So what's in a name, you say? 

A name is how people know you and what sets you apart.  If you are a parent you have you choice of naming your new baby a trendy name like Jacob, Joshua, Emma, or Isabella, a classic like John or Mary, or an oddity like Bronx Mogwli, Moon Unit, or Apple or the outrageous Ella Phant.  When you're a kid, you may like your name to blend in, when you're grown, you might not mind a unique name.  If you're named "Mary Alice" and everyone calls you "Alice," your teachers, the IRS, and all your professional contacts call you "Mary" until you clarify you want to be called "Alice." 

The dilemmas of child naming are akin to those of domain naming for your website.   Suppose your name is, well, "Mary Alice Jones "and you have a real estate business in Aardvark, IL, a Chicago suburb.  You call your business Mary Alice Jones Realty.  When someone in wants a home in Chicago, the Chicago area, or Aardvark itself, how would they find you from looking on line?  If someone knows your name, they might come up with your name as a top result when they punched in "Mary Alice Jones Real Estate."  If Aardvark, IL is a small town with not too many real estate agents, you might come up on the first page in a search as well if someone entered "Aardvark homes for sale." Not everyone knows your name or wants to live in Aardvark. If someone did the most common thing of entering "Chicago homes for sale" or "Chicago area real estate," your company might not come up until page 10.  You will be sentenced to page oblivion.  Having your name as your domain name does not guarantee Google prominence.

You may be thinking that you have seen agent names like www.alicejonesrealty.com as top rankers on Google.  Agents maybe well known in the area and achieve this placement.  If you really want your name (or your company name) as the domain name, go for it.  But if you are still building your presence in the area, you need to make sure you at least have your website filled with enough keywords and other Google attractors to pull up your ranking.  You can also buy other domain names that follow the advice below.

A better way to attract traffic is to include a geographic reference in the title.  Examples of this might be MaryAliceSellsChicago or ChicagoHomeSales.  Not surprisingly, obvious variations of this may have been scooped up by other agents who follow the same train of though.  But by slightly modifying the name, you can come up with something close that will be likely to come up when a prospect is searching for a Chicagoland home.  You can of course go for your local area (MaryAliceSellsAradvark, AardvarkHomeSales) but the area referenced might be too specific to attract the volume of visitors you want.  You want a name that will get a high Google rating so your firm is on the first page or at least near the top of the rankings.

So what's in a domain name?  Just about everything! Domain names are not a big investment, so buy and use the domain names that will meke you place high in search engines and bring actual buyers and sellers to your site.

Need some advice on domain name selection?  The Prescott Group can help you select a name (or names) in line with your marketing strategy as well as help you with website design.  Now we can even sell you the domain names themselves.  Check out our cost-effective new domain name service!

Looking for the best deal on domain names?

http://tinyurl.com/DomainDeals

Competition is a fact of life in the business world.  No where is this more true than in the world of Internet real estate sites that are all competing against your website for the client's attention. Your website has your listings, plus other listings from the MLS.  Aside from other area agents trying to promote their listings and the MLS offerings, numerous third party competitors are players too.  Trulia, Zillow, and host of smaller sites offer free information and free viewing to consumers and free listings to agents, but make their money from paid listings. 

Trulia, a site backed by venture firms Sequoia Capital and Accel claims 30 million unique visitors in the last six months while Zillow, also heavily funded by PAR Capital Management, Benchmark Capital and Technology Crossover Ventures, has seen its traffic increase 67%.  In May, 2009, nearly 3 million visitors dropped by each site to view homes, get appraisals, examine housing data, and read blogs.

Trulia is a nationwide residential real estate search engine.  In addition to allowing visitors to do  a simple search for homes for sale in a particular city, zip code, or area, Trulia allows users to access local real estate data (sales prices, schools, most popular neighborhoods)and even  compare prices & popularity by neighborhood, city, county, or state. Visitors can even ask questions.

