I’ve been having a great discussion with Sylvia Sam (Sutton REALTOR®) about the marketing value of online video tours for a real estate listing.

Here are the two sides of the discussion:

• me: Make video tours. They show a home / listing much better than photos or a virtual tour.
• Sylvia: (paraphrased) Video tours create a security risk to the consumer and should not be used. What if the video tours are used to case out a home for a robbery?

To catch you up on the discussion so far:

1. I made this comment about the minimal acceptable quality for an online listing:
   • A video walk through – HD quality, plays right off the website.
   • 10 to 20 photos, high quality. Not pics of random things. Limited view of the seller’s clutter.
   • Information: bedrooms, bathrooms, property taxes and amenities. (that’s enough)
   • User friendly / focused website.
2. Sylvia made this comment from her extensive experience on a police board
   • videos and floor plans make it easier for a criminal to case and rob the place
   • a responsible REALTOR® should never put their clients at risk

So what do you think? Discuss in the comments.

Image courtesy of ibcbulk from flickr.

This is the follow up blog post to my presentation to Sutton REALTORS®: How To Really Use Social Media. Here is the talk part of my presentation, approximately 8 minutes.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Presentation Materials

• How to Really Use Social Media Keynote Slides (PDF)
• Homework for How to Really Use Social Media (PDF)

Some Commentary…

Since I started my real estate technology training workshops I realize that REALTORS® seem to ask the same questions. I get a lot of questions like this “how do I use technology fad X”?

I use ‘technology fad’ because my top three questions are usually:

1. How do I use Twitter?
2. How do I use Facebook?
3. How do I blog?

However, what I think REALTORS® are really asking is this:

How do I get more leads from the Internet?

The answer is simple.

1. Have conversations with people (twitter, facebook, blogging). This is social networking.
   
2. Provide useful information for free. Blogging is the easiest way, but you can do an old school website too.

Just give me the answer…

I was having a coffee/one on one training with Leilani Fong (web/@leilanihomes) a few days after the presentation. Leilani is a REALTOR®, young, smart and enthusiastic about taking her marketing 100% online.

The enlightening part of the conversation is when she demanded, “just tell me the answer” and in frustration I blurted out “if I answer that you’ll just ask me more questions”. Since Leilani was the second person this week to essentially demand the answer from me I finally realized that explaining how the technology works was an ineffective approach to teaching.

Most people don’t care about how the pizza is made. They want this: order, pay, eat, satisfaction. Skip the process, the history and the culture and just give me the pie.

So what they are really asking is.. what can I buy to get online marketing?

Well that is fairly easy to answer:

1. Online ads. Banner ads, Google AdWords, advertise on yahoo, on other people’s websites.
2. A web site from a real estate website builder. They’re plenty of them.
3. Hire an online marketing company.
4. Hire a web developer, a graphic designer and have them work on your web brand.
5. Hire a content writer to write and blog for you.
6. Hire an SEO company to optimize your web site.

There are lots of company’s that provide those services. I’m know they’re more than happy to have your business. If you’re happy about their results that’s value. Why wouldn’t you do it?

Well, in my first presentation about how the Internet is Changing Real Estate, I said that the net has made communication cheap. It has made it accessible to anybody not just the people with large marketing budgets. So the point of taking your marketing online is to get the same number of leads for less money. You can do it yourself.

However, going online is challenging right now for people with limited knowledge. Training out there is limited and expensive. Getting somebody else to do it for you (just give me the pie) is expensive but it’s better than nothing. The return on marketing online just isn’t there for most people. Even more sad is that the results all still suck, consumers are still unsatisfied and REALTORS® are still confused. There must be a better way.

Maybe I should throw out the disclaimer that the opinions on this blog are mine and not my employers. (heh).

Is there something better?

