Wordpress is one of the most powerful website development and content management systems, especially for Realtors.  This Wordpress primer will give you a basic understanding of the terms and setup process in creating a site.

However, whether you have an automatic syndication service like Tribus ListingSyndicator, or whether you use a manual service, you must continue to monitor your listings across sites to check for irregularities.  In the past, we’ve monitored other brokers stealing listings to advertise as their own.  (Zillow and Trulia have yet to come up with a system that allows you to authenticate that it really is your listing.  Although we’ve publicly pushed a plan for over a year utilizing a Pin system when the listing syndicates.)  As an example, the company we setup in Los Angeles had their listings syndicated by Tribus.  The company deals in very high end real estate.  A home they had listed for $17,500,000 was overtaken by a competitor company.  I’ve personally had to make 3 phone calls to other agents / brokerages indicating they were in violation of law, by advertising a listing that was not their own.  Most agents and brokerages don’t understand the difference between syndication and IDX.

But this blog post stems from a major issue we encountered yesterday.

Yesterday, our St Louis affilaite received an email from Point2 Technologies indicating that Point2 was syndicating their listings.  After a check of Zillow and other sites, in fact the link to the property info page went back to a page on Point2.com  NOT to the brokers page.  What happened was that Point2 struck a deal with the local MLS, MARIS in St Louis, to syndicate listings automatically.  (It’s been Point2’s policy lately to extend functionality to do syndication automatically through the MLS if they can strike a deal.  The benefit being that Point2 gets the web traffic and hopefully agents see this and decide to upgrade to a paid version of their site which can cost $119/ month for a template site.)

So without any acceptance on behalf of the brokerage in St Louis, Point2 overtook the Tribus listing syndication system and started directing their leads to a Point2 page (an example of their pages here: 1649 Mount Vernon – Notice that all brokerage branding has been removed, the SEO is tremendously bad, it doesn’t follow the rules and regulations required by MO state law to display the office phone number, and they have chosen to sell ads around the listing. )  We have contacted Point2 to ask them to remove this from their site and they agreed that nothing had to be done for this to be turned on… It was a “do nothing and we’ll turn it on for you” system agreed to by the MLS.  By the time we had it shut down, hundreds of clicks were stolen by Point2 and all of the enhancements that were paid for had been removed.  We’ll have to now have someone go through listing by listing and reactivate each one.

Have you encountered similar problems syndicating your listings?  Let us know in the comments below!

Optimize WordPress permalink structure for SEO

This discussion was given at Social Media Mastermind Orange County
Thanks to Kevin Sablan for shooting the video.

What is the best tool an average Realtor can use to get business now?

Folks, it’s not Twitter.  It’s not Facebook.  It’s not postcard campaigns.  It’s definitely NOT any form of print advertising.

So what is it then?

Drip Email Programs!   By far the single most effective strategy is email campaigns to clients.  What is it that makes email campaigns so effective?  It’s simple.  If you have a regular program you either A) create interest in a potential buyer or sell to start considering the home purchase process or B) If they are already interested, you’ll constantly be in front of them so when they are ready to contact an agent, you’ll be the person they remember.

One of the keys to this process though is that your emails have to provide consistent value.  They can’t be “Go to my website” or “look at my new listing.”  One of the best campaigns we ran for our St. Louis Real Estate affiliate was a campaign on Short Sales and Foreclosures.  People signed up on the company’s website to receive weekly updates.  The click through rate for this email was an astonishing 28%!  That’s almost 3 times the average for a real estate related blast email.  Couple that with the fact that the list at it’s height had more than 3000 subscribers and you have 840 clicking through to your website each week.  Users that are sticky and spend time on the site.  Users that are constantly remember that your brokerage is where they can go to get quality real estate information in your area.  Or that your agent website has hyperlocal content.

There are other factors in email marketing.  Do you know when the best time to send out bulk email is?

Most Realtors when I ask this question say “Saturday or Sunday.” WRONG!

