In the article Secrets to Writing Marketing Copy That Customers Can’t Ignore, Kristin Zhivgao writes a very concise scenario of how you should think about your “About Us” page. The article is written from a copywriters angle and she uses a real estate office as an example. Read the whole article here.

From this:

“Depend on TriCounty Realty for your next house purchase. We have the most experienced and knowledgeable staff in the area and can help you make the right decisions, whether you are buying or selling. Our agents are trained and professional. We are a full-service firm with access to all MLS properties available in the area. Our real estate professionals provide a wealth of knowledge and education in an ever-changing market.”

To this:

“There are bigger real estate firms, but none of them has the local knowledge we have. Bob Smith has been selling homes in the TriCounty area for 20 years, and he knows every neighborhood as if he lived there himself. Trudy Williams has sold more homes in the TriCounty area than any other realtor. Our newer agents spend 30% of their time getting to know neighborhoods and talking to the people who live there. Our unique ‘know your neighborhood’ approach will help us find the right house for you to buy. And, if you’re the seller, our neighborhood knowledge will help you sell your house faster. After all, buyers buy neighborhoods, not just the houses in them.”

Mobile IDX Search for Smartphones

So to get started what we thought would work well is to offer our clients a specific IDX search optimized for mobile. We’re making a huge assumption here, but chances are we’re probably correct in our thinking and that is, if a visitor to your website is using a mobile device they are mainly interested in searching for properties. Chances are they have some time available on their hands, for example sitting in a doctors office or waiting to pick up the kids from school. There are all kinds of studies and statistics that back this up. So why not be one of a handful (or the first) in your area to offer an optimized real estate property search for your clients and prospects?

So here’s what we have to offer to get you started.

All of our website clients that have a full real estate blog website will get this feature added for free. Until the end of the year we’re offering all of our existing IDX clients for a one-time installation fee the ability to add a mobile IDX search and then pay no more than their standard idx monthly or yearly fee. As long as you remain a client you get the mobile IDX search at no additional cost.

Facebook Page IDX Search

Plus, were going to throw in an optimized IDX search for your Facebook page. If you don’t have a Facebook page but are planning on adding one at some point you’ll get this option added when you’re all setup. See an example of an IDX Facebook search, click on the link on the left that says Property Search demo and don’t forget to like us when your there.

FREE Domain Hosting

If you want to have a mobile only website all you have to do is purchase a domain name (go here to register your domain name) and we’ll provide free hosting again for as long as you remain a client. You can purchase a .com or a .mobi domain or whatever you like.

Capture Clients with a QR Code in your traditional advertising.

You’ve seen QR Codes in advertisements popping up all over the place. A QR code (short for Quick Response Code) is basically a matrix barcode that users of smartphones scan and are taken to a website for more information. In your traditional marketing pieces, postcards, newspaper, magazine advertising, sign riders, flyers in your yard sign brochure are a great way to get potential prospects that have smartphones to quickly scan that code and arrive on your mobile optimized site.

If you have a smartphone, go ahead and scan the code below. The QR code is programmed to send the smartphone user to Mason Real Estate main website, but by adding a small bit of code to their site the visitor is automatically taken to the mobile version.

QR Code Used in Traditional Advertising

Getting the Mobile IDX to work with your existing website

As far as implementation goes there are a couple of options you have available. If your existing web design company will let you, we have a 4 line bit of code that needs to be added to the <head> section of your website. Don’t worry your webmaster will know what to do with it. If your webmaster isn’t able to add this code (don’t get me started on why they wouldn’t, I’m talking the big national web vendors here), then they should be able or even you could place a graphic in the header or on your pages that will link to the mobile version. It’s as simple as that.

Future Enhancements

We’re just getting started, so we have a lot of coding to do to get all the areas we have clients in converted. So as you decide this is something you want to do, we’ll start coding out your area as quickly as possible.

As we gain a better understanding of what your clients expect and you receive feedback from them we’ll start to add additional features and of course we’ll create different looks, so as we roll those designs out, you’ll be able to switch to a different design at any time. If you have a smartphone and don’t mind receiving SMS messages we can easily add a button to the details page so a prospect can text you about that specific property.

Don’t have a Smartphone and Want to See a Demo?