Similarly, Zillow offers home value estimates (zestimates) which vary by market so far as accuracy is concerned and "owner's estimates" calculated after an owner has added information about their property.   Like Trulia, it attempts to offer the consumer "one stop" real estate shopping.  Smaller sites like Cyberhomes.com and Eppraisal.com also offer appraisals.

Then, there's the other services that may appeal to certain buyers or sellers:

• Listingbook.com provides an interactive community by partnering with several Multiple Listing Service (MLS) Databases.  Homebuyers can set their own search parameters, and the website will automatically send them updates as new properties are loaded in the MLS database.  Users also have the capability to edit their preferences, browse local listings, locate open houses, and contact their broker.  Currently consumers can only set up an account through a broker, and this service is not available in every state.
• Doorfly.com helps homebuyers find a real estate agent through a bidding system.  Homebuyers submit their needs to a pool of agents, and agents compete with each for their business.  Agents also offer an incentive rebate from their commission.   Homebuyers can then compare the agents, and select the one that is best for them.
• Walkscore.com measures the "walkability" of neighborhoods - an appealing idea when buyers are interested in buying green homes with services they need in the area so they so not have to use their car to get there.  Users just enter the address and it will provide a list of nearby stores, libraries, schools, etc. along with a walkability rating.  This website allows buyers to easily analyze the location of the home.
• Forsalebyowner.com offers homes listed without a Realtor®, which appeals to value-conscious buyers and sellers.

Though these sites cost many times more to construct and keep current than the average agent website, the challenge you face is getting the potential client to stay on your site once he has landed there.  Someone may see a house you listed on Trulia or Zillow in Cleveland, Ohio.  The buyer has a choice to stay on your site to view that property and other similar ones in the MLS or to zip back to Zillow once he has seen more details. He may then see a house offered by another agent that he could have seen on your website. You should aim to make your site so appealing the buyer stays put for a while and when he is ready to take his search to the next level, you are the one he calls.

A website is not just something you have, like business cards, brochures, and stationary. It should be dynamic and a major source of business for you.  Wonder why it's not? Contact the Prescott Group today for a thoughtful analysis of your site, as well as recommendations to move it to the next level.

Part 2...Internet Marketing and Today's Real Estate Agent: Your website

Even in this era of social networking, blogging, and mobile web, your agent website remains a vital marketing tool.  According to a recent National Association of Realtors survey, close to 90% of home shoppers use the Internet in the home-buying process.  When they look for a home on line, they may see homes on a particular agent's website after entering search terms like "homes for sale" or "real estate," coupled with the city or neighborhood, and picking one of the search results.  They may look on a site like Zillow or Trulia, see a home they like, and click through to the agent's website.  Given this consumer behavior, a smart agent continually updates his website to make sure it is user-friendly for visitors and full of useful information. This, of course, is assuming you have a website; as we mentioned in Part One of our series, some agents still think that the old ways of self marketing still work.

Just because potential buyers rely on the Internet for home research does not mean that sales are completed on line.  A very few may be, but most buyers want to see what they're buying.  A picture (or even a virtual tour full of them) but may be worth a thousand words or two, but carefully staged photos cannot show the neighborhood, how worn the carpeting really is, or how small the bathroom is.  No matter how good the website is, you as the agent, offer helpful information that adds depth to what people find on line.  You are the one with most accurate neighborhood comparative statistics, so you are the one who provides the accurate home valuation to sellers to determine a competitive price and to buyers to determine a fair bid.  You are the one who counsels the clients, negotiates the deal, and generates the paperwork that closes the sale.  Your website (or the Internet) will not put you out of business.

Your website is actually an electronic business card that shows you, your team, your properties, and your specialties in living color.  People see it; they call you.  This means your site needs to look great.  It should have a lot of information and a lot of pictures to capture your audience the first time around and keep them coming back to see what's new. (Actually, your site should have a way to capture information so that even if people don't log back in, you are able to include them in email campaigns to bring them back to the site and back to you!)

