YoChicago

Why I won't return to ActiveRain

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 21:04:38 -0600

My reasons for leaving ActiveRain have, I think, been expressed in sufficient detail, at sufficient length.

Since stating them, I've spent more time rummaging around ActiveRain, questioning whether I had overstated my case. If anything, I understated it.

I've paid careful attention to the posts and comments that my post provoked.

I regretfully conclude that, as someone famously said about my home city of Chicago, ActiveRain ain't ready for reform.

There is, in my not so humble take, too little genuine concern about fair housing, and too little appreciation for the gravity of the issue.

There are some outstanding leaders here, but I don't see them being committed to solving the problems here. I'm sympathetic to the fact that people have other priorities.

I won't be posting further, or responding to any further comments.

And, based on everything I've seen, I won't be back.

Real estate blogging - my "round up the clowns" post

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:36:49 -0600

I've come to ActiveRain and begun writing an online journal / blog so that I can learn a few things by posting on some topics and participating in a discussion of those topics, and hopefully teach a few things I know along the way.

What's happened all too often instead is that people are jumping in, ignoring the topic, and trying (and sometimes succeeding) in hijacking my post into a discussion of my style rather than the substance of what I had to say.

Some of the critics, perhaps even a majority of the critics, are well-meaning and think they're helping me with this.

They're not. They're just making it more difficult for me and the people who do want to have a discussion of the topic. They're as rude, and off base as the cheap-shot critics and the clowns. In the context of the discussion, they're all clowns to one degree or another.

This is my "round up the clowns" post.

Here you can stay on topic, since the topic is how insulting, impolite, ignorant, learning-averse, arrogant, etc. I am, and how you'd learn more from me if I just learn to talk nice.

Feel free to post your logos here in your signature, to add your credentials to your signature, to pretend that you don't have a first name and that your last name is "Your metro area specialist." You can sign yourself with your company name. You can even flaunt your religious bigotry if you wish.

You're also free to add comments that compliment me purely for the points or to make yourself feel good, but that don't advance the discussion. Here they do.

Feel comfortable. Feel free. This is your community, this post here. Look around and tell yourself "nobody here but us clowns and vandals. This rocks!"

If you don't like me or my style, express it here, and leave me and the few who want to have a conversation in my other posts alone.

Look at it this way: your collective wisdom on the subject will make it clear to everyone who reads my other posts just what a clown I really am.

I don't intend to answer comments on this post, so it's all yours. I will read it from time to time.

An equal housing opportunity statement

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Sun, 11 Feb 2007 09:21:05 -0600

I'm somewhat stunned by my inability to locate a fair housing statement here. I've tried, and I can't.

So, at least on my own behalf, I'm supplying a variation of the one I use on my other sites.

I'm doing that as a firm statement that I detest the express and implied religious preferences that others express here, and my participation here in no way implies support or approval for them. Those preferences have no place in a public real estate venue - our society as a whole disclaims them.

The Federal Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to advertise "any preference, limitation, or discrimination because of race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin, or intention to make such preference, limitation or discrimination." It is illegal to advertise discriminatory terms or conditions, or advertise that the property is available only to persons of a certain race, color, religion, sex, handicap, familial status, or national origin.

Applicable state and local laws may also make it illegal to advertise any preference, limitation or discrimination based on age, citizenship, marital status, military discharge status, presence of minor children, pregnancy, sexual preference, source of income, student status, and other personal characteristics.

You should consult your personal attorney as to the applicability of these laws and of any exceptions that might apply to you or your advertising. It may, for example, be acceptable for a person advertising for a roommate to state a gender preference.

I support both the letter and the spirit of these laws.

Complaints alleging housing discrimination may be filed with your local fair housing office or the nearest office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), or by calling HUD's toll free number, 1-800-699-9777 (voice), or 1-800-543-8294 (TDD). HUD may also be contacted on the Internet at http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/promotingfh/atyourservice.cfm.

Flickr - break some bad habits before the fun starts

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 19:12:09 -0600

Let's recap what you've done so far in this series.

First, you determined that your business needed a long-term focus, and that you'd set aside as much time as you could afford for building that focus. You decided that Flickr would be an important part of a multi-faceted Web marketing strategy for that focus. Among other things, you determined to use Flickr as "training wheels for blogging" instead of jumping off the cliff into blogging.

Then you determined what your focus would be, and that it would be a niche you would own. For illustration, I picked a pretend focus, 3 nearby subdivisions in Antioch, IL that will have about 1,600 homes when they're completed. I guesstimated that my pretend focus can yield me nearly $750k in gross income, after the split with my (nonexistent) broker, 5 years from now, when I'm up to 50% market share in resales. My income projection doesn't include referral fees for referring out buyers, since I'd only be working with sellers.

With a firm grip on your focus, you made some decisions and created a Flickr account that reinforced that focus, and stayed tightly on focus. You then took a brief detour to note how Google took my Flickr photos (I'm a few steps ahead of you) from zero to # 1 in 1 day.

Next, you began to learn how to socialize on Flickr in a low-impact way, by selecting some Flickr Favorites from other users and thinking about how that helps you.

You're about ready to begin adding some of your photos to your Flickr account. Before you start, you have two things you must do.

The first is to break yourself of some bad habits. The second is to plan how you'll organize your Flickr photos into sets / albums and make some decisions about how to tag and describe those photos. The first task is critical. There's no point in going forward if you don't accomplish it. The second is not so critical at the outset. Flickr allows you to change, delete and add information and tags to your photos at any time, and add and rearrange albums.