I’m guessing that not all our clients have smartphones To see what the mobile version looks like in your desktop browser (ok you have to pretend you have a small 3-4″ screen when you do this) goto http://www.masonrecolorado.com/mobile/index.html If you have a smartphone simply enter in http://www.masonrecolorado.com and it should automatically forward you to the mobile version.

Let’s Get Started

As always, if you have an specific requirements, or have suggestions please don’t hesitate to contact us.

To get started simply contact Ammie Thomas at 719-547-7969 and she can give you all the details.

Rick Roque the articles author starts out:

In my experience of working with sales professionals, loan officers and real estate agents are a dime a dozen. There are always excuses as to why deals don’t get done – the market, the borrower, the banks, underwriting conditions, state laws, technology, bad sales managers, companies don’t equip the loan officer with the right tools to be successful, etc…

 

With that introduction in mind, you might find the 10-minute read worth your time.

Some of the key take aways

• I am a relationship builder most importantly
• There are a lot of realtors who never go into the office, their half realtors
• Call the other top agents in town, at 11:00pm, they won’t get a hold of them
• The style doesn’t matter whether you’re kicking a 20 yard field goal or a 50 year field goal (sell a 50,000 home the same way you sell a $5m home)
• We pride ourselves on being no bull**** agents, we have to tell them in some way or another so being straightforward is the best way
• It’s more about picking up listings than what you do with the property you are listing
• Social Media is key, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn… I sold $20m last year where the buyer never saw the property
• Your website is key, people go over what they see

You’ll need to read the entire article to see how Josh would find a buyer for a $20m home in an area where most homes are selling for half that price.

The next marketing expert that tells you to not use your picture on your website… or put it under the fold… or take it off your business card… is mimicking very bad advice.

Run from their advice… all of it. Forgive them, because they know not what they say.

Or let me sway you this way.

Tell Nike to skip the swoosh on their site. That logo represents the quality of their products and a brand experience. There isn’t any one individual behind the name. Quick tell me who the CEO of Nike is? Nevertheless when you walk into a second hand store and you see that logo on a t-shirt you look at it, you contemplate buying it, because you know even though it’s a hand me down, it’s made of quality…  which your friend would probably never know you were the second person to buy it.

Tell The Gap that their logo doesn’t mean anything. Google “TheGap logo” and you’ll see what I mean, if you don’t already know what I’m talking about.

Ask Tiger Woods what his brand represents… or did.

Ask Michal Jordan to try and sell a shoe without his name on it.

What you do as a real estate agent, what you represent in the marketplace, how you are perceived, what someone thinks about you when your name is mentioned is your brand.

Unless of course your a liar, a cheat, and only care about the next closing… then by all means get rid of it.

On occasion one of our clients will change some information on our idx solution… an e-mail address, a phone number, a website domain, etc. When that happens I always take a peek at the maillog file that shows what emails requests they have received. After all I want to make sure their getting leads, otherwise when it comes time for renewal they might just cancel.

So I’m doing that today and in this clients log is this:

I am interested in looking at the home located at (address eradicated for confidentiality reasons).  I have contacted other realtors about looking at this home, but have not heard back from them.  You were recommended to me by some friends who you sold a house to a few years ago.  I am just looking right now, and this house peaked my interest.

Wow… I could do a whole day training session on the implications of the content of that email.

• Contacted other realtors about this home.
• Those realtors haven’t responded.
• Recommended by friends (seems it at least real enough that their talking to friends).
• Just looking right now. (should you respond or blow it off)
• This house peaked my interest. ( a blueprint for a buying criteria)

First off, seems like a bonafide lead to me. Perhaps not for that particular home, but some home. I did a stint for quite a while helping auto dealers with their sales training and I’d hear this a lot from managers. “We got buyers coming on the lot all the time, the problem is they can’t find a salesman.” Meaning, most auto sales people are taught how to meet and greet and then the salesmanship stops there. It’s not that they weren’t met by a salesman on the lot, it’s just the salesman doesn’t know what to do after introducing themselves.

Is your follow up weak or so stupid you should be honored in your office as the chump of the month.

