferring all this data from one machine to the other. Now, we are diligent backer-uppers. So we never worried about loosing data, it was just that to have large amounts of data locally stored, which then had to moved from the old machine to the new seemed, at that moment very outdated. Wasn’t the point of the internet to decentralize data? To store the data in between two computer rather than on one of them.

We also spend a lot of time moving data around. We have files on a server, that we individually make changes to, then save them, then someone else on the network can open them, make changes and so on…

falling in love again…

At this low ebb, google popped up with Google Voice, which we’ll talk more about in another post, but we love it. Absolutely, we are besotted once again. The google, world view seems to becoming more coherently into view with better grouping of what were seemingly disparate products.

Time spent within Google Voice, lead to us getting reaquainted with google docs. Though heavily stripped down versions of the Microsoft Office suite, the fact that are stored online, by definition all of a sudden seems immensely appealling. Having your voicemail a tab away just sweetens the deal even more.

So, as it stands, we are transitioning over to google docs, we already commited to google voice. What out Microsoft Outlook, your days may be numbered!