Start talking in a human voice. The odds are high that you have a bad habit you need to break: speaking in real-estate-speak rather than in English (or whatever language you're doing this in).

In real-estate-speak, an elegant home nestles amidst abounding rustic trees, awaiting your discriminating taste.

Would you ever talk that way to anyone? Have you ever spoken most of those words out loud? You do - in your ad copy, in voice-overs on your virtual tours, in marketing brochures, etc. Do you realize how utterly silly you sound?

Starting now, you're going to speak in a human voice to people instead of parroting real-estate-speak gibberish to leads. If you do that across the board, without even trying you'll break another bad habit that you probably don't even know you have: burning leads (a word I hate).

Learn how to nail the facts. If you're a typical real estate agent, one of the messages you communicate to people - again without knowing it - is that you really don't give a gnat's butt about facts.

You don't spell city names correctly. You don't spell street names and suffixes exactly. You don't pay enough attention to directional indicators in addresses. You're too lazy to look up ZIP codes. You either make up a neighborhood name, don't take the time to learn the correct one, or deliberately lie about it to draw more traffic. And then you waste hours trying to figure out why no one's finding your listing, and wailing about how people don't regard you as a professional. Duh?

From my 20 years' experience in doing the advertising for and looking at the listings of over 100,000 real estate agents, I could go on and on along this line. Hopefully you get my point and change this bad habit.

Everything you put on Flickr must be correct. If it is, you'll have a long-term valuable asset that grows in value as you add to it. If it isn't - don't bother. If you can't find the time to do it right, as the old saying goes, where will you find the time to do it over? Do less of it, and do that right.

Don't even think about talking about yourself. I've made this point before, but it needs to be repeated. Your Flickr photos and the tags, titles, descriptions you associate with them do all the talking. They show off your knowledge and brand you as a professional if you've done it right. They want to make people learn more about you - as a person and / or as a professional.

The people who visit your photos get to decide when they want to know more about you. If you try to make that decision for them, you're going to lose most of the people who would have otherwise done business with you.

Break the habit of putting yourself out front now. You're talking to people here, not hustling leads (I hate that word).

Stop thinking about search optimization. Every piece of advice you've ever been given about search optimization, except what I'm about to tell you, doesn't apply to your behavior on Flickr. Put it off to the side.

Chances are your search enginen optimizer (SEO) has loaded up your Web pages with all sorts of junk that has nothing to do with you or your real capabilities. You're partly to blame for that, but so is your SEO.

In a misguided attempt to draw search engine traffic you probably have your site littered with the names of dozens of suburbs and neighborhoods you claim to work in or know, although the fact is you've never even set foot in most of them, don't even know where some of them are, and have misspelled half a dozen of them. In the same vein, your Web copy is keyword-rich - and impossible to read.

All of your Flickr tags, titles and descriptions must make sense in the context of the photo. Make sure they're about the photo, and nothing else. Don't add a "real estate" tag to a photo of kids at the carnival. When you want to make friends, you don't bait them into one thing and deliver another.

If you blow this, you'll be right back to where you are now - wondering why your lead (I hate that word) conversion ratio is so low. It isn't hard to understand that unqualified (word I hate) don't translate into business.

Learn how to spell and use proper grammar. This should be self-evident, but it's apparently not. It's something professionals do as a matter of habit. If you have trouble doing it, get help from someone who doesn't.

I fear I've overstayed my welcome on this post.

Next: planning to organize your Flickr photos for maximum traffic.

Flirting with Flickr - playing Favorites

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Sat, 10 Feb 2007 01:26:30 -0600

Blogging is a conversational way of sharing what you know with people who are interested in your knowledge and, in turn, learning from them.

Using Flickr is a great way to become familiar with some of the tools that bloggers use to reach a wider public with their conversation, and to build relationships that translate into business relationships.

If you approach Flickr with the right frame of mind, it's also a great way to learn the ground rules for blogging as a social networking tool. If you've been following this series, you know that I call Flickr "training wheels for bloggers."

You're about to learn how you can leverage your knowledge about your focus area into an easily updated set of photos that you can link from your blog and / or Web site, and send to prospects, all without uploading a single photo of your own.

What are Flickr Favorites? Your Flickr Favorites are photos uploaded by other Flickr users. You can tag any photo you see on Flickr as a Favorite.

Every time you select a photo on Flickr to view in more detail, you'll see a yellow star and Add to Faves link just above it on the far left. Click the link and two things happen: it's added to your Favorites list, and the yellow icon is changed to red and the link text says " a Fave." Click it again and it's no longer a Favorite.

How to find photos to tag as Favorites. Use the search box on Flickr to search Everyone's photos. Search on keywords related to your focus area.

I built my set of Favorites about my pretend focus area by searching on Antioch Illinois and Chain Lakes Illinois (a nearby state park), and picking the non-personal photos that I thought people interested in my area would like to see. In just a few minutes I had a set of Favorites that I could display or e-mail as links to Antioch photos and Antioch slideshow.

I also searched on the subdivisions in my pretend focus area, and didn't find any photos other than mine. You'll also want to search using keywords for local landmarks, churches, parks, schools, well-known businesses, etc. to build your list of Favorites.

Be careful when looking at search results that the photos are actually in your area - there may be lots of places with the same name in the US, and the description of the photo may contain your search term in an unexpected way. For example, my search results might have included an Antioch, Michigan photo that someone took on a trip they described as "My trip to Illinois, Michigan, Iowa and Minnesota."