I’ll never forget when I first started offering our IDX real estate solutions to agents. I had a good friend who had just started a brokerage office. It’s actually how I got interested and started in this business. We put up a fancy site, gave each agent their own lead generating solution and then I tested them. I’ll never forget how Elvis responded (I’ll call him that because he had those huge sideburns like the king and looked a lot like him). I set up some fake email accounts and sent agents leads. Elvis responded back, two weeks later and this is what he said.

I’m sorry, this house went under contract last week.

End of email.

I kid you not.

About 6 months ago I ran a study on those same maillogs to try and gather some statistics. I found that in a six month period, our real estate clients were receiving on average 44 leads, brokerage offices were averaging 112 leads per office.

Two very good reasons you should follow up fast and often.

What I also found out was that the same people (based on email addresses submitted) were requesting information on different homes from different agents, at different times of the day and different days of the week.

I know the skeptic in you would say that these people were just tire kickers and weren’t in the market because why would they be asking for more information from different agents. Well, the skeptic busting answer is at least two-fold. One, they never received a response from the first agent and had moved on (considering they  never requested info from the first agent after the first request), and two, they were shopping around for an agent just as much as a home. Consider that according to NAR, 90% of all home buyers start their search on the Internet don’t you think it’s entirely likely that their also searching for an agent in which to help them purchase a home.

And if you read the quote up above again, ponder on this part real hard… “I am just looking right now.”

I can see what would go on in the mind of some not so smart agents. “I only want to work with buyers right now, if their not interested now, I don’t have the time.” Well let me ask you this. Are you planning on retiring or getting another job in the next few months? If not, I don’t care if it’s a year before they buy, their a buyer looking for a salesman.

Again, I’ll go back to my friend as an example. He thought he’d try and teach me something and impress me, so in those early days, he thought, I’ll get Rick on a conference call with me and we’ll call that lead in California (were in Colorado), and I’ll show him how “I do it”. I know he actually wanted me to become an agent in his office, so he was taking way more time teaching me things about the intricate part of the business than he should have. Anyway, so he calls this guy, talks for about 25 minutes, asks him about his family, why he’s considering moving to Colorado, and what his time frame was. It turned out to be a year if his daughter got accepted to a nearby college. He said he’d send him a relocation package and he’d stay in-touch. When we got off the phone, he was feeling good about himself, thanking me because this Internet thing is really starting to work, etc. Then he floored me. He said, “now if I can just figure out how to track him for the next year.” Again I kid you not. This guy was selling on average 70 homes a year, was REALTOR of the year just two years prior and he makes a comment like that.

Your timely follow up is crucial. That’s step one, without a doubt. If you’re checking email a couple of times a day, you’re loosing out on possibilities. If you don’t have a cell phone that can receive your emails, then you need to invest in one. Timely follow up is crucial, did I mention that already?

Second, you need to construct a plan of follow up on every IDX lead you receive. It’s always best to try and get the person to talk with you on the phone because let’s face it, that’s where you’ll shine.

What do you do when the lead goes silent?

It’s going to happen for all kinds of reasons, you’ll respond back in a timely manner and nothing, nada, zilch. You spend your time to construct a follow up message in response to the request and nothing.

One tactic is to construct a series of follow up messages that you can send automatically that will attempt to engage the prospect in furthering the dialogue with you. I can help you with that and I can show you how to do it automatically.

Another is to spend the time to create a 3 to 10 page report that outlines your market, what you can and will do for the propsect and send it to them. I can also help you in constructing that message.

Needless to say not all leads will pan out for all kinds of reasons. But let me ask you this. How long do you take to follow up on phone calls? If your a pro, you should consider and attack follow up for email requests with the same veracity as phone calls.

The other day I was reading an article on a major real estate news site and the topics was getting more referrals, and I thought to myself, this guy doesn’t get it, and to boot he is a coach. He basically was explaining with an example that the next time you’re in a restaurant you ask the waitress if she knows of anyone in the market looking to buy a home. I thought to myself, Please… That’s not referral marketing, that’s selling, and quite frankly cheezy at best. Reminds me of the 3 foot rule in network marketing. You know the one where the Amway teachers tell you pitch your idea to anyone who gets within 3 feet of you.

So I thought, ok, the idea of the article was to make sure that everyone you meet should know that you are a REALTOR®. How do you do that, without being pushy?

How do people know you’re a  REALTOR®?

