BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

You’re probably aware of eAgent.  According to their own description, the company is a marketing firm for residential real estate agents.  But, this post isn’t really about eAgent, except to say that their online marketing does drive a good number of consumers to their website.

A New Way to Increase Your Internet Exposure

The interesting thing is that the company has very recently added a Forum to their website.  It will be interesting to see how the online community responds.  Right now, there isn’t a lot of chatting on the forum, but they do have 540 users.

The forum is set up geographically, with categories for the major cities across the US and some in Canada.  The idea is that consumers and real estate professionals can participate in the forum to “discuss everything real estate related”.  And, you don’t have to be an eAgent customer to join the forum. 

If the traffic on the forum really takes off, it could be a good way to get some additional exposure on the Internet.

eAgent customers are identified with an icon on their posts, but if you’re not a customer, keep in mind that the Username you choose should reflect the fact that you are an agent.  That way, it will be obvious that you’re there in an expert capacity, not another consumer trying to be helpful. 

When you register, you also have the opportunity to add a bio, web address, blog address, and an RSS feed - using the feed from your blog would be a good idea.

Certainly, it’s too soon to tell how effective this forum will be in connecting consumers and real estate professionals, but it would be a good thing to keep an eye on!

Negotiating Is Stressful

Negotiating the sale of a home can often be more stressful than other types of negotiations because a home is a very personal item, for both buyers and sellers.  Keeping your cool as the objective outsider is one challenge.  The other is keeping your clients focused.

Here’s Some Information That Can Help

Let your clients know that, according to the experts, even people who consider themselves to be expert negotiators frequently accept a deal too quickly.  Staying calm, knowing your alternatives and being sure of the market value can all contribute to a winning negotiation for both sides.

As the expert in the transaction, you can make sure your clients know exactly what their alternatives are if a particular negotiation doesn’t result in a contract.  You also have the opportunity to use tools like real estate market statistics to make sure you and your client know exactly how much leeway you have in terms of the price issue.

Being the cool head in the negotiation will be much easier when your client has complete faith, not only in you, but in the process itself.

A high school teacher took his class on a field trip to the library.  As he was waxing eloquent about all the great things about libraries, books and reading, one of his students asked a question.

Pointing to a long shelf of thick books all of a similar design, the student asked the teacher what that could possibly be.  The teacher replied, “That’s the Encyclopedia Brittanica.”

The student turned to his instructor with a look of disgusted amazement on his face, and said, “You mean somebody actually printed it all out?!?!?”

For me, that’s right up there with the question, “Was Paul McCartney in a group before Wings?”

According to Rismedia, and as reported in REALTOR® Magazine Online, buyers and sellers are demanding more service from the real estate professionals they choose to work with.

As your clients get busier, they want assistance in each stage of the real estate transaction, including finding the right mortgage, title insurance, appraisers, and so forth.  You, like many real estate professionals, may be providing this type of support already.  The question is:  Are you making the most of that fact in your marketing?

If you’ve established a brand, is your one-stop shop approach part of your real estate brand definition?  If not, this would be a great time to update your value proposition!

Related Reading:

Real Estate Brands

Slow Markets Make for Nervous Buyers and Sellers

Slow markets make everyone nervous.  Sellers are afraid their homes won’t sell, or go slightly batty trying to hold out for an unrealistic price.  Buyers are afraid their new home will depreciate the minute they sign the closing papers, and at times they have so many choices, they often take forever to make a decision.

What can you do to help counteract these problems?  Give your clients facts they can use to set realistic expectations and to make decisions with confidence!  For example, what if you could easily do the following types of things:

• Help your buyers choose neighborhoods by showing them which neighborhoods have a history of increasing appreciation, or those where prices have bottomed-out and are starting to rebound.
• Help your sellers stick with a marketing plan based on a clear  understanding of typical days-on-market and price trends in their neighborhood.

You may be thinking:  “Sure, that would be great if I had all day to compile statistics and make pretty charts!!”

Altos Research to the Rescue!

