BRER Real Estate Marketing Blog

There’s one thing I often find missing on real estate websites: very visible privacy policies.  Your privacy policy on your website should be very easily accessible.

Start with A Visible Privacy Policy

Sometimes your real estate website vendor will help you out with a privacy policy.  For example, Point2 Agent websites come equipped with a standard Privacy Policy.  That policy can also be edited by the individual website owner.  A link to the policy statement is accessible at the bottom of every page.

If you don’t have a Privacy Policy built into your website, it’s pretty easy to put one together.  Just go to any search engine and search for the phrase privacy policy.  You’ll find page after page of privacy policies published by the top sites on the Internet to use as examples.

Having a Privacy Policy is a good start.  However, it’s very likely that very few of the visitors to your site will take the time to search out the policy.

Then, Encourage Quality Leads

Quality leads are more likely to come from someone who is comfortable with the fact that you care about the privacy of their contact information and other data they may provide to you.  The best way to make sure your site visitors know you care is to put a notice right above every form you have on your site.

Some people think that putting a privacy statement right before their contact forms looks messy.  I’ve had several long discussions with clients, trying to convince them that their website visitors care about privacy, and that the privacy statement will have a beneficial impact on the responses they get.

Think of it like shoes.  Shoes make your feet look a bit more “busy”, but they get you where you want to go.

You might be interested to know that Michael Russer, one of my favorite real estate Internet gurus also feels strongly about privacy.  In fact, he published an article about it this month on Realtor.org.  Russer notes his favorite form policy statement in the article.  He also puts a link to the Privacy Policy along with the disclaimer.  If you have a detailed privacy policy tailored to you and your visitors, that would be a good idea.

Here’s the one I often use:

• We value your privacy.  The information you entrust to us will be kept confidential.  Your contact information will never be sold to or shared with a third party.  There is no obligation.

I think the confidentiality issue is another key.  There are times when a site visitor may be providing you with information about the value of their home (for a free CMA) or the type of home they are looking for (for email listing updates).   To me, it’s important that the visitor know that any information they provide will not end up being the topic of your conversation over lunch.

Regardless of the exact wording of a Privacy Policy or a contact form disclaimer, having both on your real estate website will make your visitors much more comfortable.  So, don’t keep them a secret! 

If you’re doing real estate marketing online, you need good rankings in the search engines.  One of our contributors, Sam Chapman, wrote about the fact that he had fallen off the first page of Google for his main keyword.  Luckily, his website is strong enough that the activity on his site wasn’t really affected.

I got an email from Sam the other day.  He’s figured out how to retrieve his high ranking on Google for his main keyword phrase!

And, it’s a pretty weird fix.

When Can a Google Sitemap Hurt Your Ranking?

Sam wrote, “I had a Google sitemap warning in the Google Webmaster Tools.  It stated that my RSS feed had too many tags and that I should fix and resubmit.  The thing that both puzzled me and troubled me was that I first saw the warning a few weeks after falling off page one for my most coveted search term - Austin real estate.”

Sam tapped the resources at the REW forum by publishing a post asking if anyone knew anything about that error.  One of the other REW members posted a link to a blog post that discussed merging two blogs into one. 

The owner didn’t mention getting an error message, and his merged blogs were doing OK, but he was frustrated because his pages weren’t getting indexed very quickly.  The answer came from another REW member, whose advice was “Delete your Google Sitemap.xml file and make the search engines crawl the site from scratch.”

Once the file was deleted, the owner of the combined blogs saw his indexed pages increase dramatically.  So, Sam decided to try the same thing with his website.

Within 10 days, he was back on page one of the Google SERPs for his key real estate marketing term, Austin Real Estate.

The Morals of the Story?

• Having a site map on your real estate website is a good thing.  And, in most instances,  submitting a Google sitemap is a good thing, too.
• You may or may not get an error message in your Google Webmaster Tools when a site map is confusing the search engine web crawlers.
• There may be times when some issue with your Google sitemap can negatively impact your rankings, and you’d be better off deleting the site map.
• If you have submitted a Google sitemap, you better check your Google Webmaster Tools periodically to make sure that there are no issues you need to be aware of!

What are your Wishes at this Holiday Time?

I’m taking a few days off from blogging this week, so the blog will be back again next Monday, the 29th.  Before I go, I want to wish all of you a very happy holiday season, and to ask:  what are you wishing for in 2009?

