Online Real Estate Technology

Australian mortgage holders are a third time unlucky this year, after the Reserve Bank board today lifted interest rates by 0.25 per cent. It is the third rate rise in as many months.

Mortgage holders will be disappointed with the increase. After being told by the Reserve Bank Governor, Glenn Stevens, that rates were getting close to normal levels, borrowers would have been hoping the pace of rate rises had slowed. Today’s 25 basis point rise takes the official rate to 4.50 per cent.

It is the sixth increase since September and means mortgage holders are now paying about $300 a month extra for their mortgages than they were in the middle of last year, says Domain.com.au blogger and property author Carolyn Boyd. "There were a lot of mixed signals this month that may have had mortgage holders thinking they were in for a break. While inflation last week came in higher than expected, consumers have been spending less at the shops."

Until today’s decision, mortgage holders on variable interest rates were paying about 7 per cent to their lenders. The rates that borrowers pay to their financial institutions are expected to normalize at about 7.5 per cent to 7.75 per cent by year’s end.

That could signal there are still one or two more rate rises to come before Christmas.

The man who predicted the global credit collapse of 2007 has warned that Australia’s housing bubble is ripe to burst at any time.

US investment banker Edward Chancellor has told the Australian newspaper our economy is yet to emerge from the global financial crisis.

Mr Chancellor, who works for GMO, estimates Australian house prices are more than 50 per cent above their fair value.

He says house prices would have to fall ‘quite considerably’ to revert to their average price in relation to average income.

He also warned first home buyers were among the most vulnerable, saying the ratio of their mortgage repayments to their income would rise to ‘very high levels’ as interest rates continues to rise.

A potential trigger for economic trouble and the collapse of the housing market would come if China’s demand for iron ore and liquefied natural gas slowed, he said.

Original Story taken from www.bigpond.com

I recently received an email from the author of this post Chris Thorman about the potential that Geofencing technology has for the marketing of real estate in the future, and after reading his article I totally agree with him. This technology has huge potential in this country as we are mostly car bound and mobile, so you can imagine the impact of technology that reaches out to prospective buyers and virtually taps them on the shoulder. I hope you enjoy the article and if you’d like to read more on this you can visit Chris’s blog here

It’s Saturday morning. Joel and Rebecca are walking their dog through a neighborhood in Austin, TX. As they walk, they chat about the movie they saw last night, what they’re going to make for dinner, and the big trip they have planned for next weekend. You wouldn’t know it by listening to their conversation, but the couple is also house hunting.
They cross Brodie Lane when Joel’s cell phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s a text message that reads:

Joel says to Rebecca, “We’ve got a match from our real estate company. It’s only four blocks away. Let’s go see what the house looks like.”

Within minutes, the couple is outside the 714 Longview Rd. home. It happens to be exactly the type of home they wanted, in the exact neighborhood they wanted to live in. They call their real estate agent to set up a viewing.

How did this happen? How was the couple instantly notified of the opportunity, perfectly merging buyer requirements, location and timing? The answer involves a combination of “geo-fencing,” mobile phones and GPS technology.

If you’re a tech savvy real estate agent or property manager, this powerful combination of technology represents a great opportunity to gain new clientele. Many real estate buyers do not have the time to review new listings online, travel to viewings or patrol their desired neighborhoods for opportunities. But the vast majority of real estate buyers do have mobile phones they carry with them nearly all the time.

This technology would help real estate and property management companies capitalize on business that may otherwise slip through the cracks. Software Advice would like to see this type of mobile marketing become a permanent feature in today’s property management software systems to help advertise real estate and rental properties.

Let’s see how that could be done.

Geo-Fencing + Mobile Phones = Powerful Real Estate Marketing
What if a buyer looking for a place to live didn’t have to do anything beyond choosing what features they wanted in a home? What if a buyer was automatically alerted to nearby properties that matched their needs?

This is what we’re talking about with the next generation of mobile real estate marketing.

The use of “geo-fences” surrounding properties really drives the location-based marketing engine. A geo-fence is a virtual boundary surrounding a geographic region. When a person with a mobile phone crosses a geo-fence boundary, a notification is automatically issued to that mobile phone. Traditionally, geo-fencing has been used to send alerts when users exit a certain area, instead of entering one.

Geo-fencing has been used in conjunction with GPS technology for a while now and for a variety of uses:

• Tracking senior citizens with Alzheimer’s;
• Ensuring mobile employees don’t travel outside of certain areas; and,
• Monitoring hazardous cargo, to name a few examples.

We’re confident that someday, we’ll be able to add “Market real estate” to that list. Here’s how we see this new form of mobile marketing working in the real estate industry:

Create geo-fences. Before real estate and property management companies set up their online portals, they’ll need to create geo-fences around all of their properties. This will ensure that if a qualified user crosses the geo-fence with their mobile phone, that user will be notified about that property.

