As promised in my previous post concerning the Illinois Association of REALTORS yearly convention, I would post about my experience and what I thought. Overall, the experience was pleasant and a very well coordinated event. In all honesty though, I thought it would be much bigger considering there are over 40,000 real estate agents (according to my knowledge and please correct me if I am wrong) in the metropolitan Chicago area alone.
I'll be receiving the complete list of attendees because typically from experience, the REALTORS that attend these conventions tend to be the ones that I want to do business with and want to focus on for networking. On top of technology and looking for the newest tools before they become mainstream to give them the edge. Here is a list of the Illinois Association of REALTORS vendors. It obviously contains the usual suspects but my attendance was well worth the time and money because I did find and had the opportunity to discuss with the owner of a new company for what I think will be an extremely beneficial service for Home sellers and marketing their Barrington homes to website visitors that I will be implementing on our next listing. I have yet to see anybody else implementing this service on their listings but I consider the concept extremely important.
REALTOR conventions are much like Active Rain, I would have to say that the majority of AR members are on top and understand what the future of the real estate business is all about and how technology will very soon replace the REALTOR who honestly thinks the internet is only for Generation X's and that could hardly be further from the truth.
Interestingly, this ties into what a real estate Broker/Owner told me earlier in the week who used to be a top real estate Broker in Illinois in the late 1990's. She actually told me that her clients don't care about the internet and are more interested in seeing their homes in the newspaper or magazines. That was an interesting statement which is probably from lack of educating the client about the effectiveness of the internet. I'll certainly be keeping a close eye for those listings when they expire.
In any business and not just Real Estate, you always need to be on the look out and willing to try new things in order to honestly tell your sellers that you can effectively represent them in the sale of their home.
The reason why I focus so much on internet advertising is because I also have an understanding of financial accounting, marketing, statistics and history.
What does that have to do with anything? SIMPLE
Marketing - According to the National Association of REALTORS 2006 home buying study, over 75% of all homebuyers searched for homes on the internet which beat out all other forms of advertising hands down. (The other sources home buyers used were not even close.) What more needs to be said about that?
Financial Accounting - Real estate agents who understand this also know that internet marketing can be the most cost effective and efficient advertising there is if done properly. For anybody who thinks that a website is still an online brochure telling visitors that they were a top real estate agent a decade ago is not keeping up with the times and These are the same agents that think viral marketing is a disease. I've seen tech savvy REALTORS marketing lower tier homes on the internet far more effectively then some luxury real estate agents marketing luxury real estate and that's sad.
Statistics - Buyers searching for homes on the internet tend to be more educated, have higher incomes and are better qualified to purchase real estate. I sincerely hope I do not need to expand on the benefits of this.
History - Wake up. We are no longer in the industrial age - we are in the information age. Free information is everywhere and can easily be researched online and that's not going to change. However -- free information online can also be bad information and you need to be able to explain the differance. Something that you will not be able to do unless you have a basic understanding of the internet itself.
Having an internet presence for real estate advertising is not the end all solution for real estate marketing; but not even having a basic understanding of how to use the internet to market real estate is more then likely a sign that the individual has no concept of marketing to begin with.
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