The legendary real estate blogger Teresa Boardman of Saint Paul, Minnesota gives us the goods on the power of content in developing community connections.
We all know that measuring the actual return on investment for social networking is difficult, if not impossible.
However, anecdotal evidence from ‘veteran’ real estate bloggers, such as Ms. Boardman (4 years!), are a great motivator to get out there and own your niche!
WalkScore allows you to view the ‘walkability’ of any known location, drawing in community points of interest from Google’s vast directory of local stores, restaurants, schools, parks, etc. to calculate a walking distance score.
You can even interact with Walkscore to improve the walkability of your listings.
To improve your listings’ Walk Score, you can easily add and delete amenities yourself.
2. On the right, above the list of amenities is a link titled “missing something“. Click on this and follow the instructions to add the missing amenity to Google maps.
For any point of interest, you only have to add it once. It will be available for all your future listings for that neighbourhood.
Its a great way to provide potential homebuyers with valuable information and perhaps fetch a higher price for your listings!
According to the NAR website, anyone is free to print copies of the handouts or customize them with their own branding. These handouts are perfect for newsletters, Web sites, and promotional kits.
For Canadian real estate professionals, keep in mind that the information is from an American perspective and may need to be modified slightly to reflect the Canadian marketplace.
Nonetheless, this is a great resource!
If you are a Canadian realtor in need of a website for your business, give us a call or email and ask about our UniqueHomeSites website product and services.
At UniqueHomeSites.com, we like to share ideas regarding real estate marketing on the Internet.
Today, we want to discuss something that many in the industry seem to ignore - great real estate marketing begins with great photos!
For consumers, there is nothing more frustrating than finding a listing through a search portal that passes the initial search parameters (i.e. price, location, size, etc), but fails to offer additional photos.
The typical reaction to a lack of photos is that something is wrong with the property.
In some cases, the listing agent may do this on purpose so that only the most interested home buyers will contact them personally for more photos.
Regardless, we feel that properties listed for sale on the Internet with only one or two photos are missing out on a huge opportunity to present their listing to as many Internet eyes as possible.
This is particularly true in today’s Internet age, where web surfers are becoming accustomed to open and instant access to information on-line.
He offers some great tips and techniques for real estate photography, including the following tidbit:
“…the front shot is THE most important shot for marketing purposes.
Not only because Realtors have to use the front shot in all their marketing, but because of web site designs that make the thumbnail of the front shot the “lure” (as in fishing lure) that usually motivates the potential home buyer to take the first action (a click to look at more photos) that leads to a home buyer towards a home purchase.”
We are often getting requests from our user community to develop a single property website template that matches their personal brand as a real estate professional.
Upon request, we will engage our team of Graphic Designers to work with you to create your own unique and completely customized property website design.
Need an agent site? Hey, we also do that!
They come equipped with a powerful control panel, and are completely integrated with our UniqueHomeSites product… but that’s another blog post altogether.
Check out a few of our custom property website designs:
Listing syndication is nothing new, but the trend towards more liberal distribution of listings is not without its critics.
In response to the article, real estate blogger Dave Phillips from Charlottesville, Virginia, explores the question of whether it makes sense for local MLS systems to send their listings data to listings aggregators.
Acting as somewhat of a devil’s advocate, Mr. Phillips presents arguments against syndication, stating concerns about Internet market dilution with so many sites doing the same thing.
Meanwhile, listing aggregators such as Zoocasa.com go above and beyond for online consumers, offering a richer search experience including neighbourhood descriptions (from wikipedia), school information, home price comparisons, and even a commuter cost calculator.
At UniqueHomeSites.com, we want to know what Canadian real estate agents, brokers, and owners think about listing syndication.
Please feel free to comment below… we want to hear from you!
The folks over at 1000 Watt Consulting placed an interesting post on their blog the other day, which we believe hits the mark for real estate brokerages operating in today’s Internet age.
The post discusses 5 things that brokers should do to improve their marketing.
Here is a summary:
Start thinking like a media company
Listings and Market Knowledge = Content… Start broadcasting them!
Perform a vendor audit
Costs for things like bandwidth and online storage have dropped significantly in recent years, and new web-based applications are increasingly available at a fraction of the cost.
Better Homes and Gardens Real Estate officially announced recently that it will be expanding its real estate brand into Canada after reopening in the United States last summer.
BHG Real Estate is targeting the younger generation of buyers, who have been flooding the market in recent months, at least in Canada, thanks to historically low interest rates and falling prices.
Leading the BHG expansion into Canada, and adding a high degree of respect and familiarity, is former executive vice-president with Royal LePage Canada – Sherry Chris.
According to an article by Garry Marr of the Financial Post, which discusses the BHG expansion, Ms. Chris’ company will go after some of the independent brokerages in those markets but has a hands-off policy when it comes to recruiting any brokers from Coldwell Banker or Century 21.
“If there was an independent company in a major city that wanted to grow and felt that they could grow better by partners and affiliating and utilizing technology Better Homes and Gardens has created, they would become a master franchise for a geographic area,” Chris said.
We’re not exactly sure why the hands-off policy with C21 and Coldwell Banker, but this could be an exciting opportunity for real estate brokers across Canada, particularly those who are familiar with, and heavily use, social media (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, etc) and other internet marketing technologies.
About a year and a half ago, we did a post on real estate agents in Canada who use video to market themselves and their property listings.
Given that video is rapidly becoming mainstream on the Internet, to the point where surfers/consumers are actually expecting it, we decided to re-visit the subject.
For this post, we searched YouTube for realtors in Canada and found a variety of video marketing techniques being used right now.
And, last but not least, Vancouver real estate agent Ian Watt of Sutton Group conducts a daily video blog, from his car of all places! This guy is often cited as one of the top video bloggers in North America.
The legendary real estate blogger Teresa Boardman of Saint Paul, Minnesota gives us the goods on the power of content in developing community connections.
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