Yes. I’m working on it. It’s not ready yet but the core values are (alpha version):

1. 100% online only marketing. Save the trees.
2. Training. Lots and lots of training and information. We enable. We’ve embraced technology and learning.
3. Better and more information. Set a new standard for quality and quantity.
4. Open data. Reciprocity and VOWs are user unfriendly. User unfriendly sucks. If you want this listing in XML, in JSON, in ATOM, just add .xml, .json or .atom to a clean URL. If you want all of our listings, here is a RESTful API. Steal from Twitter’s API.
5. More people makes the system richer for everybody. More is more!
6. For people who believe in the same thing. Don’t worry about catering to everybody.
7. Usability. Empower REALTORS® to do their own online marketing.
8. Valuable. Price is what you pay, value is what you get. I want you get lots.

I often get realtors asking me about blogging, what it is and how to get started. I wrote this guide to answer the most frequent questions and provide some direction in getting started with blogging.

Where to get a blog?

I recommend that you go to WordPress.com and sign up for a free blog. The sign up process is quick and simple. This will give you a chance to play around without much time or capital commitment.

About WordPress

Since I’m much more familar with WordPress I’ll give a run down of what to expect from this:

1. WordPress.com blogs are free to start out. You will get a  web site address like: http://myblogsname.wordpress.com. When you sign up you will be able to choose the name for your blog.
2. You will be sent an email to verify your blogs creation. Then you will be set up and ready to go.
3. For free you will get:
   • A selection of themes (designs) to customize your blogs layout
   • Good SEO (well, alright SEO) already for your blog
   • RSS feeds into your blog
   • Excellent comment spam filtering
   • Pretty much everything you need to start blogging right away.
   • Never have to worry about servers going down, upgrading software, etc.
   • A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) blog editor. No need to edit HTML. Similar to MS Word.
   • Ability to upload pictures to your blog posts.
   • WordPress will add text-ads to your blog (somebody has to pay the bills)
   • Pretty awesome for free!
4. When you are ready to grow your blog or brand it some more there are advanced (paid) services
   • All the information is available here: http://en.wordpress.com/products/
   • The ones that you will most likely want are:
   • Custom web address: $15.00/year for the name, $10.00/year for the hosting. Like: http://mygreenblog.com instead of http://mygreenblog.wordpress.com.
     • Note: You can register the domain name anywhere, it doesn’t have to be with WordPress.com. They offer it as a convenience. I suggest keeping your domains together in one place.
   • No ads: $30.00USD/year
   • Custom design: $15.00/year. You still have to pay somebody to make the custom design for you. Contact me (benwong@mostlygeek.com) if you need this.

Should you Blog?

Writing content yourself is a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. You can outsource your web hosting and the design of your blog. You can’t outsource your blog’s content, that would defeat the whole point. Before you jump in read 23 questions for prospective bloggers.

Before committing, these are the top 5 questions I think you should ask yourself:

1. Do you enjoy writing?
2. Do you enjoy reading?
3. Are you willing to learn?
4. Do you have time? To get real marketing return from blogging you will need to write a lot. Do you have 3 to 4 hours to dedicate a week to writing?
5. Are you ready to be transparent and honest?

Blogging Tips

To get you started:

1. Blogging Tips for Beginners – this is an excellent series written by Darren Rowse a professional blogger.
2. Writing for the web is different than writing an email. A List Apart (alistapart.com), has excellent articles that I suggest you read. Here’s a direct link: http://www.alistapart.com/topics/content/writing/
3. For your posts, ask a question and then answer it as your blog post.
   1. What is the CMHC fee?
   2. What is the average price of a condo in Vancouver?
   3. How to work with a REALTOR®?
   4. How can I increase the value of my home?

Image Credit: ~C4Chaos of Flickr. (image)

This is the video (approx, 16 minutes) and the collateral material from my May 5th,2009 real estate technology workshop at the Sutton training center. The video is just my talk with the slides.  I didn’t want to post the last 105 minutes, since topics were rather sporadic.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here are the slides and the smart board notes:

• How the Internet is Changing Real Estate – Keynote slides
• How the Internet is Changing Real Estate – Smartboard Notes (PDF)

Top 5 things  that I learned from giving this presentation to a bunch of REALTORS® and from digesting the feedback given.

