Part 1: Hot strategies from Real Estate Connect
Bernice Ross
Inman News
During
the last week of July, the movers, shakers and innovators of our
industry met in San Francisco for Real Estate Connect. You may have
been reading about all the amazing new trends and technologies -- now
it's time to examine how those innovations can improve your bottom
line.
Our industry is
spending millions on Web advertising. With so many new technologies,
it's hard to know what will be the most effective. What's clear,
however, is our industry's slow ability to adapt. According to Burrell
and Associates, only 13 percent of the agents are using sponsored or
paid search. Translated, this means that advertising on the Web is a
smart investment because 87 percent of your competition is still not
there.
Furthermore,
while only 1 percent of today's buyers purchase properties they saw
advertised in a newspaper, about 25 percent find the house they will
purchase on the Web. Estimates place the percentage of real estate
advertising budgets spent on print advertising at about 80 percent.
This means that most real estate professionals are throwing good
advertising dollars away to achieve a miniscule return of only 1
percent. Nevertheless, poor Web strategies can cost you thousands of
dollars with no return. Specifically, the average cost of a single
clickthrough for the term "real estate" is $1.03. For the term "FSBO"
it's $1.16. It often takes hundreds or even thousands of clicks to
generate a closed sale. Consequently, pay-per-click or sponsored links
may not be the best route to obtain the greatest return on your
advertising dollar.
In
order to gain a competitive advantage using the new technology tools,
it's important to understand how consumers use the Web. Michael Yang,
the senior director of business development for Yahoo!, outlined the
four primary areas of Web activity. Those four areas include
communication, information/entertainment, commerce/shopping and search
activity. The two that apply specifically to the real estate industry
are information/entertainment and search. Yang believes that search is
the most important. Within the search area, Yang discussed three
"buckets." Those include Web search (i.e. Yahoo!, Google, MSN);
vertical search, including Trulia, RealEstate.com and mapping
solutions; and classified search, including Craigslist, Oodle and
Edgeio.
What can you do
to reduce your Web costs and obtain maximum exposure? The first step is
to make use of Web sites that address the "buckets" Yang outlined. The
great news is that you can post on many of these at no charge to you.
One of my favorites is www.postlets.com.
This site posts you on seven different sites, including Craigslist,
Trulia and Oodle. (Trulia is a vertical search engine that directs its
visitors back to the listing broker's site. Oodle is a classified
advertising site that does essentially the same thing.) A new player is
Edgeio.com. They are also a classified Web advertiser. Their ads pull
from Postlets, as well as Point2Agent.com. For properties priced above
$1 million, www.UniqueGlobalEstates
is a free multiple listing service for estate properties. They
currently have 50,000 listings internationally. Since these sites cost
nothing and refer visitors to your Web site, this is a no-brainer step
that every single listing agent should take. Remember, the Web is like
a haystack. The more needles you have in the stack, the more likely
visitors are to find you.
A different approach is to go for organic placement. According to Andrew Coleman of www.LeadQual.com,
most referrals come from organic search rather than paid search. When
it comes to organic placement, content is the key. Specifically, you
must niche various landing pages on your Web site for specific market
segments that you serve. For example, rather than going with "San
Francisco homes for sale" as a search term, it would be smarter to have
a specific landing page devoted to "San Francisco Victorian homes."
Load the page with data about Victorian homes in San Francisco. Topics
could include articles on how to restore a Victorian home, information
from the local historical society, advertisements from vendors who
specialize in providing historically accurate fixtures, etc. You could
also host a blog where readers could comment on their favorite
Victorian home, pitfalls to avoid when remodeling an older home, as
well as reliable contractors. The more data and the more interactivity
that you provide on your site, the better the search engines like you.
This in turn leads to a higher organic search position.
Another
challenge Connect addressed is how to shift our expectations from
waiting for the phone to ring to going to where our clients now
congregate. To learn more about how to generate more leads from your
Web marketing efforts, don't miss next week's article.
Bernice Ross, co-owner of Realestatecoach.com, has written a new book, "Waging War on Real Estate's Discounters," available online. She can be reached at bernice@realestatecoach.com.