Diamond Dwellings brings social media to the NAR2008 Expo
November 9, 2008 | 1 Comment
This video is a recording of a live-stream that I did at the 2008 National Association of REALTORS Conference and Expo. The panel discussion was very lively, the questions were great, and everyone shared tons of great information and strategies about real estate and social media.
The panel was moderated by Matt Fagioli of Diamond Dwellings. The panelists were (L to R), Cyndee Haydon, Ines Hegedus-Garcia, Jeff Turner, and Teresa Boardman. All of these folks are heavily engaged in various forms of social media. There are plenty of little jewels throughout the discussion. The entire discussion is about 1 hour long.
Panelists show attendees how to blog for business at NAR2008
November 9, 2008 | Leave a Comment
This video is a recording of a live-stream that I did at the 2008 National Association of REALTORS Conference and Expo. The panel discussion was all about how REALTORS can successfully use blogging for business. Tons of great information and discussion of strategies and best practices.
The panel was moderated by Dustin Luther. The panelists (L to R) were Teresa Boardman, Jim Duncan, Ines Hegedus-Garcia, and Ginger Wilcox, all of whom are fabulous and successful blogging Realtors. The video is about 1 hour long. Sorry about the cell-phone feedback in the beginning (that stops about 3 minutes into the video). It is probably best listened to with headphones on.
Forget Real Estate 2.0. How about we try 1.5 for a while?
November 3, 2008 | 2 Comments
Baketball referees, by and large, tend to be very confident people. Confidence is pretty much a prerequisite for survival in the world of sports officiating. Confidence is a good thing, but it can also get you in trouble.
I remember when I first started officiating high school basketball. Like every other referee, I started out at the 9th grade/JV level. At that time, I was in my early 20’s really not a whole lot older than the kids playing. I did a good job, I guess.
After the games, I would often watch the Varsity officials do the following game. I can remember sitting there, thinking to myself, “I can do that, that’s easy. It’s not different from what I’m doing at the JV level.” I only had one season of JV officiating, and I thought I should be doing Varsity tournament games.
There is a progression
Officials don’t go from doing JV and middle school games to doing Varsity tournament games for a good reason. There is a progression that needs to take place. There are skills that need to be learned and honed, techniques that must be learned, adjustments that must be made. The reason why I thought I could be doing much more difficult games was because the officials that I was watching were good at their craft. They made it look easy.
When my turn came to officiate Varsity basketball, I found out that what looked so easy, was actually quite difficult, and it took time to get it right. I had to draw on the experiences that I had gained through all my previous officiating, and put it to work for me. I also had to work at getting better every game.
The same thing happened when I started doing college games. I fully admit that I am but a mere Division III basketball official. The play isn’t stellar, heck, sometimes it isn’t even pretty. But I can tell you one thing, it is very different from what I do at the High School level.
When I watch the guys on TV doing North Carolina vs. Duke, I now have a completely new appreciation for what it takes to get to that level and perform. There is a process that they went through to be able to handle the challenges that officiating a game of that caliber presents.
It ain’t as easy as they make it look. Trust me.
Web 2.0 has made us overconfident
Web 2.0 sounds great, doesn’t it? Heck, it even feels great sometimes. Everything is new, and cool, and special, and neat, and– free. How great is that? We’ve been told that print is dead, and that all we have to do is have a web presence, and customers will flock to us.
Cold-calling? What a waste.
Door-knocking? You must be kidding me.
Print ads? That’s for dinosaurs.
Refrigerator magnets and recipe cards? That stuff is for losers.
But you know what? All of those things still work. There are agents all over the country who are using any or all of those strategies on their way to very successful and rewarding real estate careers. They aren’t on Facebook, they have never heard of Twitter, and they think “blog” is a derogatory term of some kind.
More power to ‘em.
See, one of the things that has been lost in all this talk of the future is perspective in the present. It is the same thing that was missing from me when I sat in the bleachers and thought I should be doing Varsity tournament games. I didn’t realize that I could just jump from one to the other. I needed to hone my skills, learn more, and prepare myself for those tournament games that would come in the future.
