Archive for Insider Insight
From the Web: Beware the NAR Police
· Comments
I found an interesting post on ActiveRain written by Marchel Peterson, an agent from Spring, Texas. She describes her run in with the “NAR Police” who contacted her about an unintentional trademark violation in her original real estate website domain name.
Marchel makes a good point that bears repeating. The word REALTOR® is a collective trademark owned by NAR. And, regardless of the fact that you can find the word in a dictionary, NAR is very aggressive about enforcing the rules related to its trademark.
I could relate to Marchel’s post because I had the same experience when I first established a real estate focused website. Yes, the infamous www.BuildRealEstateResults.com website originally had a domain name that contained the word realtor.
If you think it’s weird getting a cease and desist if you’re a real estate professional, imagine how I felt as a professional trying to assist real estate professionals!
Take a look at Marchel’s post. It’s definitely worth thinking about one more time – you really don’t want to tangle with the NAR police!
Insider Insight: Who Cares About Me?
· Comments
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets in Austin, TX
Many real estate agent websites have an “About Me” page on them, but does anyone ever read it? Most people go to real estate websites and don’t look at anything initially except the property search page. That is why agent sites need to have a really good property search feature. However, some recent experience taught me something about the About Me page and other pages on my own Austin real estate website.
I have worked with three sets of buyers within the last 6 months and all of them chose me to work with partially based on my About Me page. The story went something like this with all of the couples: First, they were all 40+ years old. These are people who have bought and sold homes before and who understand the value of a REALTOR®.
They all found my website, registered to look at home listings and were on and off the site almost daily for about 2-3 months. When they had narrowed down the area they wanted to look in, they started jumping to other pages on my site such as the ones about schools and recreation.
One of the most interesting things these folks did was start learning about me. One of the ladies told me that she liked the section on my Meet Sam Chapman page entitled “Some Things Most People Don’t Know About Me.”
I added this personal trivia because I didn’t want people just looking at education, affiliations and the like. The first part of the page was a short bio, but the things most people don’t know about me made me more human to these people.
One of the buyers told me that she read that I was an Eagle Scout and that gave her a trust factor. Another family with kids read that I had been a substitute teacher and loved that. Another thought it was very cool that I had jumped out of a hot air balloon from 10,200 feet outside of Fairbanks, Alaska.
When an initial likeability and trust level was reached, the buyers called or emailed me. That started the relationship that they felt they already had even though we had never talked before. From there, two of the couples purchased within 30 days.
My point is simply that although most people will just look at the property search page, others, especially the more mature ones, will want detailed information. Some will even want to know who that agent is. So if you are an agent with a real estate website, get a little background on yourself out there for the people who want to know you.
A Note from Kathleen: Sam’s post reinforces a couple of my philosophies. First, I’ve always said that the goal of a real estate website is to get visitors to adopt it as their real estate research headquarters. That obviously happened with the visitors in Sam’s examples – they started with the home search, then came back for more over time.
I’ve also always encouraged agents to have an effective “about” page on their sites. You’re not there when your visitors start to wonder who you are. You need a marketing message that explains to visitors why they should work with you as opposed to another agent. Sam’s idea of the “things people don’t know about me” could be a great addition to your marketing message to get more personal with those visitors who want to know!
Sample Room Makeovers for Quicker Sales
· CommentsEveryone talks about how staging homes makes them sell faster. But, it’s often easier said than done. Would it make more sense to you if you saw a few examples?
Check out these before and after photos of 9 Room Makeovers done by REALTORS® from all over the country.
The common theme seems to be neutral colors, removing things that are worn or dirty and packing away lots and lots of “stuff”. But, a picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look and see if you spot some of the same problems in your next listing!
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman who markets Austin Real Estate
The Communication Conundrum
I chaired an American Cancer Event called Relay For Life a couple of years ago. Many of the people on my planning committee were high school students. At one meeting I asked the kids what would be the best way for me to get them information. I asked if email would work.