Statistically the best time for real estate emails to be sent is actually Mondays at 12:30-1:30 pm.  Why?  Simple.  It’s Monday, people have just eaten lunch and they don’t feel like getting into work yet.  They want to avoid work a little longer so they troll through their email box and find something distracting.  Newly listed homes!  Check out their subdivision.  Check out areas they are interested in… etc.  We found that a simple shift from sending emails on Fridays to Mondays increased the total number of emails opened by almost 50%!

We’ll be writing more in the near future about this topic.  But start looking at services like MailChimp, ConstantContact, and MadMimi.

Shameless Plug: Tribus offers TribusConnect a full service drip email platform. The system connects your Customer Relationship Management software to your IDX and to your drip emails.  Each time someone opens an email it’s recorded in your email box, as well as any properties they end up viewing on your site.  Then you can tell

1. What’s for Sale?
2. What’s my home worth?
3. How’s the market?

But early last year I decided we needed to add a new item to this list.  Hyperlocal data.  Up until now, there wasn’t really an easy way for people in subdivisions or smaller neighborhoods to get news about their community.  When are the garage sales?  What did the homeowner’s association decide? etc…  Realtors across the country started to tell some of these stories via their blogs etc.  Because Realtors are so ingrained in the community they were primed to provide that data in a central easy to find source.  But Realtors only have a limited amount of time.  There are plenty of other blogs out there by community residents that discuss local news but they preiously had been hard to find.

Outside.in is changing this!  I’ve been a fan of Outside.In for driving traffic to your local blog for about a year now.  In some cases for brokers that we’ve setup hyperlocal blogging platforms for, it’s the number one referral source!  Recently we’ve been playing with a private beta version of Outside.in ’s new publisher’s engine.  And I believe it’s an easy way for real estate brokers to get hyperlocal content on their site.  While it has almost any city listed, it also in some cases gets as granular as a subdivision!  (To check out one of our sample pages using this new platform see Brentwood, MO Home Stats )

Here’s a video of the CEO of Outside.in speaking at Inman New York 2010
How to Become a Local Media Titan

First of all, although Rob starts being facetious here, some of the points he makes, he’s quite serious about. So let’s tackle some of them:
1) Why do “none” of the top 10% of Realtors in the MLS not engage in social media? Well I would suggest that first of all a very small percentage on a whole of all Realtors engage in regular social media usage. Second, a big issue is that these Realtors can sit back and be fairly complacent with their current practices and know they have checks coming in… They don’t need to embrace social media as either a lead generation or branding play. I would suggest that it’s Realtors that are looking to get to be top that are in the trenches of social media and the ones using it effectively. A great point Rob made here was that “what’s your time worth?” The top agents just don’t want to spend the time. Again Rob correctly points out that you can’t pay someone on your team to tweet for you. Unfortunately, many of top professionals attempt this only to lose all credibility.

2) “Social Media is new media” that should be treated like a marketing campaign. It’s a way to reach more people and lower costs. Although I tend to agree that social media CAN be used like the farming postcard campaigns of old, its not necessarily a given. You don’t have to hyperlocate your tweets. I think that you can easily brand yourself for your entire area and beyond as an intelligent Realtor. Using the farming method for tweeting and social media interaction is probably the closest you will get lead generation. But social media is much more about interactions. It’s about creating relationships. No print campaign can create a relationship. Social Media is so much more than just a postcard campaign.

3) Apple has no social media, so social media isn’t always necessary. Tom Ferry makes a good point here. Apple has a $400million ad budget. They don’t need social media. Much like in #1 how top Realtors don’t need social media, big brands don’t need it either. However, Apple does have some social media interaction. They do have at least two Facebook pages, one for Students for Macs and one for iTunes. Both offer free music downloads, and push current discounts for Mac products. Furthermore, Apple uses its standoff nature in it’s marketing. That’s part of their game. There is a reason they don’t release any information about products early. It’s how they build hype. They keep things close to the chest. It works for them, it doesn’t work for everyone. Realtors can’t do big announcements of new listings that everyone will fawn over.

