• High earners spend more on marketing.  63% percent of high income earners spent more than $2500/year on marketing
• High earners spend more on technology.More than 50% spend more than $2500/year, 25% spend more than $5000/year

What was really fascinating was the use of websites and social networking. 

• Nearly 50% say they updated their website more than once a week
• 39% of mid income earners update their website or blog only once a month

It’s critical to note a few things. It’s not simply a matter of spending money and assuming that the results will automatically follow. What is most critical is that any dollar spent has to be part of a structured goal focused approach. Spending money without a strategy can be as ineffectual as not spending money at all.

Also, agents who are getting most out of their real estate websites recognize that the project is never finished, and it is the on going addition of new relevant content that is critical to achieving long term goals.

For many agents, their website is the primary conversion point of their marketing efforts. When their site is down, the marketing $ are all wasted.

Typically speaking, most domain names are set up to “auto-renew” on a yearly basis. This is achieved through your chosen domain name registrar having your credit card information on file. You’ll receive an email saying that your domain will expire or renew in 90, 60, 30, 5 days. You may also see that those emails also say, “If you credit card on file has expired” or has been rewed during this time you will need to update the one on file to ensure there is no break in service…or words to that effect.

In our experience in real estate web design, this is the most common reason for domain names unintentionally failing to renew because, let’s face it, when you get a new credit card in the mail do you immediately think that your domain is directly tied to the old one?

So, to avoid this happening to you, why not log into your domain name registrar today and make sure that the domain name on file is currently update to through the renewal date of your domain name!

The example above is for our limeyboy.com page. Now we are offering this service to individual real estate agents and brokers.

Contact us for more details

I love the apps for the iphone, looking through the app store to me derives as much fun as looking through a library of books. One of my recent favorites is Instagram.

Instagram is essentially a camera app. What it does is offer you a series of filters to change the appearance of your images once you have take them. Those filters range from black & white, through to differing levels of color saturations and palettes.  One of my favorites is the filter called 1970′s which evokes childhood memories immortalized in pictures form a Polaroid. 

In addition you can also add blur. This enables you to give the effect of depth of field, which traditionally has only been achievable using an SLR. Even though this is an effect it still creates some lovely results.

What is truly amazing about these filters is how they have the ability to transform the mundane into the sublime.

For real estate agents, who are often struggling with “What to post” using an app like Instagram enables lemons to be made into lemonde. You can take a photo of something relatively mundane, tweak it with a filter and you have something stunning for your site.

What I am not suggesting for one moment is that you replace the photography of your listings with a product like Instagram. However I am suggesting that it is a great too to add some stunning eye candy to your real estate blog posts.

Give it a whirl, let us know how you make out!

After a flurry of initial growth, (20 million in the first few weeks) google+ seemed to flounder a little. No sooner was this reported on NPR, that google announced the next day that the beta trial, the limited invite system google likes to roll out new products, (google voice for example), was to end and the product was going to open up to the plebs. 

This reignited my interest in google+ and I started using it again, the problem then was that google+ wasn’t available to google apps for business users. This meant having to access to it via an alternate gmail account I had, rather than my main email account. However last week google opened up google+ to the google apps users so I could go from my email to the web, to google+ and back again. In one stroke, google made the utilization of their product much more convenient for me.

Yesterday some more good news came out of google, they had added the google+ pages functionality. Before this, all accounts had to be just personal. Great for the social side of life, but pretty useless for business users. You see I think that facebook has taught us, and for some the hard way, that there should be some differentiation between business and personal.

So now you, as a real estate agent can draw an electronic line in the sand between your google+ personal persona and your business life.

So why is this important, or even essential to do for any forwarding thinking real estate agent? 

Anyone who’s familiar with google’s webmaster tools may have noticed a new feature in the user interface recently, namely: +1 Metrics. Essentially google is trying to understand how people rate your content and information. In principle this is rather similar to Facebook’s “Like” tool. The difference being google can see your website’s +1 Metrics, how and what they make of Facebook’s “Likes” is a little less clear.

So in simple terms, if google can see that your site has a legion of followers who have +1-ed your site, that tells gives them valuable insight into your “authority” on the subject matter. Basic maths and common sense  suggest the more +1s your site garners the more likely they are to promote your site further up their index.

