Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

Every single Realtor and real estate investor should be on Facebook, right? Every real estate brokerage and agent should have a Fan Page or business page, isn’t it? The moment you have your presence and your have setup up your page you are ready to gather new business by the truck loads. This is at least what some the new born Internet “marketing gurus” tell us.

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

Realtor formal training is often very dry, focusing on legal issues and contracts. Sometime you can get private training on prospecting and closing techniques and some of the usual motivational stuff, maybe sponsored by your broker. Yet today for closing on a deal and for building a customer base one needs to be more than just very good at the technical or communication aspects, one must be able to put together everything that is needed to make the transaction happen and to make the two ends meet, WHATEVER it takes.

Realtors need to become artists in their profession

The Realtors that close deals regularly know this very well. It is often something unexpected that holds up a sale, and when you hear all these “gurus” talking about their systems for prospecting and selling on automatic one cannot refrain a giggle.

You can delegate most of the work and leverage the work of other people for sure, but it is going to be people not systems. But what people again? The people who add emotion into the the action. Sometimes you meet Realtors that are very dry themselves. Professional, but boring to say the least.

I understand that selling or buying a house can be a serious business, but chances are that the more serious you make it the less it is going to happen. You don’t need to ridicule the house of course or any of the parties, but you definitely need to put some emotion into the deal. That is what people are responding to today.

But let’s not confuse true emotion with what they call “emotional labor”: the display of fake emotions for the sole purpose of obtaining an end. You know, like one of those stereotyped smiles you see around.

When you can display a real genuine emotion, you can tie up with the person in front of you. An emotion he can respond to. You are liable to see some amazing results and what before was impossible now becomes possible.

So more true in the web and social media arena where people are attracted by emotional factors and “artistic“ factors more than anything else. I was befriended just yesterday by a Realtor on Facebook. The next day I got in my Facebook e-mail a request from her to like her Fan page. She would not try to even connect, not even provide me the link to it. I was supposed to search for it myself.

No this is definitely the wrong way to go about things. This is again the export in social media of the old habit of going around in meetings and exchanging stacks of business cards without ever really meeting anybody.

This is not going to work anymore. There are tons of mediocre Realtors and real estate investors out there. Why should people chose one of them? Because they bring them a better deal? Because they ask for a lower commission? There can be an art in everything you do, even a real estate transaction. There is no manual to follow but you are expected to create your own . Mediocrity is going out. Art is coming in.

Roberto Mazzoni

According to a research published the the NAR (National Assiciation of Realtors) for 2009, most Realtors have a web site for presenting their own listings (63%). Actually most of them had sites active for more than 5 years (57%) and the percentage of Realtors using Web for promoting their business is growing. Yet only 3% of their business actually is coming from their online presence, how comes?

Managing their web site and social media presence can be overwhelming for Realtors and real estate investors if they don't have the right strategies and tools.

Lot of effort and in some cases also a substantial investment of time an money and so little results? It turns out that the majority of contacts with prospects and customers still happen through e-mail or text messages and the phone, but the site is recognized by many as an essential part of their business and yet it is not performing well at all.

It turns out that there is a major shift going on in the culture of a typical real estate buyer and of the typical investor, and Realtors, at the same time, need to keep up with it. It isn’t all about the merit of the individual property anymore, but it becomes more and more a relationship issue.

When we look at the figures, we see that the Realtors that fare better, much better, are those which have been in the business longer (at least 16 years) and who get a substantial amount of their business from past customers and from referrals. But even they can improve their performance particularly in terms of time spent to cultivate those referrals.

So how can a new investor or Realtor coming on the scene shorten the “learning curve” and start getting referrals and customers without working almost full time for just about 8,000 dollars a year? That’s how much a regular Realtor grosses during his first two years in business and it is no wonder that half of those who join the profession for the first time plan to leave it soon.

The problem here boils down to how you use the site and what kind of information you put in there. Of course listings are important, but I doubt a customer would need to go to an individual Realtor’s site to view  the listings. You have Realtor.com, Zillow.com and a host of other sites where you can get comparisons and and again it very seldom happens that the agent actually sells the property he is listing: it is usually sold by some other Realtor who brings in the buyer.

So why use the site just for the listings, when we already know this isn’t something customers are looking for and it isn’t what is selling anyway. Indeed lot of effort is put by Realtors in social media activities as well, but again there is no set pattern of presence, a little integration strategy and very little work on personal branding.

