Online Real Estate Technology

I’m going to share some information with you all now, regarding my attempts to find out about property last Sunday 5th April, and this is the first chance I’ve had to write this post, so here goes. 

I’ve been interested in looking for a new home because of the interest rates being so low, so Sunday, I was motivated to search some suburbs very near to my local area on the Gold Coast, as I’m an Internet user, my first point of call was, of course the Internet. Just like 9 out of 10 other people in this country, well let me now share with you the frustrations that I encountered in just trying to get the information I was after.

I encountered out of date headlines, in fact one listing had “Must sell before Xmas” as the headline, and this mind you in the month of April, no open for inspection times, so I gather not one agent worked on the weekend, because none of the homes I looked at indicated any open times. Oh, i did find one listing that had an inspection time in the heading, but it was for March 31st!!!. No prices on a lot of the listings, in fact, when I did a price search between $700,000 and $1,000,000 in the area I was really interested in, I did find a fantastic home, so, given there was no price at all on this property, my wife got me to ring the agent, who then told me the property was for sale at a price of $1,300,000. $300,000 over the price search criteria, when I mentioned to him that his property was in the above price search, he coughed and spluttered and said he didn’t know that it was coming up in that price range on the net. 

 He should have taken the time to check it, and I should have called the OFT, because that was just downright annoying.

Of course a lot of the listings also had no addresses, which meant we couldn’t go and check it out, so we had to guess where the property was, and then, I couldn’t send an email from the site I was on due to an internal error, and they wonder why email enquiry is low. Then when I actually got out and found some properties by driving around, cos I really had no other option, Upon trying  to ring one agent to check the price on a block of land, she had no message bank, just a recorded message saying a text message will be sent on your behalf if you hang up now, which I naturally did. 

I then rang their office number, proudly marketed on their for sale sign, only to find it rang out engaged, which it did all day. I then rang the agents mobile again and got the recorded massage again,in fact that happened all day, when she finally rang me back the next day, she left a message on my voice mail saying she’d been in a meeting with clients, What all day?, so all in all a very frustrating exercise. 

AC Nielsen’s research on Internet usage in Australia late last year, found that 9 out 10 buyers,9 out of 10 renters and 8 out of 10 sellers now conduct research on the net and as I found last Sunday, it can be such a frustrating exercise for the consumer, yet all it takes is for you the agents to take a little more care in what you do. I’ll guarantee that if you take the time to make sure your information is correct, that you update your listings regularly, and don’t leave it to your admin staff, you’ll get more leads and property views, also remember, the more frustrated I got, the more I blamed you the agent.

It’s not good for your brand and it’s not good for your reputation.

And please, please, take care in what photos you use, because some of them that I saw were totally useless, but that’s another story for another day.

Following yesterdays Reserve Bank announcement of a .25% cut in the official interest rate, I wonder how many of you have monitored and reacted to the announcement by changing your headlines on the major portals to impact the increased searching that happens within a few days of RBA announcements. I’ve just looked at the search volumes on Google for houses for sale and real estate for sale and again search volumes have increased. 

This will mean a flow on effect to Domain.com.au and Realestate.com.au as approx 35% of their monthly traffic comes from Google searches. My question to you is, are you using the Internet as proactively as possible?, if your answer is no, then you really need to look into how you or your offices uses the Internet.

Your window of opportunity is still there, so get on today and change your headlines to reflect the interest rate cut, impact that increased search volumes for your benefit. 

I’ve mentioned in my seminars how you can monitor community issues and then take advantage of any increases in search volumes by monitoring Google trends, well it will be interesting to see  how many agents have actually taken my advice, not many I would think!!

Overall, US visits to social networking sites increased 4% in February vs the same month last year, with Myspace and Facebook still competing for a share of the market. Myspace winning the overall battle according to Hitwise, with Facebook the big winner with a growth of 149% over February 2008. Facebook also achieved good solid growth from the 35+ market, which grew 23% in February, whilst Myspace’s grip on the older demographics is starting to slip.

The social media revolution is also affecting the way the average internet consumer uses the medium, with the use of the internet for on line entertainment decreasing by 29%, being replaced by on line communication sites.

So if all of this wasn’t enough to get you thinking about taking social media seriously, couple it with the on line consumers attitude to business and social media.

In a March 2009 Netpop Research study, 93% of social media users say companies should have a social media presence,whilst 85% believe companies should not only be present, but should actively interact with consumers via social media sites. 56% of social media users feel a stronger connection and better served by those companies when they interact in social media environment. So, there you have it. 

In my travels within the real estate industry, I still have business owners tell me they have banned staff from using Facebook and Myspace in company time, well my argument against this policy, is to employ your staff to work on your company profile as a trade off, so if they spend 4 hours a day on Facebook, get them to spend 50% of the time on building your business profile and updating the site, after all the fastest growing demographic using Facebook is 35+, right in the middle of the real estate buying public. 

As a start to creating your social media strategy, you can read my earlier posts here and here, these posts will help you enter the world of social media and show you how you can start to build a strategy for your business that will help you engage your customers more effectively and create the social media handshake.

Good luck and let me know of I can assist you in any way, to make this an easier journey for you. 