We’d like to see geo-fencing modules built into today’s property management software, allowing companies to quickly create geo-fences around their properties by drawing them on a digital map.

Collect buyer needs online. Real estate and property management companies can create online portals on their web sites, where prospective tenants and buyers set up notifications tailored to what they want in a property.

For example, a user could create an alert based on square footage, number of bedrooms, pet friendliness, special amenities, and zip code, to name just a few of the myriad of options available. Once they’ve entered their cell phone number and submitted those housing preferences, all they have to do is carry their phone with them to receive notifications.

We’d also like to see today’s property management software vendors integrate these online portals into their systems. Many property management software vendors offer web site design and hosting packages to their customers. A geo-fencing module could be another module that’s presented as an option to a management company when they purchase the software.

Let the notifications begin. The notifications are where this entire concept of location-based mobile marketing comes together. The geo-fences have been set up. Users have entered their housing preferences online to receive notifications. All that is left is for the users to go about their normal lives, with their GPS-enabled mobile phones, of course.

When they get close to a property that matches their wants, they’ll be automatically notified on their mobile phone. Property management software can then integrate all of these contact points with customers into their CRM system, to track the effectiveness of the messages and review properties with clients.

House hunting couldn’t get much easier than that, could it?

The Benefits
Hopefully by now, the benefits of this unique marketing method are clear.

First, since the user opts in to receive these marketing notifications, there is no feeling of intrusiveness or annoyance as with unsolicited messages. This type of marketing is perceived as a service, not an intrusion.

Second, from a marketing standpoint, notifying the right person, at the right place, at the right time about your product is powerful.

It’s the holy grail of marketing:

• You have a desirable product;
• You have identified the person that wants your product; and,
• You can automatically tell that person that your product is nearby.

Finally, this marketing method is scalable. A real estate or property management company could theoretically have dozens (or more) of users taking advantage of this service at any given time. Beyond taking calls to schedule viewings, it wouldn’t require any extra labor on the part of the management company.

Conclusion
We don’t expect this spin on mobile marketing to be installed in every real estate and property management office tomorrow. But whether through geo-fence triggers or other GPS-centric methods, the real estate industry will undoubtedly continue to make a huge effort over the next few years to connect with buyers and renters through their mobile phones.

The technology is too compelling to ignore.

Ian Grace Mr Real Estate Advertising

I thought it was time I opened up this blog to a few of my friends and colleagues in the real estate industry and one that I’ve had the pleasure to work with over the years is probably the leading expert on real estate advertising worldwide, Ian Grace.

Ian has presented his training course all over the world and is one of the very few Australians to have spoken at the NAR conference in the US, there is not much that Ian does not know about creating great real estate advertising, so as part of this series, I’ve asked Ian to put together his top 10 tips for writing great real estate ads, I hope you get benefit from Ian’s advice.

The Top Ten Tips for Writing Great Real Estate Ads

HOODOO – a great word to help you to remember the two things that make advertising effective:- WHO – is the person who will see the most value in the property and therefore pay the highest price [that's target marketing]. DO – now show them and tell them, what they will be able to DO as a direct result of their purchase.

2. HEADLINES – remember the WHO when you write your headline, then qualify it quickly, so the reader knows you’re both on the same wavelength. Then ideally, reinforce or remind about the headline at the end of the ad. The headline must include one or more of the following:- 1. A benefit or implied benefit 2. Something that is new, news or topical 3. A curiosity element without gimmicks for gimmicks sake.

3. PHOTOS – make sure your main photo matches and works together with your headline [not the other way around] and that the other photos also match the body text.

4. PEOPLE – put people and/or pets in your photos – it’s a great way to show people what they will be able to DO when they live there.

5. NAMES – use names in your ads to personalise them – yours [in full] and even the sellers’.

6. DIFFERENT ADS – the use of different ads for different markets, enables you to talk to each prospect group about what is relevant to them only e.g. one ad aimed at first home buyers and one ad aimed specifically at investors.

7. MEDIA MATCH – make sure your press ads match with other media and vice versa, with particular reference to the main photo and headline.

8. KEEP THE SAME AD RUNNING – once you’ve written a great ad, run it at least four times if not more, as research shows people need to see the same ad or message three times or more, on average, before they will respond

9. PRICE, LOCATION, NUMBER OF BEDROOMS – if all the research done shows conclusively that these are the top three pieces of information potential buyers require, then common sense says – give it to them!

10.   OBTAIN SELLER ADVERTISING DOLLARS – research proves that the higher the seller paid advertising percentage, the higher the listing to selling success rate.

11. BONUS TIP – TEST YOUR ADS – Firstly, sellers must see the ads before they run, but most importantly, ensure at least one of your colleagues checks your ads to confirm every word and phrase will make sense to the market it is written for. Secondly, when buyers who have responded to the ads view the property, ask them if the property has matched their expectations from your ads – the feedback will be terrific and will keep your advertising right on track.

