Facebook can kill your Realtor business.

As a matter of fact, Facebook can drain a lot of your resources and can jeopardize your business entirely because you will be basing your major marketing efforts on a platform that you don’t control, that keeps changing and that could eventually kick you out if they deem that your activity is contrary to their policies. This is the warning we get from street-smart Facebook marketers.

So, do your really need to be on Facebook? Well, first of all you need to decide if you want to have a personal face to your business because Facebook is first and foremost about personal information and experience. It’s about sharing amongst individuals independent of their business.

And you definitely should not use your personal profile to pitch your properties and to look for business. You would be most likely in violation of Facebook’s term of service and even if you build your own Fan Page then you need to drive traffic and people to it and there will be a lot of exploration and testing on your part to establish how to make it work well for you. And in the end you will have increased the power of Facebook but you will have no intimate and real control on what you have built.

There is no clear and defined path on how to market successfully on Facebook, since the platform is still evolving continuously. Stay clear of gurus offering you a “system” that will work every time. I would definitely advise you to have your own personal profile on Facebook just to secure your name and expand your personal Web presence, but when when it comes to allocating your time to market your business online, I would start from building a basic presence you can control, either with your own blog or your own page on a general platform offered to you by your broker; by your Realtor association or some of the many online services for investors.

Secure a spot you can fully control and then make it known in places that have already a robust traffic of buyers: Craigslist, somebody else’s blog, on your business card, anywhere you can capture some meaningful traffic. Then, you can also add some Facebook marketing when the time is right and when you have already a platform you can control and you can drive people to. Remember, the first objective is to build a list of customer. Your own list. A list you can truly own and control.

Roberto Mazzoni

Why Facebook can kill your Realtor business is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Realtors with empty social media profiles have also empty hands.

Not everybody understands it and not everybody cares, but what I found out is astonishing. At least half of the Realtors who have an account on Twitter have not been publishing a single message for one year! Could you imagine, registering your account, putting your face out there along with a bio that clearly state you are a Realtor or a real estate investor and then don’t say a word for the following 12 months?

These people evidently don’t understand that a bad presence on the web is going to recoil on them. It would be much better for them to consolidate their presence, removing the profiles they can’t keep active and reducing their actions to what they really care to maintain updated, if anything. If myou can’t be there every day you can at least automate some content publishing so that you don’t seem to be totally devoid of things to say. There are free tools can do it for you.

Evidently the old approach of placing a sign near the property and wait for someone to call stays with them also in the on line world. Investors are a bit more active better, but not much. You can find some very big names, some “guru” or real estate investing let’s say, that with account that have been silent for months.

We all know that Twitter ha still to prove itself as a money making platform, pretty much like most of social media when it comes to pure selling, but it is also proven by now that most of the activity you do on social media and blogging is aimed at procuring leads and contacts.

Once you have the leads, you then develop business through a regular personal contact. What would you think if a customer was coming by your office every day, for one year, and always saw the sign “Ill be right back?”

I guess he would stop passing by pretty soon and would know that you really don’t care for your business.

Nobody is forced to be on social media. As a matter of fact, there are investors and Realtors who are doing perfectly fine with old style referral systems; but at least they have the good sense of not even trying to pretend to be there.

Possibly some people might even figure that they would not be found out, but today your have software and services that can give you the whole history of a person’s presence on social media. A complete picture of his activity and “value”. And it is like having a personal score that anybody can look at in a few minutes and build an idea about us even before they get in touch with us.

So possibly some of these Realtors that have a totally empty and dead account might wonder how comes nobody is calling them and that they are not getting so many leads as it used to be. They could believe that social media is not working for them. Well actually it does, but in reverse, shifting people away from them and into the hands of their competitors who maintain a decent social media presence.

This subject is important for any marketing positioning strategy in the real estate field and other business fields. Today people look much more at who your are and can immediately find out by resorting to the master of all referral systems: Google and see what comes up about you. If nothing comes up at all or if they don’t like what they see, you have gotten bad publicity right thene and you have lost business. Something to think about if you want to survive the crisis.

Roberto Mazzoni

Twitter, the big demise of the “accomplished” Realtor is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Burning credibility in real estate tile equals burning money.

What is apparently going to happen is that there will be some kind of settlement with previous owners if the mortgage papers are missing, for example previous owners could be condoned the so called “deficiency judgement” that is the bank will formally renounce to try to collect from them the remaining balance of the loan and the owner will not get a 1099 (a tax income statement) so that he will not have to pay taxes on the money she has “gained” by not paying the loan in full (see the original article from the Orlando Sentinel).

Another outcome could be that present owners could have an easier time in renegotiating the existing loan terms. But what happens to the buyer on the other side? Let’s say that a bank forecloses without having the proper paperwork and there is no evidence that shows that they do have an interest in the property, they might still be able to negotiate the existing owner out of the house, but there can be a serious cloud on title for the new owner coming in.

