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Real Estate Neighborhood Marketing

By: Reggie · Posted on January 14, 2007 · 5 Comments
Would you like to dominate a particular neighborhood? Would you like to provide the community with instant access to local information? How about providing your target neighborhood a community calendar, recipe exchange, classified ads, community news, local jobs, school information, merchant exchange, games for the youth and more? That’s what I thought! You can already see the power right? Blogs are one way to do such a thing, but Connecting Neighbors is a tool that’s built to do just that…right out of the box.

Connecting Neighbors was founded in 1999 and won the 2002 Inman Innovator of the Year award for the most Innovative Use of the Internet. In January 2005, Connecting Neighbors was acquired by Reply.com. As a result of this purchase, connecting neighbors has continued to grow and add serious features. Most importantly, they help real estate agents provide value to local homeowners while displaying your knowledge and commitment to the neighborhood.

From my experience, many real estate agents are continually struggling to brand themselves in the neighborhoods they compete in. Historically these real estate agents have done direct to consumer advertising via postcards, flyers, newsletters, block parties, sponsoring community events and more. These items all have varying degrees of success.

One thing we know is that the Internet is forever changing the typical homeowner. These individuals want immediate access to the information they seek, in a transparent nature. With Connecting Neighbors real estate agents can purchase these website solutions and lock-in their neighborhood! As Connecting Neighbors will only sell one site per area. Be the first real estate agent to provide your community local knowledge!

See an example here
To sponsor a neighborhood, click here
To search for a neighborhood, click here

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Free mortgage calculators for your website

By: Reggie · Posted on January 11, 2007 · 2 Comments

If your real estate website is one of the many consumer facing sites that still link to 3rd party mortgage calculators, you are in luck! NextStudent has recently unveiled 20 free, easy-to-use, plug-in-play mortgage calculators. NextStudent provide both ASP or PHP code to place on your site. If you are interested, take a look at their examples here.

NextStudent now provides the following calculators:

Affordability Calculator
Buy vs. Rent Calculator
Canadian Mortgage Calculator
How Much Income Do I Need to Qualify Calculator
Interest Only Calculator
Interest Only With Prepayment Calculator
Loan with Interest Only Period Calculator
Mortgage Length Calculator
Mortgage Payment Calculator
Mortgage Principal Calculator
Payment per Thousand Calculator
Second Loan vs. PMI Calculator
Should I Pay Points Calculator
Should I Refinance Calculator
Should I Use Heloc Calculator
Standard vs. Biweekly Calculator
Tax Benefits Calculator
What If I Pay More Calculator
What Is the Real APR Calculator
Which Loan is Better Calculator

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eStationery – EMAIL WITH A PURPOSE

By: NikNik · Posted on January 5, 2007 · 5 Comments

Yes, I’m sure you already have a purpose in mind when you are carefully crafting an important email for a client. But why not bring professional purpose full circle by accenting that important text with your own custom eStationery. Whether you select an eStationery header, signature, business card, or some combination of the three, you will definitely leave a lasting impression. More so, you will be making each email an effective tool with a rightful purpose. And don’t take my word for it; eStationery is becoming a standard of top professionals in Fortune 500 companies.

There are many wonderful templates out there you can customize to some degree, but I suggest that if you’re going to do it right the first time, hire someone who can provide you with custom design work. There are plenty of talented marketing specialists out there that can truly captivate what you and your company are about. Many can match or breathe new life to your company brand, as well as provide the super tech bells and whistles that will definitely get you noticed. Yes, bells and whistles beyond including your contact info, glamour shot, and company logo. You can direct traffic by including a few hyperlinks. But get crafty here. Your personal and company websites are a must, but how about a mapping link to provide clients with directions to your office. Other popular links include: buyer and seller info, search the MLS, featured properties, relocation info, etc.

So by now, I’m sure you are feeling the eStationery love that I do. I should, I have designed and created several thousand. It’s one of my many talents! At least I think so. Anyway, go forward now and make those emails have a greater purpose. If you haven’t received many emails with eStationery go to http://www.estationery.com.au/ and http://www.stationerycentral.com/ to view their templates. If you have questions regarding eStationery feel free to leave me a message.

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Cyberhomes benefits consumer and real estate companies alike

By: Reggie · Posted on December 30, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Cyberhomes, a FNRES product, offers consumers a free and robust home valuation tool. But Cyberhomes’ value goes much deeper than that! Cyberhomes allows consumers to interact with their valuation data in a totally transparent nature. For example, the consumer can make adjustments to their home based on their personal knowledge. Maybe the consumer would like to account for recent home upgrades or hand select local comparables. I’m sure this data will then become even more meaningful to the consumer. This interaction, plus Fidelity’s 100 Million plus residential ownership, sales, and mortgage records, make Cyberhomes the tool to watch in 07’.

