Here at Property Ad Guru, we have plenty of advice on how to make your website the best it can possibly be. But once property seekers leave your website and start looking on places like realtor.com and zillow.com, it becomes more difficult to ensure you stay top-of-mind.

That’s the issue US-based company realbird.com is trying to solve with its newly-unveiled a browser toolbar, which keeps agents in contact with property seekers even while they’re looking through property portals.

realbird.com explains that the toolbar, which can be branded for agents, sits at the top of a home hunter’s browser window as they search for property. When they come across a listing they’re interested in, a few clicks sends an enquiry back to the agent with the property’s title and URL. The agent is then notified via email, and the inquiry is also saved in their realbird.com account.

To access the toolbar, agents need to sign up for a “pro” subscription to realbird.com, which costs US$99 per year.

Looking for more tips on how to track enquiries? Start with our article on knowing where your leads are coming from.

Judging by the preliminary results of our poll, most Property Ad Guru readers are planning to invest significantly more in online marketing this year. With the Internet Advertising Bureau also predicting another increase in online ad spending in 2010, one question springs to mind: How do you make sure the money you spend on online advertising doesn’t go to waste? In other words, how can you fine-tune your advertising strategy this year to ensure it results in more leads?

The place to start answering those questions is your records for 2009. Where did you spend your money? What form of advertising resulted in your strongest leads? If you’re not sure of the answers to these questions, start tracking your online ad spend today, recording exactly where each lead is coming from and how much it cost you in terms of dollars as well as time.

Of course, the biggest expense for agents advertising online is usually the property portals that carry their listings. Property portals are the obvious choice, especially when we consider the number of people looking online for property: the US National Association of Realtors estimated 90 percent of potential buyers were looking online at the end of last year. But even the major real estate websites are gradually realising they don’t have every base covered when it comes to online advertising.

US property search engine trulia.com, for example, recently said it plans to bring more content to mobile phones this year, and to offer property seekers more local information. In Australia, market leader realestate.com.au has also branched out into the local and social realms with a property review website.

So if even major property websites are catching on to these trends, does that mean agents should also invest in a mobile website, add reams of local information to their blogs, and double their efforts on every social media channel?

Not necessarily. Internet Advertising Bureau chief executive Guy Phillipson, quoted on outsourcery.co.uk, sums up the issue when he says, “In the end you need to follow an audience and find out what they do all day to decide where you are going to advertise.”

Phillipson added that he sees the social side of the Internet becoming “inescapable” for online advertisers. But as with every aspect of online advertising, the key is tracking the results your efforts are bringing in. Ultimately, this information will allow you to keep fine-tuning your marketing mix until you have a personalised strategy that works for you.

For more tips on knowing where your leads are coming from, check out our article here.

[Image: thechesspiece.com]

This article was originally posted on onlinerealestate101.com.

Establishing yourself as a successful real estate professional in 2010 can easily be a daunting task. The real estate market is unrecognisable when compared to just a few short years ago. In 1994 the first online real estate listing was published in an email by Eric Hilding of Coldwell Banker in Morgan Hill, CA which changed real estate forever. Within 1 year ERA launched the first listing portal with over 50,000 listings. Today we have Zillow, Trulia, Twitter, Facebook, iPhones, and thousands of other tools and technologies which power the new real estate economy.

Because of this, it’s easy to become overwhelmed and impossible to stay ahead of the technology curve. I thought I’d put together a shortlist of critical components to your online real estate foundation. These are the building-blocks of any real estate business and most aren’t sustainable without them.

The 4 Building-Blocks:

1. You must find a Specific Niche. The new real estate economy is simply too vast to compete if you don’t have a niche. Your niche will be your area of expertise which you can leverage online and offline for your future marketing, blogging, and web optimisation efforts. Ask yourself this question: Can I really compete for terms on Google, Twitter, and more such as, “LA realtor, Chicago real estate, etc”? I hope you get the picture. You don’t need to find your niche overnight but it is a requisite to competing in an online world successfully.

How do you find your niche? Look for something you feel highly confident about, which you also love. Maybe it’s Miami Beach condos or something similar. By looking around and searching in your area, you’ll find that the smaller the niche the more the person behind the niche seems like a true expert. I’d be hesitant to spend much money on your marketing until you’ve truly defined your niche.

2. A Defined Sales Process is essential for building your business the right way from the ground up. This sales process is going to make or break you in the long run once you start generating leads. Most real estate professionals never plan this out correctly leading to low conversion rates, frustration, and ultimately lost dollars.