I asked my wife a question. “Honey, how many people do you know at church whom you have no idea what they do for a living?” She thought for a few moments and answered, “a lot.”

I told her then if I was a REALTOR®, “why wouldn’t I wear that pin they have?” After all, if I’m going to church on Sundays and bible classes once a week, and pot lucks every few months, I meet and get to know a lot of people, why wouldn’t I want them to know that I’m a REALTOR®.  I use the church example, but you can easily extract that scenario to dozens and dozens of examples that naturally occur to you each week.

Some people are going to immediately identify with the pin and associate you with being a REALTOR®. They’ll put that information in the need to know recesses of their mind. They may or may not acknowledge you wearing the pin. It doesn’t matter because if they know, like and trust you, the next time they are in the market, or talking to one of their friends and the subject of buying or selling a home comes up, you have a chance of being referred. That’s the true essence of a referral.

If they don’t know what the pin represents, they may ask. At that point you have an opportunity to give them your 7 Second Marketing pitch. Just don’t respond by selling “I’m a REALTOR®”, you can come up with something better than that, and if you can’t read 7 Second Marketing to get the creative juices flowing. You should also at that point dig into your pocket and give them a couple of business cards. Tell them something non-threatening like; “Joe, the next time you happen to be talking to one of  your friends and the subject comes up about them buying or selling a home, I’d appreciate it if you could give them one of my cards.” It’s non-threatening, and not pushy, and yet it gives you the opportunity to add one more possible referral source to your business. Who knows, that acquaintance you see all the time might just keep a card for themselves.

Still skeptical, here’s an experiment for you.

Put your pin on and wear it everywhere for 3 weeks. That act alone will get you into the habit of wearing it but I think you’ll be surprised by the results. I think what you’ll find is that one day you’ll be in the checkout line at the grocery store and the person behind you will say, “I noticed you’re a REALTOR®, I was thinking about selling my home,” or you’ll be taking your kid to a soccer game and one of the moms will notice it, and ask you how much a home would cost with 4 bedrooms because she has another one due to arrive in a few months. I think you get the idea.

If the pin doesn’t work, try  your company logo on your polo, or your denim shirts, earrings, tote bags, whatever it takes. For some ideas take a look at the NAR Store.

Oh, and let me put a shameless plug in here. Chances are your one of our clients if your reading this… don’t forget to tell them that you have all the homes in your marketplace available for them to view on your idx enabled real estate website.

It’s the simple, basic things that can make all the difference in the world and besides who wants to be a SECRET AGENT



I stumbled across a blog post about the Coldwell Banker Gen Blue conference on March 14-17 and watched a video of the presentation between Mike Ferry and Mathew Ferrara, entitled the Gen Blue Smackdown. The comments on this blog post  needless to say were heated with pithy comments on how Mike Ferry is a dinosaur and should be shoveled out of the real estate coaching industry.

I thought this was a good opportunity to give you a glimpse on how we think about technology, prospecting and earning a living offering our real estate websites and idx services to the real estate industry. Hint: Your website is a tool for your real estate business, not a way of life…  in most cases.

First I’ll save you a little time and offer up some notes I took on the smackdown, to prod you into spending the 30 minutes to watch this video. It certainly will offer up some food for thought.

If you’re not familiar with Mike Ferry, he is the founder of The Mike Ferry Organization, billed as North America’s Leading Real Estate Coaching and Training Organization. Mike was given the opportunity first to give a 10 minute presentation. The outcome of his presentation was basically saying that social media although not a waste of time is not the most efficient and productive use of your time. He made several mentions about how agents waste their money on ineffective advertising. For example, putting your picture on bus stops benches. Mike says that people that ride the bus, typically don’t have a car, and therefore probably can’t afford a home. Plus they land their butts on the benches covering up your hard earned, ineffective advertising. Needless to say this raised a few laughs from the audience but Mike is correct, agents spend way too much money on ineffective advertising. John Wannamaker, considered by some to be the father of modern advertising, is quoted as saying ” Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

Mike explained that there are basically 3 ways to make money.

1.) Wait for people to find you – what Mike refers to as a ‘secret agent.’

2.) You can buy business by overpricing listings.

3.) Talk to other people. You need to be talking to people everyday, which shouldn’t come as any surprise, but Mike emphasized that you should be talking to people that are in the market today. That’s a very important distinction.