How Favorites benefit you. In the course of building a Favorites list that you can link and send, you've also begun to socialize with other Flickr users in a positive way - by recognizing their photos as your Favorites.

When you sign in to your Flickr account, you're automatically notified when someone has selected one of your photos as a Favorite. My first inclination when I see that is to check out that person's photos, and their Flickr profile. You've drawn attention to your knowledge and yourself in a non-intrusive manner.

If Flickr users like what they see when they check out your photos and your profile, they may add you as a Contact (the topic of a later post in this series), and any new photos you post will automatically surface on their Flickr home page.

Previous posts in this series

- Before you start to Flickr, focus

- My Flickr focus - a niche I can own

- Getting started wit Flickr, training wheels for bloggers

- Google - Flickr took me from zero to # 1 in 1 day

Google - Flickr took me from zero to # 1 in 1 day

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:40:32 -0600

Did I get your attention?

Yesterday evening I posted Flickr albums of photos of downtown Antioch and Clublands Antioch (one of the 3 developments in my focus for my pretend real estate business).

A photo of Frye's Restaurant in downtown Antioch is now in the # 1 position on Google - in about 24 hours! Frye's is fairly popular, so my photo will get some views, and those views should drive some traffic to my site. I searched: Frye's Restaurant Antioch.

The set of photos of Clublands Antioch that I posted last night came up # 12 in search results on Google. I searched: Clublands Antioch.

The 72 photos I uploaded to Flickr last night have had 50 unique visitors in 24 hours - many, I'm guessing, from ActiveRain.

I did nothing special to make any of this happen, other than tagging my Flickr photos - and that should be a habit rather than anything out of the ordinary.

If I were doing this for real rather than as part of this tutorial, I would - over time - have photos of every business in the Antioch area on Flickr, with a brief note on each of them in the photo description. Many of those businesses have no Web sites of their own. I would totally own Google search results for Antioch for a while.

Hopefully you're beginning to see the power of Flickr to put you together with people who are interested in the area you focus on. Those people will be exposed to you as someone who brought them information they wanted to see, and some of them will visit your Web site / blog.

Added note: The day after I posted this AR entry, it took the # 1 position on Google for Frye's Restaurant away from my Flickr photo.

Previous posts in this series -

- Before you start to Flickr, focus

- My Flickr focus - a niche I can own

- Getting started wit Flickr, training wheels for bloggers

Ten things you should stop doing immediately on your blog

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 20:10:21 -0600

Call me a hypocrite.

I'm suggesting that you focus, and I'm not focusing. I should be continuing my series on how to use Flickr to your benefit, and instead I'm writing a top ten list of things you should stop doing when blogging.

Why would I do that? To paraphrase J.P. Morgan: every man has two reasons for what he does, a good reason - and the real reason.

My good reason for losing focus is that Rich Jacobson commented on a previous post and asked me to state, from my "experience and perspective exactly what everyone is doing wrong and how to correct it." My real reason for losing focus: it's easier than maintaining focus, and I can be as mentally lazy as the next guy.

Here's a list (in no particular order) of ten things many ActiveRainers do wrong. In each case the way to correct the mistake is simply to stop making it.

1. Stop stealing copyrighted material and posting it here. Over and above the fact that AR warns you about this each time you post so that you're violating the terms of service, no one wants to do business with a thief. Not to mention the brute fact that there are civil and criminal (yup, criminal) penalties for pirating others' intellectual property.

2. Stop slobbering over each other in comments. Advance the conversation or shut up. Too many of you sound like you're at a little league game encouraging the uncoordinated kid who simply forgot to swing at the pitch.

3. Stop spamming each other in comments. Vendors should post about their products and not try to steer people to them through comments. Realtors shouldn't use comments to try to hustle business or recruit other Realtors.

4. Stop posting your bloody listings. Would you walk into a room full of strangers who you want to become your customers or friend and start reading a listing sheet? If there's something truly unusual or noteworthy about your listing, it's OK to talk about that, but it better be something really special, and shut up about the rest of it.

5. Stop braying about your company to consumers. Like the children of Lake Wobegon, you're all handsome and above average and expert beyond our wildest imagination - and readers don't want to hear it.

6. Stop disrespecting your readers by cluttering your posts and comments with your name, logo, contact info and tag line. If you have something worthwhile to say that motivates me to learn more about you, it's easy to find that info.

7. Stop whining about how misunderstood / under-appeciated Realtors are. It just makes us appreciate you all the less, and think we understand you all too well. Tell us something you know that we want to know more about.

8. Stop pretending to know more than you do. The last person in the world I want to hear babbling about interest rates is a real estate agent or a mortgage broker. If you really knew what you were talking about you wouldn't be here begging for my business. Tell me what you do know.

9. Stop writing those idiotic profiles of yours. Re-read item 8. Almost every one I've seen makes wildly inflated claims that subject the writer to ridicule from people like me - and there are a lot of people like me.

10. Stop ignoring location, location, location. Tell me what's going on in an area you genuinely know something about. If I'm a buyer or a seller I'm starved for tidbits, stories, information, trends, changes, developments, preferences, etc. The media do a lousy job of giving me that informatton, but you guys give me even less. Give me what I want and I'll reward you with my business because you'll have established yourself as an expert rather than simply claimingi you're one. Real experts don't have to tell you they're experts - they show you.

A blog is not an ad, and it's not your Web site. It should be a conversation in which you quietly impress people with what you know and with your passion for your business. What might work in an ad or on your Web site is probably hurting you when you put it in a blog.