When defining your sales process keep in mind 3 things: Recency (how quickly you follow up), and Frequency (how often you follow up), and Consistency (following up at regular intervals). Considerations for defining this strategy include, online replies, Facebook strategy, Linkedin, emails, phone calls, thank you notes, etc.

A good book worth reading to give you some ideas on these is  “Selling the Invisible”.

I didn’t take having a defined sales process seriously until I lost a client to someone who said the only reason he chose my competitor, was they called him back first!

3. A Customer Relationship Management or CRM tool is a must. This is not optional.  The  Dunbar Number is a theoretical number that says the average human can only manage 150 relationships mentally at a time. The average Facebook user has slightly more than this number of friends so how will you suddenly manager hundreds of customers? CRM tools help you manage your customers by setting reminders, sending out auto-replies, and creating follow up communication for you with regards to your clients.

There are many to choose from in the marketplace, both free and paid. I’ve used, in the past 37 Signals Highrise(recommend), Leads on Rails (wouldn’t recommend), Sugar CRM, and most recently SalesForce (highly recommend, but a bit more costly).

Also Josh is running a CRM for Real Estate experiment with Heap on onlinerealestate101.com. I look forward to seeing his feedback.

4.  In-House Lead Gen and your Online Presence go hand-in-hand. These are where you’ll put most of your intellectual capital, personal expression, writing, and branding.  In fact, the online space has been so cluttered that by you having your properties on all the classifieds like Craigslist, Backpage, Oodle, etc. is going to give you little if any competitive advantage at all. Why?  Because there is no longer a barrier of entry into these spaces and everyone, including your competitors, are already using them. That’s not to say you avoid these, but these need to become automated functions of your business.

Your website can provide you residual efforts from much front-loaded efforts. Your web presence should be unique and offer strong call-to-actions which are visually appealing and clear in message. Use WordPress to get started if you don’t have a big budget for a custom site. Offer something of value. The 2 year old report that all of your competitors are giving away too is not something of value. Create original content, build a guide to people relocating, a dining guide, or comprehensive data on a specific neighbourhood. By creating something original you can offer a unique value proposition which will likely usurp what your competitors are offering.

Last thoughts:

Don’t be overwhelmed in your mission to be successful as an online agent. Focus on the essentials which will give you a long term benefit. These building-blocks will give you a basis for which you can add new tools you test out to your business. Otherwise you’ll be chasing a never-ending rush to find the newest, quickest, sexiest real estate tool or trend.

In the previous installments, we wrote about realtors having a mobile presence, the continued existence of video and virtual tours, low cost websites being offered to realtors in the US, the use of local information on realtor’s sites, and the rise of listing syndication.

In this second last installment, we look at the rise of businesses offering listing information delivered to your handset after entering a code from a yard sign.

The advertising and promotion of a house is all about generating leads from both buyers and sellers. The usual methods for generating leads are to advertise the listing in the paper or online and then collect the phone based or email based leads as they come in.

One method for collecting leads that made its debut around five years ago is to promote a special code on a yard sign and then potential buyers can SMS this code and receive back details of the house. However realtors who used this technology when it first appeared more often than not claimed that they didn’t receive too many leads.

However, with the rise of the Internet browser on mobile phones and the increasing 3G coverage, these applications may be coming of age and providing agents with another method to collect leads.

At the NAR Conference, there seemed to be a dozen or so providers of yard sign SMS and email technology. These providers allocate a special number to each house and then when this number is SMS’d or emailed, the providers quiz the MLS and return detailed information about the house to the phone.

If a consumer uses this approach, they are immediately providing the realtor with a phone number that they can use to follow up the consumer.

Of course this approach only works if someone is outside of a house and is interested in more details about that house. The approach also falls over as if someone has a browser enabled phone, they can also just open a browser and quickly search the realtor’s website for the listing – thus saving the cost of an SMS.

While this technology looks and sounds sexy, I am still sceptical about the true efficacy of the approach and whether the realtors will ever generate enough leads to warrant the investment in the technology.

Two of the providers showcased at the NAR conference were txt2look.com and mobilerealestateid.com.

In previous installments we wrote about realtors having a mobile presence, the continued existence of video and virtual tours, low cost websites being offered to realtors in the US, and the use of local information on realtors’ sites.

In this installment, we will look at the rise of intermediaries who syndicate a realtor’s listings to 20 or so different sites.

It doesn’t matter where you are in the world, leveraging your listings to gain more leads is the best way for a realtor to grow their business. Now there are several ways to leverage your listings.

