Online Real Estate Technology

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.

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.

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!!

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.

The slowing economy is having an impact on advertising revenues in all mediums, but the hardest hit appears to be newspaper classified advertising revenue. According to new figures released by the American Newspaper Association, newspaper advertising revenues fell to their lowest levels in 14 years.

Print advertising dollars fell by 17.7% to $34.740 billion and on line advertising fell by 1.8% to $3.166 billion in 2008.

It is not surprising then that 4 major US newspaper groups are in bankruptcy protection, the most notable is the Tribune Co, owners of papers in Chicago & Los Angeles. Seven newspapers have closed or are about to close and switch to an on line model to survive due to losses in advertising revenue.

Real Estate sections in the press have also been hit hard with newspapers advertising revenue from real estate falling 37% in 2008, car adds fell 29% and employment 42.5%. In total, real estate advertising and employment classified advertising has fallen more than 60% since 2006.

I’m sure these figures will give the Australian newspapers cause for concern.

As both a user and promoter I get to see the good and bad uses of social media. Recently I’ve started to get emails sent to me under the guise of a Facebook message. When opening the email there is a product sell for Viagra or some other medication. This really annoys me and I instantly delete the email, the unfortunate part of this, is that one day, I will get a genuine message from someone on Facebook and I’ll instantly delete it, thinking it is a spammer at work.

That got me to doing some research and I’ve noticed a lot of new comers to social media blatantly promoting their product. On Twitter.com for example, you’ll see real estate agents using it to promote open homes or new listings without adding any content or information that will create a following.

The smart way to use the media is to provide the user with good quality content that compliments what you do as a business. Create followings based on your expertise not on your product.

I use Twitter only when I have something worthwhile to say or I have read an interesting article then I’ll share it with my followers, I Tweet on updates to my blog or podcast, but as these are information sources and are not selling anything they provide my followers with good quality content. I apply the same strategy to this blog, it only promotes content and technology relevant to real estate professionals and hopefully they find it a great resource, the numbers of readers and the comments I receive from these readers would indicate to me that they do and that’s why they keep coming back.    

So if you are a new company using social media, put in place a good solid communication plan built on providing good quality content before you start to use it. Be smart about how you plan it and how you use it, don’t listen to the ever growing numbers of “Social Media” experts out there who will promote the use of social media as an advertising platform, it is a lot more than that and used strategically will repay your efforts in droves.

But please no more Viagra adds, I’m starting to get paranoid!!!

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/

So who made up the rule that your on line property listings can’t be updated to reflect what is happening in the community? No one did, it’s just one of those things that most agents never think of. Lets use the recent rise in fuel prices, internet search volumes for real estate, individual suburbs searches and more importantly property views increased during the period of high petrol prices, why? because a great number of consumers decided to do more searching at home, so how many agents reflected this in their listings, how many included the words,”Not travelling as much, don’t worry we’ll come to you” or enticed their property readers to “attend the open for inspection at home, anytime at your convenience”.

Constantly using the internet to update your listings to reflect what is happening in the local community, is to me, a very effective way of making the net work better for you. You are tapping into what affects people in real life. In the cluttered market we have today with lots of stock available, why not take the approach to use the strength of the medium, it’s ability to instantly update the consumer with new and relevant information. You’ll stand out from the crowd and consumers searching in your suburb will pick up on this very quickly, why? because one of the most common complaints about property listings is outdated information, so turn the tables!! 

Another issue to think about, I often see properties being targeted to a very wide target market and one that has not been properly defined, by doing this, you actually miss the very people you are trying to attract.

An example of this, which I encountered yesterday in an office, was a property being marketed to both a property investor and a first home buyer. Great idea except, to me, these conflict? An Investor will be looking for something totally different in that home than a first home buyer. The investor looks for rental return, good existing tenants and potential capital growth, whilst a first home buyer looks for a “home” to live in.

The agent trying to market this property would be better to properly define their target and write the copy to attract that targeted buyer, not by trying to be everything to everybody. There is also nothing wrong with marketing this listing at the first home buyer for 2 weeks and then changing the target and copy, to market to the Investor. What you achieve here is constantly updated properties that are well targeted and well defined.   

There is nothing wrong in this at all, In fact it may just help you stand out in a cluttered market and you will start to use the medium more effectively. It will also improve your copywriting skills and you’ll start to rotate your properties so that they don;t get stale. Remember, the longer they stay online, the worse they will perform, so update your target market regularly and update the property to reflect the changes in the community. Tap into issues like interest rate cuts etc. It’s all about cut through in a crowded market and the entrepreneur will be the winner.