Here’s part of my wish list:

** I wish for a solution to the economic issues we’re facing.  Not a quick fix, but a long-lasting one as soon as we’re able.

** I wish our representatives in Congress would stop fighting with one another.

** I wish that the auto companies would survive, but I can’t imagine how they’ll be able to pull it off.

** I wish strength, peace and safety for our troops in harm’s way.

** I wish I knew how to play the piano. 

** I wish Vista really worked.

** I wish people would learn how to drive.  All of them.

** I wish I had a maid.  Not full-time.  I’d just love to have a completely clean house from time to time without having to do it myself.

** I wish for all of us to achieve peace, health, happiness and prosperity!

There are so many things I have to be grateful for, including the great new clients and associates I’ve met this year, and the “old” clients and associates I still have the opportunity to work with.

Whatever you’re celebrating at this time of year, I wish you

.

Yes, it’s that time of year again.  The Holidays.  Don’t get me wrong - I enjoy the holidays.  I just don’t like getting ready for them.

If one more person asks me if I’m “ready”, I think I’ll scream.

I know the economy is slow, and the retailers aren’t having a good season.  But, you couldn’t prove that from the traffic around shopping areas in my town.  It must be that just as many people are shopping, they’re just not spending as much.

Then, there’s my brother.  My parents had the audacity to deliver him on December 21st.  It’s difficult enough to think of one present for him.  But, every year, I have to think of two at once.  Definitely not fair.

And, think about all the service people who are away from home at the holidays.  That isn’t fair, either.  But, you know you can always help out:

• You can send a postcard to someone in the military.  Visit Let’s Say Thanks.  Xerox Corporation has set up this website where you can select a postcard from among designs created by children all across the country, and personalize it with your own greeting.  The postcards are then printed by Xerox and mailed in care packages sent to military personnel.
• You can send an e-mail.  Visit America Supports You. 
• You can send a card to a wounded soldier.  Just write to:
  • A Recovering American Soldier
    c/o Walter Reed Army Medical  Center
    6900 Georgia Avenue, NW
    Washington, DC 20307-5001

Two of the easy listening radio stations in Atlanta play Christmas music for the entire month of December.  A whole month!  Do they really think we want to listen to Christmas carols for 30 days?!?!?

So, the days leading up to Christmas aren’t my favorite.  But, I do like the holiday itself.  I like putting money in the Salvation Army bucket.  I like the traditions and the feelings of good will.  I’m working on a way to get that good will stuff to last all year around.

This year, I’m going to celebrate Christmas with a couple of small children.  That will really bring the Santa Claus magic into sharp focus. 

So, if I can just get through the next week, I’ll be loving that Silent Night!

In today’s real estate market, there are a lot of home buyers out looking for deals.  And, buyers sometimes use the price per square foot as an indicator of market value.  When they find a home that has a lower price per square foot than most of the other homes in a market, they figure they’re looking at a good deal.

Some markets don’t publish the square foot of homes for sale.  But, in other markets, agents use price per square foot to sell homes.

So, where do those size calculations come from?  From now on, you might decide that the square foot measurements on your listings had better come from your own tape measure.

Why the Tape Measure?

Put yourself in the position of an agent from Texas.  The agent listed a house, and used the square foot figure listed in tax records filed with a local government office.

What this agent didn’t know was that the people who bought the house were looking for a deal.  The buyers say that they wouldn’t have bought the house if it weren’t priced under market value, based on the price per square foot.

You know what’s coming next, right?

The buyers determined that the size of the house was overstated by 253 square feet.  So, what happens to their “great deal”?  It goes out the window.  And, what do the buyers do?  They sue the listing agent and the agent’s broker.

The listing agent had noted on the MLS listing the “approximate heated area” in square feet.  The agent had relied on tax information.  The buyers had signed a waiver indicating that they had not relied solely on any information provided to them by the agents involved.  Didn’t help any.

After the initial trial, a Texas appeals court upheld the lower court’s outcome, which awarded damages to the buyers, and held the real estate folks involved liable for misrepresentation and fraud.  Whew!

If you want to read the appeal court’s decision, you may find it interesting.

The morale of the story, of course, is this:  if you sell based on square feet, you better get out your tape measure!

This guest post was written by Larry Easto who is a
best-selling business writer, and publisher of Real Estate Marketing Link

I am not a big fan of one spouse working in a small business operated by the other spouse.

