Online Real Estate Technology

I’ve written about the progress that Century 21 in the US has made with regard to the web and social media sites in the past 12 months and now they have announced a new initiative called “C21 Communities” which is available directly from the companies web site.

The new platform bundles a dynamic set of social media tools designed to enable on line conversations between it’s agents and consumers.

The bundle includes:

• Talks, an online interactive advice forum,
• C21 Talk Radio, an online radio channel for consumers interested in real estate, and
• CENTURY 21® social networking sites on Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and YouTube.

“Social media offers a powerful new way to reach consumers,” said Bev Thorne, senior vice president of marketing for Century 21 Real Estate LLC.  “It is dramatically changing the way that we market our brand and it opens up an entirely new space for our brokers and agents to market their properties and services.  By taking a leadership position in this space, we are positioning our System members for success with the next generation of home buyers and sellers.”

I’m really impressed with the way Century 21 in the US are looking at ways to increase the conversation with on line consumers and to me owning the conversation is something other franchise groups or independents, big or small should be looking at.

Well done again Century 21!!

Everyone Loves Twitter

Everybody is talking about Twitter and suddenly there are instant Twitter experts popping up everywhere, Celebrities, politicians, entrepreneurs, business leaders and everyday users are flocking to the service en masse, generating a frenzy of activity and attention. So why are people flocking to Twitter? Evan Williams, Twitters CEO has the answer:

“Twitter lets people know what’s going on about things they care about instantly, as it happens, In the best cases, Twitter makes people smarter and faster and more efficient.”

A survey of Twitter users from MarketingProfs, a US based research company, backs Mr. Williams’ views. On a scale from 1 to 5 (with 1 for strongly disagree and 5 and for strongly agree), the phrase “I find it exciting to learn new things from people” averaged a score of 4.65 and “I value getting information in a timely manner” averaged 4.58.

“Above all, people on Twitter are truly motivated by learning new things and getting information real-time, as it’s developing,” said Ann Handley of MarketingProfs.

With Twitter growing at over 1,086% per year, it’s expected that Twitter will have over 18.1 million users in the US by this time next year and at that rate, the entire Australian on line audience will be using Twitter, ohh just imagine the noise then!!

Twitter predicted growth in 2010

You can follow Mike on Twitter here: www.twitter.com/mikeandrewre 

C21 Wins Best On Line Real Estate Ad

Nice to see innovative on line Real Estate advertising recieving recognition, Century 21 has won the award for “Best Real Estate On line Ad” at the Internet Advertising Competition in the US.

The Mother-in-Law series highlights the company’s advanced mapping features by taking a lighthearted look at how a property searcher might use its pinpoint mapping technology to draw specific lines on a map to avoid living near their dreaded mother-in-law.

“Our goal is to capture the consumers’ imagination with our advertising as much as we capture their attention with our exceptional real estate mapping technology,” said Bev Thorne, senior vice president, marketing, Century 21 Real Estate LLC. “This award is an outstanding accomplishment for our brand and further evidence that our online marketing efforts are succeeding in reaching consumers in an entertaining and informative way.”

Congratulations to the Century 21 team, well done!

Every day I visit real estate offices and talk with agents about how to improve their marketing on the web, and part of that presentation looks at social media strategies that are designed to improve their profiles on the search engines and open up new communication channels for them to network on the web. 

Once I’ve done the presentation, I know a number of them will want to head straight to their office and try and get started on their social strategy, and unfortunately a great number of them will end up failing, why? 

The reason a lot of agents fail is because they apply traditional marketing strategies to a new media environment. The rules that apply for print, magazines or brochures will not always work for you on the net or social media, you need to tailor or adapt your message to the strength of the medium and get an understanding of how to communicate to users of the new media. There’s a tendency to take what worked for you in one medium and transfer it unchanged into the new.