Luckily, you don’t have to buy an eyeshade and sleeve protectors.  Altos Research is doing the work for you:

“Altos Research has developed a unique technology platform that gathers real estate data, analyzes it in real time and creates analytical reports for local markets. The patent-pending system gives you a snapshot of important trends in today’s market: prices, supply and demand, and insight into where the market is heading.”

The market information Altos Research provides is updated weekly.  You can’t get more current than that.  If there’s a change in your marketplace, you’ll be the first to know about it and respond to it, leaving your competitors in the dust.

And, with the power of the market information behind you, you’ll make a big impression on your prospects, before they’ve even met you!

You can get an overview of the type of market information that is available by reviewing the Altos website page geared for consumers.  Then, check out the information for REALTORS®.  You’ll have access to information:

• For Your Website:  Charts that can be easily added to your website with no coding knowledge required.  These charts are “live”, meaning that they update every Monday right on your website.
• For Your Clients:  Multi-page reports are available in PDF format so that you can e-mail them, or print out hardcopies to distribute.  The reports are branded with your photo and/or logo and contact information, and they include analysis notes in addition to the chart data.

Pricing for access to the market statistics vary depending on the coverage area.   As of this date, pricing ranges from $19/month to $150/month and up.  The service is not available nationwide - yet.  Areas are being added regularly, so even if you don’t see your market listed in the coverage areas, be sure to call to verify availability.

4 Great Reasons to Become a More Knowledgeable Market Expert!

• Increasing the stickiness of your website.  What better way to motivate people to return to your site than displaying valuable information that updates weekly?
• Improving your competitive edge.  Offering this type of in-depth market information will quickly peg you a step above your competitors.
• Strengthening your negotiating position.  Whether you’re working with buyers or sellers, you’ll have solid information to backup your negotiating  position.  In fact, you might just leave your counterpart in the transaction with their mouth hanging open.
• Offering better service to your clients.  To me, this information isn’t just unique website content or a great marketing tool.  I think you’ll see your market area in a completely different light, and you’ll be able to give your clients more valuable advice than ever before!

The September issue of the Newsletter is now available, but I’ll repeat the contents here.

The Real Estate Results Newsletter has been published since 2005.  In 2006, this blog was started.  We’ve decided that we can serve you better by combining the two.  There are several advantages to that combination:

• All the tools and information we provide to help you establish a competitive edge for your business will be in one place, not split between the blog and the newsletter.
• You’ll have access to new information on a more frequent basis.  We’re going to send the new Newsletter once a week on Wednesdays.  You’ll be able to quickly scan a handful of topics to see if you want to click through to get more information.
• You can subscribe to the blog through an RSS Feed Reader, but if you don’t use one, you can still get the information via the e-mail Newsletter.
• You’ll have an opportunity to participate with comments, suggestions or questions by leaving Comments on a specific post.

You can subscribe to the new Newsletter on our main site, or using the Subcribe Via E-Mail Newsletter link in the right column here on the blog.

We’re looking forward to continuing the tradition we established with the original Newsletter with the new BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog Newsletter.  And, we’re looking forward to your participation, too!

Give Your Visitors the 411 on Schools

Visitors to a real estate website very often want to check out schools in the neighborhood they’re targeting for their move.  You can make their life easy, and your site stand out from the crowd, if you provide school information that is integrated into your website.

It’s not enough to publish links to the local schools’ website.  Your visitors want to know more than what the school system will tell them.  You could publish a link to one of the online school websites, but then you have to take visitors off your site which is never the optimum situation.

Consider GreatSchools.net

GreatSchools.net is one of the online school sites.  While it is illegal to frame their site into yours, you can purchase an annual subscription that will provide you with an ad-free frameable solution.

When you look at the frameable solution, you’ll see that it takes on an entirely different look than the public website.  If you want to provide school information like a pro, contact GreatSchools.net at businessdevelopment@greatschools.net. 

The annual fee for an ad-free frameable solution is $250.  A small price to pay for providing a simple way for your site visitors to access teacher and student statistics, parent ratings and other information for public and private schools in your target market.

“Hey, This is a Great Website!”

