John Marlow

In a down market, knowing the tools that will make you more effective can make the difference between a struggling agent, and a successful one. As technology opens up new advantages that make us quicker and more efficient, we are given the opportunity to do what we do better.

Broker Opens and Open Houses are two tools that many REALTORS simple are not taking full advantage of when it comes to the benefits of today's technology.

With the right enticements, Broker Opens can pull in dozens of buyers agents who might have the other piece of the puzzle you need to close the deal. The first couple weeks are crucial in the listing period. A "new" property is easiest to sell. For this reason, you want to increase the exposure your new listings get by pulling out all the advertising stops you have.

With that said, and on the topic of using technology to make you more efficient, I highly suggest utilizing the open house/ broker open promotional website www.advantagechicago.com , next time you have a listing for sale. Their website comes up on the front page of google for searches for chicago broker opens, they have over 1000 Chicago area Twitter followers, and send weekly announcements to their network of agents, buyers and service providers who are interested in Chicago homes for sale.

This is currently a FREE service so TAKE ADVANTAGE! It takes only about a minute to fill out the details of your broker open or open house. Free advertising is a great thing to have, especially in this economy.

As we move into the next phase of online buyer customers we (as agents and brokers) may need to readjust our approach slightly. Over the past 5 years expectations have been changing for buyers searching for real estate online. In the beginning, they felt it customary to give their email address in exchange for the ability to search for home online. As time progressed, certain websites allowed users to search using an IDX solution that gave them the ability to search for listings without giving an email address. As most of you know, IDX does not allow users to search as many listings as a VOW search, but not having to sign-in immediately is appreciated by many customers.

Competing systems like IDX has changed expectations. Now, many customers expect to be able to search for listings without logging in. The drawback that many of these customers overlook is that they loose the digital ability to keep track of the listings they like. The benefit is they can search quickly.

I do not have access to enough data to know what is the most popular system being used in today's market so I put this question to those agents and brokers who are reading this post: what do your customers seem to prefer and why?

The second question (and depending on your interests, the most important), given an equal number of customers being driven to the respective landing pages, which MLS search solution produces the most appointment requests. In the end, appointment requests turn a web visitor into a potential client and therefore this is the highest and best use of any MLS search portal (from the broker's perspective).

Thanks for reading!

John Marlow
Real Living Helios Realty
www.NeighborhoodDirectoryChicago.com
jmar@heliosresidential.com