Online Real Estate Technology

What has this post got to do with the title The Green Green Grass of Home ? Absolutely nothing, I’m just testing some keyword searching on the search engines to see how this title is picked up by Google and Yahoo.

Really this post is about Twitter.com and a really cool tool you can use to see how effective your efforts are at social media. Remember my post on Twitter.com? The Day The Earth Stood Still – Almost !!  just click on the link to refresh yourself on what Twitter is and how you can use it in your marketing. I’ve just been playing with a new application called Twitter Grader and checked my own ranking on Twitter. It seems I’ve made the Twitter Elite status, so I’m happy about that, I’ve got a ranking of 69 out of 100 and when compared to other Twitter users on the Gold Coast I rank number 6, so not bad, but I’d really like to be number 1, so I’ll have to work on that. The score is based on your reach, the number of followers you have,the pace of your updates and strength of your network. Not content to leave it at that, I thought I’d compare some really well known users of Twitter.

Kevin Rudd has a Twitter profile and his Twitter Grade is 95.5 out of a 100,not bad, but how does he compare with the leader of the opposition Malcolm Turnbull? Malcolm has a Twitter Grade of 94 out of a 100. Kevin and Malcolm are about even on the number of followers each have, but with regard to the number they follow in return,Malcolm leaves Kevin well behind. 192 for Malcolm to 11 for Kevin.

Lets compare that to both Barack Obama and Arnie Schwarzenegger, Arni has a rating of 99.8 whilst Obama ranks 99.91, so on Twitter at least Barack Obama rules the Governator.

 Just for fun if you’d like to follow Arnies personal tweets here’s the link: http://twitter.com/Ahnuld.

Try out http://twitter.grader.com/ just for fun, and you can start to follow my technology updates here: http://twitter.com/mikeandrewre

As I meet and chat with lots of real estate agents, I discuss the opportunities that exist for them with a strategic social media strategy. My intention is to open up new communication channels for the offices and agents I deal with, and to help them understand the options available to them on the web. Occasionally like yesterday, I come across the so called “bean counters” who cannot see the value of an integrated communication strategy using social media, or how the groups they work for can benefit from this type of exposure. I put that down to them looking at the web from a very traditional viewpoint and not looking any further into the future than today.

During my presentation yesterday I was asked what is the ROI on this type of strategy, a very good question to ask, and because the use of social media strategies in Australia is very limited at the moment in the real estate industry, there really is a limited understanding of how an integrated and corporate social media web strategy can work to drive leads, communicate with the on line real estate searcher, build brand awareness and word of mouth, not to mention the impact of effective backlink building on your SEO.

I intend to post more about this in the next day or so, but in the short term, I researched yesterday the number of social media or networking opportunities available to you as a business, and at last count there were more than 350+. Now you can’t possibly use them all, but as a bit of fun I thought I’d post a link for you to research what is available, so have fun and I’ll post more about this in the next few days:

http://mashable.com/2007/10/23/social-networking-god/

Rumors in the US that a new bill is being introduced called the Camera Phone Predator Alert Act. The new law will require any mobile phone containing a digital camera to sound an alert whenever a photo is being taken. It will also make it illegal for the phone being equipped with a device designed to silenced or disable the tone.

Will make for some interesting interpretations of the law, such as will it apply to existing phones or older phones?

I’ve been chatting to real estate offices lately about including social media into their long term communication and web strategy and as I’ve mentioned in my previous post on SEO How Important is An Effective SEO Strategy to Your Real Estate Business  you can use social media to build traffic to your web site instead of paying Google to do so.

Given that you may have the best real estate web site in the country, how do you use social media to drive lots of traffic to it. Here are a few tips and suggestions to help you, as long as you have great content and your site is up to date. There are more social media sites out there than you can possibly use in a lifetime, so lets look at the ones that will have a major impact for you.

Social Bookmarking sites: There are lots of social bookmarking sites for you to use on the web, so bookmark and tag all your content. Sites such as  delicious.com and Mr Wong are a great start to expose your content to other web readers, Mr Wong also allows do follow links which will help with SEO for your blog.  Stumbleupon.com is another great site to use, you should also leave a review of your content. Make your tags as broad as possible to allow users to find your site.

Blogs:Do they really work? Integrating a blog into your web site is a great way of bringing new content and visitors to your site or blog. The trick to blogging is to always provide good quality content in a consistent manner. Once you start cranking out consistent quality content, you can then start to submit your posts to news sites such as Digg, Reddit and Mixx.com, which will open up new audiences and web traffic for you. These are really good sites for exposing your content and will generate backlinks for your web site.

Facebook, Myspace,Linkedin and other networking sites are all smart places to submit your  blog to, all your connections will be able to see your content and blog. Twitter.com is another great resource to share your posts, for both business and pleasure just check out my profile at http://twitter.com/mikeandrewre to see how Twitter works.

Make sure you set up RSS feeds and email subscription links to allow readers to continue to recieve your posts and content once they leave your site. 

Hopefully this may answer some of your questions on how to set up an effective social media strategy for your office. A good social media strategy will help you build good quality backlinks to your web site that will also help your Google ranking. 