And so it is with real estate. With all the talk of Real Estate 2.0 being the future of our profession, we seem to have forgotten that we live in a 1.0 world. We can’t simply wish the future upon everyone and make it happen. It just doesn’t work that way. As much as I would love to be able to eliminate our brokerage’s need for print advertising, it is still a viable strategy. As much as I would love for all of my clients to friend me on Faceook, many of them don’t even use email regularly. I want desperately to practice Real Estate 2.0, I live in a 1.0 world.
Despite the fact that what I want maybe isn’t possible right now, that doesn’t mean that I can’t get there some day. Getting there, however, is going to require effort, learning, and bringing others along the progression with me. Practicing Real Estate 2.0 without any clients won’t do me much good. But since many of them are living 1.0, what am I to do?
Let’s try 1.5 for a little while
How about we meet in the middle. I know where I want to go, I just have to figure out a way of getting people there, with me. Enter, “Real Estate 1.5.” This is exactly what we are going to try to do in our brokerage to bring the two worlds together.
What this means is that we are going to take all of those great tools and philosophies from the 2.0 world, and slowly introduce them to our clients and customers in the 1.0 ways they are familiar with. The hope is that, in doing this, we will be able to take advantage of the tools we have, and so will our clients, but they won’t even really notice it. Everyone wins.
Example #1
The biggest component of our 1.5 practice is going to be our website, but it’s not quite finished yet. More on that, later. In the mean time, we wanted to acclimate our clients and customers to some of the things they can expect. The first of these things is our market reports.
We created a local real estate market report. I’m sure many of you do the same thing. It is pretty extensive, and we wanted to get it into the hands of all of our clients, and as many members of the public as possible. Web 2.0 dictates that we should have posted it on a blog, or on our website, done some fancy SEO, sent out a few emails, and wait for the hits to roll in. 1.0 dictates that we would mail it to our clients with a letter. Neither of these works very well.
Here’s what we did: I created the report in Keynote, and exported it as a PDF. We then set up a special email account: Stats@StrongTeamRealtors.com, and emailed the PDF to all of our current clients. We then posted the report to Scribd. Once it was on Scribd, this allowed us to send out an email to key folks in the community with a link to the report. In the email, we encouraged them to download the report for themselves, or share the link with others. Since Scribd tracks views, we know how many people have looked at the report. The final component was getting the report into the hand of the community at large. The best way to do this was to do a press release.
Really? A press release? In a newspaper?
Yup.
In the press release, we urged people to stop by our office (imagine that), and pick up a copy of the report (a hard copy, imagine that). You know what happened? We gave out a bunch of reports on the first two days. Every person that came into our office was an opportunity to talk with them about the market, and an opportunity to let them know that we were going to do the reports regularly, so they could give us their email if they wanted, and we would just email them the next one.
Overall, we’ve had just over 50 people view the report online, we’ve had more than a dozen people come through our office, and our dozens of clients were thrilled to get all of the information first. I’d say Real Estate 1.5 works pretty well.
Into the future. . .
This was our first crack at real estate 1.5. We’ll keep at it, and once we have our website buil
Is this really how people want to conduct a real estate search?
October 6, 2008 | 4 Comments
Here in the Charlottesville area, the largest real estate publication is owned and operated by the Charlottesville Area Association of REALTORS. It is called the “Real Estate Weekly.”
The Real Estate Weekly (REW) is exactly what you might expect it to be- dozens of pages of ads by real estate and mortgage professionals, with some cultural and industry articles sprinkled in for good measure. Advertising in the publication is, in my opinion, quite expensive, especially when you consider their circulation and the amount of publications that actually get picked up by readers.
To their credit, the REW has been exploring ways to increase the value they deliver to advertisers, especially in light of the fact that many agents and brokers are concentrating their marketing efforts online. The most recent development was the launch of the Real Estate Weekly Clickbook. The clickbook is basically an e-book version of the print publication. Every single page of the print publication is there for folks to browse and flip through. One interesting feature of the clickbook is that all of the website and email address that appear in the print publication are actual live links in the online version. This means that when we use our website in one of our print ads, folks viewing the online version can actually click on the link. Even MLS numbers can be clicked, and users will be taken to the MLS listing they have chosen. Pretty neat.