Next up was Mathew Ferrara from Mathew Ferrara & Company. Matthew Ferrara has been a driving force for evolution in the real estate industry for the past 20 years. From the About Us page, Mathew’s philosophy is simple: It’s time for real estate to evolve. He believes it’s time for a “Industrial Revolution” for the real estate industry.

His main message was an acronym for the FUTURE using social media as the foundation for his discussion.

F – Forward thinking

U- Understand the customer – what’s going on in their lives – social media will tell you what’s going on in their lives

T – Target your communications – how are you going to talk to them

U – Universal Sales – the world is smaller than ever – people are investing from all around the world

R – Rapid or Referral – rapid concept – the time is all online – email, skype, etc. -prospects usually pick the first agent that gets back to them  and then a second R,  the referral aspect – this part of the business will never stop being

E – engage the marketplace or simply go through the numbers – build up long term relations. Prospects want to be talked to -  you need to build up trust

The next ten minutes was a toe-to-toe conversation with great points on both sides. Mathew’s main point  is that old school thinking is antiquated, Mike’s point was that most agents aren’t going to survive if they don’t sell homes soon. He’s correct as well. In fact, I saw a statistic by a well known real estate researcher and commenter that stated that 50% of agents didn’t make a single dollar in commission in 2010. I haven’t been able to substantiate that claim, so I will not quote the source, but my guess is it’s fairly accurate.

Here’s my takeaway and one piece of advice.

Since there are millions of people flocking to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, it does make sense to engage in these ‘water cooler’ conversations. You do indeed need to search out and try and friend everyone you know on these sites because that’s the easiest and most cost effective way (in terms of dollars and time) of knowing what’s going on in the lives of the people you know. You simply can’t ignore these platforms to stay in touch.  Engaging in social media platforms should be considered a long term prospecting endeavor not a quick ‘get hundreds of leads’ type thing that some so called real estate social media experts would lead you to believe and ask you spend hundreds to buy their program of closely guarded secrets.

There are other social media platforms that cater to engaging agents to have conversations between each other. These sites should be avoided during your money hours. Talking and discussing the latest trends, latest technology gadgets and in some cases a place to vent your irritations and frustrations is a complete waste of time during your working day.

In fact, a quick study of several blog posts about this exact subject led me to look up the commenter’s on these sites and here is what I found. I struck out those commenter’s that linked their comment to a brokerage site, and only counted the agents that linked to their personal website. Out of the 26 there was a total of 18 listing that these agents were displaying as their own personal listings. It seems that agents that don’t have any listings are spending a lot of their money hours engaging in conversation with other agents.  They should be engaging as Mike Ferry pointed out to finding and identifying people that are in the market today to buy or sell a home. It doesn’t make any sense that if you’re hurting for listings or buyers for that matter that you should be posting and commenting and engaging a conversation with other agents around the country.

Thanks to TechSavvyAgent for the taping the event.

If you can’t view the video above on IE8 with 64bit take a look at these instructions. http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10_square.html

Over the past few years we’ve encountered dozens of prospects for our idx solution that have asked ‘do you have a mapping solution?’ We’ve lost a few existing clients along the way because we were not going to offer it and they moved on to other vendors that do have it. Since I don’t do the actual selling, my answer has always been ‘because it’s stupid.’ Of course until now I couldn’t say that in public. We’ve obviously had a more politically correct way of handling this sales question, but my underlying answer has always been… it’s stupid.

Back in January, I was vindicated when Google announced that they would stop offering mapping in their Google Base product simply because they found that  visitors to their site weren’t using it.

One reason I think it’s stupid is because if I was in the market for a home the last thing I want to do is search out all those little bubbles to simply see the front of the house. Bubble on top of bubble? No thank you.

Isn’t selling real estate and from my viewpoint buying a home all about curb appeal? What curb appeal is there to look at bubbles on a map? I want to buy a home not a bubble. I know there are solutions that give you 5 or 10 at a time, but every time I have seen these types of solutions, I simply moved my eye-balls past the map and down to the thumbnails of the home, or keep my eye on the left or right hand side where the listings are. Sometimes their isn’t even a bubble on that map. I’m a southwest home kind of guy, living in Colorado, that’s not going to surprise those that know this area. However, there a lot of homes in my area that don’t fit that criteria, so why would I want to wade through a bunch of two stories or Victorian type homes?