Getting started with Flickr, training wheels for bloggers

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 15:35:25 -0600

Flickr is a wildly popular photo sharing, photo search and social networking site. It's owned by Yahoo! and so will be around for a while.

Flickr can be an extremely valuable (and dirt-cheap or free) tool for building relationships with people who are interested in your focus area, and for enabling them to find you and ultimately do business with you. Flickr albums frequently surface very high in Google search results.

For starters, focus on the word "social" in social networking. If you make your Flickr account about you, or about your business, you'll waste most of its value and you may violate its terms of service and waste all of your efforts when your account is closed.

Blogging is also social networking. Flickr can be a useful, easy way for you to begin learning how to become adept at online social networking, and an easy introduction to some of the skills and habits that will make you a good blogger. Think: Flickr = training wheels for blogging.

I've started to build - and will be expanding - some illustrative Flickr albums about my pretend focus area of 3 subdivisions in Antioch, Illinois. Here's an album on Antioch, and one on Clublands. Flickr also offers detail and slide show views of each of your albums without any extra effort on your part.

If you're not experienced with Flickr, take a quick tour of its features, and read the page on how to get the most out of Flickr. In later posts we'll tell you how to turn some of those features to your advantage.

Free or Pro? Flickr offers a free account (100 mb of photos uploaded a month, only the most recent 200 displayed) and a Pro account (unlimited photos and more) at $24.95 a year. A Flickr Pro account also allows you to create unlimited sets (think of them as albums) in an ad-free environment.

You'll find the extra features in a Pro account valuable as you go along. Plan to spend the money for a Pro account, if for no other reason than to brand yourself as a Flickr "Pro."

Before you open your Flickr account, give a lot of thought to the following:

Your Flickr nickname. This is a "screen name" that will be displayed with each of your photos as a link to your Flickr profile.

Since I selected 3 subdivisions in Antioch as the focus of my pretend real estate business, I'd want a screen name that identifies me with Antioch.

If Antioch isn't available (nicknames have to be unique), I'd pick something like Antioch173 since my focus area lies along Route 173 or AntiochFan. Keep this neutral (no AntiochExpert or, even worse, YourAntiochRealEstateAgentForLife) or anything to do with you or your business.

You can change your screen name at any time if you become dissatisfied with it - but make any changes before you've developed contacts on Flickr.

Your Flickr Web address. Flickr allows you to select a unique URL in the following format: One of ours (we have several accounts) is http://flickr.com/photos/yochicago1 and the URL for our focus area (which contains some towns outside of it) is http://flickr.com/photos/yochicago14.

The last part of your Web address on Flickr should be your screen name.

You can create your Web address at any time after you've opened your account (it's in the Your account section of Flickr), but I don't think you can change it. Select it carefully.

Your buddy icon. This image is associated with everything you post on Flickr and is your most recognizable "branding" on the site. It's a small image, only 48 pixels by 48 pixels, so it can't contain much information.

Do not, under any circumstances, even think about posting your personal photo as your buddy icon. You're sharing photos here, and want people to pay attention to the information you're offering them that they care about, which is simply photos of your area.

Don't even think about using your business logo. No balloons, please.

Select a buddy icon that identifies you with your focus area. Clublands, one of the subdivisions in my pretend focus area, has a half dozen gazebos scattered around, so I'd go with one of those for mine.

Resize the image to a square before uploading it. Otherwise, Flickr may distort it to fit a square shape.

If you don't have a good image to use for a buddy icon, stick with the default one that Flickr gives you until you do. You can change this at any time.

Your Flickr profile. Provide minimal information about yourself. Don't disclose you're a real estate agent. You're not using Flickr to sell anything at this point, especially your services. We'll revisit this issue later in this series.

Flickr enables you to include a link to your personal Web site. Link to your online journal / blog about your focus area. The URL for that journal / blog should also not be about you, but about the area: I'd use something like AntiochUpdate.com or AntiochToday.com for my pretend site. If you're not ready yet with something that works to identify your focus area, don't include a link to a Web site.

Your first Flickr photo upload. Upload your best photo that best represents your area. Stop. Don't upload any more for a while.

Hold off on posting more photos until you've spent the time socializing and understand the environment and the ground rules a little better.

In my next post in this series, I'll talk about how to begin socializing with other Flickr users.

Previous posts in this series -

- Before you start to Flickr, focus

- My Flickr focus - a niche I can own

NOTE: I owe thanks to Kevin and Sherry Spengel for reminding me, in a comment on a later post, that Flickr holds your first few photos from being seen by the public until they've been determined to not contain offensive material. You can see them, but they won't be searchable for as little as a day or as many as several days.

ActiveRain tells the world that you're a lazy, brain-dead monkey

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 13:28:29 -0600

As a newbie here, I'm in a state of complete confusion about many of the posts I see here.

Do most real estate professionals, I wonder, have a business death-wish? Are they completely clueless about how much of the world perceives them?

I've read several posts today from agents touting how ActiveRain has improved their search results on Google, and followed the Google links to the agents' posts. What were these people thinking when they posted? Why on earth would they brag about what's being found?

ActiveRainers need an objective take on what they're posting here, and here it is.

Too many ActiveRain posts send the following message to prospective buyers, sellers and investors, and to other real estate professionals: "I'm a lazy brain-dead monkey, and I want the world to know it."

Stop and consider - what you've posted here to be found by Google may follow you for the rest of your professional career. What you've posted here may very well shorten your professional career, and cost you business in the meantime.

I suspect your fellows aren't going to tell you that because they're happy to see another lazy brain-dead monkey bite the dust. One less to worry about and one less to degrade our profession's image.