Social media is all about the sharing of information and not about product, yes that becomes part of the mix, but should not be the focus of your strategy. As real estate professionals, when you are in a social situation, what do people talk to about when they find out what you do? talk about the weather, no, I’m sure they will ask you about the current market and pick your brain about real estate and information. You’ll more than likely ask them to call you or hand out your business card and then continue to enjoy your social time. Social media is no different, it is not nor never was designed to be a commercial medium. 

New research is backing up this statement with 38% of on line Australians today considering advertising on social media sites to be an intrusion compared with 29% in 2007.

So before you start, read this post, once you’ve read it, then and only then, put your plan into action. Design your strategy and think about how you are going approach social media or digital marketing. 

Remember, it’s about sharing, networking and providing information to your future clients.

Consumers are talking about you and your business

On Line Reputation Management, four words that you as a business owner should be very very aware of, why? because these four words can ruin your reputation and can directly influence whether a consumer does business with you or your company.

It’s been a little while since I last wrote about the worst property videos on the net, so given that they are very popular with you the readers of this blog, lets have a look at another little gem sitting on the web.

This one is not strictly a property video tour, this is actually a demo from a company offering to do a video of your house for sale. This one shows you how “good” a property video can be.

There’s no soundtrack, no voice over and the opening shot is of a car, so ladies and gentlemen, rollup, because this is how “not” to film a property video demo. 

Twitter Social Media

Back in January I wrote about hackers striking at Twitter and adding a few nasty little comments to Britney Spears and Barack Obama’s Twitter pages, well the hackers have done it again, with 2 worms being let loose over Easter.

The first spam worm from a web site called Stalkdaily, infected Twitter profiles and forced Twitter accounts to send updates towards the StalkDaily web site, this was then followed up by a second worm called mikeyy. This worm, posts unwanted messages on your update page and appears to be more of  nuisance than a threat.

If by some chance you are a victim of this worm, you can visit this link to get it removed.

The best way to avoid these worms is to use the following 3rd party applications,Tweetdeck and Seesmic .

Good luck and watch out for mikeyy!!

It’s now official, Facebook added it’s 200 millionth user last Wednesday,and if Facebook were a country it would now be the fifth largest country after China, India, the US and Indonesia. The US still leads the way with the most numbers of users, with western Europe having the highest concentration of users and Australia now claiming approx 4,600,000 users to Facebook per month. I’ve included the US figures in a chart below for you, which gives you the age demographic breakdowns and as you can see, again it’s not a Gen X & Y site, so as a business you need to start to utilise the networking available to you via Facebook.

US Facebook Traffic Increases Again amongst Older Users

News also today that the other 3 year old flavour of the month Twitter, is growing in popularity with older consumers. In fact, according to Comscore, the majority of Twitter users are over 35, so in effect, younger users are not driving the success that Twitter is having world wide. The number of Twitter users worldwide in February had grown to 10 million, up 700%, from a year ago,while in the US the number hit 4 million, a growth of 1000% over last year. Those aged 35 – 44 spend 20 minutes on Twitter on each visit, but one surprising statistic that stands out, is that the 55 – 64 year olds spend an average of 9 minutes on Twitter, the longest of any demographic using the site. Over the past 12 months both Myspace and Facebook have experienced growth in the older age groups, but it’s Twitters popularity that is being driven totally by the older users.

Twitter Trend Use

To me this is a clear example of the increasing comfort level that older users have with social media sites and the fact that they are embracing these technologies means that business should embrace these sites today, and no longer have a “ban this site“ policy. What it means to you as a business, is that your customers are embracing this type of communication faster than you are,so if you want to stay relevant to them as a business, you need to move with them. 

The more traditional forms of marketing are being left behind, so as a business, you need to use social media from a non traditional approach. One side effect of a social media strategy, is the impact is has on a companies culture, after all, social media is built on sharing.

I’ve seen so many businesses try to attract consumers via social media sites using product as a incentive, and I’ve seen that approach fail time and time again. You need to use the medium where it’s strength is and that is in networking, providing information and interacting and sharing with your customers. 