The consumer is not the only one to benefit, so will brokers and their associates. Marty Frame has made it clear that FNRES has gone to great efforts to ensure Cyberhomes is a Broker friendly tool! Cyberhomes has the ability to display “For Sale” listings from any participating broker. These active listings will enhance the Cyberhomes tool by showing not only sold data, but active signals from the marketplace. In addition, Cyberhomes can be 100% branded by participating brokers and integrated into their own website. This gives real estate companies a solution to instantly fulfill their customers need for rich property information, but doing so in a way that allows the consumer the freedom to look and interact privately. Then as the consumer gets closer to actually transacting, it’s a simply step since they’re already on the real estate company’s site. If their consumer is on Cyberhomes.com, and clicks a broker’s active listing, sophisticated back-end rules allow traffic to be routed based on each real estate company’s desired process.

If you would like to know more about Cyberhomes, visit Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions at http://www.realestate.fnf.com/. You may also want to ready my previous post here.

Watch the Inman Stories video of Cyberhomes featuring Scott Hoen and Marty Frame.

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Create a Google Toolbar Button for Your Real Estate Blog

By: Reggie · Posted on December 24, 2006 · Leave a Comment

Google’s Toolbar is very popular and they’ve made it easy to add your blog articles to your reader’s toolbar. All we need to do is make a custom button feeding off your RSS feed. This button not only makes visiting your blog easy with a one click shortcut, but it also itemizes your recent topics.

Start by opening notepad, and copy the code below into the new notepad document:

<?xml version=”1.0″?>

<custombuttons xmlns=”http://toolbar.google.com/custombuttons/”>

<button>

<site>http://www.YourSiteHere.com</site>

<title>Your Title Here</title>

<feed refresh-interval=”3800″>http://www.Site.com/feed.rss</feed>

<description>Enter your brief description here</description>

<icon mode=”base64″ type=”image/x-icon”>Insert base64 output here

</icon>

</button>

</custombuttons>

Now we need to make a few edits to customize the Google button for your blog.
Start by editing the bold areas of the code above:

  1. Replace http://www.YourSiteHere.com with your blogs URL.
  2. Replace Your Title Here with the title of your blog.
  3. Replace http://www. Site.com/feed.rss with the path to your RSS or ATOM feed. Keep in mind Google requires RSS 2.0 or Atom Feed 0.3/1.0 XML.
  4. Replace Enter your brief description here with a brief description of your blog. This description works like a tooltip, and pops out when a user moves their mouse over your button.
  5. Now you need to think about the icon you would like to use for the toolbar. (Hint: images with 24 bits of color –RGB work best.) Once you’ve identified the icon or picture you’ll use, click here to convert your image to base64. Then copy the code it produces, and paste it over the text the reads Insert base64 output here.
  6. Now its time to save the notepad document we’ve been modifying. Click “File” then “Save As.” Now give the file a friendly name and add .xml after the name. For example, I named my button MyTechOpinion.xml.

Great, you’ve customized everything you need for a working button. Now you can do a few things:

To visit the Google Toolbar 4 API Documentation, click here.

To view the MyTechOpinion button and related Real Estate articles, click here

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YouTube for Real Estate Marketing

By: Reggie · Posted on December 24, 2006 · 1 Comment

YouTube is turning out to be a noteworthy tool for Real Estate. I’m not just saying that because they’ll host your video for free. Let’s face it; YouTube has become an online destination. And not just for teenagers. In November, iMedia Connection covered an eMarketer report dispelling myths about the average YouTube visitor. eMarketer said, ages 35 to 64 make up the largest audience, with ages 25 to 34 coming in second. I was surprised to learn this; it’s contrary to what the mainstream media leads us to believe. eMarketer also stated ages 35 to 64 were the largest share of unique visitors. As if that isn’t enough, according to Nielsen NetRatings, YouTube was the fastest growing Web brand the first half of this year. Compile that with ComScore Media reporting over 60% of YouTubes visitors earn 60k or over annually. Now what do you think of YouTube and its benefit to Real Estate Marketing? (Read my entire post over at Ubertor Real Estate Blog.)

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Does your real estate website provider supply you with prewritten content?

By: Reggie · Posted on December 19, 2006 · 7 Comments

Thanks to the Blog Swap RSS Pieces put together, Stephen Jagger of Ubertor is our guest today. Ubertor serves the real estate industry with agent and broker software. I would like to thank Stephen! Here is his post:

Stephen Jagger, Ubertor – Many of real estate website providers supply prewritten canned content on the web sites they sell to real estate agents. This canned content comes in many forms:

  • Free Reports
  • Top Tips
  • Buying Tips
  • Selling Tips
  • plus much more…

Google says “we try hard to index and show pages with distinct information“.