My Flickr focus - a niche I can own

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 00:57:42 -0600

I'm putting off my promised post on Getting started with Flickr for another post or two, while I define my business niche and give some more background.

It occurred to me that my whole series on using Flickr as a business-building tool would make more sense if I started with a realistic (I think) business focus and then built some actual sets of photos on Flickr around it, and illustrated how I'd use Flickr as part of a marketing program.

My son recently bought a new home in a 955-unit development (the builders call it a "community") called Clublands Antioch, in Antioch, IL. Neumann Homes, the developer, is also building NeuHaven, a 455-unit subdivision just across Route 173, and Pulte is almost sold out of a 182-unit development called Red Wing View, just west of and ccntiguous to NeuHaven. Clublands and Red Wing View offer single-families only, while NeuHaven also includes condo townhomes.

Click here for a larger version of the Google Earth view of my niche.

These projects began at varying times beginning in 2000. About 800 of the approximately 1,600 total units in these 3 developments have been completed and sold.

NeuHaven's developer units are base-priced from the high $170s to the low $280s. Clublands developer units are base-priced from the low $220s to the high $390s. In all of the developments, options easily and often add $30K to $50K to the base price. Pulte's few remaining units are base-priced from the low $300s to the $350s.

These are 3 very attractive developments, surrounded by forest preserves and lakes, about 4.5 miles from I-94, and several miles outside of the older Antioch downtown.

The Village of Antioch is in northern Lake County, near the Wisconsin border. It has very much of a small town feeling, with some of the flavor of a resort town. It bills itself as the "gateway to the Chain o' Lakes" after the state park with the same name.

You can see a Flickr album of downtown Antioch I uploaded tonight from photos I'd taken six months ago. Here's another view of the same photos, and a slide show. I've marked some other Flickr users' photos as Favorites. There's also a slide show view. Finally, some of my photos of Clublands, and a detail and slide show view of them. Look for many, many more photos to come, and some jazzier ways to view them.

Antioch is growing rapidly, and that growth is expected to continue. According to the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, its population is expected to more than triple: from 8,788 in 2000 to 30,594 in 2030. Household growth is also expected to triple during that period, while employment will grow only by 75%. The growth will make Antioch more of a commuter town, capitalizing in part on its commuter rail access to downtown Chicago and points in between.

There's a Wal-Mart Supercenter a mile west of my niche, and a Home Depot nearing completion next to the Wal-Mart. More big-box retailing is on the way, and my niche is 10 minutes from the vast Gurnee Mills shopping center.

Given the recent vintage of the 3 developments I'm focusing on, and their mix of housing, I'd expect a current annual turnover rate of about 12%, and would expect that to grow to 15% over a 5-year period. Again, looking at the mix of housing in these developments, I'd estimate average prices of about $275,000 currently and $350,000 in 5 years - with the increase coming from a higher percentage of larger homes rather than from price appreciation.

No single real estate agent currently has any significant market share in resales in my niche. If I were a real estate broker - I'm not - I'd focus on the seller side of my niche, and aim for a 30% market share within a year, and a 50% market share over a 5-year period. I'd refer out all buyer inquiries - except for sellers of mine who were moving up within my 3-development niche - and charge a referral fee.

My 1-year projected GCI (gross commission income, after split) from sellers would be 30% X 800 homes X 12% X $275,000 x 2.25%, or $178,200. That's not an acceptable income level, but it would be supplemented by referral fees and income from my existing willy-nilly business that I'd phase out over a 2-year period.

My 5-year projected GCI would be .5 X 1,600 homes X 15% X $350,000 X 2.25%, or $742,500. That's more like it - the cost of living is reasonable in Lake County and I live fairly modestly, at Clublands, where I can walk my entire niche in not much more than an hour.

While my competition is driving itself nuts being all things to all people, I'll be enjoying the fact that every single thing I do contributes to my owning my niche, and that I know everything about my niche and everyone in it.

Before you start to Flickr, focus

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 15:53:55 -0600

I've previously posted that if you try to be everything to everyone you'll end up being nothing to anyone.

When the market was a feast of opportunities, that approach didn't necessarily hurt you. It was easy to lose focus, grab or chase every piece of business that came your way, and still do reasonably well. That's not a good approach for the long haul.

Years ago I used to pursue nearly every good idea I had - and I had a lot of them. My business expanded rapidly. I hired dozens of people I soon came to dislike. I was working insane hours. I wasn't making very much money, and needed to focus my way out of the situation.

I asked myself what there was about my business that generated the profits that enabled me to pursue my great but money-losing ideas. Once I determined what that was, I began winding down the rest of the business, and firing everyone who wasn't a part of what was profitable. I promised myself I'd go at least two years without having a good new idea (or at least without pursuing one).

My head count quickly went from the mid-30s to five people I liked and enjoyed working with. Within a year my income increased tenfold, and it was fun to go to work again. I was doing only one thing, but doing it well.

Focusing your business takes time and discipline. You have to start one small piece at a time.

If you're going to start using Flickr, determine what your long-term business niche / focus is before opening your account.

A focus is, by definition, narrow and something your mind can encompass. Planning to farm a 10,000 home community is not a focus.

Every aspect of what you do on Flickr should reflect and reinforce that focus.

The topic of the next post in this series will be Getting started with Flickr.

How many unlicensed real estate agents blog on ActiveRain?

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 00:49:23 -0600

Something about several of the bloggers I found here struck me as suspicious and I looked up those individuals on the Illinois Real Estate Licensee Lookup site.