Hitwise Facebook Results

Don't Get Ripped Off

One thing that really ticks me off, is when a company or business preys on you because you may not have the knowledge or time to research what they are trying to sell you, or be aware of the value of the product or service they sell and to work out whether the cost they charge is reasonable, so here is a warning to all business owners not just real estate operators.

I’m going to let you in on a situation that I walked into this morning during one of my office audits, I’m going to hide the names of the real estate business for obvious reasons and I can’t name the company involved, but I’m going to do my best to make sure you don’t get ripped off by these sharks by writing this post.

So here’s what happened, During the course of my audit, I check what domain names the agency has registered, and in the discussion today, the agent handed me correspondence from a domain name registration company in Melbourne advising him that his company name and location domain name was available for sale and that by filling in the attached credit card form he could secure that domain name from them. Now here is the sting, the price was $295 + GST.

 The domain name offered for sale is a .com domain name, so I then checked the domain name availability on GoDaddy.com, and found it was unregistered and still available and the price for that domain name was US$14.

Now, how can you sell something you don’t own, and at $295+GST, that’s not a mark up, that’s a complete rip off. My advice to the office this morning was to buy the domain name from GoDaddy at US$14 and tell the company in Melbourne to go jump, and so should you, if you get these sharks trying to rip you off. 

If you do get one of these letters, first thing to do is check out the domain name availability, and you can use GoDaddy.com if it is a .com domain, or Crazydomains.com.au if it is a .com.au domain and check the price.

The business owner said to me this morning, that his first action was to pay the company because it looked like an invoice for payment and he had no idea what a domain should cost.

So now you have been warned, if in doubt and you want advice, then email me from this blog, I’ll be more than  happy to help you shaft them.

So what is more important, Blog readers or Twitter followers? Well the answer to that question appears to be very simple, Blog readers.  Problogger has been running a poll about this subject and the results which were released last week found that 84% of respondents preferred blog readers to Twitter followers and only 16% thought Twitter followers were more important.

To me, generating a good readership for my blog by providing good quality content and building relationships via that content, has always been my goal for this blog. My use of Twitter is to solely to promote and push new readers to my blog.  Twitter which allows short message updates of 140 characters is a great push tool and I find my readership and podcast downloads goes up when I tweet on new content.

I’ll continue to work on my content and my blog readership and my suggestion to new blog writers is to concentrate on good quality content and build your blog readership. Use Twitter and Facebook, which is also a microblogging site to help build on the foundations you set on your blog.

As always, let me know if I can assist you in anyway. I hope Darren Rowse at Problogger won’t mind but I’ve included the results of the survey for you below.

Bloggers are preferred to Twitters

Get Your Banner to Work, Not Just Look Pretty

Over the past few weeks conducting my office strategy sessions for business owners, the subject of banner advertising has come up. During the discussions, I’ve suggested some ways that the office can get the click through rate on their banners to increase. Most of the agent banners, when and if they are clicked on by a consumer,go through to the agents web site, and don’t really offer the consumer anything tangible to encourage them to click on the link. 

The major portals charge a fair amount for the privilege of having a suburb banner or skyscraper, you start to go a bit potty trying to remember all the names they give them,and I’ve found the account managers that service the agents aren’t all that creative in giving you advice either, it’s more a question of getting your money than worrying about the banner actually acheiving something for you.

So lets look at what the on line consumer wants when it comes to banner advertising, and then we’ll look at how we can maximise the value of the banner to really start to earn its way by generating click throughs.

Looking at some recent research on what a consumer will click on, a survey in the UK, found that over 51% of males & females will click on an add that is relevant to them and provided helpful information in what they were researching on line. On this subject, males and females are very similar in their responses. 43% of those surveyed said they would click on an add when it was useful and 33% responded that ”Money Off” offers got their attention.

Interesting side to this, is that more females responded to this type of offer than males. The results also varied by age, with younger readers more interested in special offers, and the baby boomers wanting more relevance & usefulness to them in the advertising . 

So with that in mind, lets take a look at banner advertising, I asked the business owner of one very big office the following question, “If you included an offer of a $50 petrol voucher on your banner, what would be the response?” He replied, “The clicks would go berserk” ,Why I asked? His response, “Because of a perceived value to the consumer”.

So with this in mind,where to start, first work out what you want the banner to do, then work out a strategy for the banner and decide the offer/incentive .

When you have a banner in the local suburb on the portals, people who frequent the site are searching for either real estate to buy, rentals, investments or information on real estate agents etc, so why not include a perceived value offer in your banner advertising, that is relevant to them and tie it to either a seasonal event or an offer. Change your creative on a regular basis, a suggestion could be to change it with the seasons, also monitor Google search trends and react to what is happening in the community. 

Make your account manager more accountable, by asking them to provide you with click through rates on your banners, they can get this for you, but not surprisingly, it’s not that easy for you to get. If you’re paying big dollars to own a banner, you really want it to work for you, so don’t be fooled by the “We don’t sell on click throughs,It’s there for your branding” sell job.  

Here’s one suggestion for you that has really worked well for a couple of agents, Instead of offering the old stand by of “ Click here for a free appraisal” why not use the following on your creative, “ If your current property is not selling, then ask me WHY“.

Play around with your banners to get them to drive response for you, at least then, you’ll start to get your monies worth from your advertising.

Here’s some  interesting research for you on advertising on the internet:

If you’d like advice on this post, please let me know, I’d be very happy to respond with more on this if needed.