marketmedia's Blog

A follow up: "Realtors who drive away business" pt. 2

William McCauley (marketmedia,llc) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 11:58:00 -0600

A while back I wrote a blog about my own personal experience in searching for property listing in another state in order to do a between the job interview, whirl wind tour of listings with my wife in a town we would be looking at moving to should she land a new job in that state. This is a follow up to that experience, as the owner of a Kansas business and property marketing company I have had to file away mistakes, problems, typo's, and a wide assortment of things I have learned over the years that did not have the desired result or down right made my company look bad to the customers I was seeking to gain or to my exsiting clients, so I could be darn sure it never happened again......Ever!

In my business if you make your client look bad you won't have clients very long, so it has always been very important to me that what ever we put our name on, it has to be the very best or it doesn't get released till it is 100% right, we don't want to make our clients' look bad or our company! Now that I have moved my company across the country and started rebuilding my company to be a Kansas 360 virtual home tours leader, I was approached by a friend to consider starting a new company with him in my new location, in order to do this new venture we would need to find between 40 and 80 acres of flat land in a prime location.

I was asked to search large acres of land in the area for sale, so I hit the internet and started searching for the right location and for the amount of acres we would be needing for this venture. As I soon found out today's acreage agents (some of them) are not up to speed on the use of internet sales and marketing. I had found the perfect parcel of land in a search, the listing info had a very poorly done black and white plot image taken from the space shuttle and it wasn't even oriented north or marked directionally. It had Google generated map with a pin marker placement of the property location. Well as I looked at the Google map, I knew the county roads out that way, it just so happens the property the listing agent had marked was the 40 acres of farm land that is right next door to one of my long time friends farm.

As I studied the map and plot image something just didn't jive right. So I opened up Google earth and took a look, none of the land marks would line up no matter how you moved around on Google earth. I tried to call the agent and ask if the land on his map was the right property I was looking at but no answer, I left a msg and called my buddy up and asked him if knew anything about it, he said no way that land was for sale he has been trying to buy it for 20 years. Well about and hour later my phone rang and it was the listing agent, so I opened up the map he had on the listing and tried to talk it over based on the roads shown on his map. This guy thought I was from mars or something as I described to him what I was looking at and after about a half hour and pointing out other known land marks such as "Lone Star Kansas" located a half mile north.

DING DING DING the light bulb lit up with this guy and he says "oh no my listing is two and a half mile to the north of there" well I was able to find the new location no problem, it was not what my business partner is looking for and I just wasted about two hours trying to research this listing using the wrong info posted by a listing agent. I would have been happy to add a link, but the listing is now gone and for 545.000 I doubt is was sold in this market, maybe? I lean more towards it expired and I wouldn't be surprised if the property owner had very little traffic.

Why would an agent not make sure they done their job right and double checked their online listings to see it's done right, why would an agent put their name on something so wrong? Why do such a disservice to your client? The day's of the old huge MLS book are long gone and they won't be back, so if your not up to speed in today's computer based world, then you should take advantage of the free or cheap classes offered by most B.O.R.'s or C.E. classes for computer. Now I know most of the people I'm talking about are not reading this because they can't even check out their listings, but hey it needed to be said. On the bright side all these poor performers sure do a good job of making those of you who do it right look good.

marketmedia launches youtube channel for Kansas virutual Tours

William McCauley (marketmedia,llc) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:19:39 -0600

marketmedia,LLC DBA Kansas 360 Tours, Topeka Virtual Tours, Lawrence 360 Tours. Services for residential virtual home tours & commercial real estate tours, real estate photography, Aerial Photography. Is pleased to announce marketmedia,LLC has released it's youtube channel for enhancing it's Kansas virtual tours and providing our clients with more marketing power. Why? Well youtube is one of the larger search engines out there and a simple video home tour coupled with our proprietary SEO spider friendly tour code, it will have our clients, Kansas virtual tour getting more exposure in very little time, often less then 24 hours the video with the tour link will land on page one of a Google search for any of the keywords.

As the owner of marketmedia and having just moved my company to it's new location, I have property for sale and we did a virtual tour for that listing. My Realtor is not only one of marketmedia'sclients, she is a good friend too, so I needed to find out what all the youtube fuss was about. We did a test to see how well this idea would work for us based on what I had been reading, so I made a simple short video and uploaded it to youtube and attached the virtual tour link in the description of the video and I used my keywords wisely. Now I had talked my Realtor right after the upload around 6pm and she did a quick search of the address, city and zip, and nothing but the marketing that was already in place showed up, BUT I did a search again of just the address just before turning in for the night around midnite, and BAM there it was at the top of the page our test video with tour link!