It is long past the time when you can get by with a site that looks homemade and unprofessional.  Your site does not have to be a million dollar project done by an advertising agency.  There are a variety of nice template sites on the market that range from being free to costing a couple thousand dollars.  With a more costly website program, you get more flexibility in design and more features.  For a minimal investment, you can get a site that is easy to use and where you can personalize the text so it reflects your message and showcases your neighborhood in a clear and graphically appealing manner and contains the features you need: auto listing update, blog, listing pages, and content pages.  (Other bells and whistles are nice; these are the essentials.) Your site sells you, not just your franchise; this why you may want to go beyond having a Re/Max or Keller-Williams or Coldwell Banker site and have a site of your own.

Once you have your site, you need to promote it to bring traffic to it.  If you are an agent in Baltimore, MD, you hope that clients will find you because your name comes up on the first page of Google when buyers type in "Baltimore MD real estate" or "Baltimore homes for sale."  Until that happens, you want to make sure you promote your website anywhere and everywhere.  Put it on your business cards and all your advertising materials - your brochures, listing flyers, postcard, email signature, print and online ads, giveaways.  If your website name is easily accessible, prospects will type it in their browser bar - and there you are!

Looking for a reasonable website package?  The Prescott Group offers great looking basic sites starting at $195, including the services of a virtual assistant who will get your site started. Upgraded packages that include customized headers, Flash presentations, and other personalized features are also available.

The Prescott Group, by the way, has a new website of our own!  Check out our virtual assistance website and our services today!

Part 1...Internet Marketing and Today's Real Estate Agent

In this day and age it seems almost shocking to hear of anyone, especially a real estate agent, who is not “online.” But that is the hard and simple fact of it…many are not. So, if you are reading this article and you have recently ventured into the land of cyber space, this is for you! If you are a cyber-geek or even just a cyber-newbie, then we hope this simply reiterates what you already know or what you are learning.

“Well, Prescott Group,” you may ask, “why should I go online with my marketing anyway?” Let’s see. Do you want to reach the average real estate consumer these days? Do you want to spend less on your marketing yet increase your potential market at the same time? Then the internet is the medium you need to be using!

All of you are already online to a certain extent, we assume, if your listings go to your local MLS. The problem is that internet consumers are not seeing your listings on YOUR site. They are seeing them on the site of Mary Smith or Joe Jones with the agency across town. How? Because a typical real estate consumer in 2009 does their “window shopping” something like this:

Sally Sue and her husband have been renting for years but have decided to purchase a home. Being an internet-savvy 30 year old, she uses the easiest method for searching for new homes. She doesn’t know any real estate professionals, so she goes to Google and she searches for “Edina Minnesota Real Estate.” She thumbs through a few results and finally decides to stay on the CBBurnet.com website.

At the top of the page is a search for homes option. This brings up the homes listed in the MLS, not just Coldwell Banker listings. The first one that catches her eye happens to be a RE/MAX listing, she clicks it and would like to learn more about it and clicks the more information button. So who does the button contact? Not the agent who listed it of course. Sally ends up contacting the CBBurnet team!

So in this way, even if you have no internet presence, your listings are showing up somewhere online. But who gets the credit for them?

Now, let’s say that Sally is not a renter and in addition to searching for a bargain in the current market, she is also going to need to sell her home, perhaps after the market picks up. Since she didn’t find YOU online when she searched, do you think she will pick you to list her house? Nope, chances are she will end up with the Coldwell Banker agent who contacts her through her search request.

Are you seeing the reason to use the internet for your business marketing now?

There are so many places out there you can use for marketing online. The only cost for some of them is the time you spend, or the time your assistant spends, posting them. Others have monthly fees which can vary from $10 a month to $100 per month or more. We will cover your options more later in this series.