That’s what a lot of people say right before they frame the site into their real estate website.  I’ve seen real estate sites with a range of other websites framed into one of their pages, including:

• School and Board of Education websites
• City and/or County websites
• Chamber of Commerce websites
• Parks and Recreation websites
• “Things to do” websites
• and the list goes on and on

Here’s What You Should Know . . .

FIRST, it is illegal to frame many websites into a page on your real estate site.  The fastest way to tell if an organization prohibits framing their site is to look for a link in the small print at the bottom of the site’s pages that says something like Legal, Terms, Terms of Use, or anything else that sounds like information you are agreeing to by using the website. 

Read that page carefully.  A lot of it will be legal mumbo-jumbo, but somewhere in there you will find the conditions under which you may use the website and the information it contains.

If you’ve never noticed a link like that, just do a search on any search engine for the search term Terms of Use.  The search I just did on Google returned 1,480,000,000 results.   No, that’s not a typo, it really is 1.48 billion.  So, there are just a few sites out there that publish their terms of use.

And, besides being illegal to go against a site’s terms of use, I don’t think it fits into anything you’ll find in the NAR Code of Ethics!

SECOND, you’re not doing your site visitors any real favors when you frame in another informational website.  Visitors come to your website for information.  They don’t stop in to find out where to spend another 15 minutes trying to find information.

If you want to tell your visitors about things to do in your market area, write an original content page to summarize it.  Original content - that means you write it in your own words.  It’s not copied from a city website or stolen from the site of another real estate agent in your neighborhood who took the time to write it down.

You can always provide a link to other websites for more information, but don’t expect your visitors to get excited about the prospect of wending their way through your Convention and Visitors website to find out what’s happening in the area.

THIRD, keep in mind that search engines don’t read content that is framed into one of your pages.  If you want the search engines to consider your website an expert resource on Smallville, USA, you better have original content pages that talk about Smallville.

It takes more work to create a content-rich website, but it will keep you out of trouble with the law and the regulators, your visitors will love you, and the search engines will, too!

Here’s one that has always amused me:

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”  This was said by Thomas Watson, who lead the rise of IBM from the 1920’s to the 1950’s.

It’s got to be a classic.  It’s believable to many because when computers were first invented, they were giant things that required care and feeding by individuals who thought in terms of zeros and ones.  Forseeing the way computers look today and the number of them around would have been difficult in the 1920’s.

According to the Wikipedia on Watson, that famous quote is actually a misquote because there is no proof that Watson ever made such a statement.  But, it certainly does make a good story!

And, have you ever wondered where the term “computer bug” came from?  In 1947 Grace Murray Hopper was working at Harvard University on one of the early giant computer systems.  Something went wrong, and her staff discovered a moth caught in one of the system’s relays.  So, they reported that they had debugged the computer.  And, we’ve been haunted by computer bugs ever since.

Creative Link Building

There are lots of ways to get good incoming links, and many people on the Internet have created lists of them.  One of my favorites is on the SEOBook website, and that lists includes 101 ways to get incoming links.

If you look at that list, you’ll notice that #1 under the heading Love for Lists is to write a list of 101 things about a topic of interest.  And, you can see it worked for the SEOBook folks, because I and a lot of other people have linked to that list.

You’ll also notice that #5 on the list suggests creating a list of gurus or experts because it will be useful for your Internet audience, and because the people on the list may well link back to the list.  If that idea sounds a little over the top, you might want to reconsider.

Creative Link Building Works!

Brian Thibault at International Listings took that idea and ran with it.  Brian created a list of Top 100 Real Estate Blogs - and he included the BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog on the list.  Then, he contacted me (via a contact form on the main website) to let me know that this blog was on the list.  And, now he has one more link to his website!

I wanted to use this as an example of someone being very proactive to obtain incoming links.   But, I’d also recommend that you take a look at the list because it does have some interesting blogs on it.

For example, it never occurred to me that Appraisers had blogs.  I don’t know why, just didn’t consider that.  Brian found blogs by Appraisers, Mortgage Brokers, professionals in the Title business, among a host of others.  He even has a category that is just fun stuff related to real estate.

So, the moral of the story is:  study those lists of ways to get incoming links.  You might be more successful with some of the truly creative approaches than you think!