• Firstly, there is your own website. We have already discussed the importance of a realtor’s website in a previous episode of this series.
• Secondly, there is ensuring that your listings are on your franchise or broker site.
• Finally, there is ensuring that your listings are prominently displayed on ALL portal sites.

Now I can hear the screams of incredulousness from realtors saying that it is too expensive to advertise their listings on all sites. However, the real question is can you afford not to advertise your listings far and wide?

In the US for example, a realtor’s listings will automatically be in the MLS database and therefore automatically turn up on the MLS site and realtor.com. However, we are talking about promoting the listings to a wider audience.

Therefore, before dismissing the advertising of listings on sites such as trulia.com, zillow.com, Craigslist, dothomes, cyberhomes, myrealty.com etc, it is important to understand the ROI from using these sites. To do this, you are probably going to have to take a leap of faith and actually try them out. Only then will you know how effective they are.

For a realtor to manage the distribution of their listings to a broad number of sites is not easy. You need to know who the sites are and then you have to make sure that you are sending the listings in the right format to those sites. This is not an easy task and realistically beyond most realtors (both in complexity and the amount of time required to make it happen).

A number of services have arisen to help distribute an agent’s listings to a broad number of sites. These services interrogate an MLS and extract the listings that a realtor wants to syndicate. The business then sends those listings to the target sites. The more sophisticated service providers will then track the performance of those listings and provide a summary back to the agent or broker thus allowing them to make better decisions about their marketing investment.

Often these services are an add-on component to web design companies or even virtual tour companies. It also seems that many of these businesses are free for the realtor to use. Therefore I am not 100 percent sure where they are making their money from.

One company worth checking out is ListHub.

If you are a realtor and have listings, then you should be investigating the use of these types of services to promote your listings far and wide. The more people see your listings, the more chance you have to gain leads and thus grow your business.

A recent article on propertyadguru.com by Simon Baker argued that print advertising is obselete, and has been replaced by online advertising.

It seems that many agents agree, including Tom Tognoli, founder and COO of Intero Real Estate Services in the US.

Intero Real Estate Services has cut its spending on advertising from $3.2 million a year in 2004 to just $500,000 this year, a massive reduction achieved mostly by switching to online forms of advertising including portals and exploiting blogging and social media. The company also invested heavily in its website.

At Inman’s Real Estate Connect Conference in San Francisco last week, Tom spoke of the company’s approach to advertising, saying that before pulling the plug on print advertising, it’s important to have a new marketing plan in place.

Tom said that Intero was amongst the first to syndicate listings to trulia.com, and everyone was up in arms when they started. Intero then began expanded this approach, syndicating listings to other sites and spending money on online banner ads and featured listings. Today the company spends less on banner ads and featured listings, with Tom arging that if a brokerage has a dominant share of its market, it can achieve a big enough footprint online through listing syndication, with ads of limited value.

VP of sales for trulia.com, Sean Black, was quoted by Inman as saying that agents and brokers should ask themselves four questions about any online marketing technique they are considering employing:

• Where do I get traffic and leads from, and can it scale?
• Where can I reach the most new-home shoppers?
• Where can I get the best targeting?
• Where can I get tracking by agent and listing?

Read propertyadguru.com’s article Print Advertising is Obsolete – The Case for On-Line by clicking here.

The exception to this rule is obviously propertyindex.com as it has been operating under a similar pay-per-lead model in the UK since late 2008.

zoopla.co.uk now offers 300,000 properties for sale and to rent and says the new pay-per-lead model aligns the interests of the agent and the portal in a true partnership.

The company says it is uniquely positioned to provide agents with not just buyer leads but also much sought-after vendor leads via its user base of property owners and exclusive AskAnAgent feature. zoopla.co.uk also argues it has the most active property community with over one million user contributions to the website already.

Alex Chesterman, founder and CEO of zoopla.co.uk, commented:

“Our model is all about bringing efficiency to the marketplace. By charging only for results, we plan to change the game for agents in terms of the efficiency of their marketing spend and their ability to track performance. During these challenging times, it has never been more important to understand and measure the results of every pound spent and zoopla.co.uk is leading the charge in enabling agents to slash their marketing spend and pay only for the results they get.”

zoopla.co.uk claims to be the UK’s fastest growing property website and according to some metrics is now the 5th most visited property website in the UK. Over the last 12 months zoopla.co.uk has announced its highest ever monthly user figures, recording just short of a million website visits in January 2009 – a total of 972,802. This is a month-on-month increase of over 50 per cent. The website began the year by securing £3.75 million in new funding, listing a record breaking 15 million sold house price records, and revealing Malcolm McCallion’s appointment as Sales Director.