Need some more convincing that the internet is the place to be for the modern home shopper and real estate agent? Check out this well done video on YouTube about the social media market.

---

The Prescott Group is a real estate virtual assistance company that specializes in helping new and experienced real estate agents set up and maintain their online marketing.

Would you like to find more locals to follow on Twitter? (And hopefully get them to follow you back!)

A new Twitter application called GeoChirp may be just what you asked for!

GeoChirp is a handy website which uses Google maps and the location identifiers of twitter users to pinpoint the most recent tweets from a zipcode.

You can set it to search within a 1 to 50 mile radius. You can even narrow it down within that region.

If you leave the search box blank, it will pull all recent tweets, but if you search for “house” you will get all tweets in your search area with the word house.

A real estate agent performing this search in the Minneapolis area may have just struck gold, because the second tweet that we came up with in that search was from “flashyandy: At Ikea, wishing we owned our house.”

Well…you all know where that might lead! (As a matter of fact, we will probably suggest to a few Edina real estate agents we work with to add him!)

GeoChirp claims to be the first on the scene to find Tweeple by zip code. Well, sort of. Twellow has that option, but it will only show those who have actually signed up to be listed in their directory.

The great thing about GeoChirp is that it will pick up everyone with that zip code listed in their Twitter account.

GeoChirp is a beta program released by CueBlocks. They have also recently released some other GeoChirp features including:

• Subscribe to the RSS feed of your search
• Option for global search results which are not limited by zip code
• Twitter translation tool (translates Tweets to and from any language)
• And of course, you can follow GeoChirp on Twitter, Facebook and their blog for all the latest updates.

Have you tried GeoChirp? What did you think about it?

---

Pending Home Sales are UP! That's according to the National Association of Realtors®.

But I’m sure you already knew that.

Have you given thought to what that might mean for you?

Let’s see…you are a real estate agent, you sell homes, homes sales are up…so that will hopefully mean home sales are up in YOUR area as well…in which case you should be getting busier and busier with all of these homes that are selling like hot cakes!

Ok…well, one can dream right!

Regardless of whether your business is up or not, chances are you could use a virtual assistant to help with your business.

What do you need?

Maybe some marketing assistance so that all those home buyers will come seeking out your expertise?

Probably someone to help you get your listings on all the latest websites and social media sites so that all of those happy buyers will see them!

Definitely someone to help in one aspect or another of your business.

Give Tricia Allenson a call at The Prescott Group and see what services we can help you with. We have standard services, of course, but we can also customize to suit your individual needs.

---

Nothing makes a saying so trite at embellishing it on a plaque or throw pillow, but Home is Where Your Heart Is is still the most apt way to describe my favorite childhood home in Cleveland, OH.  Actually the home of my paternal grandparents, the two store fiberboard double home with a screened porch, a finished attic, and a dingy basement cradled me as a baby, was the scene of many happy events in my childhood, and influenced my later preferences on many things.

We came to live there because after World War II, my dad went back to finish college at the University of Detroit; the decision was made that my mom and I would live with my grandparents at least until he graduated.  Mom and I stayed on the second bedroom of their home on the second floor until Dad came home when we briefly moved upstairs until my Dad, who finished school and got a job, was transferred to Philadelphia.

My parents were wonderful people, but it was my grandparents that I bonded with and who became my lifelong allies.  As soon as I could walk, I would get out bed in the morning and snuggle up with my grandfather in his armchair as he went through his morning pre-breakfast ritual - morning prayers, a couple cigarettes, and a couple games of solitaire on a peculiar one-legged table he balanced on his knee.  After Grampa went to work, Granny and I would plan our day.  If I was lucky, the day would include a road trip to the Kreske's Dime Store or Lasche's Meat Market around the corner, a chance to get at the butter mints and M&Ms that were always in her buffet, or a trip to the attic or basement to watch her do the only two household tasks she loved - sewing and mangling.  She was a championship mangler!

