My latest post on Zillow’s Geek Estate Blog drew some fire from various places and was compared to stalking.  I think it improves service and conversions at the same time.

You be the judge.  Here’s the link to the article, “Use Linkedin and Facebook to Increase Conversions.”

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In addition to writing for Geek Estate, I’ve also  joined Josh Ferris and the team at Online Real Estate 101, which is a new online real estate media property.  The site is focused on the real estate community and the online efforts behind it.  You’ll find a varying degree of voices committed to keeping the real estate industry current through interviews, demos, reviews, and general thoughts on today’s changing real estate economy.

I hope you’ll enjoy the post I’ve put together for you on the 4 Essential Building-Blocks for Agents New to Online.

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I remember a few years ago being upset when someone was marketing a house I was selling as their listing.  At the time protectionism was in full force by NAR and they had us convinced that all the data needed to be protected.  For why, I can’t remember.  I only remember there being some doomsday scenario about licensed real estate people who weren’t “REALTORS” screwing unsuspecting buyers.

Fast forward to 2009.  RealComp in Detroit is appealing the FTC’s decision to force RealComp to publish listing data to promote cooperation.  NAR’s continued protectionism strategies have me personally baffled.  I’ve had run in’s with several real estate agents this year who did not like my firm picking their listings out and advertising them.  Even though they haven’t opted-out of the provision which allows us to do so.

I actually ran across other people marketing some of our properties only to stop and call them in a thankful way.  Why wouldn’t we want everyone to market our properties?  I hope my properties are on 100 different websites.  I hope my competitor’s like my company’s listings well enough to push them to their clients.

Take a quick peak at the busiest real estate portals according to Property Portal Watch and ComScore:

Website (Total Unique Visitors by ‘000)
SouFun.com Limited (13,056)
Yahoo! Real Estate (10,225)
focus.cn (10,087)
Move Network (7,599)
SINA Real Estate (6,099)
ganji.com (5,123)
ImmobilienScout24 (4,396)
MSN Real Estate (3,956)
Enormo Sites (3,590)
AOL Real Estate (3,259)

Although many of these are foreign, where is REALTOR.com?   Of course they have arrangements to populate many of these sites.  Don’t we go on assume we are the best marketers?  In fact we aren’t.  These large data portals are able to do marketing better than we can ever hope to.

Visibility is your friend.  I love nothing more than getting stat updates from Zillow, Trulia, and other hubs showing how many property views and inquiries each home has had.   How many agents are assembling this data and presenting it to their listing owners?

Make your data shareable.

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In this post I’m giving you a demo of our new Investor Nation promo vid.  Check it out and give me your opinion.  Hopefully you don’t think I’ve wasted 37 seconds of your life.

Investors Rock Promo Video from Investor Nation on Vimeo.

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In recent history (last 12-18 months), there has been a horrible spike in classified ad spam.  What used to once be an effective place to advertise your property or home and have a competitive edge, now is a large daily exercise to try to keep your posting to the top of the heap.  I’m singling out Craigslist during this blog horizon because it has become almost too ubiquitous.

A few posts back I talked about creating in-house lead gen systems.  A great case study has evolved in my office over the last 14 days.  An agent in my office decided that although she didn’t have many of her own listings she knew that in order to generate strong buyer leads some inventory, somewhere had to be advertised.  So she started finding listing agent who were not leveraging web 2.0 to market their properties.   She then took these properties and found interesting ways to parse these properties out to real estate search engines like Zillow and Trulia.  Within a matter of days she has had 3 buyers approved for financing and is actively working on more.

The beauty about the real estate business from an agent side is the vast majority of agents are still years behind.  So much of who you’re competing against are e-Pro agents and other tech savvy real estate entrepreneurs who are taking up the majority of the space on the search engines and classified sites.  For the old-school agents who are doing the same thing today and relying on open houses and yard signs, good luck to you.

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Lately I’ve seen too many companies complain that they are struggling to generate quality real estate leads despite them using little more than 3rd partly lead generation systems.  Sourcing out your lead generation can be pretty dicey.   Although they certainly improve your property listing exposure (I can attest), relying on these systems solely is likely to leave you in the same place you were before you started using them.  How is this possible you might think?   Answer: Everyone is doing it now.  And once everyone is doing it, then you no longer have a competitive edge.   This is the perpetual problem of the internet and its ubiquity.

I sketched out the old school sales funnel to illustrate what most real estate agents, brokers, and sellers are doing;

The unfortunate problem with the above sketch (besides the fact I’m graphically challenged), is that all of your competitors are already doing this.  You may have received an initial “pop” of activity when you started using them as you likely beat some of your competitors to market, but in the end if a property portal works well enough, it becomes ubiquitous and everyone starts using it including your competitors.   So where does that put you?  Basically we are in a never ending technology rat race.  So even though your competitors are there, you still have to post to all these sites (even though you didn’t 5 years ago), and it’s giving you little advantage if any.