That is pretty darn remarkable really, when you stop to think, how many Virginia Drives are there in the USA? Yet a simple search of my address by number and street only, NO city or zip code used in the search. My agents name also shows linked to the video and the tour we already had online. After this little test I ran it was decided that having our own marketmedia youtube channel was the way to go and we would offer this tool to our clients who wish to unleash the power of youtube without having to take the time to do all the work time & time again for each of their listings.

When we couple this youtube channel with our large Kansas virtual tour distribution portaland social bookmarks code, you'll find one of the best real estate marketing values for your money. Not only do we go to your listing and take your professional high quality images for your MLS & marketing needs, we build you the best SEO friendly virtual tour on the market and we can add your listing to our youtube channel along with the social network book marks, you'll have more coverage in one stop with a phone call and a click of your mouse your done and can focus on what you do best.....Sell real estate!

Kansas Virtual Tours - Helping you get to SOLD!

William McCauley (marketmedia,llc) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:07:10 -0600

Hello active rain,

We have some exciting news to release to the public as well as our future clients in the northeast Kansas area of Topeka, Lawrence & Kansas City. marketmedia, LLC has moved is operation to Lawrence Kansas and is offering real virtual tours as Lawrence 360 tours.

Lawrence Kansas - January 23, 2009 - Kansas 360 tours a division of marketmedia,LLC has relocated corporate offices and service center to Lawrence Kansas. Kansas 360 tours, the newest addition to the marketmedia, LLC services, has partnered with RTV, inc. (RTV), the world's largest and fastest growing virtual tour software provider.

As a RTV full service Douglas County virtual tour provider, Kansas 360 tours offers state-of-the-art virtual tours and innovative online marketing solutions to local real estate agents and businesses throughout the northeast Kansas area of Lawrence, Topeka and Kansas City.

Read the full press release here for more information. We are very excited about this moved and to be offering our services to the local market as well as our national clients. Our products and service can't be beat by those impersonal national companies & "do it yourself" virtual tour companies that sell you software, charge you a monthly fee and make you do all the work. Our Virtual Tour Distribution network will get you the most bang for your marketing dollars. When you combine this with our tour reporting service and search engine friendly tours your be sure to stand out over your competitors who are still using poorly taken imagesand building slideshows with the same images a home buyer is seeing in the MLS and other marketing outlets.

Today it is more important than ever to incorporate social networking tools into your overall marketing strategy. Fortunately, marketmedia, LLC has just made your job much easier! Our social networking bookmarks on every tour, brings you marketing power by loading your Kansas virtual tour right to your favorite social networking sites such as, active rain, facebook, linkedin, digg, mixx and many other sites.

The software powering your Kansas virtual tours now includes a Social Networking Tool that allows viewers to bookmark your tours within their social networks with just a click of their mouse! All you do is simply select 'Social Bookmarks' from the 'Share Tour' menu and the icons will appear at the bottom of the tour instantly. Share the news about this new tool with your sellers at your next listing presentation!

Let's review all you get when place an order with us

Professional Photo's for your MLS & media outlets.
A High quality Kansas 360 virtual tour
Optional Craig's lists posting of tour
Social bookmarks
SEO friendly tour (spider friendly link)
Detailed tour report weekly
Email-able & burn-able tour
A personable and friendly local service provider
Optional youtube video on our youtube channel
Tours built in 24 hours & online
Our distribution engine to 90 websites
Power of the spining red house (realtor.com)
The best 360 virtual tour on the market!

You get all this with one phone call and never have to leave the office and worry about taking photos or uploading them and fooling around with substandard image software taking hours out of your day you could spend on selling houses.

Realtors who drive away business!

William McCauley (marketmedia,llc) — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 11:04:22 -0500

Hello AR,

Well it's been awhile that I've posted a blog, that would be due to me TCB and not having the time and that is a good thing, it means business is good. As a real estate marketing company owner in the Dayton & Cincinnati Ohio area www.marketmediallc.com. I always see listings in another light as those of you who sell listings. Well the time has come for my wife and I to look into making a move across the country and in what spare time we have we search the local area we would like to move to and house hunt.

As usual I can't help but see some awful marketing going on out there in the market place. The most common thing I see is 1. No photos or only one image 2. Poorly taken images 3. really bad virtual tours that are more fancy zoom in pans & fades that don't show the rooms 4. websites that list all the local listings but then in order to see any information about the listing the end user has to sign up. So today I'm posting to you all as a end user and NOT as a real estate marketer.

