Online Real Estate Technology

I first wrote about walkscore.com back in September, How Walkable is Your Home or Suburb? – Like to Find Out? and I’ve been an advocate of it’s use by real estate agents in Australia. One of the real estate sites has even done some research on it’s impact on a property listing, when used as one of the images and surprise surprise, it’s the most clicked on image on the listing, so it comes as no surprise to me that the site has continued to grow in popularity.

Last week, at the Inman Technology conference in new York, it was reported that the Walk Score rating system was being added to over 85 million property listings in the US. You’ll soon see the rating system on the major real estate portals such as Zillow.com.

Walk Score promotes the car free lifestyle by providing a personalised walk-ability rating for any address. 

The company says: “Homebuyers rank proximity to daily conveniences as one of the two most important factors in choosing a neighborhood.

Check out the web site on www.walkscore.com.

Back in October I wrote how to set up Google alerts to monitor you and your brand on line,heres a reminder of that post, On Line Reputation Management – How To Set Up Google Alerts For Your Business , and looking at the growth of both consumer ratings sites and social media sites in Australia it seemed a good idea to revisit this. Setting up Google alerts to monitor your brand will give you lots of valuable information on what and how your brand is being used on line. I have an alert set up for this blog and of course use lots of social media sites to help me promote the blog, so I like to know where and when I’m mentioned. I get about five mentions a week across the web on who uses my name and links to me, and thankfully to date, it has all been positive, but to me having a monitoring strategy in place is now so important to any business owner not just real estate. Well you can now add a new site to help you monitor your on line brand it’s called social mention and here’s the link for you to do some research. http://socialmention.com/

Social Mention is a search engine that scans user generated content such as blogs,bookmarking sites and comments. You can search on all social media sites by using keywords, phrases  etc. I entered the search term for my blog, mike andrew’s real estate tips & technology and got a search rank of 35/100 and a result which indicates at least one mention every hour, I’ve been as high as a rank of 80/100 or 1 mention every 10 seconds, you can also set up RSS feeds for a particular search term and follow your mentions on line. Below you’ll see the search result for mike andrew’s real estate tips & technology.

Mike Andrew Real Estate Search Result

My recomendation is to set up your Google alerts and then add social mention, this will then be able to track your blog,bookmarking and comments etc on the web. 

As always let me know if you need futher information on this.

If you have been reading my blog for awhile or have attended one of my on line presentations, you will have gathered that I’m a fan of using video as a tool to market not only yourself and office but also your clients properties. Check out my previous post on this Research on the Power of Real Estate Videos .

Whilst I’m a fan I realise there are some limitations of the medium, and that is, in most cases the consumer needs to view the video in it’s entirety and hasn’t had the ability, well at least here in this country, to view the various chapters or rooms and navigate around the video like you can on a virtual tour. If the video of the property is longer than, say 90 seconds, I believe you lose the attention span of the consumer, but now available in the US and I’m hoping it won’t be long before someone does it here is Australia, if you do provide this capability please let me know, and I’ll include you in my presentation and free publicity, is a video tour that enables the consumer to jump chapters and view the areas of the property that are important to them.

Here’s a screen grab and link to the home page which will give you an idea on how the video screen shot appears and how you can then use the chapters to navigate around the property.

http://www.realtyflix.com/

Another great idea from RealtyFlix.com, is that you can film the property on your own camera and if you don’t feel comfortable about editing it yourself you can forward the full video to them for editing. Yes they charge a fee but it may not be an issue if you’re not familiar with editing software. The technology available now, is making the process of using and making video more and more accessible to agents and consumers alike. The growth in video on the web has been incredible over the past 12 months and will continue to be a powerful tool for real time marketing on the net.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley recently gave the following quote on where he sees the future of online video: “In ten years, we believe that online video broadcasting will be the most ubiquitous and accessible form of communication. The tools for video recording will continue to become smaller and more affordable. Personal media devices will be universal and interconnected.”

Experiment with video, read my post on Creating Cut Through In A Cluttered Market – Create Your Own Video Show!! on how you can use video, don’t limit your imagination, this medium is portable content and you can use it lots of different ways to market yourself.

Most of all, be creative and good luck!! See you at the Oscars.

I highlighted in an earlier post a company in the US called Utopria and their mobile search platform for the Iphone, The Future of The Mobile Real Estate Search on Iphone  , well the company has released an update on their software, and given that Google have released Google Earth as a free application for the Iphone, I thought it relevant to revisit the post.

I’ve included a video for you to view and see how the software and application called mediapod works, lets hope they have plans to release this in Australia in the near future, but until then, enjoy the future of mobile searching for real estate properties. This allows the agent to include a video introduction as well as including a host of features for the consumer.