I also was crazy about the downstairs neighbors who would come upstairs to play cards.  Angie and "Uncle" Jim became like second grandparents to me.  At 2 or 3 years old, I loved to sneak downstairs to visit and, of course, to sample the delicious ravioli or spaghetti that we were often on the menu there.  My grandmother was a good cook too, so I had two dinners as often as I could pull it off.

When I was five, my parents and I moved to Philly, but my heart remained in Cleveland.  For the next seven years, I would come down for a long visit of two - three weeks that would end when my parents came to get me.  Our family kept expanding, so I regarded my time in Cleveland as my time for special treatment.   As I got older, my ways of starting the day with my grandparents continued but the ritual expanded.  I could always hope for a day or two at Euclid Beach Park, an amusement park that was a short bus ride away, sewing lessons with Granny, a trip downtown that included lunch at the Silver Grille in Higbee's department store, trips to the library, a quick series of swimming lessons, and endless games of cards.  At least once during my summer trip we would end up in Mentor to visit my beloved Aunt Olive and her daughter Alice.

Aside from the great times with my extended family, I loved the house on Hillgrove.  They say girls "marry" their dads, but I grew to love features there that shaped some of my housing preferences my whole life.  Throughout my life, I have bought or lived in homes that were very similar to Granny and Grampa's.  This is strange, as I actually prefer nice modern houses with straight lines, but I am still a sucker for some of the features of Granny's house:

Starting at the top, the finished attic had wonderful ceilings that followed the gables.  The attic was divided into three rooms, but I spent the most time in a room where my grandmother sewed.  She always had multiple projects underway.  I always took note of the "projects" as many were things she miss-cut or made too small that I inherited.  Since I was 8 and she was in her sixties, this made for some odd outfits when I was growing up.

The kitchen was fairly small, but still a favorite spot for preparing Granny's classic recipes, especially her crumb coffee cake.  It was in this very kitchen that I saw, pre Parkay days, a bag of oleo with a red dot that you pushed to release the yellow color.  (This was back in the days when dairy farmers lobbied to make margarine look different than butter.)  She also had a cool stove with a deep well, a built in deep fryer.  (It never worked.)  Late every afternoon, Granny would have a beer and we'd start steeping the tea bags for the iced tea we'd have for dinner unless she had concocted an excuse for my grandfather to take us out to dinner. 

When there were more people for dinner, we would pass through the swinging door to eat in the dining room.  I loved the built in leaded glass cabinets, as well as the china cabinet she had to house her collection of salt and pepper shakers.  A window seat between the cabinets made the room perfect.

The bathroom at Granny's was purely functional, but it had a clothes shoot that emptied in the basement.  I vacillated between being intrigued and terrorized by the imaginary animals who spent their nights running up and down the clothes shoot.  These creatures, the angdowns, looked like wolves but wore overalls and red bandanas almost the color of their long tongues.  Despite comforting words from Mom and Granny, I always feared they would pull me from my bed or suck me down the shoot.

The living room featured built in bookcases and a fireplace that permitted Santa to enter every year.  Granny loved to help Santa.  Every year around September, she would cover her couch with a sheet; suddenly, the sheet would grow to something that expanded by day.  When I asked her about it, she would say it was a dead cow under there.  On Christmas Eve, Grampa must have disposed of the carcass while l napped till Santa came. When I woke up, there were packages everywhere and the sheet was gone from the couch.

The last compelling feature of the Hillgrove house was a magnificent screened in porch.  It made the living room dark but sleeping out there on one of the comfy chaise lounges was a highpoint of the summer. The porch was also the perfect place to sit and chat with my friend in the house next door.

My family came back in Cleveland when I was 12.  My grandparents moved from Hillgrove when I was 16 to another home only a mile from us.  I grew to love that house too - but that's another story. 