What does that mean?

Canned content, generic content and content provided to you is not helping you… but actually hurting you.

Write your own Free Reports, Top 10 Tips, Sellers Bonus Material, etc… be courageous, be opinionated, take a risk, tell people what you think and be UNIQUE.

Google, Yahoo and MSN are looking for unique, quality content that they can provide to their users. Someone searching for Vancouver Real Estate is looking to find the best website about that topic. The search engines are looking to find that website (actually the top 10 under than term). To get your website to come up under the keyword term you are trying to target start by reviewing these points:

  1. Start Blogging
  2. Google likes sites of at least 100 pages and pages of 300-500 words/page
  3. Get rid of your canned content and write your own
  4. Write about the term you want to be found under
  5. Write about the term you want to be found under again
  6. Comment on other blogs that compliment your industry
  7. Use WordTracker.com or a service like it to view actual searchers searching for that term
  8. Engage your visitors, request comments, feedback, questions
  9. Keep your solds within your website – never delete or hide them
  10. Blog, Blog, Blog and then do it again

Blogging has proven to be the most effective way to gain exposure within the search engines.

The real key: Write for your readers – then review for the search engines! – not the other way around. Google’s mantra is “Be Good Not Evil” Bloggers’ mantra is “Write for your Reader, Good will follow”

Take a look at what the other real estate bloggers had to say that participated?

Transparent Real Estate’s Pat Kitano vs. Zillow’s Drew Meyers

RSS Pieces’ Mary McKnight vs. Future of Real Estate Marketing’s Joel Burslem

St Paul Real Estate Blog’s Teresa Boardman vs. Phoenix Real Estate Guy’s Jay Thompson

3 Ocean Real Estate’s Kevin Boer vs. SLC Real Estate’s Nigel Swaby

Issaquah Undressed’s Larry Cragun vs. Maury Properties’ Andrew Maury

Chicago Home Weblog’s Geno Petroche vs. NY Houses 4 Sales’ Christine Forgione

Jonathan Dalton’s Phoenix Arizona Real Estate Blog Jonathan Dalton vs. Bonnie Erickson’s Real Estate Snippets Bonnie Erickson

The boys of Sellsius vs. Real Estate Tomato’s Jim Cronin

ML Podcast’s Michael Price vs. FamousAgents.com’s Elise Wright

My Tech Opinion’s Reggie Nicolay vs. Ubertor’s Steve Jagger

Redfin’s Glenn Kelman vs Rain City’s Ardell DellaLoggia

CondoDomain’s Anthony Longo vs. miOaklandCounty’s Maureen Francis

The San Diego Home Blog’s Kris Berg vs. Urban Dig’s Noah Rosenblatt

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Have you experienced VREO Real Estate Dashboard?

By: Reggie · Posted on December 16, 2006 · 5 Comments

It’s almost time for those New Year’s resolutions for your business, so I thought I would dig into the past and focus on a piece of technology that you likely now about, but intimidates many…VREO Real Estate Dashboard for Tablet PC’s. What do you think of the idea about being “paperless?” It’s possible; all it will take is a few key investments in technology and you could enhance your business forever.

VREO’s Dashboard helps real estate agents capture a signature on any Microsoft Word, Adobe PDF or image file by using a Tablet PC and stylus. The signing process is very similar to the typical signature experience of pen and paper. Also VREO’s Real Estate Dashboard can send and receive faxes electronically. So once you have the required signatures simply fax or email the document to its desired location without printing!

VREO’s Real Estate Dashboard is built on a secure vault. This is where you would import transaction documents and forms, for quick access and signing. The vault is continually backed up and synchronized with VREO’s facility in Agoura Hills, California. Obviously you need anInternet connection for this feature. Using the vault you can also assign permissions to contacts involved in the transaction so they can access documents online. If your Tablet is stolen or misplaced, you can easily retrieve another copy via the vault. Meanwhile the documents on your lost PC cannot be opened without a Password. If you’re wondering, VREO’s Real Estate Dashboard employs a proprietary binary encoding format –DSD, or “Dashboard Serialized Document”.

In November, FNRES (Fidelity National Real Estate Solutions) and VREO launched an e-Signature Initiative. “The centerpiece of the effort is bundling VREO’s Real Estate Dashboard e-signature software for Tablet PCs and FNRES’ TransactionPoint transaction and document management platform.” Read full press release from FNRES.

Click here for a free trial of VREO’s Real Estate Dashboard
Click here for review of Tablet PC’s