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Social Networking and The New Real Estate Sphere of Influence

Actually, we’re not just talking about “social networks,” but business networking as well. The Internet has made dramatic changes in the way the world shops, locates information, and in how they communicate with each other. Of course, email is the elephant in the room. But, as we become ever more mobile and in a hurry, networking will become a many-faceted activity.

So, what do we mean by online or social networking? It’s all about sending messages to one another in real time, and getting back responses quickly. But, it’s also about introductions. We introduce our contacts to others, and they can introduce us to their network. It becomes an ever-growing circle, encompassing more people who in some way keep up with what we are doing or saying.

Continue reading: Social Networking and The New Real Estate Sphere of Influence

The Etiquette of Effective Lead Capture

It’s been written around the Web that 90+% of real estate websites and blogs are not effective at their intended purpose. This is assuming that your goal for your site is the actual direct generation of business. If all you want is a billboard to place your listings and show to your listing clients, then most any site will do, and you really don’t need to get into lead capture as a strategy.

However, that’s a great waste of the potential of a real estate website. Believe it or not, you can generate listing client leads as easily as buyer leads with the right website and tools. The trick is to entice your visitors to give you their contact information, not steal it from them with black-hat techniques. The right content, a great IDX search page, featured listings, and special offerings is the way to go.

Though there are ways to do it, you never want a visitor to your site to automatically get an email because you somehow captured their address without their knowledge or approval. If you are capturing the contact information of a site visitor, it should always be with their full knowledge, and it should happen because they intended to give it to you. Usually, that will not happen with a simple “Please sign our guestbook” popup. Why should they… what’s in it for them.

Continue reading: The Etiquette of Effective Lead Capture

Housing and The Stimulus Package from NAR

Dear Fellow REALTOR®,

Here’s our take on the Stimulis Bill and Treasury announcements made this week. We look at the Stimulis package AND the Treasury’s package holistically, in compliment with each other – mostly because that’s how the Obama team is looking at it. Your representatives, the NAR Board of Directors, asked us in November to do 4 things (with an unspoken but clearly understood mandate to PRESERVE what we already have). Here they are: 1) get loan limits raised for high cost areas, 2) make the $7,500 tax credit NOT a loan, 3) try to find ways to push interest rates down (which are higher than they should be due to systemic risk right now) by 200 basis points, and 4) help provide solutions to the foreclosure/short sale problem.

Continue reading: Housing and The Stimulus Package from NAR

Sacramento Sees Record January Home Sales

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: February 13, 2009
(RESIDENTIAL RESALE STATISTICS January 2009)

An unusually active January kept sales above average for the month. The following information, compiled by the Sacramento Association of REALTORS®, is collected from the MetroList® multiple listing services and covers Sacramento County and the City of West Sacramento. January closed with 1,542 single family home sales, the most ever recorded by the Association during the month of January. Month-to-month, this figure represents a 20.2% decrease from December’s 1,932 sales, but a 108% increase over the 739 sales of January 2008. Of the 1,542 sales recorded this month, 1,168 were listed as REO properties. This accounts for over 75% of all sales.

Continue reading: Sacramento Sees Record January Home Sales

Developing and Working a Niche Online

The most competition-intensive thing you can do with your website is to develop all of your content around keywords and phrases that are generic real estate, as “YourTown real estate.” Virtually 95+% of your competition is doing the very same thing. Far from a negative, this opens up a great opportunity for you.

Wait, you say! I work residential real estate, so I really don’t have a niche. Actually, you have several.

[...]

IDX – Make it Prominent & Easy

It would be difficult to find a real estate professional who doesn’t understand the value of a website, and the need to have some type of MLS search displayed on it. Yet, a great many of them also complain that they get few or no leads from their websites.

First, if you’re not using some type of analytic or statistics software to track your site’s visitors and the pages they view, you may not even know where you need to concentrate for improvement. Once you know what’s going on, you can do what is necessary to make it better.

How many people are visiting your IDX search page? How long do they stay there, as searches usually make it one of the “stickiest” pages on your site? Few of us would deny that we need to improve these statistics. But, how do we do that?

Continue reading: IDX – Make it Prominent & Easy