Good luck with your planning and let me know if I can help

Ever wondered what the total number of people world wide is that use the internet on a daily basis? this is one of those trivia questions that come up from time to time. Here’s the answer for you. Internet World Stats counted nearly 1.5 Billion web surfers world wide as of June 2008. Only 15 to 20% of the worlds population is currently connected to the web, which means the growth potential is still enormous.

So which countries are the largest users of the web? well here’s a breakdown by country and region as of December 2008, courtesy of Comscore:   

1. China: 179.7 million
2. United States: 163.3 million
3. Japan: 60.0 million
4. Germany: 37.0 million
5. United Kingdom: 36.7 million
6. France: 34.0 million
7. India: 32.1 million
8. Russia: 29.0 million
9. Brazil: 27.7 million
10. South Korea: 27.3 million
11. Canada: 21.8 million
12. Italy: 20.8 million
13. Spain: 17.9 million
14. Mexico: 12.5 million
15. Netherlands: 11.8 million

Worldwide Internet Audience

• Asia Pacific: 416 million (41.3%)
• Europe: 283 million (28.0%)
• North America: 185 million (18.4%)
• Latin America: 75 million (7.4%)
• Middle East & Africa: 49 million (4.8%)

Just lifting out the Oceania/Australia stats:

Population:  33,981,562

Internet Usage 2000: 7,620,480

The 2008 Stats are below:

Over the past few weeks I’ve spent a lot of time visiting real estate offices and conducting audits on their internet marketing efforts. The point of the exercise is seeing how vulnerable they are to competitors or where the weakness’s are in their on line strategy, and there are a lot of them. One area that comes up more often than any other is SEO, search engine optimisation, and how an office or franchise group can generate a better page ranking within their local region when searching on Google or Yahoo. I’m asked this question more often than any other and I thought I would share some interesting research and information with you on this subject.

Lets look at the US market first and then come back to how real estate agents approach this field in Australia, PCMS Consulting a SEO company in the US, has released a comprehensive study on the role of SEO as a marketing tool, within the top 50 US real estate companies.

It may come as no surpise to find that most surveyed felt that an effective SEO strategy was important to their on line presence, yet could not convince the decision makers within the companies to allocate traditional marketing funds to promote their web sites with new generation SEO optimisation services.

According to the report, real estate companies are overwhelmingly neglecting SEO optimisation and thus missing out on a considerable opportunity to boost their profits and thrive in todays economic conditions.

Most searchers use keywords to conduct a search. The most used real estate keyword is “real estate”, not a brand name. Therefore, real estate companies of all sizes can effectively participate on line. As a result, even the most established companies need to optimize their websites to maintain their market position.

Now lets look at the Australian result, in August last year,NSW based SEO company First Rate, released a report on the performance of real estate offices and franchise groups in the country and the results were almost identical to the US result. FirstRate found that, individual real estate web sites are failing to compete in the search engines with the large portals, they lacked decent natural search engine rankings,did not partake in paid search engine marketing for the most popular real estate search terms and do not have good link popularity or page rank scores. As a result their web site traffic is suffering.

When you analyse the search trends on Google you’ll see the the popularity of each keyword search in each state including the spike when the last interest rate decrease was announced.

Real Estate Search Volumes for Keyword Search Phrases

There are lot of factors that you need to consider in optimising your web site, and these should  include link building, this is often overlooked by businesses, but is now a vital element in gaining higher search engine rankings. High quality links need to be formed, to benefit the most from linking, and just as important is the creation of  “Deep Linking”, links that point to sub pages within your web site, search engines are likely to rank these pages higher when they have high quality external links pointing to them. Creating good organic search results should be part of your strategy along with using paid SEO.

So how much of this can you control yourself? Write great content, a lot of SEO falls within writing great content and building authoritative backlinks to that content within your web site.

Sites that are image heavy and text light,don’t have headings and subheadings or sitemaps that search engines can’t crawl won’t fair well.

If you write frequent relevant content that incorporates keywords and phrases that searchers are looking for, your site will be found. This is where blogging and social media can help in the creation of good keyword rich copy and the building of backlinks to that content.

The other point to remember is that 99% of your competition don’t know what their doing.

There’s lot to understand about keyword rich copy, backlink and reciprocal link building and web site optimisation, so if I can help demystify this for you please ask, just send me a comment on the blog or email me from here How You Can Work With Mike

If you want an example of good organic search engine results, Google “mike andrew real estate” and see the result of good external link building, good content and internal linking.

Ever wondered how entrenched the mobile phone is in our society, and where people use their mobile phone? It has become an essential part of a real estate agents operating tools and most would feel naked without theirs hanging on their belt or in a  handbag. A new survey released has looked at the usage of mobile phones in Australia and the results are very interesting. For instance, in what strange places do you use your mobile phone? the survey found that 1 in every 2 Australians uses a mobile phone on the toilet, that computes to 48% of the population, small when compared to 66% of Chinese people who say they take it into the toilet with them,well it is a good place to do your business, I suppose. 