You need to enter the conversation and create the handshake.

If you don’t know where to start with this strategy, then contact me via this blog and I’ll be very happy to help you on your way.

Do We Need a High Speed Broadband Network?

I’ve left this debate alone this week, but now I’m going to offer my opinion on this, Do we need it? Of course we do, and we needed it years ago not just getting around to thinking about the pros and cons of it today.

 There is already a super fast network in Europe called “The Grid” run by CERN, the company which tried to recreate the “big bang”theory which provides speeds at 10,000 times faster than a typical broadband connection, in real terms that means you could send the entire Rolling Stones back catalogue from Britian to Japan in less than 2 seconds, and of course the biggest usage of these speeds right now is for medical research and to provide Doctors with vital information during operations etc.

So as I sit here on the Gold Coast, with my 18kbps download antique ADSL connection, which Telstra tell me is fast, yeh right, and I pay about $70 a month for the privilege of sitting here watching the world go by as my downloads happen, try and ring the Telstra support line to get help with any problem and you’ll see what I mean, it’s not the staff, they’re very helpful when you finally get to speak to a humans fault, but how could you trust the development of a superfast broadband network to a company that can’t even provide cable services to my new estate on the coast? I take my hat off to Kevin Rudd for having the foresight to get this up and running.

Sol, take your millions and go back to the US, cos as far as I’m concerned the money you were paid could have been a lot better spent. With 80% of the Australian population currently connected to the net and a further 17% who are not connected today doing so by the end of 2009, the demand will only get greater for high speed broadband, and that is not even thinking about how medical science or the business community could benefit by having this high speed access.

So roll it along Kevin, cos I just can’t wait to give Telstra the boot and be able to download movies or music in a few seconds, rather than take a cut lunch to my desk and wait 10 hours for my downloads, anyway that’s my opinion, I’d like to hear yours as well through this blog, so let em come.

Another real estate portal has launched onto the Australian property market and this one with the unusual name of Enormo Australia. Their tag line, “Every property Everywhere” sums up what they are all about as well as being one of the worlds largest property portals with over 7 million properties world wide.

I’ve been playing with the site today and I have to admit to being a little underwhelmed by their search functionality, and I can’t really see what they are doing differently to the other portals.

The site is nice and clean with little clutter and free of annoying third party advertising, but as a consumer tool it’s a very bland offering. Compared to what’s currently available with video and multiple photos etc, this really doesn’t offer me, the property consumer, anything I don’t already have or want. In fact in checking some of the properties, I noticed a lot were listed back in 2008 and 2 examples I looked at were 12 months out of date.

Enormo Australia Front Screen

As I’ve said a lot of times in the past, when asked the question about whether an agent should support new property web sites coming into the market, if it is a free offering by all means, use the site, but if they are charging you to list your properties then you really need to look very closely at what you will get from paying to be there.  Yes, they have a strong international base and if you are looking for that market, then you could justify the cost, but for the domestic market, I’d wait a little longer and look at how they perform locally.

Property View Page

 
When I searched Google for Enormo Australia they didn’t come up on the first page, so that they’ll have to fix.

The cost to you at this stage is US$ 129 for 1 – 100 listings and US$188 for 101 – 1000 listings. This without any qualification on traffic numbers etc in Australia and with Myhome and Homehound still offering a free listing service and struggling to get consumer support, it’ll be interesting to watch how Enormo plans to sell this to the consumer, let alone the industry.

My advice, is wait and see how they perform before you go and spend your money on advertising and listing, particularly when budgets are tight and you need to account for every dollar and make those dollars drive leads.

Now, if one of the portals would look at taking advantage of what is happening with Social media and include as part of or supplemental to the subscription, tools such as Blogging,podcasting and Video logging, all attached to the suburb searches and feeding off the traffic, to me that would be providing you the agents a valuable tool, instead of looking at new product all the time that AM’s struggle to sell.