Use your agent website to gain credibility

Rob McCance posted an article on Agent Genius blog last week, which discusses real estate websites and how they can impact your credibility as a real estate professional among an ever-increasing Internet audience.

“Whenever I see a really bad real estate website, what that says to me is that the person behind the site has a very low attention to detail. Also, they are apparently not overly concerned about their on-line credibility, as is being conveyed by their website.”

McCance goes on to describe 4 basic elements for an agent website to convey a high level of credibility:

Navigation – Is the content on your website easy to navigate?

Most visitors will be looking for one thing, and one thing only – listings!

One option is to make your property search functionality front and foremost on your website.

Don’t make your visitors have to think about where to find your listings or make them click too many times to get to what they really want.

Design – Real estate professionals are operating in an industry where first impressions are critical.

With so much competition out there, it is important to make sure that your website is clean, attractive, and has well-designed elements.

Visitors to your website will quickly pick up on design flaws, sometimes subconsciously, and formulate their opinion of you based on these flaws.

Error-free – This seems like a no-brainer, but you would be surprised how many people post content to their website without first running it through a spell-checker.

Other things like broken links, missing images / documents, and inaccurate or out-dated information on your website will have a negative impact on people’s perception of you as a real estate professional.

Brand – Most sales representatives and brokers are obligated to display their brokerage logo somewhere on their website.

However, you do have a certain amount of freedom to promote a personalized brand, either through a customized logo, caricature, tag line, and/or the overall look-and-feel of your website.

This personalized brand should be something that will leave a positive and lasting impression.

Higher Levels of ‘Walkability’ Linked to Higher Home Values

As reported on BuzzBuzzHome blog (weird name, great blog!), a new study shows that higher levels of ‘walkability’ are directly linked to higher home values.

The report, “Walking the Walk: How Walkability Raises Housing Values in U.S. Cities,” looked at 94,000 real-estate transactions in 15 markets across the U.S.

The report was commissioned by a group called CEO’s for Cities and uses the Walkscore web service that we have integrated within all of our UniqueHomeSites.

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.

1. From the local amenities link on your UniqueHomeSite click on the “bigger map” link in the top right corner of the Walkscore box.

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!

Reinforce your real estate expertise with free educational handouts from NAR

Real estate professionals looking for content to add to their marketing material should check out this comprehensive list of informative handouts for buyers and sellers, courtesy of the National Association of Realtors).

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.

1-866-9UNIQUE or sales@uniquehomesites.com

Get Ready for Homeownership
10 Ways to Prepare for Homeownership
5 Common First-Time Home Buyer Mistakes
Why You Should Work With a REALTOR®
Questions to Ask When Choosing a REALTOR®
7 Reasons to Own Your Home
Tax Benefits of Homeownership
Take the Stress Out of Homebuying

Finance Your Home
Specialty Mortgages: Risks and Rewards
Loan Types to Consider
6 Creative Ways to Afford a Home
Lender Checklist: What You Need for a Mortgage
Get Your Finances in Order: To-Do List
Budget Basics Worksheet
What You Can Do to Improve Your Credit
5 Factors That Decide Your Credit Score
How Big of a Mortgage Can I Afford?

Buyers: Find the Right Property
8 Tips to Guide for Your Home Search
How High Tech is Your Home?
5 Property Tax Questions You Need to Ask
10 Questions to Ask the Condo Board
Your Property Wish List
Tips for Finding the Perfect Neighborhood
Tips for Buying in a Tight Market
Pros and Cons of Going Condo
10 Questions to Ask Home Inspectors
What a Home Inspection Should Cover

Buyers: Prepare for Closing and Beyond
5 Things to Know About Homeowner’s Insurance
Tips for Lowering Homeowner’s Insurance Costs
5 Things to Know About Title Insurance
What’s a Home Warranty?
What Not to Overlook on a Final Walk-through
Common Closing Costs for Buyers
Moving With Pets
Closing Documents You Should Keep
17 Tips for Packing Like a Pro

Sellers: Before You Sell
Does Moving Up Make Sense?
8 Reasons Why You Should Work With a REALTOR®
12 Questions to Ask When Choosing Your REALTOR®
5 Things to do Before Putting Your Home on the Market
Understand Agency Relationships
What is Appraised Value?

Sellers: Get Ready for Showings
Simple Tips for Better Home Showings
How to Improve the Odds of an Offer
How to Hold a Successful Garage Sale
Prepare Your Home for a Virtual Tour
Low-Cost Ways to Spruce Up Your Home’s Exterior
12 Tips for Hiring a Remodeling Contractor
5 Feng Shui Concepts to Help a Home Sell

Sellers: Prepare for Closing and Beyond
Understanding Capital Gains in Real Estate
What to Leave for the New Owners
10 Tips for Moving With Pets
Moving Checklist for Sellers
Forms You’ll Need to Sell Your Home
Checklist: 17 Service Providers You’ll Need When You Sell
Open House Safety Tips
How to Prepare for the Open House
Is Your Buyer Qualified?
Tips for Pricing Your Home

Fishing for Sales with Good Photography

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.