My Own Experience

This attitude is founded on my own experience in starting my first post-marriage business. At the time, my wife who is a bright, highly-educated person was taking a break from her professional career to raise two small children. Feeling totally fulfilled as a mother but under-stimulated intellectually, she was looking for something to keep the thinking part of her brain engaged and challenged.

At my suggestion she agreed to look after the bookkeeping of my small two-person business.  This turned out to be really bad decision. While she loves math and arithmetic puzzles, she was and remains totally undone by any numbers with dollar signs in front of them. It was as if the dollar sign transformed each number into some kind of a weird unintelligible symbol, loaded with psychological and philosophical significance.

After one very frustrating month, we all agreed that life would be better for everyone if my secretary looked after the bookkeeping and my wife looked for intellectual stimulation somewhere away from my business.

Over the years, I have seen many small businesses encounter difficulties as a result of the involvement of the owner’s spouse. Not surprisingly, many domestic situations have also been negatively impacted as a result of business issues carried home by one or other of the spouses.  Recently I experienced another example that reinforced my dislike of one spouse working in the business of the other.

A Website Design Debacle

A couple of years ago, I worked with a very good graphic designer on a client project. I liked her and respected her design talents. We worked well together and produced a book that delighted my client.

Since the designer also offered website design, I chose her to help me with my first website. In website design projects, she looked after graphic design…the look of the site… and her husband, a full-time IT professional, designed the technical elements of the site, after his normal working hours.

At the first meeting with my design team, the graphic designer behaved as she had in all of our other meetings. Her husband acted like a know-it-all, answering questions that I directed at his wife and generally running the meeting.  Because I had faith in his wife, I ignored his behavior and we proceeded with the site development.  With minimal fuss, we came up with a design and appearance that was exactly what I wanted.

However, when I started to research issues as search engine optimization and driving traffic to my site, I realized that there was not much behind the attractive façade. Missing were such elements as page titles and descriptions and key words that feed search engines. Also missing was the ability for me to monitor traffic, pages visited, referral sources and similar features.  

When I raised these issues with the graphic designer, her response was simply to tell me that they had done what they were contracted to do.  This being the case, it would seem that all of the problems with my original site were my fault. Apparently I failed to specify everything I required…even though I was relying on an IT professional to provide the technical elements I needed but didn’t know I needed.

Issues of responsibility aside, my experience with this website design team reinforces my no owner’s spouse rule.  I will continue to avoid dealing with small businesses, including real estate agents, that are operated by one spouse and include the other spouse in some capacity.   

Experience is indeed a great teacher.         

Note from Kathleen:

Larry’s experience points out a great lesson in website design.  There are many elements that need to be addressed to create a useful website.  If you’re planning to have a custom site designed, make sure that the vendor you choose can address all of the critical issues.

• Website design needs to start with SEO (search engine optimization).  You need to work with someone who understands SEO and can assist you in selecting the right keywords to target, then make sure the on-page elements of the site supports that strategy.  An SEO expert does not necessarily know anything about design or coding.
• The web site needs to have a professional look and design,  A designer does not necessarily know anything about SEO or coding.
• The code for the site needs to be clean, and all functions need to work properly.  An IT or code expert does not necesarily know anything about SEO or design.

If your website vendor can’t address all three of those issues, you’ve got the wrong web builder!

I started listening to contemporary Country music a while ago, and now I’m hooked.  It was rather a surprise.  I wouldn’t describe myself as a Country music sort of person.  But, my problem is that I like to sing to music, not just listen to it.

Back in the day, there were songs you could sing along with, like “Turn the Page” by Bob Seger.  I remember one time I was on a long-distance drive, fortified with my favorite Foreigner tape.  I was rocking out to Head Games and Juke Box Hero, with the pedal to the metal.

It occurred to me that I should clean up my act when a guy in front of me made a bee-line for the right lane, then stared at me with a startled, almost frightened look on his face as I zoomed by.  I’m not sure it was the speed that got him as much as the fact that he probably thought I was yelling at him the entire way.  Likelihood is he couldn’t hear the music. . .

But, then, music got to the point where there was little melody, unusual rhythms and words you could only figure out if you memorized the lyrics from a printout on the CD.  And, half the time you wouldn’t want to know what the song was about, anyway.

So, one day I was playing with the radio and came across the local contemporary Country music station.  And, you could understand the words, the harmonies were great, and the songs were pretty interesting.  Country music has moved beyond the ”I lost my dog and now my girlfriend won’t talk to me” phase.

