In real estate, some of the easiest business to win is generally from your own network: your family, your friends, and friends of theirs.
After that, you’re generally prospecting against other agents who have their own networks, so you’re essentially in the position of stealing business away from their networks.
So what happens when sites like Facebook help people keep in better touch with their networks? It certainly seems possible that real estate agents engaged in sites like Facebook will have an easier time closing business with a larger percentage of their network.
I searched for “real estate” within Facebook after logging into my account just now. After doing that, I clicked the “people” tab and found out that I’m currently friends with 20 real estate agents. Among those agents, I have between zero and 21 mutual friends. Some I know fairly well and some I went to high school or college with. To me, this is a reminder that real estate agents advertising to me have virtually no shot at winning my business away from one of the 20 agents I’m connected with on Facebook. And, of course, there are other agents I know well who aren’t on Facebook yet.
(This isn’t to say that all 20 of those agents have equal levels of experience, skills, or work the same geographies.)
My 21st friend in real estate. The one who knows what she’s doing but isn’t on Facebook yet, is missing out on a big opportunity. She’s no longer getting her name in front of me at the same degree 20 other friends are. And I’m just one of hundreds of people in her network that she’s not touching, virtually, on a regular basis, for free.
Going outside of my friend network doesn’t disappoint either. I can still find out way more about prospective agents when I research them within Facebook than I can on their own websites. Why? Because they share so much more about themselves, such as where they went to school, who their friends are, what other jobs they’ve had, where they like to travel, their tastes in movies and music, and dozens to thousands of photos of themselves and their friends. None of this can’t be done on their main business sites, but they don’t seem to realize that they should.
If you’re not engaging with your current network through online tools like Facebook, you’re opening up the door for all of the other real estate agents they know.
If you’re not sharing information about yourself online through Facebook and on your business site, you’re making things easy for your competitors who do.
According to Zillow.com, the home I purchased last fall has increased by 70% in less than a year:
While I wish that was so, I have a hunch that any real estate agent I talked to would collapse if I suggested listing the property for what Zillow suggests.
There are two upward spikes in the green line on the graph that represents what Zillow has thought my home was worth over the past decade.
The first, a year ago, is when I purchased the house for WAY more than Zillow said it was worth at the time.
The second is when Zillow decided that the house was worth WAY more than I paid for it.
So which is it?
Neither.
But, if you look at a large enough set of data, Zillow’s numbers are probably pretty good. Notice the trend of the Yellow line. That represents the median price of homes in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
But here’s the problem: I already know that my home is a bit above average if you take the entire city into consideration. You don’t need to show me a graph to explain that concept to me. What I care about is my OWN house, and I know that data is broken.
So what exactly is the value of this data beyond inspiration for a blog post?
Matt Bailey, founder of web marketing firm Sitelogic, has been spending some time on real estate websites lately, and let loose with a rant earlier today about his disappointment with the state of online RE sites. One of his main concerns: poor quality property photos:
Online Marketing in Real Estate - Fast Start to Stagnation
If I had my house on the market, I would be going ballistic on my Realtor, as there are no excuses for :
* Low res, pixilated photos
* Blurry pictures
* Pictures of toilets and mirrors
* Less than 3 pictures uploaded for any listing
* Cameras held at an angle, making everything look like it’s on a slope
* pictures of beds, which I am not buying
* No pictures of the items listed in the description. If there is a workshop – take a picture!everything seems to be leaning to the right
* no labeling of photos that have been uploaded
* No interior pictures!?!?
* Snow on the ground – and it’s late May
* The same three photos – repeated 2-3 times.
* Misspelled adjectives – “Emaculate Condition!” (really?)
Matt, if that’s your biggest complains, you’re being generous, since many many properties still contain NO PHOTOS.
We’ve studied this at WhereToLive.com, and have found that online marketing performance of real estate agents is very polarized. Even when it comes to fundamental tasks like publishing property photos. They either get it and do a great job publishing a large number of high quality photos or they do next to nothing. We see very little participation between those extremes.
While it’s tremendously frustrating for home buyers, it does provide excellent, objective, information for home sellers: You can judge who understands online marketing based on how they market other listings.