4) Agents shouldn’t brand the broker on Facebook. This concept goes directly to one of our core beliefs at Tribus. The balance has shifted DRAMATICALLY towards agents having too much power. When agents can put out ads like these brokers need to start taking control.  Consumers think less of those major brands because of the ads that the agents put out.  Just like with print ads, someone in a brokerage should at least be monitoring the brand and ensuring it’s proper usage in ads like on facebook.

What do you think of each’s arguments?

Zillow Adds Rental Listings – Charges For Them

Today Zillow announced they will be adding the ability for landlords to advertise their for lease properties on the site.  You can search them at Zillow Rentals.  Here’s the kicker, Zillow knows they need to start making money.  (After all they’ve received $87 Million in venture capital funding… someone is going to start wanting some of that back.) Without specific information, I’m sure that their ad revenues are down.  Their primary ad partners were Realtors advertising themselves and their listings.  With revenues to Realtors down they are surely not forking over the dollars they were willing to in 2006.

So, to add a for lease listing to Zillow they will charge $9.95 for the post to be live 180 days.  Each post is entered manually and not received via a syndication feed.  This means that Realtors will not have the ability to have their rental listings appear on Zillow without manual entry and paid insertion.

I believe that this new rental traffic could drive as much as 15% new traffic to Zillow’s site which would put them in the number one spot for all real estate websites.  We’ll see though if they can drive enough traffic by having paid insertions.  My guess is that at some point rentals will go the same way that for sale properties do.  Paid insertion for manual entries, free if included in the feed.

Search By Monthly Payment

Zillow is also adding a new Search by Payment feature to the filters once results are returned.  These new feature will compare For Rent listings with the expected average mortgage payment to purchase a home.  This way people in the market considering renting can see what they would be able to buy for the same price.

Zillow To Charge To Manually Insert For Sale Listings

While it’s a big deal that Zillow will be adding rental listings, I think the hidden story is Zillow finally going after revenue…

According to Zillow, 3% of all listings on the site are manually inserted.  This means a Realtor, Brokerage, or Owner is manually typing in the details of the home and uploading the pictures.  Like the rental listings, Zillow will now charge brokers to do this.  Again the fee will be $9.95 for 180 days listed on the site.  The fee however does get you something extra… manually uploaded listings will now be featured on the site.

However, this is going to effect some people that generally really understand the power of Zillow and are probably some of their biggest proponents.  Chances are these manual insertions are from small to independent brokerages and for sale by owners that don’t have the resources to create their own feed.  These agents need to immediately find a resource to syndicate such as Postlets, VFlyer, or Tribus’ listing syndication system.   (Owners will still be able to list a “Make Me Move” price, it doesn’t allow them to feature the property for sale.  Also if your listing is currently for sale it will stay on there until January 13th when it will expire or you’ll have to pay.)  I wonder though, will Postlets or Vflyer start to consider charging because of this?

Consider that Zillow has around 4 million listings on the site.  3% of 4 million is 120,000.  Potential revenue: $1.2 million every 180 days.  I think it’s more probable that only a small percentage of those people will end up actually paying for the service.  But it’s a start to making $87 Million.

So will landlords pay to place listings on Zillow? Will sellers and small brokers?  That has yet to be seen.

Jim Somers, an agent at Alain Pinel who sells Homes in Redwood City, CA recently told me he spent $4000 with one SEO firm who promised him top page of Google, yet he never made it past page 3.  Of course he didn’t get his money back and ended up doing better by purchasing SEO for Dummies!