“The world just got a little smaller” that’s how the official media release from Google opens, Google Earth now available for download to your Ipod Touch or Iphone. By downloading and adding this to your Iphone you’ll be able to search for local businesses and using the MyLocation feature you’ll be able to zoom in on your exact location in the world. Here’s the link to the release for further study http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2008/10/google-earth-now-available-for-iphone.html

So how will this affect real estate searches in the future?  Being able to find information on the local area is very valuable to property searchers, information on schools,employment,suburb data etc is very valauble and now with Google releasing the Google Earth application for the Iphone it all has gone mobile. There’s an interesting post on using Google Earth in a real estate application and if you’re interested in reading more about this, click on the link.

http://blog.unionstreetmedia.com/technology/4-ways-to-use-google-earth-for-the-iphone-for-real-estate-internet-marketing/ 

As always let me know your comments

Interesting the little gems that you find in doing research on the web, particularly the way the web is able to provide information to consumers searching on line for real estate, surburb or lifestyle impact of the home they are researching to purchase. This web site has been around for awhile now and I originally did not write a blog piece on it as it contained US information only, but just recently, thanks to Google base, it now contains information on the walkability of Australian suburbs. What do I mean by this?, essentially if you as a real estate agent quote in your listings that the beach is a 5 minute walk, or that the local shopping centre or public transport is just around the corner, this web site will allow on line real estate searchers to actually check your estimates. The site is called walkscore.com and when you load the site, you can input the street address of the property or suburb and the site will give you a walkability score. I checked my own house and suburb on this site and it gave me a very low score, meaning that I need to use my car to get to any of the conveniences, shopping centres or restaurants etc in the suburb. Whilst the web site still quotes US suburbs on it’s front page, it will give you Australian suburbs via Google maps, now wouldn’t that be a great tool to add to your property or suburb information. Provding this type of information to buyers will really brand you as the local expert, give it a try, I’ve included the link below for you to try it out.   There’s a screen grab of an address and suburb I’ve used as an example,for you to see how the site provides this information.

On the left of the screen is the information regarding distances to shopping centres and other amenities, measured from the address of the property, the centre map shows the location of these. You can then click on the street level view to see the street and property.

How Walkable is Your Suburb or House?

And here’s the link for you to try this out for yourself:

http://www.walkscore.com/

Remember my recent post about traditional media and the big disconnect regarding real estate agents marketing budgets? coming out of the US today is the news that Zillow.com is expanding its relationship with key newspapers to give national advertisers in the US news ways to reach local markets.

Zillow’s new offering will target advertising from real estate agents and industries looking to serve new homeowners. This could include teleco’s wanting to pitch new phone and Internet services and retailers wishing to sell new furniture as well as tradespeople wanting to advertise to a very targeted market.

The way the new system will work is that Zillow.com will use targeting technology, so that real-estate and related ads can appear anywhere on a newspaper’s site, not just within the real-estate section.

Zillow will identify an Internet user as a likely home buyer based on visits to its site. At Zillow, on line real estate searchers can list a home for sale or see what it might sell for. Once a home is sold, traffic to that listing tends to come mostly from its new owner, letting Zillow flag the visiting computer as belonging to a recent home buyer.

This new relationship also allows newspapers to charge more for their on line adds by directly targeting on line readers more likely to buy the products.

Both companies are calling this a one stop shop style of solution for advertisers.

I’ll watch this with interest over the next few months.

I’ve received a number of emails and comments about my upcoming seminars so for everyone,following is the information asked for, the seminars consist of 3 guest presenters including Advertising expert Ian Grace, sometimes referred to as Mr Real Estate, Grant Thorpe, Global Real Estate coach and Business Mentor and myself. The subjects covered on the day include How to Secure Vendor Paid Advertising, the Only 5 Things In Real Estate that make you Money,Maintain Commission Level and the subjects that I will cover include On Line Reputation Management, The Internet Consumer 2008, How to Maximise your properties performance on line, Blogging and Podcasting and how you can generate greater exposure on Google and use these mediums to make more sales, and I’ll also cover social networking sites such Facebook and youtube and how you can set up new forms of networking using this technology. Plus some more surprises. The cost is $300+GST for the full day seminar and you can register at 1300 662 203 or email at realestate@kaplan.edu.au. Please let me know if you need any additional information. Regards Mike

As part of my training for agents I often talk about the quailty of photos on listings that are published. Just thought I would share some of the more interesting ones with you on this post. These are from the US and do demonstrate just how bad photos can be.

Just the thing to Impress your new tenant

All That's Missing is You

The Cone of Silence

I’ll add more of these over the next few posts and add some of the Australian examples as well.

If you would like to know more about how to resize your photos for the major portals and what is the ideal resolution then please ask.