Another more compelling reason comes from NAR’s own research. For many years now consumers have said that more photos of the home, complete descriptions and yes even videos and virtual tours are what they want to see. Less than half of people polled have said that mapping was a desirable feature they wanted to see on their agents real estate website.

At one point I broke down and said, ok I’ll see what I can do about offering a solution. I spent a couple of weeks programming that feature into our solution, and always came away saying it doesn’t work to my standards. Having access to data in over 30 locations across the country, there is less than a handful of boards that offer longitude and latitude in their data. This is the only correct way to point a bubble on a map in the right place. Couple that with the fact that unfortunately agents sometime don’t spell the addresses correctly. So the only alternative is to constantly run the mls data through a third party program to interpret the address to arrive at a longitude and latitude. In my opinion, it’s too many moving parts to feel comfortable that it will work with any regularity. My home for example maps on google, yahoo, and mapquest around 500 few to the west onto a vacant lot. I got a kick out of reading another idx vendors blog post about how the agents now have the ability to go into their solution and correct the marker. Really, as an agent do you want to spend your time verifying the little bubbles are in the right place?

The biggest compliment we get from our clients is when they tell us, someone contacted them because of all the sites they’ve looked at our solution is simple to use.  After all, do you really want to turn off a visitor to your website because they can’t navigate a wily and wooly property search?

Our philosophy has been and always will be in our idx solution a simple one. We don’t want our clients loosing out on potential leads because a visitor to their website needs to have the skills of a rocket scientist to navigate and search for a property. We have designed our idx solution to enable even the most computer illiterate user an enjoyable experience. Just remember, if a technology can be accomplished doesn’t mean it’s needs to be implemented. Do you or someone you know still have a blinking clock someone in the house?

For some interesting comments on what others in the industry say, you might want to check these links out. Plus you really need to read the comments to get the full scope of others positions.

The Future of Real Estate Marketing – Why the Map Based Search is Dead

Another Nail in the coffin for Map Based Search – Zillow goes back to list view

And from Brian Boero over at 1000wattconsulting:

“The debate over map-based property search Joel started last week continued over at Vendor Alley. Some really good points were raised – all underscoring the complexity of creating a great online real estate experience. My take: users will always tell you they “want” map search when you ask them. Frequently, their clicks will as well. They lie. Maps sounds good. They look cool. They can even be fun to play with. But let’s remember: the conversion numbers tell the true story.”

For a long time we were one of only a handful of companies offering an IDX property search solution to REALTORS®. Over time we offered less and less traditional web design to the community here in the Pueblo area, concentrating fully on offering our idx solution. Along the way we have designed some real estate web sites for agents and brokers that thought they were paying too much or getting no support and updates from their existing web designers. But it has never been our focus.

Over the years we have grown more and more frustrated, along with our real estate clients, because the cost of updating and maintaining their websites have skyrocketed with little to no reason. Further, the larger real estate industry web design marketing companies periodically decide that they would just change the design of our mutual clients web site without even telling their clients. With these new designs, our idx solution would go missing in action.  We believe that 80% of the reason for having a web site in the first place is to allow prospects to search for properties. So needless to say we have started to re-ignite our web design business again.

Like many companies we put up our website in hopes of gaining some new business, but have relied on good old fashion cold calling to get the job done. In our case, it’s very easy to identify who our target market is; a real estate agent or broker that has a website with no property search. It seems counter-intuitive that we would admit this, but it’s the difference in our perspective that we hope to convey over the coming days, months and years.

Our company is small, in fact, is basically a husband and wife team, with the occasional independent contractor helping us out behind the scenes. If you want to look at our biographies on the Company page link you’ll find that we have years of sales, technology and marketing experience. Getting to know our clients is our greatest strength and over the years we have helped many REALTORS® grow their business by offering advice and consulting beyond our normal product offering.

So our new direction is to offer as complete of an end to end web site solution as we possibly can. Along the way, we’ll post some advice here, pass along information we find on the Internet that we find might be of value to our clients and as always welcome your calls to ask us for advice or direction.