So what’s a real estate marketer, agent, seller, to do?

The only answer is to create an “in-house” solution.  A solution that is unique, because unique, after all, is the only thing that is noticeable in the digital age.  You must hack the system by creating your own.

Here’s a few ideas to get you going;

• Webinars of value – a webinar of value is an educational or informational webinar, not a sales event (everyone is already doing those).
• Whitepapers that matter – why not create a document that none of your competitors have with unique content?  Market it with lead capture on your site to create an effective opt-in list.
• Respect opt-in protocol – when you do get subscribers don’t spam them.  I’m signed up for several competitor sites and usually it is spam central with self-centered email messages not relevant to the list I signed up for.
• In-person workshops – workshops can be very effecting in meeting your clients face-to-face while offering some educational benefit to them. Stay away from bait-and-pitch tactics where you sell them after promising education.
• Create content evangelizing them – if I see another “me, me, me!” video I’m going to throw up.  People will share quality content, not garbage.  When’s the last time you shared an advertisement with someone?

To build an effective in-house lead generation program you need to have strategy and goals.  Most importantly when you do generate leads, be persistent, yet respectful.  Follow up timely.  The chance of converting a new lead drops by 70% if you don’t connect in the first 24 hours.

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I recently attended the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. Present were many of the thought leaders in the real estate industry including: Craig Newmark (Craigslist), Peter Flint (CEO, Trulia) Steve (CFO, Zillow), Glenn Kelman(CEO, Redfin) and more. This was truly a summit of the people moving the real estate industry forward.

Here are the trends that can’t be ignored and how Investor Nation is embracing them.

1. Transparency - I couldn’t help but think how the online world is creating an incredible degree of transparency. The data is all available on today’s leading real estate search portals; comparable sales, economic data, foreclosure data and more. I thought about how our company has used transparency to our advantage by taking it a step further; home inspections available for download, financial analysis, appraisals, local economic data. Increased transparency leads to reduced fluff. Reduced fluff leads to companies competing more so on service and client success than who can scream the loudest or has the most gray hairs.

2. Online Communities – Online communities are shaping the way we act as consumers. It is changing our buying patterns and how we allocate our time. People are returning less and less to websites and staying more in their social networks We’ve created networks with our footprint that allows both clients, and non-clients, local vendors, and others to discuss markets, connect, and nurture local communities. Our networks have no profit goals and are not branded as such. Our Memphis Investor Network has achieved great success and is now the fastest growing of the 3 investment organizations in Memphis associated with National REIA.

3. Streaming data - Streaming property data becomes even more important. Investor Nation has adopted the use of Twitter and we’ve crossed the 10,000 follower mark as I write this. Our company is embracing these paradigm shifts by streaming our properties to our Twitter feed(@InvestorNation). This makes it easy for our clients and potential clients to see our available properties the minute we publish them. Additionally our team members are using Twitter to create dialogue about what is happening in the investment home world. See @StephenKGreen, @CurtDavis, @JBWilli3, and @Ryan Hinricher.

You surely are exposed to these trends already. As we look to grow our investment portfolios and accelerate our retirement, working with companies who are understanding the trend shift is important. It is likely they’ll be the ones offering ways to interact, keep you informed, and offer clear and easy to understand choices of where and how to invest in real estate.

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I like the trend of books coming from experts who aren’t busy just trying to sell you more services but are actually providinga  as service by giving us a look inside not only their brain but their methodology as author David Viney has in this SEO  masterpiece.  Afterall David Viney is the foremost expert on Search Engine Optimization as it relates specifically to Google in the UK.

I’ve had a lot of online training on SEO and getting my sites ranked well, but Viney outlines a specific strategy, the necessary steps to take and is able to bridget the gap and make a book equally valuable for both beginners and experts.

Viney goes extensively in to a “7-step” process that everyone trying to get their rank up needs to implement.   He’s able to navigate the complex world of SEO and explain how Google specifically operates (at least the public knowledge).

I’ve seen far too many people think getting ranked high by Google is a feat that can be obtained with a few dollars and don’t fully understand the value of the ranking.  Viney explains the “Size of the Prize” very well and allows you to wrap your mind around how big it can impact your business.  He makes it easy to understand terms like “match driver selection” and “geographical otpimization”.

Of all the SEO books I’ve read which easily is between 30-40, this was the easiest to digest that allowed me to grasp a true road map to follow to rank higher on the search engines.

Consider making this pearl of wisdom an addition to your shelf or kindle today.

You can pick it up here for your Book shelf.

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