If you’d like to contact Ian you can visit his web site Ian Grace Marketing

Having just gone through the process of buying and selling our family home, I could relate to this video. The real estate agent who handled both of our transactions did not fall into this category but I had to laugh when I watched it, so please enjoy it before it gets removed.

Google and Real Estate

For those of you who are interested in Googles ultimate goal for its real estate listings service, they have finally announced their plans for the service. In New York, Sam Sebastian, the company’s director of local and business-to-business markets has told the Inman technology conference that Google’s recent refinements in the real estate space, which include creating “place pages” for individual listings, don’t mean the search engine giant is moving to create a national multiple listing service.

He said the recent refinements have improved the quality of traffic the search engine delivers to advertisers — including big brokerages that Google is out to sign up as clients.

“Agents have always been pretty engaged” in buying keywords and targeted ads from Google to drive traffic to their Web sites, Sebastian said. “But the big brokerages that can really do this in scale, and work this into their marketing programs — that’s where I think the future is.”

Since Google got into targeted advertising, agents and small real estate offices have been “very entrepreneurial” in taking advantage of its ability to deliver potential clients, Sebastian said.

“They could compete with the big boys, and we were building a good set of users,” Sebastian said. Then third-party listing aggregation sites emerged, packaging and selling the leads traffic to their sites generated to brokers and agents.

Google got into the listing game itself, through its Google Base service, which accepts listings from agents and third-party aggregators.

Aggregating listings is not nearly as controversial as it was when third-party aggregators started cropping up more than a decade ago, Sebastian said.

But Google has captured the attention of the real estate industry in recent months by creating individual “place pages” for listings and making it easy to find them in map-based searches

Place pages, Sebastian said, were originally created not for real estate, but as a way to give local merchants a presence on Google. Place pages pull content from around the Internet, such as reviews, photos and other information Google has tracked down, organizing it in one place.

When the implications for real estate became clear — that Google, in theory, could amass a database of every property on Earth — not everybody in the industry was thrilled with the idea.

“We got a little bit of hemming and hawing,” Sebastian said. Some wondered if Google was taking the first step in building a national MLS, he said.

But the sites providing the information indexed by Google are finding that the quality of traffic the search engine delivers to their site has improved.

The plan was not to take business from real estate brokers, but to provide a better user experience, Sebastian said.

“It’s not some evil plan we have in Mountain View (Google’s headquarters in California), with millions of folks talking about how we want to take over the real estate markets,” Sebastian said.

Asked about reports that Google has been talking to real estate search site Trulia.com about an acquisition, Sebastian said he could not comment. (A Trulia spokesman told Inman News in December that the company “does not comment on rumors or speculation.”)

But Sebastian did say that Google is likely to continue acquiring one to two “small and nimble” companies a month, a pace it’s kept up for the last 18 months.

Source: Inman News

During my research I’ve come across a great video that I thought I would share with you, the video was compiled by Socialnomics09, and is called Social Media Revolution: Is Social Media a Fad?

For those real estate business owners that have yet to consider social media as a business strategy then hopefully this will provide some insights into the On Line world of the future. This video details some facts and figures that are hard to ignore.

I’ve been like a voice in the wilderness promoting the value of a social media within the real estate industry in Australia so hopefully this video will add some weight to my voice.

If you do decide to adopt a social media strategy for your office, make sure you get someone who knows what they are doing, read my post on Fake Social Media Experts before you get fooled to part with your hard earned dollars by these so called experts, or better still, give me a call.

Please enjoy

I’ve had a couple of agents send me emails this week inquiring about QR Codes, so I thought I’d write this post to explain what they are and how you can use them in your real estate business.

QR stands for “Quick Response”, and they are the next generation of bar codes. They have been in Japan for awhile with the Japanese going absolutely crazy over them and they are just starting now to appear in this country.

So what do they do?

• They contain lots of information such as your web site address

• They can be read upside down and faster than a standard bar code

• You can get a QR reader for your phone or iPhone – as long as it can browse the web.

• They can be scanned from a computer screen,a newspaper or flyer, magazine and Property billboard or Listing signboard.

So how does it apply to real estate, by generating a code, which is a simple process, you can apply the bar code to your listing sign board,your advertising including print and magazine or flyers, and people can simply scan the code and your phone will take you directly to the web site that the code has embedded.The code is scanned by taking a photo of the code and the phone then opens up a browser which takes you directly to the URL in the code.

This is a great tool if you want to specify a web site or property for First Home buyers or Retirees etc, as the code will take your reader directly to the URL you have specified. You can create your QR code to send people to a web site URL, a telephone number,an SMS message or text message.