This deal with asking people to sign up and give you personal info and email address so you now have a lead generator is understandable from a business point of view, however from the shoppers point of view it is very VERY annoying. As a person who is now in the market to buy a new home in the location we are going to, I can tell you that if your one of these Realtors who do any of the things I numbered above, you are losing business!

The first thing I do and any other buyer who is searching the web will do is click the big red X! Because you limit your website viewers to seeing the information about a listing by requiring them to provide you with personal info for your lead generator you come across as the "used car salesman" and consumers hate the used car salesman, it is one of the biggest reasons why home buyers in today's market turn first to the web..... To avoid dealing with sales people who are pushy or who spam you because you have to sign up on their website in order to see a listing in more detail.

I'm here today to tell all of you out there, that there are a number of agents who we will not be doing business with next week while my wife and I are in the area we plan to move to, WHY? because you have limited our ability to do our home work and research. Had you not not done so and you were the listing agent or I took the time to click on your website, GUESS WHAT< I would have called you to set up an appointment to see the property! Consumers don't want your spam and sales calls from your lead generators, we'll call you. So any guess who's phone will be ringing next week? That's right your competitors across town!

So those of you who do this type of lead generating and use really bad photos and virtual tours in your marketing, and there is a lot of you out there, not only are you losing out on sales leads and clients, your doing a really poor job for your clients listing.

In Todays Tough Market It Pays To Think Outside The Box

William McCauley (marketmedia,llc) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 23:30:45 -0500

As a full service virtual tour builder and real estate photographer in the Dayton & Cincinnati Ohio area I have been telling some of my clients that in todays tough market it pays to think outside the box. That's right folks the tricks that worked in years past are gone and if you want to remain competive you have to be willing to go the extra mile, stand out above the rest, and use todays tools to your advantage.

Many of you read everyday on active rain and other industry sources about the wealth of ideas and information that professional photographers and real estate marketing companies have to offer, yet quite often we're blown off or not taken as knowledgeable in the industry because many of us are not licensed agents or brokers and therefore we couldn't know anything about selling or marketing real estate. We not only give away many great ideas to our clients and those we would like to have as clients, but we also blog on this site and tell all of you about them, but many times we hear comments like "I don't like 360 virtual tours" or "My point and shoot digital camera is fine" & "I don't think that will work"

But the funny thing is, it's not about what you the agent likes, it's about what the consumer wants and we keep seeing the same old mistakes repeted over and over by agents who think they are doing their clients a bang up job by using poorly taken images and virtual tours and many other basic mistakes that turn off consumers, this means they click the big red X and move on. What many of you fail to understand is that we get to hear from the public and what they say behind your backs or about the listing agent they fired, because a progressive agent who thinks outside the box moved in and won the listing presentation or your expired listing, it's surprising some of the things we as service providers hear about you the real estate agent and how bad of a job many of you do at giving the end user (Mr & Mrs. John Q Public) what they want and like when searching for property. We service providers are not as clueless as many of you seem to think based on your posts and comments here and in the office.

What's the point you ask to this post? The point is this, I have a number of agent clients who refuse to even try some simple ideas that would only cost them their time and not any money, such as posting thier listings on http://www.craigslist.org/ and using postlets to make an ad that would stand out above every other ad posted there. It's really quite simple, not only will your listings show up in Google searches if you use the right keywords, you can drive a ton of traffic to your lisitings and it's FREE, but wait, theres more!

I have conducted my own test with a few of my clients to prove a point to them as well as the stuck in a rut old fashion thinking agents I know. And wouldn't you know it the numbers speak volumes about how right I was. Now before you all think I'm going to break my arm patting my own back, it was a high volume agent who gave me the idea I sort of stoled it from her for my own company's SEO benefit. The test went so well that one of my clients had four qualified buyers show up to her open house and told her they saw my test ad's on http://www.craigslist.org/ and we're not talking about a 25K crack shack, but a 269,900 listing and a 450K listing. You can see the numbers here http://www.realtourvision.com/hit_stats.php?utl=RE-0809-YEQZM7-01 and here http://www.realtourvision.com/hit_stats.php?utl=RE-1555-HK0OZS-01 You can see how agent kelly Morse posts her ads every Thrusday and the numbers spike on Friday, Saturday & Sundays.

