Monday, January 30, 2006

Converting Online Leads

Inman News is doing a series on converting and tracking online leads. Today's article gave a brief overview of what some of the top companies are doing, but all I really got out of it was that the top companies are generating a ton of online leads, and now realize they need to track the conversion.

One point I found interesting was that about 6% of online leads convert (ie actually turn into a deal). Now we know that online leads take about 6-12 months to buy or sell, so the importance of staying in touch is even greater.

If your website generates 100 leads a month now, in about 6-12 months you should be pretty busy! Contact me if your site isn't performing the way you'd like.

Friday, January 27, 2006

Search Engine Ranking Tool

Ever wanted to know how your site ranks on the top search engines? I just found this cool tool.... click the link below, scroll part way down the page and enter your web address in the submission form, and the keyword you want to check. In about 30 second it will show you how you score on the major engines...

Search Engine Rankings - Instant, online reports of web site rankings in 7 top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN, AOL, Teoma (Ask Jeeves), AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and the top 3 web directories; Yahoo! Directory, Open Directory (Dmoz), and LookSmart - FREE!

Thursday, January 26, 2006

Real Estate Agents Lose Their Blackberries?


NTP is suing RIM for patent infringements. How on earth does that matter to real estate professionals? Well.... RIM is the company from Waterloo, Ontario, that makes Blackberries, which have become very popular among Realtors. NTP owns some patents, and claims that RIM has been using these patents in their technology. The case has been in the courts for quite a while - RIM denies the charges - and on Monday the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear RIM's appeal. NTP can now seek an injunction forces RIM to stop using the technology, which would pretty much end service for Blackberry users. Of course, RIM could settle with NTP and avoid the situation, but it might be best to prepare just in case.

Friday, January 20, 2006

New Online Real Estate Bookstore

www.realestatebooks.org is a new online bookstore that sells only books related to real estate. Excerpts and reviews are available for the books which are broken into different categories such as sales strategies, marketing and technology. The bookstore's goald is to make it easier to find books relevant to real estate professionals, as most bookstores carry only real estate books that are relevant to the consumer. Check it out!

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

More Reliance on Agents, More Internet Use - NAR

NAR does a survey of homebuyers and sellers every year that gives insights into how the industry is changing. Although NAR is out of the US, CREA does not do a similar survey (as far as I am aware) so we have to go with the American stats. When it comes to technology, Canada generally has a faster adoption rate than the US, so we can assume our stats are similar, if not slightly higher. I did read a survey from Ipsos Reid last year that showed exactly that.

This year's NAR survey shows an increase in internet usage when searching for a home from 2% in 1995, to 77% in 2005 (it was 74% in 2004). How a decade can change an industry! 24% of buyers said the first learned about the home they ended up purchasing on the internet, up from 15% last year.

“Buyers who use the Internet in searching for a home are more likely to use a real estate agent than non-Internet users, and consumers rely on professionals to provide context, negotiate the transaction and help with the paperwork,” said Stevens, senior vice president of NRT Inc.

In fact, 81% of buyers who used the internet as part of their search, purchased their home through a real estate agent, as compared to 63% on non-internet searchers.

“We find that the level of for-sale-by-owners is on a sustained decline and is now at a record low. In addition, a growing share of FSBO properties are not placed on the open market – they’re private transactions,” Stevens said.

Only 13% of sellers sold on their own (of which 39% were between parties who knew each other in advance), down from a cyclical high in 1997 of 18%. The median price of homes sold with the help of an agent was 16% higher than those sold FSBO.

When it comes to choosing and agent, most people were referred by a friend or family member, and the most important factor in deciding on who to use was reputation. 85% of buyers and 82% of sellers said they were likely to use the same agent again.

The complete survey results are available here, and include other stats mostly to do with demographics of home buyers and sellers.

Monday, January 16, 2006

Master Your Real Estate Business

I previously did a post on sites that all real estate professionals should bookmark, well, I missed one. www.brokeragentnews.com is loaded with good articles on this business.

One article in particular, titled "In pursuit of real estate mastery" outlines the reasons why as a real estate professional you should choose to become a "master of real estate competencies" and how it can help you succeed in your business and life.

He talks about the three roads we all have to choose from in this business:

1. You can choose to become a master of the competencies and have your value speak for itself.
2. You can take the road of prospecting, lead generating, selling and closing, which requires you to become a master of persuasion.
3. Or concede your lack of value, become master of nothing and make working for less your value proposition.

I particularily identified with these paragraphs:

Many extremely ambitious people fail in real estate. Hard work isn't the answer. You can't prospect harder. You cannot hold an open house harder. The key is to make it easier, not harder.

To make it effortless, it has to be fun. If it doesn't provide you with satisfaction, you cannot succeed. Note that athletes and performers are among the best compensated people in our society. And, they are doing what they love to do. The love of an activity and a high level of proficiency go hand in hand. How can anyone achieve their full potential doing things they don't enjoy?

Consider the words of author James Michener:
"The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him, he's always doing both."

The complete article is available here, I highly recommend giving it a read.

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Zillow.com - Aiming to put Brokers out of the biz?

I found this article on the Business Week Online Blog called Hot Property. Zillow.com is the latest idea from Richard Barton, who founded Expedia.com and changed the way we travel. He spoke at the Inman News conference in New York City yesterday, and apparently let very little out about what Zillow.com would actually be. It is supposed to launch in the next 6 months, and Richard assures he is not out to "wipe out the jobs of real estate agents and brokers." There was very little information given about what Zillow.com would actually be, but he did say it is going to be an advertising vehicle for brokers and agents, and the users of the site will provide much of the information.