Before contracting with an agent, take a look at their current listings. Do they have photos? None? Run. Some? Would they make it past Matt’s criteria outlined above?
An agent can do a lot more than this to market your property, but if they’re stumbling at fundamental steps like this, beware.
I think this is particularly valuable when considering working with a friend, family member, or close acquaintance. This is a very large financial transaction, so working with someone you know can be reassuring, but will they market your home in a competitive manner? Reviewing current (and when available, past) listings is a good measure of whether they’ll marketing your home in a professionally competitive manner. While it’s great to give someone close to you your business, if you were to lose a couple percent on your closing price due to poor marketing, you’d be better off buying them some very (very) nice dinners for your friend while choosing with a superior home marketer in your market for your real estate transaction.
Michael Wurzer raises some interesting points in a post on how real estate shoppers discuss home listings today.
He explains that real estate is a different animal than the latest consumer gadget, which makes commenting on individual properties more difficult since fewer people have hands-on experience with a property than the latest iPod.
However, it seems clear that Wurzer knows conversations are happening today. Just not on real estate websites:
How Do Consumers Discuss Listings Today?
I do think there are great opportunities for authentic conversations on-line about particular listings and, as Rob suggests, starting gingerly is best. Some of these conversations are already occurring on-line through showing systems that allow the agents to share comments with each other and their clients from particular showings. Expanding on these systems is an obvious way to extend the conversation.
Personally, I think people are having more conversations regarding buying decisions today than at any point in human history. Why? Because more conversations are asynchronous than ever before. Drop someone you know who’s in the know a note via email, SMS, IM, Twitter, etc., and get a response from them when they get a chance.
For example, a friend of mine just shot me a quick question about a grind & brew coffee maker I own. He’s considering buying one as well. Seeing that I was available through IM, he shot me a quick note, and within 2 minutes he had more confidence in his buying decision (which happened to be to NOT buy something he was considering in this case).
This conversation never would have happened without technology. It could have happened via SMS or email, but wouldn’t have happened if he had to wait until the next time he saw me to ask me the question.
Collaborative Shopping
Buying doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In the case of real estate, people are constantly passing around information that effects who they’re going to work with, which houses are worth investing time to visit in person, and which companies to use for insurance, title, etc.
Because of this, an agent or broker fails if they only manage to impress a prospective customer with their website. They also need to impress the prospect’s spouse, friends, and family to whom they send links for a 2nd, 3rd - 10th opinion.
Michael Wurzer raises some interesting points in a post on how real estate shoppers discuss home listings today.
He explains that real estate is a different animal than the latest consumer gadget, which makes commenting on individual properties more difficult since fewer people have hands-on experience with a property than the latest iPod.
However, it seems clear that Wurzer knows conversations are happening today. Just not on real estate websites:
How Do Consumers Discuss Listings Today?
I do think there are great opportunities for authentic conversations on-line about particular listings and, as Rob suggests, starting gingerly is best. Some of these conversations are already occurring on-line through showing systems that allow the agents to share comments with each other and their clients from particular showings. Expanding on these systems is an obvious way to extend the conversation.
Personally, I think people are having more conversations regarding buying decisions today than at any point in human history. Why? Because more conversations are asynchronous than ever before. Drop someone you know who’s in the know a note via email, SMS, IM, Twitter, etc., and get a response from them when they get a chance.
For example, a friend of mine just shot me a quick question about a grind & brew coffee maker I own. He’s considering buying one as well. Seeing that I was available through IM, he shot me a quick note, and within 2 minutes he had more confidence in his buying decision (which happened to be to NOT buy something he was considering in this case).
This conversation never would have happened without technology. It could have happened via SMS or email, but wouldn’t have happened if he had to wait until the next time he saw me to ask me the question.
Collaborative Shopping
Buying doesn’t happen in a vacuum. In the case of real estate, people are constantly passing around information that effects who they’re going to work with, which houses are worth investing time to visit in person, and which companies to use for insurance, title, etc.
Because of this, an agent or broker fails if they only manage to impress a prospective customer with their website. They also need to impress the prospect’s spouse, friends, and family to whom they send links for a 2nd, 3rd - 10th opinion.