1. Most people wanted to know about Twitter
2. People were curious about what a blog is rather than what blogging is
3. A lot of different skill ranges, from the sort of knowledgeable to “where is the power button?”
4. A lot of people wanted to know about SEO
5. The talk was too general and needed to focus on a particular subject

After the presentation I was giving some thought to both the feedback and the content. So these are the changes I’m going to make for next time:

• Keep the presentation and the workshop to about an hour.
• Focus more on specific topics. Blogging, Twitter, social media, search engine optimization, etc.
• Keep the classes a little smaller.
• Have better information on the Sutton Education website beforehand.

For my next presentation I’ll cover How to Really Use Social Media. I don’t think most of the people in the room really care what Twitter or Facebook is, or why it is cool (or lame).  What they really want to know is:

How can I get more leads from the Internet?

A lot of people out there basically giving out the same message. This was my message too so  I also got it wrong, and I sounded a bit like a broken record.

1. Use Twitter
2. Blog more
3. Pick a niche, blog about it.
4. SEO your website
5. Use Facebook, etc. etc.

After some reflection this is a better answer:

Use these tools to expand and interact with your network. They are not direct marketing tools.

Thinking this way gives you control over the technology instead of being controlled by the technology. Technology should improve your lifestyle. In my presentation I mentioned culture a lot. Each social networking tool has its own culture, nomenclature and personality. Even something as archaic as email. Use it if it makes your life better and only if you can adjust to that specific culture.

Otherwise it’ll just be fake to you and fake to everybody else. You’d be a social media poser and people will make fun of you (if you’re lucky). If you’re not, people will just ignore you.

Secondly, it’ll never be fun or enjoyable. If it is not enjoyable it’ll be work and then you’ll wind up with a blog with that one post from a year ago and that is worst than having no blog at all.

You’re better off having a single web page, hosted for $5.00 a year with your picture, your phone number, and a message saying: “I helped X people realize their dreams. Let me help you today.” Just update that every time you do a transaction. Done.

This morning I was listening to a real estate website sales rep give a presentation on their website technology. It got me thinking that after all this time online real estate marketing still sucks. The reason it sucks is because everybody has essentially the same web site with the same set of features. 

This is the problem.  When a realtor signs up for one of these websites they’re getting in the back of the line of the long tail of real estate websites. Then spend money and time trying to become a hit where all the action is. This is how online real estate marketing operates. Great if you’re a hit. Terrible if you are in the tail. 

Becoming a hit is hard. It takes doing small simple things over and over. This amounts to a significant amount of work. This work is rarely ever done and is the reason why most realtor sites are in the tail. 

Here are the basics for becoming and staying a hit: 

1. Start by picking a real estate niche, like a neighborhood, and dominate the search results for that niche. The curve still exists but you can get to the head quicker and the tail isn’t as long. 
2. Generate good, informative content in your niche. This is where all those small things add up. Share your knowledge and experience. Creating good informative content people want to link to results in good search engine placement. 
3. Make your site is search engine friendly. SEO is more about making your content easy for search engines to see instead of using a whole bunch of keywords in meaningless content. 
4. When you’ve dominated your niche choose another one and do the same thing. 

Rogers recently started offering a new voicemail to text message service. This should be interesting for people who receive a lot of voice mail. It is trendy, geeky but expensive. The rub is that it is a $15.00/month service on top of already inflated cell phone prices.

Alltel recently deployed the same service, also powered by SpinVox, but on more graduated pricing. Their service starts at $5.00/month.

Even with my paltry 5 or 6 voice mails per month I would love to use this service. Listening to voice messages is too time consuming which makes it annoying.