One expert in this area is Larry Lohrman, operator of the Photography For Real Estate blog.

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.”

Fish on!

Better Homes and Gardens enters Canadian Real Estate Marketplace

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.  

We’ve discussed BHG on this blog in the past, pointing out the numerous resources available on their website for anyone buying or selling a home, including an article entitled - ‘14 Ways to Add Curb Appeal’

Canadian Realtors using Video – Re-visited

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.

To see the complete results of our analysis, visit our recently created YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/uniquehs and have a look at our subscriptions.

Alternatively, have a look at some of the videos below that highlight some of the better uses of video that we found.

Matt Richling, of RE/MAX Affiliates Realty LTD, produced this video for one of his office listings:

Rich Zalaudek, of Homelife Benchmark Realty in White Rock, B.C., employs the professional video services of Video Openhouse for this listing presentation:

Team Cook of Royal LePage Team Realty in Ottawa, provides a more personal approach with voice-over descriptions of the property and neighbourhood.

Edmonton Realtor Sheldon Johnston, of Coldwell Banker Johnston Real Estate, discusses sales, listings, inventory, and first time home buyers in the Edmonton, Alberta, real estate market.

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.

Twitter How-to Guide for Real Estate Agents

Word up to Mike Andrew’s Real Estate Tips & Technology blog for pointing us to Twitter for Real Estate – A Guide on How to Do It.

The guide was originally put together by Nicole Nikolay from MyTechOpinion and is ideal for those real estate agents looking to generate leads through social networking.

For those who don’t know about Twitter, the best way to describe it can be found on the Twitter website: 

If you aren’t familiar with Twitter, it is one of those things that sounds totally ridiculous and stupid when you first hear about it. But once you start using it, you realize how much fun it is.

Not only is it fun, it is a fast and easy way to connect with like-minded people, such as home buyers and sellers.

After reading, we decided to create an account of our own and were amazed by the results.  Check us out at http://twitter.com/uniquehomesites

Within 48 hours of creating a Twitter account, we had established a connection with over 70 individuals in the real estate marketplace across Canada, North America, and worldwide.

The number of people who Tweet is now around 6 million and traffic to the web site has grown a staggering 600% in the past 12 months.

You or your sales agents need to download this guide today!

Re/Max Canada Introduces ‘Fit-to-Sell’ Home Staging Program

As home selling conditions across Canada shift to a buyers market, Re/Max Canada has taken steps to ensure that sellers have the information required to prepare their homes for sale through staging.

According to Michael Polzler, Executive Vice President and Regional Director for RE/MAX Ontario-Atlantic Canada, there are three major factors that come into play when selling a home - location, price, and condition of the home.

The idea behind their recently announced ’Fit-to-Sell’ program is simple – focus on the condition of the home, as this is the one factor that a seller can influence directly.

Through the assistance of staging expert Carla Woolnough, RE/MAX has created a comprehensive package of videos and checklists on the top 10 priorities for preparing a property for sale, which are available online to the public at www.fittosell.ca.

At Base 10, we also believe that home sellers across the country will have to go the extra mile when marketing a home for sale in an increasingly challenging environment.

Activities such as home staging, professional photography, and single property websites are expected to become much more important during the home selling process.

CREA reaches out to ‘next generation’ of realtors

An article appeared in Business Edge News Magazine last week describing a new Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) taskforce designed to help younger realtors survive in today’s marketplace.

According to the article, CREA is expecting a 3% decline in its membership to 97,000 members in 2009, but is bracing for additional declines in new licensees as markets begin to cool across the country and the home selling environment becomes much more challenging.   

“There’s a recognition that our next-generation realtors operate on a very different level than we do,” says Beth Crosbie, who heads the taskforce.

“This is an effort to bring them in, because they’re our future leaders, and we want to make sure that the association is providing them with the right tools and services for their style of work.”

Crosbie is referring to Internet tools such as Facebook and YouTube, which are growing in importance for real estate agents in reaching potential home buyers and sellers.

At Base 10 Web Solutions, we couldn’t agree more with this approach. Thats why we develop products and services that are designed to help realtors survive in today’s Internet age.

Every day we see examples of real estate agents who have done little to enhance their web presence or participate in some form of social networking online.

We expect that, as a new generation of home buyer emerges, real estate agents who do not embrace technology will be left behind.

Certainly, many established real estate agents across Canada will continue to be successful due to an established referral network. However, the successful rookie realtor will need to be ahead of the technology curve.   

We ‘ll keep you posted on any results that are made public from the CREA taskforce.

 

What do Wine and Real Estate have in common?

Nothing, really…. but Gary Vaynerchuk from Wine Library TV sure knows how to inspire a crowd, just as he did as a keynote speaker at the 2009 Inman Real Estate Connect conference last week in New York City.

While some struggle to see the bridge between what Gary preaches and the professional realtor, no one can deny the success Gary has had in using Internet technology to build his personal and professional brands.

The following video was shot from the flip phone of someone at the conference. Check it out and let us know what you think.