Is this what people want?
While I think this is a welcomed addition to the REW, I have to wonder, will anyone really use it? I mean, if folks aren’t really using the print version all that much, are they really going to use the print version just because it is online?
After viewing the latest edition of the REW clickbook, and going through the interface on a couple of different computers, I’m not optimistic. First of all, if you have a smaller screen, you are going to have to zoom way in in order to be able to read anything on any of the pages. This necessitates scrolling all over the screen, since you can’t get the full thing on one screen. That’s annoying.
Being able to click the links and email addresses is kinda cool, and the online version actually looks a lot better than the printed version (the REW has had some notorious printing problems). There is also a feature where you can email to folks a page out of the publication. This would be a good feature for listing agents, since clients are always wanting to see that their home has been in ads. You can also search the entire publication. That might come in handy.
But is is good for consumers?
So I guess the clickbook can be seen as an improvement for agents and brokers, but is it really what consumers want?
First of all, if they do want it, I’m not sure how they’re going to find it. The only place it shows up is on the CAAR website. REW has no website of its own. So much for Google juice.
If they do find it, are they going to use it? Will someone searching for a home really use an online version of a print publication to do so? We’re not talking about a search website here, folks, we’re talking about an online version of something that exists in the exact same form in print.
I dunno, it doesn’t look good.
REW is supposedly going to keep stats on how many visitors the clickbook gets, and how many links are clicked, you know, all the regular analytics stuff you would expect. I would imagine that the results from the first few weeks are going to be skewed pretty heavily towards advertisers checking everything out. Month 2 will probably yield more accurate results (although there still won’t be a way to separate out the visits of curious REALTORS).
The bottom line
So, now there is an online version of the REW. I’m not really sure what this means. I do know that they aren’t adding any additional charge to advertisers for the clickbook. On the flip side, rates are apparently set to go up across the board next year. I guess you really can’t have everything.
Time will tell if the clickbook is a viable addition to real estate marketing, or if it’s just lipstick on a pig.
Jimmy Buffet might help you sell more real estate
September 3, 2008 | 8 Comments
I spent most of my Labor Day with the Parrot Heads at a Jimmy Buffet concert at the Nissan Pavilion. Kari and I aren’t huge Buffet fans (with the exception of a few songs) but my Mother-in-Law, Patsy, is a Parrot Head. We got the tickets for Mother’s day, and Jimmy Buffet on a holiday weekend ain’t such a bad thing.
I had never been to a Jimmy Buffet concert before, and I have to say, I was quite impressed. I wasn’t impressed so much with the music, Jimmy isn’t the best singer or guitar player, but the atmosphere is great. Jimmy Buffet is in his 60’s, and the guy sells out wherever he goes. Everybody is there to hear the same 4-5 songs, the rest is just filler. But still, the place was PACKED. I’ve been to shows at Nissan Pavilion before, and I have never seen that many people.
How does Jimmy do it?
How does he do it? How has Jimmy managed to sell out everywhere he goes, for decades, singing pretty much the same songs. People travel the world to see him, and people are fanatical about it.
Being at the concert made it obvious. Jimmy Buffet isn’t selling music. Jimmy Buffet is selling a lifestyle.
Sure, his songs are all kinda the same, and his best ones were written decades ago, but it doesn’t matter. People don’t listen to Jimmy Buffet for the songs, they listen to Jimmy Buffet songs because it takes them someplace they want to go. It helps them escape their daily lives, it puts them in a state of mind that they wish they could hold on to forever.
More power to ya, Jimmy.
Why selling lifestyle is important to you
Here’s the thing. You and your business can benefit from selling lifestyle, too. As agents, sometimes we get very wrapped up in selling the features of a home, the location of a home, the number of bedrooms, the upgraded kitchen, the great value it represents. . .
Sometimes we forget, however, that people aren’t just buying a structure. They are buying a home. The difference between a house and a home is the lifestyle that goes with it. Sure, they want a great location, but that is because that location allows them to live a certain lifestyle. Sure, they want a great kitchen, but that it because it enables them to live a certain lifestyle.