One of the kids looked me dead in the eye and said; “Mr. Chapman, email is so 90s – you need to learn to text!” Well, aside from everyone cracking up, it told me something that I kind of already knew, but that I didn’t really have a good handle on – yet!
So How Does That Apply to Real Estate?
I got a call from a couple of sisters in college about needing to sell the home of their recently deceased father. I realized pretty quickly in the listing process that they would not respond to phone calls or emails.
So when I needed them to see something or to get paperwork, I would send as an email and immediately send a text stating that I had emailed something important and that I needed them to check email. Guess what? It worked!
The transaction closes next week and I got a call from the title company yesterday telling me that they needed information from one of the daughters. I asked the person at the title company to send a text following an email. I was told that they were not allowed to text.
So I sent the daughter a text message stating that the title company needed information ASAP in order to set up the closing. The daughter called the title rep within minutes.
Here’s My Point
We as REALTORS® need to learn different ways to communicate. The younger generation is all about instant everything. Text messaging is just that.
Would I recommend that we text all clients? No way. The more mature crowd may not get a message and the middle-aged crowds may think we were being unprofessional.
However, if a client communicates on the fly via BlackBerry email or texting, it is perfectly OK to do the same. If you’re working with someone in or right out of college, my feeling is that texting is OK if you do it right. In fact, with some it will be a necessity.
This guest post was written by Sam Chapman.
Your Primary Keywords Don’t Drive the Majority of Traffic
Most good real estate webmasters understand that the majority of traffic driven to their sites is not from their most key search terms. For example, the terms Austin real estate, Austin TX real estate, Lake Travis real estate and Austin real estate blog generated only 13% of the visits to my site in September, 2008. That percent would be higher if I eliminated the statistics for visitors who didn’t use a search engine to get to the site, but still, this is pretty interesting.
Use Long Tail Search Terms to Increase Traffic
So what is my site found for? Long tail search terms. If you don’t know what the concept of the long tail is, here’s a good article on the subject.
Some of the long tail terms I get found for are Hamilton Pool, Austin MSA, Circle C homes, Apache Shores real estate and Spanish Oaks. The latter three are all Austin area subdivisions. Getting found for Hamilton Pool is OK, but it nothing compared to being found for real estate related terms.
The Power of Community Pages
Now that you know about the long tail, let me share something about how you can generate long trail traffic. I set up a main page on my site called Austin Neighborhood Listings that links directly from my home page.
On that page are links to neighborhood specific pages, categorized by geographic area. Each page has a few paragraphs of content talking about the neighborhood and then framed IDX search results showing homes specific to that neighborhood. The content before the IDX search frame is critical, as search engines can’t do much with information inside frames.
Here is where things get interesting. Remember that my main terms result in about 13% of page views? More than 10% of the page views on my real estate website are these neighborhood specific pages.
Not many real estate agents optimize for specific neighborhoods, so this is a great way to get long tail traffic. Visitors also navigate to the neighborhood pages from the link on the home page so this is also a great way to make your site more sticky and keep people on it longer.
Adding neighborhood pages can accomplish several things:
- It can give you pages about specific neighborhoods, which human visitors love.
- It can give you more pages of unique content, which search engines love.
- It can give you great internal links to neighborhood pages with appropriate anchor text, which is good for human visitors and search engines.
- It can give you the ability to generate long tail traffic, which is great for you.
In case this tells you anything, I am getting a listing in Apache Shores this week from someone who found my Apache Shores Homes page last weekend.
In order to frame the listings, you need to have a good third party IDX provider that allows customization of the IDX link that will show homes by neighborhood. The IDX vendor also needs to be approved by your Board as a third-party vendor. Check with your Board to see who the approved vendors are and check them out.
If you can do what I did, start building neighborhood pages on your real estate website. You’ll be happy that you did. If you want to see what I am talking about, visit my Austin real estate website.