If I were to be giving a listing to a Realtor I would like to know what he would do for me to facilitate the sale. If I were  planning to purchase an investment property, maybe from a distance or even from abroad, I would expect my Relator to be competent and trustworthy.

The lack of personal branding is even more dangerous for new Realtors who don’t have past clients voicing for them and that cannot bring to the table a substantial amount of transactions, of experience and accreditations.

So again there is a huge space of improvement possible in the field of real estate, both for investors and Realtors looking for buyers and sellers. It is a matter of integrating and finding out what’s working and testing it as they move along. The current statistics tell us that it is definitely not working: only 3% of transactions are coming from the web. It is a clear indication that change is needed and the sooner the better.

Roberto Mazzoni

Today I share the content of a very interesting article from Robert Hann, an entrepreneur now turned marketing consultant with a specific focus on real estate. The matter discussed here is whether you should be using a blog to promote yourself as an agent or an investor as compared to purely SEO strategies and tools.

Is the real estate blog really dead?

Should you provide valuable content that improves your image but drains your time and energy with no apparent immediate result or should you just focus on getting on the first page in Google no matter what the content and then try to convert your leads? My personal answer is that you probably need to do both, but the article describes very clearly that while SEO is the real deal when it comes to business generation,  a full fledged SEO strategy is well beyond the means of the average real estate investor or agent.

Also interestingly, Hann devalues the hyper-local approach that we have seen evolving in the last few years. We have been invited by the Internet Marketing “gurus” to go local, to focus on local search keywords. here is what Hann has to say about it: “When a Big Company decides that it wants to compete in SEO for some desirable keywords, it will simply outspend the little guy and just crush him.  The focus on hyperlocal and “long tail” strikes me as the result: small companies and individual agents pick up the crumbs that the big guys let fall from the table. In other words, their SEO-based strategies are viable only insofar as some Big Guy allows it to be viable.” (read the full article by Robert Hann)

So even if SEO has a key effect on your ranking it cannot be the backbone of your marketing effort as a little entrepreneur. Yet even blogging is not enough, and here we have the opinion of Garron Selliken, a technologist and broker in Portland: “When comes to generating leads from search, the past, present and future of real estate sites is SEO, not blogging, transparency, authenticity and finding your voice.  The way to get clients is to show up where the most concentrated group of most motivated buyers/sellers are hanging out and ask for the business. This is why SEO focused content kills blogging…it is targeted directly at the relevant phrases and lands on pages designed to satisfy needs AND convert into conversation.” (the full article by Selliken is well worth reading).

Gahlord Dewald, a SEO consultant, adds more weight in reducing the value of blogging as a business platform in this article: “Online business strategy and blogging” He says that “The real estate blog may have never been alive in the first place” and comments: “Though I don’t have any data to back it up, I’d wager that for every solid, compelling and meaningful real estate blog there are twenty zombie real estate blogs: packed with stolen/poorly crafted/duplicate content that is either devoid of purpose or stuffed to the gills with SEO keywords”.

Do you think this would be applicable for many other fields in addition to real estate? I do

Roberto Mazzoni

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The National Association or Realtors reports that home sales have been up, nationwide, for two months in a row. Historically-low mortgage rates result in mortgage payments that sometimes are lower than rent. Indeed the national average commitment rate for a 30 year fixed rate conventional loan fell to 4.35 per cent in September 2010, which is a record low. As a comparison, the rate was 5.06 per cent in September of 2009.

Houses have never been so affordable as today.

Lawrence Yun, chief economist at NAR, states: “A housing recovery is taking place but will be choppy at times depending on the duration and impact of a foreclosure moratorium. But the overall direction should be a gradual rising trend in home sales with buyers responding to historically low mortgage interest rates and very favorable affordability conditions.” A decade ago mortgage rates were almost a double of what they are today and they are about 1.5% lower than the peak of the housing boom in 2005 and prices are 22% lower than in that time frame (in some states like Florida prices have been pretty much cut in half, really).

What is even more important, housing affordability conditions are today 60% higher than during the housing boom so it has become an even stronger buyer’s market especially for families with long-terms plan that will reap the benefits of the low rates not only now but for all the many years to come (see the original article from NAR).

The glut of foreclosure is still keeping the market down in terms of median prices, but the recovery signs are visible also in new homes sales that have risen 6.6% in September, reducing the overall inventory from 8.6 to 8 % of new homes monthly supply (see the article from Agent Genius).

Roberto Mazzoni