If you’ve ever seriously shopped for a home online, you’ve probably had some frustration with the search process. For example, it can be very difficult to find out how long a house has been on the market, what the original listing price was, or when the property was repriced.
As someone who works for a company that builds real estate websites, I’d like to point out that the bottleneck is not a technology issue.
Teresa Boardman offers some insight into what data she, as a Realtor, can see in her local MLS system that generally isn’t accessible on consumer websites:
The MLS, or RMLS that we use here in Minnesota tracks CDM, or cumulative days on market for all homes. Unfortunatly the CDM is not available to the general public, but then neither is DOM, or “days on market”. For buyers I say if you want to know how many times a home has been on the market in the past year and at what prices then please call a Realtor, if you are working directly with the seller, ask the seller.
This is such a strange situation. Personally, I find value in working with real estate agents due to their knowledge of the real estate transaction process, home evaluations, and appraisal skills. I feel like I’m wasting their time and my own if I have to ask them to look up data points like days on market for me.
What’s even stranger is that most consumers don’t know what data Realtors have access to beyond what’s found on public real estate websites. I’m sure most consumers believe their seeing the entire MLS when they’re surfing their local agent or broker’s site. If that’s the case, Realtors are doing a poor job marketing the fact that they are gatekeepers to valuable data.
What’s your take? Do Realtors benefit from withholding listing data from public websites?
Update: Glenn Roberts has a related post on the Inman blog about who has a right to use the term MLS in their domain names.
Redfin’s new Real Estate Scientist service plans to crunch info and report on trends they see in the home listing data they deal with on a daily basis.
One nugget that jumped out at me was the listing traffic benefits gained from pricing a home on a round number rather than a dollar higher or lower:
We’ve tried to put this information to good use. We know that listings that debuted on Friday rather than Thursday drew 7.7% more visitors; that a vacant home increased the odds of a price reduction by 9.5%; that, because of how real estate websites filter on price, a listing priced at $351,001 got as much as 7.1% less traffic than one priced a dollar lower. A team of agents, engineers, statisticians and writers worked together to produce the report. Some of their findings are surprising, while others confirm conventional wisdom, which has value too.
This seems to make perfect sense since listing sites tend to allow users to filter by fixed increments. By listing a home at $350,000, you’ll show up in searches for $300,000-350,000 AND searches for $350,000 - $400,000.
But what about the psychology of pricing? Would the house appear cheaper to buyers if it was listed for $349,999?
I haven’t looked into this much, but here’s my gut take on whether this effects actual home sales: Nobody buys a house at the low end of what they can afford. It just doesn’t happen. So gaining additional traffic from the $350,000 and up crowd isn’t going to bring in the type of person who will seriously consider buying the home.
Reggie Nicolay at Technology for Real Estate has an interesting post title about how Yahoo Pipes could be used to refine real estate search. The post itself does more to explain Yahoo Pipes than how it could be applied to real estate, so I’ll try to build upon the concept here.
A quick refresher on Yahoo Pipes: This is a service from Yahoo that makes it relatively easy to filter content from RSS feeds, combine content from multiple feeds into a new feeds, and many other interesting things that allow you to process information in fresh new and exciting ways. Examples include filtering a group blog’s RSS feed for posts by a specific author, combining a Netflix Feed with an Amazon Affiliate program to create recommendations with affiliate sales, or filter out posts from an author on topics that don’t interest you.
How could this be applied to real estate?
First, few real estate sites have RSS feeds today, to this is an explanation of how to make a technology that doesn’t yet exist in real estate better. Strange as that may sound, the technology itself isn’t new any more. It’s just that real estate is a bit behind when it comes to syndicating content on the web.
Now, imagine you run a search on your favorite real estate site. You’ll probably drill down to an area that interests you using either a map or a zip code query. Perhaps a neighborhood search if you know the names of neighborhoods in the area you’re searching. At that point, you may save that search and subscribe to an RSS feed so you can receive the most recent matching results in your favorite RSS reader.
The problem: You’ll probably receive some false positive results. While you can easily select appropriate specs for things like beds, bath, and price range, it’s tougher to nail down the geography on sites on the market today. For example, I’ve been searching for a home in a narrow North/South area of Minneapolis along the Mississippi River. No site makes it easy for me to select a narrow strip 3-4 blocks wide so I end up with receiving false positive results from properties East or West of my self-defined target area.