One of our virtual assistants wrote this memory of her childhood home in Cleveland, OH.  Ironically, after many moves, she lives a mile away from this home on the site of the old Euclid Beach Park.  The home is currently for sale.

By Carol
Virtual Assistant - Blog Specialist
The Prescott Group

We told you the benefits of using tiny URLs in your emails and, especially, in Twitter. It is actually nearly essential for many URLs if you are tweeting them…they are simply too long otherwise.

Well anytime something that is good for business comes around, those who are disreputable tend to pick it up and run with it too. And it’s happened again with the tiny URLs.

Earlier this month, it became apparent that spammers had figured out how to use URL Shortening sites as well.

In early July, MessageLabs, a division of Symantec, announced a skyrocketing number of shortened URLs in spam emails. The spammers have gotten wise to these short URLs because they allow them to slip past anti-spam tools and often unsuspecting readers will click on them assuming that they are being directed to a site of interest.

While there really isn’t any way around using tiny URLs in your tweets, you might want to consider using them sparingly in your emails. Try using a hyperlink instead. Of course, if the link you are using is more than 1 line long, you might need to use a short URL, but consider the fear that others might have in clicking on it first.

What about the tiny URLs that people send to you? Be careful about clicking these. Only click the ones that came from friends, family, or others that you trust. If it comes from NAR, you are probably ok. If it comes from someone with an oddly spelled name or someone promising you thousands from a long-lost inheritance, then you probably should not click it!

Not sure if its an ok link? You can check it out at http://untiny.me/. This site allows you to copy and paste the tiny url, no matter what service provided it, and they will reveal the original site address to you. This might take you a bit more time, but it could save you from nuisance sites or even worse a destructive virus.

I have it bookmarked and I recommend you do the same.

---

If you would like to learn more about what a real estate virtual assistant can do for you or how virtual assistance can help you build your business, please contact Tricia Allenson, (952) 212-7598, or Chris Prescott, (952) 944-1728

Two virtual assistants with miles between them were chatting one day over a cup of coffee (virtually, in both cases, of course) when their conversation drifted to the subject of local blogging.  Both were students of Active Rain and had come to believe that community blogs were where the action was when trying to pull SEO for their clients.  Buyers, after all, buy homes in a specific area like Sparta, MO or Grand Rapids, MI, not some undifferentiated place in the U.S.  Even an agent who comments on national real estate issues often does so from the perspective of their locale; an agent from Las Vegas would have a whole different perspective on foreclosure and short sales than someone from Vermont.  So, writing blogs with an eye to geography makes good sense.

One assistant, from a small town, firmly held that the best local blogger lived in the community and was up on all the local happenings.  The other, from a bigger city and an urban history student in her distant past, was equally adamant in her belief that good research and a lot of links could overcome distance.  They finally agreed on a couple things.  Some things need to be done locally.  A virtual assistant in Boise, ID couldn't take pictures of attractions in Hiram, OH, especially on the same day she was snapping up local color in Raleigh, NC.  Living in Boise, she might not get the flavor of the housing politics in Schaumburg, IL.  On the other hand, a virtual assistant blogger would have a very small market if she only covered topics of interest within a 25 mile radius of her home, especially if she lived in Armpit, NJ, population 1,200.  In a larger city like Orlando or Cleveland, it may be less true that someone living there would be aware of everything happening within the city limits and suburbs.  Good research, usually with local sources, would still be crucial in yielding a great local blog.

By time they finished their coffee, the virtual assistants came up with a perfect solution.  While it is true that many agents hire them to provide turnkey operations for certain services, a small amount of input from the agent could melt geographic walls where blogging was concerned.  The virtual assistant could do the legwork and write the post - two time consuming tasks - while the agent could read the copy and tweak it slightly to add the name of a popular restaurant or add an interesting tidbit based on their experience in the local market.  An investment of 5-10 minutes could effectively maximize their blogging efforts and make them shine in the real estate community and among clients with a vested interest in the area school with the best basketball record!