When most buyers and sellers are searching online - especially early in their search - the last thing they are interested in is a house salesperson!

What they are looking for is education, information, listings, and generally learning the process of home buying or selling as they casually sift through and absorb the seemingly endless amounts of information available online.

If you want to learn about cities such as Boston or Chicago or any other major city, it's very easy to find plenty of that online. But if you're interested in a small, residential community or a small neighborhood in a major city, it can be very difficult to find out ANYTHING about these small communities. (generally it's a short paragraph that came from the Chamber of Commerce site that every Realtor lifted for their site!)

One of the single best ways to make your website "sticky", to showcase a small neighborhood and it's quirky shops, neighborhoods and residents is to do a community video tour! Not only that, at the same time you are selling yourself... your knowledge of the community. Inotherwords, you're giving people what they want (information on the community) and at the same time, giving them an opportunity to meet and see you (what they don't want!).

The shelf life of a community video is essentially - forever! Over time, building a library of community videos can provide a rich addition to your website, separate you from virtually all of your competitors and at the same time showcase you as the community "expert".

It's a "win-win"!

 

FACT:
Nearly 90% + of buyers begin their search on the internet.  That's a pretty large majority!

Yet, most MLS systems have a maximum number of photos they allow.  The size of the photos are not much bigger than a large postage stamp in many cases.  And to make matters worse, their systems compress all of the life and color out of those photos when they put them on their system.

If that wasn't bad enough, they limit the number of characters in the description, which forces Realtors to get "creative" with their abbreviations and punctuation.  In most cases, those abbreviations are made up on the fly, giving 'regular people' absolutely no hope of understanding exactly what the heck they are talking about!

So, lets see... almost all buyers start looking on the web, yet what they see are a limited number of muddy, sometimes unidentifiable photos with descriptions that sound like they're written in another language.

Boy, I can't think of a bettter system than that!

"Curb Appeal" of yesterday is "Web Appeal" today

Your web presentation means everything.  Buyers are eliminating properties solely based on what they see on their computers.  It doesn't matter if you think it's right, wrong or unfair - it IS what buyers are doing. 

With a record number of properties on the market, and broadband connections and computers in every home why wouldn't you do that?  You can see photos of the exterior... then step right inside and look around and see the house!  Why wouldn't you make your decision based on what you see? 

Yet, the MLS seems to be stuck in the days of the old MLS books - offering poor quality and tiny photos and a brief description of the property.  Of course, back then you HAD to call a Realtor in order to have any clue as to what was on the market, right?

Well, those days are long gone.  At least Realtor.com has it together when it comes to presentations.  You can put up to 25 LARGE photographs, plus a video or virtual tour on your listing.  But not with most MLS IDX systems!

How to offer on the MLS what buyers want, even though you can't.

Even though your MLS may be living in the stone age, there is a way around this:  A virtual tour.

Of course, most Realtors use this virtual tour to link to a zooming slideshow of the bad photos that the buyer just looked at on the MLS!!!!!

Exactly what is the point here?  You're offering NO additional information to the buyer, and I hardly think buyers are fooled into thinking that those photos are any different or better because now there's zooming and music! You're just offering the same information in a slightly new package.

Done properly, with the click of the virtual tour link, you can present your buyer with a full screen presentation of large, beautiful, clear photos!  You can show a walk through video tour of the home.  ALL AVAILABLE ON YOUR LOCAL MLS.

This is an example of what can be shown to buyers directly from your local MLS

If you have a lot to say, a way around the short character limitation of the MLS descriptions is using a narrated video tour! You can give complete descriptions, and perhaps interesting tidbits, the history of the home, local amenities and more.

This is also an example of what can be shown directly from the local MLS with narration

Just because your local MLS is still living in the stone ages, if they offer a virtual tour link,
you have the opportunity to provide a killer presentation
that will entice that buyer put YOUR listing on their short list to visit in person!

Gmail has a little known tracking device built right in!  You can play "detective" in the hopes of tracking down the source of some of your spam!