Here’s a code I created, which when read will send you directly to my web site at www.mikeandrewconsulting.com, although I could have scanned any URL and sent you there if I wanted to promote a product or service.

You can add these to your business cards as well, which is a great promotional tool for your agency. You can download a QR reader from iTunes if you have an iPhone and some of the Nokia phones have the reader as standard.

To generate the bar code is a really simple process as all you do is search on the web and you’ll find a site, in fact to make it easy for you here’s the link to one I used.

Good luck and have fun with this, it’s a great promotional tool and you can add it anywhere.

If you’d like to have more information on this or are not technical enough to add it to your marketing, send me a comment or email at info@mikeandrewconsulting.com and I’ll help you out as always.

Earlier this week I was a presenter at a training session in Sydney run by one of the major real estate franchise groups, and my topic for the session was “How to Market More Effectively Using On Line Technology” , or in other wards, how to write better copy to be found on the search engines such as Google and Bing.

The first part of the day focused on writing for print, and the presentation really was quite good, it focused on writing clean copy with no clutter and writing catchy headlines and avoiding cliche’s.

A lot of time and effort went in to focusing on the print side, how to submit your editorial, when was the best time to do so, what style of writing does the editor like etc, and then, when looking at the end result, which had been written up on a white board, I thought about how those headlines or keywords would research on the web. A lot of agents simply copy and paste their print copy onto the web, with no consideration of keywords, search phrases etc.

You really have no idea whether your copy or headline will have any impact on the property searcher unless you have a clear understanding of how they search on the web, what phrases do they use, what are the trigger words or keywords they search for, these are all the questions you need to answer before you submit your copy to the web.

It’s even more important today, with Google’s real estate section now publishing listings, because anything that is published on the web, will be indexed by search engines, so make sure you start to optimise your copy with keywords or phrases that target your market, if you don’t, you’ll end up not showing on the search results, or being missed by your buyers, and whilst those headlines look OK in print, they may not work on the web.

With 9 out of 10 property searchers starting their property search on the web, how much time are you going to spend on your research to get it right. So lets give you a few ideas on where to start: A really good place to start your research is in your own office and for a refresher please read my earlier post “Choosing the right Keywords for your Content”

The post I’ve highlighted will give you some really good ideas on keyword research, so next time you sit down and start brainstorming ideas for your headlines and listing copy, give some thought on how your buyer searches on the web and what phrases or words they use, if you do that you’ll have a head start on getting your property found on the web.

Great Words of Advice

Today whilst visiting a real estate office we got talking about social media strategies and why as a real estate office they should be working towards implementing a social media strategy, not just to farm new pastures, but also to help them in the optimisation of their web site. During the conversation we got on the subject of blogging, and why creating a blog would help their Internet marketing efforts.

Well I have to admit that over the last few weeks I’ve neglected this blog a bit as I explore new areas and work on my web site, so with a little bit of a guilty feeling, I’ve motivated myself to write this article, and you can probably guess what it is about, making sure you create and maintain a disciplined approach to blogging.

In my research I come across a lot of blog writers who after a period of time, and it’s often around the 12 month scenario, tend to get a little bit of writers block and lose interest in maintaining their blog, which is what happened to myself, and in a number of cases the blog gets abandoned altogether.

The Internet is full of abandoned blogs, left in the wilderness by writers who lose interest.

It’s not easy maintaining a blog on a regular basis, you also have to work hard at maintaining your audience and coming up with new content that appeals to your readers.

So today I’ve written a list of things that I will do to assist me in writing articles for my blogs and I’ve listed them below for you, if you are just starting as a blogger I hope they help set you on a disciplined approach and most of all don’t give up.

1. Set aside 1 hour each day to research for new articles – doesn’t matter what time of day it is, just DO IT! – Talking to other people also stimulates ideas for posts. Mornings I find are much better, I can sit in my pajamas and coffee and read.

2.Write when you get urge - A lot of times I’ll come up with an article idea and leave it till later, in most cases later never comes.

3. Create a list of topics and categories – Then write first about what you like or are passionate about. That way you’ll enjoy writing about your favourite topic.

4. Revisit your old articles - Some of these older stories can be updated and rewritten. As some of these topics are changing almost daily, providing updates on these old stories can generate new ideas.

5. Read other Blogs & Bloggers - This will help to create ideas as well, it gets the creative juices flowing and helps with topics and trends.

6. Subscribe to RSS Feeds - Make sure you get updates delivered right to your computer, and use some of these articles on your own blog. They help break up the style of writing and provide different opinions on topics. But remember, always credit the author of the article.

6. Commitment - Now here is the magic word, once you start you really need to be committed to your blog, so create that list.

That is what I intend to action from today, I put it up on my office wall so that every morning the first thing i see will be the list.

I hope that if you are just starting out, this little list will help keep your blog on track and if you have any additions to the list please share them with me.