There are great musicians like Little Big Town, Sugarland, Lady Antebellum, and of course, Keith Urban of Nicole Kidman fame.

If you want to know what Country music is all about, find a song called “Songs About Me” by Trace Adkins.

And, if you want to strain your vocal cords on a long road trip, tune in to a good Country music station.  You just might be surprised.

But, don’t worry.  I haven’t invested in the hat and guitar. . .  yet.

You may recall that I wrote a couple posts about CyberHomesPro in the past.  I was on RealTalk today and noticed that Reggie Nicolay from CyberHomes had resurrected one of my earlier posts on that forum to suggest that we take another look at the CyberHomesPro Smartframe.

So, I did.  I found that the changes that have been made make the SmartFrame a good way for you to provide home evaluation information and neighborhood data on your website and/or blog.  For an example, take a look at this test page.

I set up the test using “Atlanta” as the area of interest.  You can also narrow things down by setting up the SmartFrame for a specific zip code.

When you first reach the page, you’ll see quite a few homes in the Atlanta area.  If you want to test it out, try typing in the address:  356 King Rd NW, Atlanta, GA.  I’m  not sure that address even exists, but it will give you a chance to see how things work.

Once you type that address, and click Search, you will see some other homes on that street with descriptions.  Using that function, you can get an idea of prices in an area, even if your specific address is not in the database.  If you use one of the existing addresses that are shown, you’ll see a range for the estimated value.  I think that makes much more sense than those sites that claim to have a valid estimate. 

If you use that address and change the drop down to the left of the search box to Neighborhoods, you’ll find that CyberHomes has figured out the address is in the 30342 zip code, and it displays neighborhood information for that zip code.

There’s a lot of neighborhood information:

• 12-month change in home values
• median sales prices and volume
• sales tax
• cost of living index
• recent and projected job growth
• crime statistics
• climate averages

And, I could go on - but you should really take a look at it yourself.

I set the frame up to scroll, although that is not the default.  I did that because some of the pages a visitor might end up on are longer than the norm, and without the scroll, they’d have no way to see all of the page.  But, the most commonly used pages can be seen without an interior scroll bar, so I don’t mind the scrolling issue too much.

You do need to set the width of the frame at 1000px or the page will be cut off.  For most sites with vertical navigation bars, that means you’ll need to eliminate the nav bar as I did on the test page.

I’ll update this post if I get an answer to the question I asked about what happens if someone creates an account on your SmartFrame.  I’m not sure how the information will be used at this point.  Update:  See the Comments on this post to see the answer to this question from Reggie at Cyberhomes!

But, given the fact that the last time I looked at the SmartFrame it was unusable for most people, I’m very glad to see that this version provides a great deal of information in a very usable form!

This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets Austin Real Estate

Ouch, That Hurts!

I fell off page one of Google for the term Austin real estate about 6 weeks ago.  The same players are at the top of page one, but there is quite a bit of movement in 3-10.

I found something very interesting when looking at my traffic statistics recently:

• This year, from November 1 through November 23, my traffic showed 5,635 unique sessions. For the same time period in 2007, I had 6,345.
• For the term Austin real estate, I had 611 sessions last November, compared to just 89 this November.
• If I subtract the number of sessions generated from the term Austin real estate from the total sessions for both time periods, my traffic is only down by 188 unique sessions.

What does this tell me?

The Power of Long Tail Search Terms

It pretty much proves the power of long tail search terms, which I blogged about back on October 14.  I think my traffic has actually increased in a sense. 

This year has seen loads of buyers cut out of the market.  Home sales in Austin are down more than 20% compared to 2007.  Most of my clients are buyers from outside the Austin area.  They find me on the internet searching a variety of terms. 

So if the number of buyers has decreased, the traffic on my site should have decreased much more than it has, but it has remained relatively stable.  This November, the number of unique sessions on my site is down just 188 sessions.  That isn’t very significant considering the state of the market.

The Power of Blogging

When I take a really detailed look at my stats, I found that so far this November, 27% of the top 100 entry pages into my website are blog posts.  That is serious long tail stuff.

When I look at the visitor navigation stats, the top page is the home page.  The second page that people click from are blog posts.  In other words, they start with a blog post and click over to the main website.

So falling off page one had me a bit freaked out a month ago, but not I am not quite as concerned now.  Should I work on getting back there?  Of course!  But, it shows that the short tail (high traffic search terms), as powerful as it is, isn’t quite as critical as many people think it is.