The proof is in the results.  Where does your site rank after someone has managed the SEO?  Be wary immediately of any SEO person that promises a specific result.  The truth is that SEO is art, it’s just as much art as the original design of the site.  It takes knowledge of what users search for… it takes knowledge of how search engines rank results… it takes knowledge of how code works.  Furthermore, it takes content, quality written content that to the average users appears as completely natural, but to a search engine it’s gold.
We had a proud moment at Tribus today, our Los Angeles, CA brand Partners Trust Real Estate Brokerage made it to position 6 for the term Los Angeles Real Estate Brokerage.  One might think this is a lengthy term, but there are 58 million results that were produced from this search.  We were able to achieve this after just 3 months of the site being live.

Some examples of changes that we’ve previously made at this time of year:

• Focus on alternative financing programs when subprime borrowers could no longer obtain credit
• Programs for short sales and foreclosed homes
• Adding drip email programs
• Deleting printed postcard programs

This is a great time of year to review the year that was in real estate both for you and in general.  While it’s not necessarily a good idea to go chasing every fad that’s out there, sometimes looking for a multi-year trend to capitalize on can be very profitable.  For example, short sales and foreclosures are at the forefront of our minds right now but in 3 years from now they might only be a blip in the total nationwide sales (likewise 3 years ago I wonder how many agents knew what a short sale was).  But I bet there are plenty of agents that survived this year because they went after this shift in business.

So as you review the tools and systems you have in place in your business, don’t take anything for granted.  Don’t just assume you need this product going forward.  Unfortunately, on many sales calls I am involved with, I speak with people who have spent thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars on products that just aren’t working for them.  They don’t want to leave it though because of the investment.  Understand the concept behind a sunk cost.  If you an make $100k by dumping your current product and investment $25k,  and your current product is only making you $25k on a $25k investment, you should obviously move to the new product (assuming you have the budget to make the move).

Which of your systems, tools and marketing are working?  Are you still spending $1000s on print advertising?  If so why?  Study after study proves broadcast printing that it’s a losing money effort.  In speaking with agents and brokers nationwide the only true return I see from any print advertising is farming a hyperlocal area.

Have you considered an E-Farming system?  Systems like Constant Contact, MailChimp, and MadMimi, offer low cost solutions that offer broadcast emailing.

Do you have a Customer Relationship Management software designed for Real Estate?  Setting reminders etc for client follow up can help you break the curse of most agents, that only 6% of clients return for a follow up sale.

Are you syndicating your listings?  Many of you probably are, but to just one or two sites.  Why not get your Seller’s the exposure they deserve?  Imagine the marketing you could do by increasing your online presence.

Do you offer virtual tours?  Did you know that listings on national websites get viewed 299% more than those without?

Why not take the next few weeks, and consider dumping some of your expenses and looking into new options that are available.  Review what worked for you and what didn’t.

Make a business plan for next year and try to stick with it.  Take a look at the article Linsey Planeta wrote over at AgentGenius on Planning for Your Next Year in Real Estate and creating obtainable goals.

How many times have you been let down by a promise by someone?

How many times has a company let down a promise to you?

• Were you promised amazing service at a restaurant and it was not delivered?
• Were you promised that the cable guy would be there from 8-noon and he didn’t arrive till 5:30?
• Were you told it would be one price and then when the bill came it was another?

It’s all about doing what you say you will do.  I know it’s debated, but I personally love flying Southwest Airlines.  Why? Because they deliver on their promise.  They are rarely late, I know how I’m going to board, I know that there is no food, I know that my bag flies free.  They have made it very clear what their brand promise is.  Cheap fares, decent service, efficiency.

What about real estate companies?  Many promise great service, how many agents within the company thoughactually deliver on that promise though?  If you are an agent are you working for a company that sets you up for brand promise failure?  Do they promise a technological edge and don’t deliver?  Do they promise to do everything it takes to sell your home and they don’t?

As a broker do you have agents that are poor agents that don’t follow through to build trust in your company?  Why?

In a world where trust is becoming even more scrutinized due to social media and the speed at which information is shared, why not starting building trust with your clients and potential clients by starting at your brand promise.