Sure enough, one of them had a license status of "Inoperative" (i.e., not attached to a licensed broker) and the second had never held a real estate license, at least in the name under which she's blogging here.

The unlicensed individual had 3 glowing testimonials from clients on her profile.

Both of those individuals are associated with the same firm, which also doesn't show as licensed under either of the names on its Web site(s). It's impossible to determine, from the information given, whether a third individual associated with that firm who blogs here has a license or not.

As I newbie, I'm wondering if this is common on ActiveRain or whether I've encountered a a few anomalies.

Are there a lot of unlicensed individuals blogging here as real estate agents?

Added note: I was recently added as an associate by a sleazy agent whose corporate brokerage license expired last November. Not one of the people mentioned above. The first dog gets the bite. I'd advise anyone similarly situated who's tempted to add me as an associate to rethink the idea. Also, I have a policy of blocking Associations from anyone I ihaven't had personal contact with or don't know by reputation.

Flickr is far more valuable than you might think

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 23:39:17 -0600

Run a search on Flickr in ActiveRain blogs, and the results may give you the impression that Flickr is nothing more than a way to share and organize photos.

Flickr is much more than that, and it can be extremely valuable to you in a number of ways.

I'll sketch the ways you should consider using Flickr in a series of posts beginning here.

The overall theme of my posts will be that you should approach Flickr as a set of training wheels that will keep you upright as you learn to ride confidently around the world of social networking on the Web.

Blogging is a part of that Web world of social networking, so the skills you learn in using Flickr will help you blog. As a bonus, Flickr has a number of features that add content to your blog and make it easy to post photos to your blog.

As an even bigger bonus, if you use Flickr properly it can be very effective at driving targeted traffic to your blog. I'll elaborate on that in another post, but offer two simple illustrations here.

First, all of your photos can contain a link directing viewers to your blog or to a specific post or page on your blog. See the link in this photo description, for example.

Second, if you organize your photos into Flickr sets, those sets are likely to rank high on Google search.

An illustration - annual downtown sidewalk sales are popular events in Chicago's affluent north shore communities, and we've posted hundreds of photos of them on Flickr. A Google search on Glencoe sidewalk sale or Winnetka sidewalk sale returns our Flickr photoset in the second position in search results, a short step away from our related blogs.

Next: Getting started with Flickr.

ActiveRain is not a good place to learn about blogging

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 12:09:15 -0600

I'm a newbie at ActiveRain, but I've been lurking for a few months, and I've followed the real estate blogging scene from its birth, and blogging itself since its birth.

Real estate professionals, who are otherwise street-savvy, are suckers for "magic bullets," and many people here are pushing blogging as the next magic bullet. It's not.

"Blog" is just a shorthand way of describing a rich collection of Internet communication tools and technologies harnessed to a marketing approach that's more attuned to how people learn and socialize on the Web.

Becoming a successful blogger requires a very substantial commitment of time - both in learning how to blog effectively, and in acquiring or distilling knowledge that's of value to the readers you want to reach.

Be realistic: most of you will never commit the time to using these tools successfully, and many of you don't have enough knowledge to be blogging about real estate topics. If you fall into either one of those groups, blogging is going to hurt rather than help your business. You'll make a fool out of yourself, and the power of search engines will let everyone know you're a fool.

All of that is prelude to my main point in this post: if real estate is your career, and if you're serious about blogging (you should be!), go outside of the ActiveRain community to learn about blogging.

The signal to noise ratio here is far too low to make this a good place to learn about blogging. Much of the advice I see given in posts here is pure trash. Sorting through it wastes your time; following very much of it will hurt you.

I subscribe to dozens of RSS feeds about blogging through my Bloglines account, and read them all. You probably don't have time for that, so let me recommend just one for starters: Copyblogger, copywriting techniques for online marketing success.

To short-circuit any comments along these lines, please know that I'm a big fan of ActiveRain, and think it has a lot of potential.

YouTube can kill you

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 01:14:14 -0600

YouTube is a powerful weapon for marketing yourself on the Web, but it has as much potential downside as upside - if not more so.

Any powerful weapon can blow up and destroy the person who deploys it prematurely, improperly or on the wrong terrain.

Most of you have enough social skills not to barge into a total stranger's wedding reception and start handing out listing sheets, all the while yelling that you're a great real estate agent. But that's exactly the kind of behavior that most real estate listings amount to on YouTube.

Here's a bright-line rule for you to follow: don't even think about posting a listing on YouTube until you've posted 20 other videos and have developed a feel for what kind of a place YouTube is, what the social ground rules are, and what visitors are interested in. You'll know that by seeing how many times different videos have been viewed.

Another bright-line rule: not a single one of those 20 videos should be about you.

A final (for this post) bright-line rule: nothing you post to YouTube, except for your company name, should identify you as a real estate agent. Repeat: nothing.

If you're not willing to take the time to contribute something of value to the YouTube community by posting those 20 non-listing videos, and taking the time to develop relationships, it's in your best interest to forget about YouTube. Whatever you do there is likely to blow up in your face, and it may take your head off when it does.

YouTube video - no camcorder, no problem

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 17:00:40 -0600

You don't need a camcorder to make a video that you can post to YouTube.

You can make videos from a series of still images, and add a voice-over to them. If you have the right software (Photoshop Elements, for example) you can add zooming and panning effects that mimic motion video. Think Ken Burns' Civil War series on PBS.

