There is so much offered to Realtors® by way of technology and social media yet very few seem to use it. Why? I am increasingly puzzled by this. From my point of view, as a consumer not a Realtor®, it seems that it could be costing you business.
Here's what I mean:
At the end of my block there was a house that had came on the market. Shortly thereafter, while I was watering my front lawn, a young couple (they looked like Millennials) in a BMW pulled over and they asked me if I knew anything about it. Not really, I said, ‘was there a flyer’? The couple said no there wasn’t.
They told me they tried to find the house on their phone by going to the website on the for-sale sign but all it did was to take them to the main home page of the very large real estate brokerage. They couldn’t find the house.
I said “why don’t you call the agent” his info was on the sign. They said to me that they “weren’t ready to speak to an agent”, they just wanted to know the price and details about the place. We talked for a few more minutes and then they drove off.
Later in the day I looked at the sign. They were right; there were no flyers in the box. There was also no QR Code on the sign. No URL for the agent’s website. No URL for the address of the listing. Obviously, there was no video shot of this home. In short, nothing to help anyone learn anything about the house unless they called the agent.
There was an interesting article on Inman.com with a telling statement about Millennials “they won’t answer your phone calls [or call you] because they fear being trapped on the phone in idle chitchat with their Realtor.” Wow.
Did the couple try to find the house again later? Did they ever call the agent? Or did they just give up and move on to another house, with another agent, who made it easy for them to get the info they needed?
Later that day I went onto the big brokerage’s website and, you know what, I couldn’t find the listing either. Not by the address and not by the agent’s name.
Why should buyers have to hunt for details like this? I see this all the time; signs with so little information so as to be almost useless. Why? From a consumer point of view, all the agent needed to have done was to have his name registered as a domain name. His website would then be www.JohnDoeRealtor.com and it could have been on the sign.
On the website he could have had info on the listing on it. Why didn’t he? Cost? Domain names cost about $10. Websites are cheap and easy to create. There was no reason for the agent to NOT have one. Websites have been around for over 20 years. Social media is not a fad.
It got me to thinking…perhaps this agent is more ‘old school', perhaps his way of marketing his listings is to use lawn signs and newspaper ads. (Did he know that only 23% of Americans actually read a printed paper?). Perhaps he doesn’t know that 90% of all real estate searches start online (or, put another way, 90% of all real estate searches start without an agent).
Does the agent use any social media? Is the agent on Facebook? Is he on Twitter? Does he send out an email newsletter to his prospects, past clients and potential clients to keep in touch with them or to get referrals from ha
ppy clients? What is the agent doing to take advantage of everything that social media has to offer? From a consumer point of view the answer would appear to be nothing.
And that’s a shame because it may have cost the agent a sale.
About us: We shoot full-motion real estate video tours in Los Angeles and we use social media. Our background is in filmmaking. To us a real estate video is 30 frames per secondnot a series of still photos put together in a slide-show. Our website is RealEstateDigitalMedia.com
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