Category Archives: Winning Listings / Instructions
Referrals Still the Top Strategy
After surveying 1,300 agents and brokers, US real estate marketing company HomeGain has found that referrals are seen to be the most effective marketing strategy to acquire new clients. The top 10 strategies list reveals an interesting mix of traditional and newer marketing options.
Top 10 Tips for Online Branding
Here at propertyadguru.com, we see plenty of examples of online branding in any given week. Some agents have their online branding down to a fine art, while others are still getting the hang of things.
Tracking the Mobile Momentum
At the start of the year, we looked at what 2010 might have in store for real estate agents. One of our predictions was that a mobile presence will become a necessity for agents this year.
UK Agents Plan to Move Online
It seems the UK’s financial downturn has some real estate agents reassessing their spending priorities. A survey by property specialists movewithus found that at least 20 percent see a move from their high street premises to a home office as possible or likely over the next ten years.
66 percent of the agents surveyed said they would be likely to focus on their web offering over the next decade, with a further 28 percent seeing it as a possibility. If you’re also considering this move, but aren’t sure where to start, be sure to check out our guest post from Ryan Hinricher: “4 Essential Building Blocks for Agents New to Online”.
Fine-tuning Your Ad Strategy
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?
Going Local for Leads
In a recent guest post, Ryan Hinricher said agents need to define their niche market to stand out in the online marketing game. It’s sound advice when you think about it – finding your niche, and owning it, gives you a much greater chance of becoming the agent who stands out when a buyer hones in on a certain suburb.
So, how do you promote yourself online as the expert in your chosen niche?
4 Essential Building-Blocks for Agents New to Online
propertyadguru.com welcomes a guest post from Ryan Hinricher:
Establishing yourself as a successful real estate professional in 2010 can easily be a daunting task. The real estate market is unrecognizable 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.
Rental Search Data from rentbits.com
US rental property search engine rentbits.com has released its first whitepaper: Maximizing the Effectiveness of Marketing in the Single and Multifamily Rental Industry.
The whitepaper covers a range of information on the rental housing market including what type of housing renters are looking for, which marketing sources renters are using, and how rental search varies across demographics.
NAR: Buyers Relying on Referrals
The US National Association of Realtors recently released its 2009 Profile of Homebuyers and Sellers and the results show an even heavier reliance on the Internet to find homes than in 2008.
The often-quoted statistic from the 2008 NAR report had 87 percent of US home buyers looking online for their next home. According to figures posted by Sara Bonert, zillow.com’s director of broker relations, that figure has now risen to 90 percent.
Bonert’s blog post also shows that looking online for properties was the first step taken by both first time and repeat buyers, rather than contacting an agent. Buyers spent an average of two weeks on this initial property search before they decided to find an agent to help them with the buying process.
Back to Basics: Why Advertise Online?
propertyadguru.com occasionally receives requests for information on how to list a property online. While this may sound like a strange question to some, we think the fact that this question is still being asked probably reflects reluctance amongst some agents to make the jump to online advertising.
The reason we think online advertising is worthwhile is simple: it’s the fastest growing source of enquiry.
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