Yahoo Pipes to the Rescue
Yahoo Pipes could help clean things up by allowing me to filter out terms that are generating false positives. For example, I could filter out the street names outside of my area. And in my case, I’m interested in living on the Minneapolis side of the river, so I could filter out listings where the city equals “St. Paul.”
Now, I’ll receive new results less often, but when I do they’ll be more relevant to me. Signal to noise ratio improved. Higher satisfaction.
Over time, real estate sites will figure out how to provide more control over search criteria. But for now, Yahoo Pipes is a great way to fine tune your real estate RSS feeds.
Malok asked in the comments on my pre-Inman Connect Conference post for some insights. This is a shot at that.
The theme this year, as I mentioned before, was blogging. And they did a great job covering the topic. Real estate agents who’ve used blogging as a marketing strategy gave testimonials on how much business it has generated for them. And the numbers were impressive.
Sessions covered a wide array of blogging angles, from panels of real estate bloggers sharing tips on how they deal with comments, what they choose to blog about, what makes for a good real estate blogging voice, etc. Great stuff.
And, of course, many companies were on site offering tools to help real estate companies and agents get started blogging.
Sitting there watching non-bloggers learn about a marketing tactic that costs little to nothing and is capable of generating significant amounts of new business was an interesting experience. While every experienced blogger I heard speak made a point of mentioning that blogging takes time and can be hard work, that seemed to be glossed over by the audience who focused on the dollar signs.
While some of the attendees likely went home, started a blog, and found that it was a good fit for them, others surely started a blog that’s already growing stale. That’s not a big deal, since the cost of getting started is so low. In fact, one company was offering free t-shirts to people who created a new blog on their platform.
My suggestion to agents who caught the blogging bug at the conference was to start by reading other blogs and commenting on other sites. It’s hard to find a voice for yourself before you have a feel for the flow of a blog’s content, understand comments and commenting etiquette, and learn what seems to work for others when it comes to building an audience.
The other impression I got was that some people seemed to think that they’d already missed the blogging wave. Perhaps they think that once it’s the topic of a conference, the secrets out of the bag and the returns are diminishing. Personally, I don’t think that’s the case at all in real estate since it’s such a locally focused business. If you’re a real estate agent, can you honestly say that the area you work is overwrought with great real estate blogging coverage? I doubt it.
Overall, it was a great experience, and will hopefully lead to more great real estate blogs across the country.
Jeff Jarvis has an interesting post over on BuzzMachine describing Edgeio’s new premium content widget. In his post, he explains that this could be used by smaller time content producers to create premium versions of their stuff. For example, a blogger could report the facts of a story for free, but charge $1 for the analysis.
What Edgeio has created is a slick little widget that lets you see and then buy content without leaving a site. So let’s say you’re on GigaOm or PaidContent and they want to sell you a special report or exclusive video they’ve done. You click and buy and view the content right there within the same page. Until they’re clever enough to go free — or until someone makes them — I could see the Wall Street Journal enabling people to embed their stories on their blogs or sites with this pay structure in place: ‘Want to see the story right now, here? You can.’ The widget also has a link that lets you grab it and put it on your site, selling the content and taking a cut. Right now, this is enabled with credit card or PayPal.
This made me wonder: What if this was applied to real estate? Agents seem reluctant to shoot lots of photos of homes, which seems strange since people are clearly interested in seeing every room of a home they’re considering buying. What if agents conducted truly thorough shoot-outs of homes, but only provided 1-2 photos for free and charged a buck or two to view the rest? Would they make enough revenue to justify the additional time it took to shoot and upload the photos?
Or, would they get heat from their seller who wonders why they’re leveraging the listing for side-revenue?
More realistically, I could see this happening with condo and neighborhood developments where local real estate review sites from outside the real estate industry would shoot high quality development videos and charge viewers access to the content. They would profit from delivering content agents hold back from consumers in an attempt to force consumers to contact them.
Personally, I’ve been in the market for a condo and can’t find good information on local developments without talking to salespeople. I guess that makes me the perfect candidate for this type of content.
Recent Comments