A great percentage of real estate being offered on the market today, particularly in Florida, is connected to a foreclosure, therefore sound foreclosure paperwork is a must in order to maintain and re-establish credibility for local and international real estate investors. It cannot be simply reduced to a financial settlement between private parties (the bank and the current owner for example), but the federal government has to step in and define ways that will ensure future owners protection of their own rights (see Foreclosure Fraud For Dummies, 5: The Necessity of Government Action and Ways Out of The Crisis).

If not properly addressed, this can be a far more serious crisis than the real estate bubble of 2007. By the time the United States real estate market loses credibility in its ability to defend title and to warranty private ownership, international buyers are going to flee to other more secure destinations and the foreclosure glut is going to take much longer to clean up.

Here is a summary of the consequences that can ensue out of the mismanagement of loan documentation:

1) Government investigations: “the various parties accused of misleading the court could be investigated for fraud if there is evidence of systematic action designed to improperly speed up the foreclosure process at the expense of the defaulting homeowners.”

2) Civil suits: “there are likely to be two potential classes of plaintiffs pursuing civil suits against the banks and others for their roles: first, homeowners who earlier lost their properties to foreclosure in which questionable documents were filed, and second, title insurance companies that may be on the hook for claims by purchasers of foreclosed properties who now have a cloud on the title to their house. Each may claim that the faulty documentation in the foreclosure cases caused them harm.”

3) Mass litigation: “the potential liability for a violation includes triple damages and – music to any lawyer’s ears.

To get the full scope of the thunderstorm in the making, you can read The Gathering Storm Over Foreclosures. The effects aren’t going to be immediate. It usually takes 6 months before buyers and investors realize the tide is turning, but once is turned and the long standing trustworthiness of real estate title in the US gets tarnished, a major shift in the market is likely to occur.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. if you know or are aware of real solutions being developed in this area please share.

Ready-set-stop! Thawing the foreclosure crisis is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

The commercial real estate market is changing deeply.

Find out how the property is going to be assessed and how the short sale process could happen in this case.

There is an interesting interaction between the court, the appraiser, the bank and all the parties involved.

Roberto Mazzoni

Is there a stigma on commercial real estate bankruptcies? is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Top ten real estate sites.

Site #1: Creative Real Estate Online – creonline.com
It provides hundreds of real estate investment articles divided by topic and signed by some pretty well known investors and info-marketers. Some of the articles carry no date so it is a bit difficult to establish if the information is still current, but in many cases the concepts given are of general nature an applicable to any market. The site has also a store for digital products produced by the very authors featured in the articles. This was one of the two first sites I encountered when I started my real estate career and helped me get oriented and I believe it can do the same for other investors.

Site #2 & 3: REI Club the article section (position 2) and home page (position 3)
As of today you find 748 free real estate investment articles divided by topics and authors. Here you find again several of the most prolific info marketer in the real estate arena and you can read some brief article that introduces you eventually to a course each one of them is selling. The content is similar to CREOnline and here you find also a substantial collection of free e-books and a glossary, which is fairly extensive. Again there is no date in the articles so you will have to figure by yourself what is still current, but most of the information is general enough to be usable in any market as an introduction. This is again one of the two sites I looked up when I began my investing career. The site is very well ranked and covers two of the top positions.

Site #4: LifeStyleUnlimited
This site looks more like a blog and has a definitely more modern look as compared to the two previous ones. It is connected to social media and each article is dated and is complemented sometimes with audio. The articles stand on their own and there is no immediate attempt to sell you something at the end of each one of them. We could consider this one to be the most popular blog in the industry. They provide mentoring and training and have a video as well as an audio section, plus two podcast channels: one for audio and one for video. They are base din Texas and provide a free starting guide they have developed. Finally they offer a membership program (with a fairly high price tag).

Site #5: MSN Money Central Real Estate
The Microsoft flagship Internet portal has a solid section on real estate investing and it is definitely an area you want to check you if you are looking for some “independent” type of information. The articles are written by reporters or bloggers. So they might not be investors themselves, as different from the previous but they are giving advice to normal people about investing opportunities and dangers.

Site #6: The Creative Investor
This is a community site where you can contribute with comments, where you can pitch your properties and where you can read articles contributed by the members of the community. A necessary destination for anyone operating in real estate investing.

Site #7: The Wall Street Journal section on Real Estate
It doesn’t need presentation. Just note that it is at the seventh position.

Site #8: Investing Secrets
This is a blog published by a single author, Scott Roemermann, who is evidently expert both in real estate investing as in blogging and Internet Marketing. The site has several articles on different topics, but not too many. Scott leverages Twitter to have more than daily updates and for getting a higher ranking.

Site #9: The Bryan Ellis Real Estate Letter
This blog provides articles on some investing strategies and some guru reviews. And the real core of the operation is the newsletter as mentioned in the title of the site. Ellis is an expert in Search Engine Optimization and therefore knows how to bring people to his site.

Site #10: John Reed and his guru rating
This site is totally devoted to unmasking fake real estate gurus and their shameful results. No wonder it has a high traffic.

You can use this guide to help your real estate education but you can also use it to see how a market is evolving online, starting from traditional, content showcase sites, to blogs and review sites.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. Take some time to explore these sites, you will learn something even in you are not in real estate.

The top ten sites for real estate investing is a post from: Using the Web and social media to sell real estate