If you live in Melbourne, your partner is more likely to go through your text and phone messages than those living in Sydney. The survey commissioned by Microsoft and was conducted across Australia, China, Taiwan, India and Japan. The full story can be read here http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?newsid=1222736

Looking at this in a little more depth, the future development of the internet as predicted in my post The Future of the Internet – 2020 and Beyond  is the prediction that a mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the internet for most people, and with new real estate applications becoming available for both the IPhone and smart phone platforms, it is not hard to believe that this will be an integral part of how consumers will access on line information including real estate in the future and will shape how we do business in 2020.

One of the very interesting results is that 13% of Australians said they would use their phone during extremely intimate moments. Now that one I’m not going to touch!! Na, I can’t resist, maybe they just put it on Vibrate!

We’ve had Walkscore.com and I’ve talked about the fantastic amount of information you can get from this great site,well now, and it had to happen, we have Drive Score.

I checked the site out earlier and got a screen grab for you which is displayed below. I then went and checked the site again and got a message saying that Google were blocking traffic because of the high traffic volumes searching the site, just goes to show the popularity of this type of information.

With all the emphasis now being placed on local search and local suburbs and neighborhoods, it is no wonder the site is very popular. Walkscore gives you the environmentally friendly version,but if you want to live out in the country areas or some of the outer suburbs you need to know where the local utilities are and how far away from your property they are. So this web site is just the score, pardon the pun!!

When you type in the address of the property, you’ll get a Google map displaying the house and the properties drive score out of 100. The greater the number of businesses and amenities nearby, the higher the Drive Score. You’ll also find on the map the locations of parks,restaurants,hospitals,libraries & other amenities. If you click on the icons on the map, you’ll then get directions to the location based on it’s driving distance from the house. It shows the distance in miles, but remember this is meant for the US market, to me though, that’s only a minor issue, given the great information the site gives you.

Users can also turn off some of the search results, so you can fine tune it to your requirements.

 The site is attached to US For Sale by Owner site Fizber.com and you can click on the link here if you’d like to check it out: http://drivescore.fizber.com/

Drive Score Screen Shot

Here we are 19 days into 2009, and there are lots of interesting news & blog reports about the growing usage of the net and what tools are becoming popular with on line users.

I’ve been looking at various trends with technology this year and I’ve mentioned Twitter and other social media tools that real estate agents can get on board with to communicate and share information with consumers searching on the web. One of the tools I’ve been pushing for awhile is video, and readers of this blog will know, as I’ve mentioned so many times in the past, I’m a big fan. Not just of property video tours, but video as a tool to provide market updates, create and build an agents profile, share information with other like minded people, training etc and the list goes on.  I’m predicting that 2009 will be the year that more and more of the real estate groups will integrate video into their marketing mix and we’ll start to see more video tours on properties, and once main stream marketers start to utilise this medium more aggressively, that will open the flood gates.

A recent survey conducted by Permission TV revealed that over 400 senior marketers from advertising agencies & the media in the US will significantly increase implementation of their on line video initiatives in 2009.

The Key Findings of the survey were:

Here’s a graph with the findings: 

Some additional Findings:

• More than two thirds (64 percent) of respondents reported that strengthening relationships with existing customers and/or prospects is the primary goal of online video initiatives.
• When focusing on respondents from the traditional and digital/interactive advertising agencies, more than 90 percent are overwhelmingly confidentin their ability to recommend online video initiatives to clients.
• Digital/interactive agencies expressed more confidence in recommending online video to clients compared to traditional agencies; however, traditionalagencies claim more responsibility for driving online video initiatives than digital/interactive agencies.

Video in 2009, should be a high priority along with using social media in your marketing mix, but it won’t be good enough to start a blog and then not target it correctly or post one piece of content and expect it to  generate good quality leads, or make a home made video of very dodgy quality and then expect that to be viewed by the masses. No, all that will happen is you’ll end up on a blog like this one on what not to do. 

Social media including any public communication tool like video, needs a comprehensive strategy attached to it, so that your agency or business can really capitalise on it’s strengths.

Understand the target market you are aiming at, be aware of the way the consumer uses social media and play to it’s strengths, be very aggressive in syndication of your social media communications or projects and make it part of your broader marketing initiatives. 

Social media will not be for everyone and it does take time to work at it, if you are not sure about how to put this strategy together or are not aware of what social media you can use in your business, then contact me. I’ll help you put together a comprehensive communication plan that encompasses all the tools on the web, to drive leads and open up new doors for you and your business. 

Source: Permission TV Survey December 2008

A new survey by Entrepreneur magazine in the US on the most popular franchises in the country has ranked the RE/MAX system at no 44 out of the top 500. This places RE/MAX ahead of all the other real estate franchises operating in the US.

The top 5 franchises were:

1. Subway 

2. McDonalds

3. Liberty Tax Service

4. Sonic Drive In Restaurants

5. Intercontinental Hotels Group 

If you’d like to read the full list I’ve included a link for you to follow:

http://www.entrepreneur.com/franchises/rankings/franchise500-115608/2009,.html

Congratulations to the RE/MAX group for achieving this ranking.