With two rapidly growing portals, zoopla.co.uk and propertyindex.com, now operating on a pay-per-lead basis it will be interesting to see what kind of challenge this model issues to the Big 4 in the UK.

The decision came as a result of some research propertyindex.com undertook, which revealed that many customers preferred to speak to an agent as soon as possible, rather than wait. The company has set up a unique telephone number for each agent in the hope that it would increase the opportunity for agents to convert enquiries into viewings and valuations.

The company says it is offering every client the opportunity to receive these free leads via an 03 number directed to a specified landline or mobile number of their choice. With 03 local rate numbers, enquirers will incur no additional charges. The free telephone leads offer extends from now until the end of March and the company says it could be worth in excess of £50,000.

“Agents will be alerted by a voice message when they answer the phone telling them the lead has been generated by propertyindex.com. From 1st April telephone leads will be charged at the usual £1 per unique, as-per email leads,” a statement from propertyindex.com reveals.

Unanswered calls will divert back to propertyindex.com’s call centre which will capture the details and forward the enquiry to the agent by email.

Chief Executive Lee Bramzell explained further:

“This is a great opportunity to demonstrate the volume and quality of the leads propertyindex.com can generate. Agents should be capturing callers’ name, telephone number and email at an absolute minimum and work to organise appointments.”

Agents can track calls online and will also be sent a monthly report detailing each telephone lead. From the end of March, agents will have seven days to dispute any leads before payment is debited from agents’ accounts.

Online advertising is heavily data-centric. By this I mean that most advertisers online analyze data to the nth degree. This is both the pro and the con of internet advertising. It’s a pro that you no longer have to ask that old adage of advertising -

I know that 50% of my spend is wasted, I just do not know which half.

With internet ads, you can understand what is working and what is not just by looking at the data.

The con is that you can be buried in data.

In the property lead generation space, not a lot of thought is given to data and the power of conversion. Not yet. We here at Zoomf believe that agents will start to get familiar with ‘conversion’ over 2009.

So how can you get a step ahead in the game? It’s pretty simple. Ask yourself the following questions -

1. What do I consider a conversion on my website ? (hint – its a call or a registration)
2. Who are the top 20 websites sending me traffic ?
3. How many calls are generated from my site every day ?
4. How many registrations ?
5. Which sites in the top 20 have the best conversions to calls or registrations?

Once you know the questions to ask, then you get your IT or software provider to enable the tracking. Now you’re ahead of 80% of the competition and part of the movement gaining momentum today.

If your website is on Google Analytics, have a look at goals and funnels within the interface. Perfect starting point for conversion tracking.

At propertyadguru.com we couldn’t agree with the sentiments more. It is extremely important that agents and realtors around the world truly understand how effective their online advertising spend is.

It is vital for every real estate office to have processes in place to effectively monitor enquiry, ascertain the source and ensure leads are followed up.

But for the moment let’s look at the source of enquiry and why knowing where your leads are coming from is important.

Source enquiry monitoring provides:

• An understanding of what and where marketing and advertising is working.
• Information that will assist in allocating marketing and advertising funds more effectively.
• The opportunity to ensure all enquiry is being followed up and with what success.
• Information on the success of enquiry into real business can allow you to analyse not only the quantity but the quality.
• An important statistical tool for presenting to clients when suggesting certain methods of promotion and particularly where you are seeking advertising funds from the client.

Property portals in the main offer an excellent range of statistical tools and reports with some even providing designated telephone numbers allowing you to track telephone enquiry off the Internet.

This allows you to monitor effectively which portals are working for you and providing leads, but once again you need to follow through and track progress to ensure you are recording the quality of the lead. At the end of the day, the source that provides you with the greater number of leads that actually turn into revenue for your business is the most successful.

But not all enquiry will be so clear cut, you need to ascertain from each contact where they first saw the property or your brand. Property research may have been undertaken on the Internet but first contact with you may be by way of telephone or walk-in.

Steps in effectively utilising enquiry monitors:

• The point of contact should be where the enquiry is recorded, whether it be at the reception area for walk-ins, answering the telephone or perhaps at an “open for inspection”.
• All sources of enquiry should be recorded not just the general medium, so under “Internet” the source portal should be recorded.
• You may wish to establish a code for every marketing or media source.
• Many offices may have CRM or back-office systems that record or follow enquiry and leads right through the process.
• If you don’t have such a system, a simple excel/word sheet can be quite adequate.
• Your enquiry monitor should also include email enquiries coming from property portals.

The more you record and analyse where your enquiry is coming from, the more effective your advertising dollar will be in the future.