If what I'm saying is not true then why do we see so many blog's like the following:

1. http://activerain.com/blogsview/408469/Let-your-photographer-wear

2. http://activerain.com/blogsview/404893/Why-don-t-realtors

3. http://activerain.com/blogsview/155103/Which-Camera-What-Angle

4. http://activerain.com/blogsview/414887/Real-Estate-Marketing-on

I could just keep linking all afternoon to blog after blog, there is a ton of info on this site all about this stuff us service providers and even your peers have been trying to say. In closing I would like to say in todays market you can follow the leaders or you can be a leader. And the leader in todays industry are thinking out side the box of standard real estate marketing and using it to their advantage because they know, today people are no longer looking for real estate on just realtor.com and those sites for which you pay a high price. You can beleive me or not, I'll let people like Karisma Olson who found out on their own tell you in their own words. (see link #4)

How not to impress a home buyer or investor

William McCauley (marketmedia,llc) — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:22:32 -0600

So your out there in the real estate world and you work hard to land a listing and now that you have landed an account, it's time to market the listing, like many other agents you try to skimp and save a few bucks, so you go ahead and buy it one of those "do it yourself " virtual tour systems and take only a few minutes to learn how to use it.

So you rush out to that new listing and start snapping photos and once you have your images you run back to the office and start to build your tour on your DIY system, thinking you done a bang up job, you pat yourself on the back and post the tour to the internet for the whole world to see. Well guess what, you never know just where your work will show up or who will see it, so it might be a good idea if you take the time to make the best impression you can so you provide the best possible service that you can to your client the seller and don't do anything to embarrass yourself on a world wide stage, let alone on the local level.

Just think what your competing agents in town will have to say about you at their listing presentation while trying win the same account you are, when you do high quality work such as this little gem here.

Link: http://www.visualtour.com/shownp.asp?t=1349114&prt=63 (highlight and right click for new window)

So moral of the story is if your going to shoot your own in house virtual tours then at least get the place cleaned up before the photoshoot or you risk looking really bad and like a lazy agent or an agent who is clueless as to what makes buyers and investor want to take a look at your listings, instead of having a good laugh and moving on to the next listing that was marketed like a real, real estate professional!

You know some things are better left to a trained professional photographer and virtual tour provider!

Substandard virtual tours & images

William McCauley (marketmedia,llc) — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:13:56 -0600

What dose it say about you the real estate agent, when you show up to your clients home and shoot one of those poorly lit slideshow type virtual tours or one of those nauseating quarter pan type virtual tours? It's says, "hi I'm your agent and I'm to cheap to hire a real photographer and spend money to market your home". We see these every day in the industry and with digital cameras so affordable these days many agents think they can save money by buying into one of those "do it yourself" virtual tour packages or they shoot images for the MLS with their 200 dollar camera & lens they got a wal-mart. The end result is.....well really bad images and very badly done slideshows passed off as a virtual tour.

Ever notice how you see a photo of the front of a house that was taken from clear across the street and the house looks like a postage stamp in the image? This is because the use of those cheap cameras & lens, a real professional will use the right lens and take the shot in the front yard so the person searching for a home can see the house clearly. It never ceases to amaze me just how many agents will use such bad images in their marketing, I always enjoy a good "drive by", no I'm not talking about a shooting by gang members here, I'm talking about those agents who don't stop the car as they drive by a listing and stick the camera out the window of the car as they go by, I guess their blind or assume everyone else is blind and can't see the blur in the images. Or they shoot a house that faces east @ 5 pm so so ti's all back lit.

Two weeks ago after I uploaded a real virtual tour for a client, we were searching her brokers website for comps in the area to see what other agents in the area were doing for marketing, and up pops a listing that had a DIY virtual tour and the agent had taken one of those "nauseating pans" from the landing of the stairs looking towards the foyer......the funny thing was, it was laid on it's left side and paning back and forth, my agent looked at me and asked "what the hell is that?" so I turned my laptop on it's side and that's when you could see it was a half pan from the ceiling to the floor, I couldn't believe it and the agent I was working for just busted up laughing and said "that's my local Competition?"

So agents & brokers in todays tough market place it pays in the long run to hire a professional in the long run and you won't look like a person trying to do marketing with out having a clue and you'll save time and money over all by selling more houses and using clear and crisp images and real 360 degree virtual tours that can be hosted in multiple websites. On the plus side though, the more of you who keep on using substandard virtual tours & images, you just keep me looking better and working for your competition. And if your a home owner, you need to make sure you choose an agent who is not to cheap to hire a real professional to shoot you homes virtual tour so you don't get stuck with a lame slideshow with badly taken images.

William McCauley President www.marketmediallc.com