If you can sell the lifestyle that comes with a house, then it makes it that much easier to sell the features that make it all possible.
Maybe you have a listing or two that aren’t the fanciest homes on the block. Maybe they don’t have all the bells and whistles. Well, maybe you can focus on the lifestyle that those homes will provide for their new owners. Focus on what that home will be like when it is filled with family and friends, what it has to offer the new owners aside from appliances, bathrooms and bedrooms. There is value there for people, you just have to show it to them.
(the post image comes from jahdakinebrah, and is a photographic representation of famous Jimmy Buffet songs and lyrics. All of them are tagged here)
Will the Real Estate Industry Just Serve Up a Bunch of Meatball Sundaes?
May 29, 2008 | 1 Comment
While I has some free time last week, I did something that I love to do, but hadn’t done in a while– I read an actual, real-life, hardbound BOOK. Amazing!
The book that I chose to read was “Meatball Sundae” by Seth Godin. I’m going to skip the Seth Godin introduction, and just assume that you know who he is. If you don’t– you should. You can start by reading his blog.
“Meatball Sundae” is one of those books that went straight to my core. It is one of those books with concepts and examples that are so relevant and easy to understand that I read the whole book twice in one week.
Read the book. Seriously.
What is a Meatball Sundae?
I’m not going to explicate the entire book, but you should understand the basic idea behind what a Meatball Sundae is, especially if you are going to get anything out of the rest of this post.
Seth describes the Meatball Sundae:
A meatball sundae is the unfortunate result of mixing two good ideas.
The meatballs are the foundation, the things we need (and sometimes want). These are the commodities that so many businesses are built on.
The sundae toppings (hot fudge and the like) are the New Marketing, the social networks, Google, blogs and fancy stuff that make people all excited.
The challenge most organizations face: they try to mix them. They attempt to slap new marketing onto old and end up with nothing but a failed website.
The Real Estate Industry is Built Upon Meatballs
The practice of real estate as a profession is pretty old. NAR turns 100 years old this year. That is a long time. While a lot of things have changed over that time, the foundations of the real estate industry really haven’t. I hear agents say all the time that the industry really hasn’t changed in the last 40-50 years, its just that now we do more stuff electronically than we did before.
This is especially true when it comes to the public-facing side of the real estate industry. If you look at any real estate publication today, the marketing in that publication is going to look exactly the same as it did 50 years ago. Granted, the paper quality has changed, and maybe the design is up to date, but the same old messages are being touted everywhere. One of the criticisms of NAR’s REALTOR awareness campaign has been that the ads (television, print, radio), all feel stale. They all seem to be saying the same types of things over and over and over again.
The real estate industry has become very good at churning out the same old meatballs year after year, decade after decade.
The Real Estate Industry Also Loves the Taste of Toppings
Right now, there is a whole lot of emphasis being placed on the sundae toppings throughout the real estate industry. There is buzz about video, social networks, blogging, you name it. All of the new marketing tools that make up the sundae toppings are receiving all kinds of attention. Hey, why not, right? All of this stuff tastes good, and all of it seems very promising. After all, this is what the consumer wants, isn’t it?
Every new thing that comes out is being touted as being able to revolutionize the industry. But is this really true? Or is the industry just preparing to serve consumers a big ol’ nasty meatball sundae?
The Real Estate Industry Needs Ice Cream
Just as Seth points out in his book, if an organization is wants to be able to make use of the sundae topping that is new marketing, that same organization had better have ice cream to put it on, and not meat bal
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Disclaimer
My name is Daniel Rothamel. I am a licensed real estate agent in the Commonwealth of Virginia and a member of the National Association of REALTORS. As such, I adhere to a strict code of ethics and all laws with regard to equal housing, which is reflected in the content of this blog. My broker is Strong Team REALTORS, 86 Joshua Lane, Palmyra, VA 22963; (434) 589-5800. My VA Real Estate License number is 0225 077325. All of the opinions in this blog are mine, unless otherwise noted.