There are so many advantages of getting an SMS message instead of a voice mail:

1. It is less interrupting. In a meeting you can still pretend to be listening (less rude) versus actually taking the call.
2. I don’t have to listen to somebody talking.
3. I can save it for later reference. This is also possible with voice mails delivered as an email attachment. Which I love.
4. It can be indexed for search.
5. It saves me time. I can read a lot faster than most people can talk.
6. I don’t need to call into a voice mail box to retrieve my messages. My voice mail at work has like 300 messages in it. I never call in. It’s just too annoying.
7. I can determine how important a message is without having to listen to the whole thing. This is my hot button. Where do I sign?
8. You can scan backwards. Most voice mails systems do not have a seek functionality. In case you missed the name at the beginning, the message in the middle or the phone number at the end.
9. Text is smaller (data wise).
10. Voice mail is so 90′s.

For me there is no downside to this technology. If only Rogers was reasonable in its pricing. Fifteen dollars per month is a lot of money to pay. Especially when cell phone bills are already averaging around $40.00 to $60.00/month.

Pat Kitano on the Transparent Real Estate blog has a good distillation of Chris Anderson’s keynote at Nokia World 2007 on the emerging economy of free.

The keynote is a must watch. Chris Anderson, the Editor-in-Chief of Wired talks about how abundance is creating the new economy of free. This got me thinking about how abundance has affected real estate and how it will change it forever.

There are a lot of real estate agents and listings. CREA has 92,000 members and NAR has more than 1.2 Million. That’s one agent for every 365 people in Canada and one for every 250 people in the US. Listings are even more abundant.

So where is the scarcity in all this abundance?

The scarcity is in time. The time somebody needs to find the right agent and the right property. Realizing that,  agents need to focus on two things for the win:

1. Be a scarce resource. Differentiated themselves by experience and knowledge.
2. Help people get what they want in as little time as necessary.

I decided to do all of my real estate blogging on the Sutton Blog.  Read it, enjoy it and feel free to contribute. We’ll be using this blog to post release information on our web products, some editorials, etc. It’s still just a baby and the goal is to grow it as an integral part of our online marketing network.

Sutton.com 2.1 was launched this morning around 10:00am PST. In this we’ve added some really cool features to improve the usability and functionality of the web site:

1. Google Search Appliance Integration
2. Ajax Quick Search
3. Mini-links
4. Miscellaneous site tweaks

Google Search Appliance Integration

The web site was seriously lacking a search option. Rather than build one from scratch I opted to purchase a Google Mini Search appliance. Setting it up and configuring it took about 2 hours. Tweaking the search results be a project of constant improvement.

What we did:

1. Have the Mini index the entire sutton.com website. Since our site has hundreds of thousands of documents, when you count all the images and dynamically generated pages, we filter out a lot of unnecessary content. This gives a happy medium between our site’s specialized searches (listings, Realtors®, offices) and the brute force mini.
2. We use the XML search results. This gives us a lot more flexibility in how we display results. The extra work will pay off when we begin to sutton-ize the search results.

Ajax Quick Search

I was often frustrated at how long it took to simply pull up a phone number and an address for a particular office on sutton.com.

In 2.1 you can get an office’s contact information in less than 3 seconds (depending on how fast you type ;).

How to use it:

1. Type in approximately what you’re looking for, say North Vancouver, into the site’s search.
2. An Ajax call will go and fetch information that matches. It’s sorted, offices first, Realtors® and then listings.r
3. Try searching for an MLS number or the address of a property you’ve seen. Try typing in “2 bedroom condo”…

How it works:

1. We use the Ajax Auto Suggest script.
2. It does a HTTP GET request which returns the XML search results.
3. The JavaScript parses it and displays the pretty results.

The challenge for this feature was getting the XML search results to come back fast! How did we do that? That’s our little secret. ;)

Mini-Links

This feature came out of a personal need to share search results on the website with other people.