Here's a video of a Chicago landmark district that we made from a series of stills, and another that was made with a digital camera. Neither of these are professional in any way, but our take is that quantity trumps quality, and we'll be talking more about that, later.

You can also make video with a cheap webcam attached to your computer, with most digital cameras, and with many cell phones. YouTube makes it easy to upload video directly from a webcam or camcorder attached to your computer, and even makes it possible to send video directly from your Web-enabled cell phone or mobile device.

You can, of course, use a camcorder to shoot video. We use a Sony SDR-100, which records up to 7 hours of high-quality video directly onto a built-in hard drive. That makes it easy to transfer the video files to a computer and begin working with them immediately.

I'm old enough to have a "Wow!" reaction to these capabilities, but millions of people are growing up with them and taking them for granted.

The combination of cheap digital cameras, high-speed wireless networks, the increasing craving among the young for instant connectivity, and venues like YouTube will have dramatic effects on the way we share information, and those effects won't be long in coming.

YouTube - just because you can doesn't mean you should

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 19:14:19 -0600

My previous post triggered a lively comment thread and, apparently, is spurring some folks to head to YouTube to start peddling their listings.

Stop. Look. Listen. But mostly, stop.

Don't put a listing on YouTube until you think it through very carefully, and have a clear idea of what you're trying to accomplish, and how realistic that is.

Start by understanding what YouTube is, and why people go there.

YouTube is a video search, video sharing, and social networking site. People are going there to be entertained, to learn, to meet like-minded people, to share something of themselves.

Several of the commenters noted - rightly, I think - that people don't go to YouTube to search for real estate listings. I never suggested that people do go there for that purpose, and I think most people who find real estate listings on YouTube will be annoyed by almost all of the real estate listings they do find. Seriously annoyed. Annoyed enough to rap the agents who post them.

Think of YouTube as a potluck dinner open to the public at lrge.

A real estate agent shows up at the dinner, empty-handed except for a stack of listing sheets, pushes some of the food out of the way, and sets some listing sheets in the center of the table and begins passing the rest out.

Another agent brings a dish of cookies decorated with sprinkles that spell out "4 br, 2.5 ba, $375K" on them, sets them on the side of the table, and spends the rest of the evening enjoying dinner.

Which agent gets better results?

If you're planning to use YouTube, bring cookies, not listing sheets.

How you bake those cookies, make them enticing, and get people filling their pockets with them are subjects for some later posts.

Results of our first video experiments on YouTube

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 12:24:52 -0600

Take a minute to visit YouTube and watch Coldwell Banker agent Lyn Flannery talk about Wilmette, Illinois.

YouTube, as I noted in a previous post, is a video search and sharing site that's the 5^th most visited side on the Web. It was recently acquired by Google, which integrated its content into the search on Google Video, and is expanding its functionality,

Wilmette is an attractive, leafy suburb, population about 27,000, on Chicago's affluent North Shore. It's part of the nationally-known New Trier School District.

If you run a simple search for Wilmette Illinois on YouTube, the first result is the video we've embedded above. Run the same search on Google Video and you'lll get similar results.

You'll see that our videos dominate 4 of the top 5 positions on those searches, and 8 of the top 10, and that no other real estate agents appear in the search results.

Use the Find an agent search on Realtor.com for Wilmette and you get the maximum 500 random results back from the nearly 2,000 agents who are identified with the area in Realtor.com.

Some Google searches also lead to fun reslts:

Flannery Wilmette (the agent featured in the video) returns the YouTube video as the # 1 organic result.

Coldwell Banker Wilmette returns the YouTube video as the # 7 result.

These videos were our first, rough, exploratory efforts using YouTube. We made a ton of mistakes, but still produced hundreds of views for a $1.3 million property without making any real effort to drive traffic to it.

In later posts I'll talk about what it took to put these videos together, and the lasting benefits of having done so. In the meantime, check out what others are saying about YouTube on ActiveRain.

ADDED NOTE: This post has triggered a lot of comments, and apparently spurred some people to head to YouTube to post their listings. It's also resulted in commenters sending links to videos that never should have been posted to YouTube. After reading the comments, be sure to see my next post: YouTube - just because you can doesn't mean you should.

Maybe you focused on the wrong search engines

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:52:39 -0600

Are you spending a tone of time, effort and money trying to increase your search engine ranking with little success?

Maybe you're concentrating too much effort on the wrong search engines - Google, Yahoo!, etc..

Those are the wrong search engines? Right. The reasons for that are the topic of a later post.

There are other heavily-visited search engines that can produce quick results with little effort, and where you can be the only agent that's found. Not just the # 1 agent - the only agent.

By now you've heard of YouTube, a video-sharing site, and Flickr, a photo-sharing site. They're also search engines for video and photos, and the 5^th and 39^th most visited sites on the Web.

I'd describe these sites as black holes for real estate agents, except for the fact that almost no real estate agents have been sucked into using them. And even fewer agents are using them effectively - as a way to showcase their market niche to the people who are seeking information about it.

Those people are often the very-valuable relocation clients agents are eager to reach.

In a later post I'll tell you why YouTube and Flickr are so valuable, and why posting to them increases your search engine rank on Google and the mainstream search engines. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, go to Flickr or YouTube and search for photos or video about your neighborhood, or whatever you've defined as the focus of your blog. I'm betting you won't find any real estate agents. You might also want to reflect on the title of my inaugural post: Almost everything you've been doing is wrong.

Why tell everyone you're a dog?

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 12:20:10 -0600

Let them draw their own conclusions.

I've written previously about real estate agents putting their personal photos front and center in their marketing materials.

