Has the Internet made an negative impact on how we list and sell homes? Do we just give up too much with the Internet for buyers and sellers? Is it too easy for buyers and sellers to scan the Internet and find what they want without ever calling an agent? With all of these articles and blogs about how to buy or sell a home have we taken the mystery out of buying or selling a home? Thankfully, YES! Sorry if you were thought of these questions as a rallying cry to arms to cut down that big tower that transmits all that Internet stuff but let me explain. Honestly, I am happy that technology has moved center stage on how we do business because it's created opportunities that would have never been there before.
Can you believe that I have friends of mine that are agents in their 30's that actually HATE the fact that technology has made such an impact on real estate? I'm talking people that think it's the scourge of what is wrong with the industry. "They have too much information." and "There's no reason for them to contact me if they have all of the information right there." are just a few of the things that I've heard before. I guess I am a glass half full type of guy. My thought process is, this is exactly why they will contact you but it's not going to happen magically. It will require you to work different. If you only have a website for your real estate business you're not arming yourself with enough ammunition.
Put yourself in your clients shoes. When you first learned that an agent has to have a website to succeed in real estate, you probably started doing your homework to find the best fit for you. You might have asked another agent that you know but no matter what their answer was, you still did some research online. You might have gone to Google and typed in "Real Estate Websites" and gotten hundreds of pages of results. You probably clicked into the first couple of them and saw an ongoing list of features or ‘must haves'. You might have read testimonials from their customers that talked about how their business improved by using "Brand X" website provider. But then you clicked a couple of other providers that gave an entirely different list of ‘must haves' and new pricing and their customers testimonials about how much better their business is because they used "Brand Y" websites. After you've looked over a couple of site providers you started to notice that one or two companies have multiple results in that search. Yes, they have their website but they also have articles about them, press releases, reviews, blogs, etc. and there's a pretty good chance that you might have chosen this company as your provider. Why? Because you felt that if they had this much information out there, they were probably the best choice out there because of their exposure and expertise. But, isn't this the same thing buyers and sellers do when it comes to choosing an agent?
So if we feel like we're "giving too much away" on the Internet, why do we ask our clients to be different than the very way we operate? Just as you typically will not choose the first entry on a search engine result because it was there, why do we assume that if you're first on the "Orlando Homes for sale" search that they're going to choose you? If there's one thing we know, it's that today's buyers and sellers are some of the most tech savvy clients we've ever dealt with and that trend will increase not decrease. With our instant gratification society, they have too many television shows, website pages, iPhone applications, and other forms of media to simply leave it up to fate and choose the first result in a search engine "just because they were first".
Instead, we need to expect the same of our clients that we expect of ourselves -- to make an educated decision. This brings me back to my original story about the friends I mentioned earlier. These are the people that think because they have a website with 15 pages on it and provides a ton of information about the buying and selling process, provides all of the available homes in their market, and has a bio about how fast they can sell a home, that they're going to have a chance of capturing these web surfers. While a website is a great start, having just 15 pages out of the millions that are available, there's a pretty slim chance you're going to capture a lot of buyers or sellers. When this happens, those agents tend to look at 'technology' as a bad thing because they still see the Internet as a free-for-all. Or they'll make the grave mistake that I commonly see. When an agents website doesn't produce leads they'll set up a trap -- most agents will call it a "Guest Book". But forcing people to sign in and give information will actually produce the exact opposite of its intended effect. If you were only getting one or two leads from your site, this move will ensure that you will drive that down to zero. People don't want to feel forced to give information and they know they can find it somewhere else.
The best way to increase your leads and one of the best ways I found was to increase my exposure and make me a multiple result was to start branching out past my website. I created a profile on ActiveRain and started writing about things I encountered when listing or selling a home. These included solutions that other buyers and sellers should watch for, questions on how to handle situations to other agents that were on the forum and technology suggestions that I wanted to pass on to the group. Within my first 4 articles I was finding my blogs and conversations popping up when someone typed in, "Belle Pointe Edmond Oklahoma". Because I was including the cities I covered in my articles and adding them as keywords to my blogs, search engines were picking them up and returning them as results in future searches. I also put out a press release about a new technology that I was using to help decrease a home's days on the market and sent it off to the real estate section of my local newspaper. They picked it up, wrote an article about it and it appeared on their website as well.
Within a couple of months I had gone from trying to compete for buyers and sellers armed with just a website, to multiple articles, press releases and blogs about my business that showed I was the expert when it came to selling homes in my area. When buyers and sellers see your name over and over in their search results it helps connect the dots to making an educated decision.
I posted some information yesterday that's blowing the socks off of the people who get it
double digits for the holding period, and if you buy a short sale with us, then you also get equity. That equity is predicted to hold firm in 2009 which I believe will be the worst year we face in home values.