How do I send you a list of all the Sutton Group – West Coast offices in BC?

In 2.0 I would have to send you this:

http://www.sutton.com/office/search?officename=West+coast&city=&province=11&subm…

In 2.1, the URL is nice, short and email proof:

http://www.sutton.com/l/1p

Mini-Links are available on Sutton.com wherever you see this:

Other Miscellaneous Tweaks:

1. Flexi-Site redirection pages are now Google friendly. They no longer index as “you will be redirection in…”. Take a look at the new one. You can also pause the redirection so you have time to write down the contact information.
2. View an office’s roster by photo. Good with faces but not with names? Well this feature is for you.
3. We added a sitemap. Since the release of 2.0 the new pages have slowly been trickling into the search engines. The sitemap files, mostly unseen by users, will help improve indexing of our web site. Take a look at our robots.txt or our sitemap.xml. The information at http://www.sitemaps.org was essential in getting this built.

Whew! Look out for more cool features and updates coming out in the next couple of weeks.
[tags]sutton.com, google search appliance, ajax[/tags]

Today we launched the new sutton.com. This is a milestone day for me because I’ve been working on this project for more than 2.5 years. It is an amazing feeling when something you’ve put so much hard work into is finally released. Instead of blathering on about my feelings, let me tell you how we built sutton.com and why this is the best real estate site in Canada:

1. Be search engine friendly. We’ve designed the site so search engines can easily index and catalog all data on site. You can browse to everything, listings, agents and offices.
2. Don’t hide your listings. You can access our listings fast. I chose to design our listings around a browse and filter approach rather than search and find. A single click gives you more than a thousand listings in Toronto from our front page. Sweet!
3. Use clean urls. Almost everything on Sutton.com can be accessed from a short URL.
   1. http://www.sutton.com/listings/view/V631030 – a listing
   2. http://www.sutton.com/office/search – the office search
   3. http://www.sutton.com/office/BC/Vancouver – our Vancouver offices
   4. http://www.sutton.com/realtor/ewong – a REALTOR®’s flexisite
4. Use clean mark up. We’ve built the site using as few table layouts as possible. This makes the site much more accessible as well as reduces the amount of HTML required. The site is very usable in Links.
5. Make the site fast. People hate waiting for stuff to load. The new site is twice as much code as the previous one and it still loads just as quick. We’ve invested lots of money on a dedicated database server and a dedicated web server. Performance is important and we’re always looking at ways to make the site faster!
6. Make the site usable. Everything is easier to use. Our goal for the 2.0 release was to duplicate the functionality of the site. During development we’ve made improvements to usability across the board.
7. Never forget the small stuff. We’ve done many things to make our listings really stand out. Loading photos and the mortgage calculator in Thickbox windows (check it out). Descriptive titles for search engine display: 8 Bedroom 8 Bathroom House for Sale in Vancouver, BC. Icons for listing features, and tonnes more.

This is the technology we used:

1. Leverage Open Source. We built the site on top of Drupal. Powered by Linux, Apache, PHP and MySQL. We also leveraged Thickbox, NetPBM, TinyMCE, Subversion and Smarty. There are probably a few others I missed. :)
2. Buy the fastest servers you can afford. Our web server is a Dual core Xeon with 4GB of RAM. We have a dedicated database server which is a dual processor Xeon with 4GB of RAM and a RAID10 array (FAST!).
3. Use the latest web techniques. Use CSS layouts, use clean URLs, be good to Google and make sure your site is really easy to use.
4. Get the brightest people you can afford. This site would not have been possible if it wasn’t for Dave Shea helping us with the design. The good advice from the guys at Bryght. The site’s main programmers Shaun and Will and Sutton’s Marketing team! Go Team Sutton!

It has been a long haul to get to this point and we’re just getting started. Around the corner is Sutton 2.1 and 2.2 with more features and surprises for you and the Real Estate industry.

[tags]sutton.com, real estate, open source[/tags]