More details...

Wednesday, January 11, 2006

Real Estate Blogger Makes It Big


Inman News published a story today about a mortgage broker in Minneapolis who credits his blogging to bringing in $4 million in mortgage originations, a new job and a radio show. His blog, Behind The Mortgage, broke the story of a 2005 FBI investigation into local mortgage fraud gaining a lot of attention from the local media, and consequently consumers in his marketplace. Inman reports:
The blog has been a marketing boon to Alex Stenback, who created the site in October 2004 "out of my own frustration," Stenback said. "There was no good spot to find out what local people were talking about regarding local real estate and mortgages."

The local newspapers carried such news, as did other sources, "but to find all the content was hard, because you had to go to so many resources. I tried to aggregate the information and pick up things that were interesting and start conversations about them," Stenback said.

Stenback's approach to the fraud story is classical for blogs: He posted the letter with a comment that sources reported the FBI was investigating mortgage fraud in the Twin Cities, saying, "Though we've yet to corroborate these reports, and no specific companies were named, we thought we'd throw this out here (we check our facts in real-time here in blogland). Anyone heard anything?"

"The victims of this thing (mortgage fraud) are the public," Stenback said. "Why not let them know what's going on, rather than making it secret?"

"Blogs are a great way to get business directed to you," the broker said. He bases his estimate of business attracted by the blog on e-mails from people who tell him they heard of him through Behind The Mortgage.

"The advertising on my blog is very low-level," said Stenback. "I don't use the blog as a promotion of my business. People appreciate it as a resource, and they reach out to me.

"If you have a blog or a radio show, you don’t want to turn it into a commercial. Answer people's questions, give the information, and the business will come," Stenback said.

In Stenback's case, not only new business but a new job and a radio show grew out of his blog.

After learning about the broker through the blog, CTX Mortgage Corp. offered him a job as a senior loan officer/sales manager. Part of his duties involve contributing to a weekly radio show the company sponsors and hosts by providing content.

"We thought it (the blog) was a great warehouse of information we could use in order to provide content for the radio broadcast. It certainly helped that Alex is articulate and understands the market and we could play off that," Velasco said.

Friday, January 06, 2006

Links Every Agent Should Have Bookmarked

Here's a list of sites I visit all the time...I highly recommend you check them out:

www.inman.com - ok, if you don't already get their daily updates on the industry, it's time

www.rismedia.com - has a good mix of press releases and advice articles, all to do with real estate

www.businessknowhow.com - tons of articles on running a business, stuff like advertising on a small budget, business planning etc.

www.agentsonline.net - an online discussion board for the real estate industry, agents and brokers post questions and offer advice to eachother. This site also drives a ton of traffic to your site if you post frequently.

http://overvalued.blogspot.com/ - interesting blog that is tracking the actual values of homes in major US cities compared to the trend over the last 30 or so years.

http://edmonton-homes.blogspot.com - shameless plug for our other blog...

www.edmonton-homes.ca - shameless plug for our web site.

Thats all for today, I'll add more soon :)

Tuesday, January 03, 2006

Agents blog for success

When you think of blogging, you think of an online journal - people writing about vacations, posting family photos, politicians getting in trouble for inappropriate comments... But now blogs are starting to earn a purpose for business, and the real estate industry has jumped on board. Companies and individual agents are starting blogs left right and centre, something you should consider or risk missing the boat.

An article I read in the National Post recently reported that 70,000 new blogs are started everyday. The two blogs that our humble little company produce deliver enough traffic to our website to bring as many leads as our paid search campaign brought in. In fact, we put our paid search placements on hold over Christmas, hoping to cool the site down so we could take a break from the leads, but our Edmonton Real Estate blog more than picked up the pace and we spent much of our time of dealing with leads.

The real estate industry has embraced blogging. It is easy to do, requires very little technical skill (if you can send an e-mail you can start a blog), and it gives us professionals a place to demonstrate how much we really do know about selling real estate. If you're sitting there thinking, I barely know what a blog is, and I don't know any agents who've started one, this girl is crazy....think again. I just did a quick search on Google's blogsearch and found 2.5 million blog entries to do with real estate. (Oh, and in case you haven't read any of my previous articles, search engines LOVE blogs....)

A recent article from RISMEDIA talks about a company in the states that started a blog in late October (just after yours truly). Their blog is a place where they write about the houses they are selling, their city's quality of life, give advice on how to obtain a home loan and list the area's accolades, such as its ranking as a top place to retire. They got the idea for the blog after reading an article about real estate blogging in the Wall Street Journal. They once thought blogs were a fad until they discovered Really Simple Syndication, a program that feeds Web sites that consumers choose to them every day.

Their blog hasn't yet resulted directly in the sale of a home, but the agents believe the new tool is getting the word out about their company and them. "Anytime we can get our name out is a good thing." Some weeks there are daily entries while other weeks, submissions might pop up several times. The agents blog as much and as often as they want. Of the office's 70 agents, about 30 are blogging. Visit the Long & Foster Daleville office's blog at roanokerealestate.blogspot.com.

Real estate blogs alone don't necessarily drive buyers to purchase a certain house. They often are the first step to connect a person to a real estate company's Web site where they might find other home listings and information. Most firms link to their own home pages from their blog sites.