Have you ever started to receive a lot of junk mail and wanted to know what company was selling or distributing your email address to others?

Do you do email blasts and want to make sure your mail list isn't being abused by a third party?

It's easy with Gmail!

When you send an email to someone that you may want to track, append that email address with a plus sign (+) and a description.

Say you go to a trade show and register for services with Active Rain.  If your email address is JohnJones@gmail.com, give them an email address of JohnJones+ActiveRain@gmail.com

You want to append your Gmail username with a plus symbol (+) and the tracking information.  

The email will go through as normal, but you will be able to see WHERE that email address was obtained from.  If you receive email from the Publisher's Clearing House addressed to JohnJones+ActiveRain@gmail.com, you know Active Rain sold or gave your email address to Ed McMahon!

There are many benefits to using Gmail - this is just another one! 

 

 

Google rolled out enhancements to Gmail Wednesday, including the ability send a viewable and watchable YouTube video directly in email, without clicking through to the YouTube site.

The preview functionality makes it possible for Gmail users to see photos from Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa photo management services, in addition to playing back YouTube video clips.

This could be a great marketing tool - easily send out a real estate video tour of your newest listing to potential buyers - email your video marketing report to your mailing list - there are a lot of possibilities here!

Here is a quickie on how to set up this capability within your Gmail.  Of course this won't work if you're not using Gmail.  Just another reason to switch your email program.  Gmail is THE BEST email program - incredible spam filter, almost limitless storage, archival capabilities (I have literally 4 years of email stored on Gmail!).  Better yet, you can set up your gmail to send mail from YOUR DOMAIN (myname.com) instead of from Gmail - for free! 

 

For the past four years, in good times, in OK times, and now in difficult times, I have monitored the number of properties on the market that offer virtual tours (and I'm using that term very loosely).

The ratio has been almost exactly the same, regardless of the economy and in spite of the fact that the number of properties on the market has exploded in the past year. Roughly 20% of all properties in Hillsborough Country have a virtual tour on the MLS system. Only 568 properties out of nearly 2,700 on the market.

Numerous polls and studies done in recent years show that the quantity of photos, the quality of photos and the presence a virtual tour help make properties stand out, receive more views, and help get perspective buyers in the door. And yet, with a record number of homes on the market, only 1 in 5 have a virtual tour of any kind! And many have photos that are embarrasingly bad.

To make matters worse, probably 500 of those virtual tours are just regurgitated photos that have been recycled from the MLS and put into an inexpensive program that now zooms in and out and in and out - set to music! The zooming is random, so oftentimes we're zooming in on the arm of a sofa (are you selling furniture or homes?). And of course, being small, low resolution, low quality photos in most cases, when you zoom in, the slideshow gets blurry.

Does this offer a buyer anything of value? NO. In fact, you're insulting the buyer by forcing them to take extra time to download your "virtual tour", only to find the EXACT SAME information they just saw, only now it's ZOOMING! What is the point? Buy downloading a virtual tour, a buyer is expecting more information. More photos, more angles, larger photos, neighborhood photos... MORE than what they've already seen on the MLS! And most of these so called "virtual tours" are just giving them the same and wasting their time. More importantly, these slideshow programs are what they see time and time again when they find a listing that even offers a virtual tour. Same old, same old. Most even have the same (default) music in the background, and most offer absolutely nothing of additional value.

How can your listing stand out among the rest? How can you stand out as a professional and as someone who understands how to properly market real estate? How can you make your listing engage the buyer so they pick up the phone and visit in person? How can you use high quality marketing to make you look like a professional?

Virtually all buyers begin their search online. Your internet presentation is THE first thing buyers see. It's your 'curb appeal'.

Pretend you're a buyer. Compare these three listings, all listed for over a million dollars. I'm sure all three properties are beautiful homes - in person. Based on what you see here, which would make YOU interested? Which home LOOKS like a million dollar home?

Look at this listing with it's tiny 12 photos and no virtual tour.

Look at this listing presentation and virtual tour

Then look at this listing and it's presentation with professional photography and a narrated, full motion video tour?

Which would you choose?