Using the Web and social media to sell real estate

I have been conducting a research on the most visited web sites for real state investors by using one of the most popular software tools for Google ranking evaluation: Market Samurai. They are invariably sites that provide a fair amount of free information for real estate investors and that have been around for some time.

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.

I have just read an article published on the blog of Llenrock Group, a real estate advisory and investment banking firm that deals with major projects and I quote: “The robustness of the commercial real estate industry and its ability to recover from the economic recession relies on foreign investors buying US real estate.” So the experts are already rising flags calling people attention to the need of foreign currency to bail out commercial real estate projects.

International investors coming to rescue US commercial real estate

The article provides a complex explanation on how you can protect a foreign investor money from currency exchange fluctuations and differences in taxation and political scenarios. It looks to me that the complexity is a bit too much, because we very well know that a deal has to be evaluated on the base of the location and the people who manage it and it is very difficult to rely only on some high level general mathematical formula. Anyway the above quote is meaningful and if you want to read the original article you can find it here. They also tell you that not only foreign capital is going to be necessary to bail out many commercial properties, but the owners of US real estate will have to put up with very high discounts because international investors will have to protect themselves from the resk posed by the current economy situation in the US.

I still quote from the article: “Investors view the US to be more risky than many blue chip companies, and several foreign countries.” So it looks there are going to be really tough times for commercial real estate, while residential is more attractive and simple to deal with even on an international level.

Roberto Mazzoni

P.S. If you are an investor or a Realtor who deals or wants to deal in international real estate, write me or even send me a guest posting.

Foreclosures are still abundant all around Florida and people wonder when the market will ever come back, but there is news for them. International real estate investors are making a big difference in some areas of the state and Sarasota has already begun to recover and has become a seller market in some specific neighborhoods.

A beautiful villa on the Gulf of Mexico - 3410 Flamingo Ave Sarasota

It is funny because the Sarasota market stopped abruptly few years ago when the bubble burst and suddenly prices plummeted to half the value just overnight. There was no gradual descent and now it is the first to pick up thanks to the heavy positive effect of European capital coming over. But why are Europeans preferring Sarasota to other locations in Florida or the US?

The city has definite an European flavor when you go to its key locations and there already major communities from different European countries. There are whole neighborhoods that are devoted to specific nationalities and languages. Like for example there is a huge and upscale gated community that has Italian street names, Italian restaurants, Italian tradesmen and so on. And you find also strong British, German, Polish, Russian communities.

Real estate professionals in Sarasota have heavily invested in services which are friendly to the international real estate investor: almost all major real estate brokers demand that their agents know and speak fluently at least two languages, there are attorneys and tax consultants that can provide specialized services to foreign nationals and you also find currency exchange services that can lock your exchange rate at a certain date when you are ready to buy real estate.

And, most importantly, you have banks that are willing to lend to foreign nationals, which is a rarity today in the US real estate market. The combination of all these elements, is pulling in huge amounts of capital from Europe and Realtors are frantically active in Sarasota. I have just been there and seen it personally. It is a good model that is worth imitating.

Roberto Mazzoni

I have just returned from an amazing evening presentation by Chris Krimitsos the founder of  The Wealth Building Annex in Tampa and a leading expert in how to train business men to use Internet Marketing without becoming Internet Marketers full time.

The Wealth Building Annex meeting on social media strategy.

It was a private session for just a limited number of people and I have come back with the feeling that something has changed in my whole perspective of how the Web will play a key role in the future evolution of business. First I will quote a statement that was emphasized during the event: “70% of business comes from referral”, which means it comes from word of mouth by your existing or previous customers.

Social media makes it easier for the word of mouth to spread, but the real connection happens between real people who have been involved in real business. Gone is the time (or soon gone) where you just use some technology trick or technique to gather always new potential customers and then leaving them behind to find some more (high churn based on ample availability of leads with little competition).

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One of the key concepts that you’ll get from some real estate experts I that you should start from your own back yard, meaning first get familiar with the market you have close at hand and then spread your reach gradually as you go, moving further and further.

International real estate businesses are built through partnerships

It is definitely a best business practice if you are considering doing some major rehab work. It is such a labor intensive activity that you need to get a solid understanding and control of the activities by either being involved directly in the work or monitoring very closely those who are performing it for you. Therefore you don’t want to add long travels in the initial burden of learning the trade, learning your market and building your team.

But when you bring it to an international real estate perspective, you rapidly see that you can’t really use the “back yard” concept because your investor or buyer will not be familiar with your specific market and therefore will have no specific interest in it but she will rather look from the best market that can provide her the best return with the minimum effort.
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