It's late at night but I did want to mention something. I've been meeting with brokers and agents to discuss the services that I am now offering. When I was a Realtor I was a bit sheltered from a few things. I was not aware to any great extent what other agents were doing except for those whose pictures were in the newspaper real estate section every week. I was very focused on my prospects and clients.
Now that I've been out of real estate for a short time and back into it in a different capacity, I have a somewhat new perspective. I had one extremely experienced broker tell me recently that most agents don't invest in their own business. I'm not going to get into much of it now except to express my surprise at how few agents use virtual tours (VT's) in my area. They'll spend several hundred dollars for a weekly newspaper ad but won't spent the $99 I charge for a VT that will be advertising for them for a year if need be.
I did an informal search on Realtor.com a few days ago in zipcode 19709 and surrounding areas. The search was for homes priced over $450,000. The search turned up 196 listings. How many of these would you expect to have VT's. I was surprised. 12 had VT's and at least one was a chinsy (sp?) home-made video which I don't understand how PicturePath accepted it, expecially since it was branded. And, that wasn't 12 agents, that was 7 agents with 12 listings. The point is that there were only 12 listings total. That's about 6%. The other even more surprising thing was that only 33 had more than 1 photo. WOW!!! Don't these agents realize that the more exposure they give their listings the greater the chance of it being sold. Who is going to seriously consider a home that they can't even see?
Any opinions about this? I'm baffled. I'm also racking my brain trying to figure out how to educate the public or someone - yes I have an ulterior motive - I want to sell tours!! But still?
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