There are worse things you can do - like using a photo of a pet. It's a great way of screaming "I am NOT a professional. I'm simply desperate for attention. I am NOT a professional."

All other considerations aside, if you use an animal to brand yourself you've probably ruled out working with everyone who has an allergy to that type of animal. Why would you do that? What are you thinking?

That's a rhetorical question; please don't answer it.

I've already heard agents who market this way tell me what they were thinking. I'd prefer not to hear it again - unless you have a clearly focused marketing niche in selling kennels.

More seriously, when you market yourself with a picture of a dog, a significant percentage of intelligent people think you're a dog. When you market online with a picture of a dog, you amplify the damage you do yourself. It is so easy to move on online ...

If what you're engaged in is a perverse form of truth in marketing, fine. Otherwise, you might want to rethink what you're doing.

I talk about blogs, but you shouldn't

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:48:10 -0600

According to a report in January 2005 (pdf file) from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 62% of online Americans did not know what a blog is

That number's probably lower today, with all the buzz about blogging. But, when I talk to real estate agents, even recently, it seems that a higher percentage of them still don't know what a blog is.

I'm talking to real estate bloggers here, so I talk about blogs. You shouldn't when you talk to consumers.

Too many people don't know what a blog is, and you should be telling people what your blog is about - what's in it for them or someone they know - rather than fumbling to explain what a blog is.

Come up with a short phrase that clearly describes your blog's value proposition.

Example: My site has complete information about new construction in Oak Park.

Example: My site's about vacation homes in Lake Geneva.

If your blog doesn't have a strong, focused value proposition to a highly targeted audience, well ... you shouldn't be blogging.

Never try to sell a meteor to a dinosaur

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 11:14:31 -0600

From the ever-wonderful Hugh MacLeod at Gaping Void.

Tons of companies are evangelizing blogging these days, and with good reason.

Blogging makes it cheap and easy for anyone anywhere to begin a conversation with everyone everywhere who has an interest in the information and knowledge the blog has to offer.

The blogging evangelists, however, haven't always made it clear that the real power of the technology lies in facilitating intelligent conversations.

They're selling meteors to dinosaurs.

As the cartoon says, they're wasting their time and annoying the dinosaurs, who will become frustrated with the predictable lack of response from the stupid blogs they create.

I don't care about the dinosaurs. I'm not talking to them, and I tell them to go away when they try to waste my time telling me why they're not really dinosaurs. It's not like a dinosaur is hard to identify.

Some of the blogging companies are little baby dinosaurs themselves, trying to be everything to everyone who's interested in blogging. Avoid them.

The attack of the killer blogs

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 01:02:57 -0600

You've seen it happen with agent Web sites, and you're seeing it happen - almost in real timie - with agent blogs.

"it" is the attack of the killer Web site / blog, the Web site / blog that is so bad, so truly awful, such a pile of random yapping and yammering trash that visitors flee in terror and resolve never to visit another agent site / blog.

The Web has been infested for so many years with so many junky agent sites that the professional agents who have great sites see the value of those sites radically diminished.

As an ActiveRain newbie looking about the landscape, I'm seeing far too much of what I see elsewhere - blogs that are polluting an enironment that has the potential to be a fabulous business-getting tool.

Read the typical agent self-description here, and read a random sampling of posts and you'll quickly see what I mean.

There's gold and wisdom here, but much noise and clutter. I'm hoping - but with little to go on so far - that real estate blogs don't suffer the fate of agent Web sites.

Obsess about leads - and die

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:58:06 -0600

Last summer, like most summers, I attended the Inman Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco. The main topic of discussion at many of the sessions was "leads" - how to get more of them, how to "incubate" and process and manage them, and how to convert them into customers.

Browse a few sites that cater to real estate agents, and you'll note that the obsession with leads is front and center. HouseValues, for example, bills itself as "leading the real estate industry in advanced lead generation and lead management services." HomeGain touts itself as "your best source for home seller and buyer leads." Intersend invites agents to "experience a totally automated lead management Internet marketing system ..." Poke around the Web and you'll easily find hundreds more like this. Listen to the vendors visiting your office chant "leads, leads, leads."

People want to do business with someone they know, trust and like, and whose opinions they respect.

People don't like people who think of them as "leads." They don't trust people who think like that, they don't respect them, and they don't want to know them.

Many real estate agents have trouble grasping that simple concept. Those agents won't survive the coming revolution in real estate marketing, and they won't be missed.

A new generation of Internet tools (ActiveRain is one of them) is empowering real estate agents to engage in conversations with home buyers, sellers and renters, develop relationships with them based on demonstrated expertise and ability to generate confidence and trust.

When people can connect on their own terms with real estate professionals they trust and respect, the only agents looking for leads will be the soon-to-disappear losers. Those agents will be whining along with Dave Moss in Glengarry Glen Ross:

"Baby, I can't make a goddamn dollar with these leads, and you're killing my ass on the street."

Strike the word "lead" from your vocabulary. Now.

Step down from your camel

Joe Zekas (YoChicago / New Homes Magazine) — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 22:02:04 -0600

If you don't have time to read the entire Cluetrain Manifesto, at least break out a few minutes for the 95 theses. You'll begin to understand how to converse with the people you'd like to develop a business relationship with over the Internet.

A sampling:

73. You're invited, but it's our world. Take your shoes off at the door. If you want to barter with us, get down off that camel!

74. We are immune to advertising. Just forget it.

75. If you want us to talk to you, tell us something. Make it something interesting for a change.