Online Real Estate Technology

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.

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.

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

Just a reminder that my real estate technology seminar series continues next week in NSW. The location and timing for the seminar is as follows:

Maximising Your On Line Marketing for Real Estate Professionals, Tuesday 17th March at Parkside Ballroom A – Sydney Convention Centre NSW.

If you would like to attend, please contact me here, we already have close to a full house but some seats are still available.

Look forward to speaking with you on the day.

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

Around this time of year, a lot of people and blog writers all look back on the year that was, so to do something a little different, I’ve decided to look into the future. I’ve pulled out my crystal ball,well actually it is pewinternet.org’s crystal ball and gone forward to 2020. This great research group has looked at how the internet will evolve over the next 11 years and what we can look forward to. Here are the results of the survey, taken by asking some of the leading internet experts in the world today and the invitations to these experts was via Facebook and used social media to interact with these contributors.

Here’s the key results from that survey: 

• The mobile device will be the primary connection tool to the Internet for most people in the world in 2020.
• The transparency of people and organizations will increase, but that will not necessarily yield more personal integrity, social tolerance, or forgiveness.
• Voice recognition and touch user-interfaces with the Internet will be more prevalent and accepted by 2020.
• Those working to enforce intellectual property law and copyright protection will remain in a continuing “arms race,” with the “crackers” who will find ways to copy and share content without payment.
• The divisions between personal time and work time and between physical and virtual reality will be further erased for everyone who’s connected, and the results will be mixed in terms of social relations.
• “Next-generation” engineering of the network to improve the current Internet architecture is more likely than an effort to rebuild the architecture from scratch.

There you have it ladies and gentlemen,the way the experts see the evolution of the net into 2020. If you’d like to read the full report, click on the link here: http://www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_FutureInternet3.pdf

Thanks to the great research undertaken by the team at www.pewinternet.org

Now here’s my take on the next 12 months for real estate offices and agents:

1. Video will become more sought after by consumers and agents will start to look at how they can integrate this media into all their on line marketing as well as the integration of office video profiles.

2. Use of social media tools such as blogs, podcasting and vlogging will impact on office marketing. Facebook and YouTube will also become part of the daily marketing routine.

3. Agents will have to work smarter with their property marketing and employ best practice policies within their on line marketing. As the online consumer gets smarter about the type and quailty of information they can get from the net, they will demand more from agents. Frequently updated content will be a requirement.

4. All real estate agents will need to look at their SEO and SEM and take a more indepth look at their own web sites and how to use these as a local marketing tool. Agents will need to demonstrate the “Local Market Expert” tag. Start to work your own marketing and not rely so heavily on the major web portals to deliver leads.

5. On Line Reputation Management will become vital to all on line business’s not just real estate. This is the practice of monitoring, managing and reparing your on line reputation.

6. Real Estate Press will slowly start to lose business as real estate agents realise that by moving away from this medium they don’t lose market share. However, you’ll need to start embracing more on line marketing techniques and improving your current marketing attempts to capture a greater share of the on line researcher.

7. The industry should demand more from the on line portals next year, these sites have had it way to easy for too long,  demand better up to date technology, more tracking tools for agents and more accountability. Rates are going up, but in a lot of ways service and technology has not improved. Products are being released not to help you or the consumer, but to find ways to take more money off you, But do they really work??      

 As always, let me know your thoughts and ideas on these suggestions.