This is especially interesting in light of google’s recent algorithm update to focus on “newness” of content. If you are a real estate blogger, who on a regular basis generates quality, insightful, niche based content, encouraging your readers to share your content via +1 is only going to help.

So in short I would recommend setting up a google+ account and then creating a page for your business. Then, in the same way you use your facebook business page start adding content to it…and fast. In addition make sure that you are giving your readers the opportunity to share you content via +1.

The broker model also included our indexable IDX. Now, the information from each listing resides on the website, rather than being integrated through an iframe. This offers huge improvements in SEO.

With the sluggishness of the economy dragging on, the opportunity that the real estate rental market offers is being taken up by real estate agents.

It is estimated that by 2015 home ownership will drop to the level that it was towards the end of the 1960′s. In this time 10,000,000 homeowners will become real estate renters.

This represents both a loss of units in real estate sales inventory but also an increase in the number of rental transactions.

Getting into the rental real estate market has been seen in the past as being an opportunity to catch the first time home buyer while they are still tennants and also as a way to engage landlords with their services both in finding tennants and assisting in purchasing rental properties.

The real estate websites for real estate agent we are building are increasingly featuring rental sections or even dedicated rental real estate websites such as rentals in Princeton NJ and Westfield rentals.

We are giving away $1,000 of free advertising at google courtesy of our friends at google adwords!*

Ever thought about giving pay per click advertising a go, (you know those adds at the top and on right of google search results window). Well, today you can give it a try with $100 to play with. We are giving away 10 google adwords gift cards.

All you need to do is hit like at facebook or share this by the link below and let us know your mailing address here! The cards will go out to the first 10 we hear from!

*These coupons can only be used for new google adwords accounts

Well, google may have just solved this problem for us. It’s a problem we know well.

Say we go to a real estate office to meet with 8 people. We’d like to meet with each person for 30mins. So in total we need to block out 4hrs. You email out to all the attendees the time frame, say between 12 & 4pm, in half hour sessions, and then you wait to hear back from everyone. Inevitably there will be conflicts and overlaps from the get go.

Everyone will email back to you at a different rate, no sooner has one slot filled, than another wishes to have that same slot, all before you have had time to update the latest available slots.

Introducing Google Appointment Slots

What google has done is added a new function called “Appointment Slots”. The way the process works is as follows:

• Open your google calendar
• Click Appointment Slots (shown as a New! feature)
• Create a block of time or split this large block of time into slots of however long you want

• then this calendar can either be embedded into your website, or you can create an appointment sign up page
• then when someone visits their calendar its overlaid with the appointment slots, where their preferred slot can be chosen, which then updates the remaining available slots

Google says that this feature will rolled out within the next few days.

How many people will this affect? Statcounter think about 17% of google’s current users will be affected by this.

Why are google doing this?

In May 2006, PC World rated IE 6 the eighth worst tech product of all time. However, at the time with 90% of the browser market its probably true to say that there was a fair amount of complacency  at Microsoft. This is demonstrated by the face that it took them 5 years to come up with its replacement IE7!

The fundamental problem with IE6 is that it did not fully support CSS or cascading style sheets.

IE6 requires it's own CSS

Style sheets are a set of rules that dictate how your website appears on the browser. It controls things such as the position of all the sites elements, the typeface, the size and color of fonts, the roll over effects when your mouse hovers over a link etc. CSS is really the DNA of your website. When you have browser that doesn’t support them it leads to problems.

As a web designer, you are forced to essentially build one style sheet for all browsers IE7 & beyond, and one for IE6 which is essentially a series of hacks and work arounds to make your site behave correctly for those still using IE6. This was a major disservice from Microsoft to omit support for the most basic web design parameters.

Microsoft has also tried to get users to update to newer versions of IE, to some extent, but news that google is essentially going to start forcing their users to migrate to newer plaforms is only a good thing. IE6 has been broken for a long time, we’ll not miss it.

Download the latest version of Internet Explorer here*

Download the latest version of Firefox here*

Download google Chrome here*

*Uploading any software to your computer can exacerbate any existing problems or issues with your machine. We can take no responsibility to anything that happens to your computer during the installation of this software.