This blog post available as a podcast: www.mikeandrew.podomatic.com/Updating Your Listings Body Copy to Reflect the Current Market

Got this last night as a media release and thought I would check out the web site of Sydney company YouVu. The company have just released a new advertising product called YouVu Property Advertising which allows agents more features when marketing a property on line, but does it live up to the hype of the press release? Well I thought I would check out the offering for you, but first here’s a little of the media release from the company: 

“The innovative folks at YouVu Interactive have created a brilliant new web tool that can assist real estate agents to cut through the clutter of properties for sale on the internet by capturing the buyers’ attention, and maintaining it for longer.

Sydney, NSW (PRWEB) November 19, 2008 — Sydney businessmen Gary Bateman and Trevor Reid have created an innovative new web tool called YouVu, which takes the best of the web, and applies it to real estate property marketing.

The result is a real estate advertisement with many differentiators. It is a real estate ad that will attract the attention of a potential buyer and maintain their focus for many minutes.

Online property portals are emerging. Whether they be in Europe, the United States or Australia; more buyers are consulting the web for property information before buying than ever before. In Australia, research has shown that more than 75% of buyers use the internet to research properties and in excess of 7.5 million unique browsers view properties advertised on the web each month.

Bateman and Reid of YouVu realised that the biggest challenge with internet advertising is making sure that an agency’s properties stand out from the crowd.

Bateman said: “Sure, you can pay for a prime position. But once the potential buyer clicked on your ad it was clear to us that they all looked the same.

“A few details in small font, a clever headline if you are talented enough and a handful of images. What you get is a potential buyer having made up their mind ‘yes’ or ‘no’ after a few seconds.”

YouVu Property Advertising is definitely different. Its goal is to display a holistic view of a property to the potential buyer.

Reid explained: “Firstly, it can have as many as 25 rooms with their own individual pages.

“Secondly, within each of those rooms, our ‘Emotion Icons’ allow agents to bring certain key components to further attention of potential buyers. For example, you may want to highlight a feature on a wall or an appliance in the kitchen.

YouVu also allows one to add a Virtual Tour and/or Image Slideshow to their ad, making it more interactive and viewer-friendly.

And how do the people behind YouVu plan to get this magnificently dressed up ad to thousands of potential buyers?

“Easy,” says Bateman. “Most agents use existing portals such as realestate.com.au and domain.com.au, and we would be asking them to do the same, except they will also add the link to their YouVu ad to encourage people to take a closer look at their property.

“We already have dozens of YouVu users doing this to great effect.”

YouVu is the most comprehensive a real estate advertisement can get. The key selling point at the moment is the price it is offered at. From only $40, any property can become extra sellable with a YouVu ad.”

So lets have a look at what features this product has ,Here are 2 grabs of the main image:

Screen Shot

Firstly, you can add shots of different features of the house and then have emotion icons that allow the property searcher to view features that may be lost in a standard add, when you place your cursor over the icon the feature pops up on the right hand side of the screen, a feature that I really like in this product is the use of Google street view and the ability to include local suburb information that is easily accessible by the consumer. You also have the ability to share the listing on social media sites such as Facebook,Myspace and on bookmarking sites such as Delicious and Yahoo Bookmarks. You can also add a virtual tour and image slide show, whilst the developers have not indicated this, I really hope they allow a dedicated video tour link as well, I’m sure you could add this as a virtual tour, but I’d like to see a dedicated icon for video.

You can add the link to the YouVu add if you are using domain.com.au but it’s going to be interesting to see how realestate.com.au reacts to this, as they don’t allow hyperlinks on property listings, nor will they probably like traffic being directed away from their portal to YouVu, because, in essence this is what happens when a buyer clicks on the link, nice little idea from these guys to build traffic to their website and you the agent pays for the privilege. Any product that allows agents to market their property smarter and provide additional information to the consumer, particularly on local suburb and lifestyle info, will get my endorsement. You’ll pay $40 for a 12 week run and the site will allow unlimited changes on each property, but they don’t say whether they provide traffic statistics for each property such as property views and email enquiry results.

It’s worth checking the site out, so here’s the link: www.youvu.com.au/ 

I can’t help but think though, that if you give a lot of thought to how you market a property,define the target market and then develop the content in line with your target market, add great photos using 15+ or more and a video or virtual tour plus adding local suburb information from www.walkscore.com, you will stand out on the mainstream portals. It really comes down to effective marketing of your property with the right target market and content.

But that’s just my thoughts, check out the site and let me know what you think, I would be really interested in your comments.