Technology Strategies for Real Estate

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Your family, friends, and business connections are using lots of different sites to find a share content. Some are writing blogs. Others write restaurant and product reviews. And many are uploading photos and videos. Social Networks have become very common and many of your clients business connections have accounts on one or more of them.

Some of the more effective for real estate are:

Linkedin  Is one of the more professional networks. Build a network of past colleagues, friends, and industry experts. The Answer section helps you build a reputation of an industry expert. Get people to write recommendations of your work.

RealTown is the oldest and most respected real estate network featuring a variety of online communities as well as a wealth of community created content. Great place to be found.

ActiveRain Is a social network for real estate professionals. Great networking and referral building happens here. This blogging platform has all the right tools to let the newest of Real Estate Professionals to be found on the internet.

Plaxo Pulse  is a public profile that is not static; it’s constantly enriched by the aggregated stream of the content you are creating all over the web. You’ve got fine-grained control of what content and information you include. The result is that you have control and portability of your public identity.

Yelp  Use Yelp.com to find good restaurants, to get insider info, to get good tips and tricks for wherever you may be traveling to. Contribute to the community with your own reviews. Consumers are reviewing real estate professionals here.

Facebook  Try not to get caught up with the extraneous applications like poking, and throwing sheep. Post what you have to offer as a professional and let consumers read your blog post. This site is where people want to get to know you, but keep it professional until they feel comfortable to reach out.

Myspace  Another social network for the Generation X and Y Generation. If you client base is here you need a profile page on this site.

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A year or so ago I had a $56 line item on my cell phone bill for 411 calls. Not me, but my husband and his foreman. As I was venting my frustration my son, home from college casually mentioned I should teach them to Google on their cell phones. So now I teach this in my Tools of the Trade Class. Sometimes a quick message is easier than a phone call or an email. many of our clients DO NOT have their email with them during the day but everyone has a cell phone.

Matthew Rathbun has a done a great job explaining the “How To” of googling. Click here to see how he explains it.

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This week I had the privilege of speaking for the Georgia Association of REALTORS. I travelled to Young Harris, GA where they hold one of their week long GRI programs. I teach technology (of course) for their level 200 and 200 courses. Georgia has a dean and governors which help keep the program running smoothly. These are dedicated REALTORS that believe in the program and donate their time and energy to make this program one of the most successful GRI progams in the country. One of these governors spoke to me about how she uses her TheFLIP video camera in her business. Listen to Hazel Hendrix, a REALTOR from Century 21 The Hunter Group in Statesboro, GA. Visit her website here.

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In my Internet Marketing class I speak about real estate search engines and the social networking aspect of posting listings on sites like Zillow and Trulia. Why? Both of these sites have creeped up into the most viewed real estate sites in the real estate vertical, beating out most of the national brands. Check out these statistics by clicking here. They are located on REALTOR.COM Why again? Because they provide content that they consumer likes. The consumer is driving our industry to consider what content is important and  offer it to our clients. One main issue with Zillow over the last two years has been the  reliability of the zestimate. Instead of my trying to explain how they arrive at the zestimate. click here to read the details.

This is an estimate of a homes value based on town records data. This has vastly improved over the last six months. Here is a video with Lloyd Frank of Zillow. Enjoy!

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I subscribe to The Mossberg Solution -a newsletter by the tech writer for the Wall Street Journal. He has a good article on bluetooth solutions for the car. It is called “No Hands, All Ears For Sound in Cars. Check it by clicking here. I “preach” in my classes to NOT dial, text message or read emails while you are driving. You need to figure out a solution. I use the Jawbone headset. it has a noise cancellation feature.  It measures the ambient noise and helps eliminate background sound so you can hear clearly. To see a demo click here. Mr. Mossberg speaks about adapters that you can put in your car. His articles are always in depth and informative.

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According to a post on Jessica Beganski’s Blog, a REALTOR who specializes “west of the River” in Connecticut they will.  She attended a seminar with Ken Gronbach (now demographer, once ad exec) hosted by Horizon Home Mortgage, who offered some trends that will effect the real estate market.

An aggravating factor in the real estate market will be that the homes Baby Boomers (born 1945-1964 and about 79 million in size) built, won’t have anyone to buy them. Gen X (born 1965-1984) is a smaller generation by about 10 million.  The only remedy would be an influx of immigration.  When do you think we’ll start to see McMansions converted into condos???

Gen Y (born 1985-2005), the largest generation of about 100 million, is about 4 years away (at the peak of the generation) from buying their first house and having a significant impact on the real estate market.

With the increase in population will come an increase in crime in inner cities, driving everyone who moved into upscale downtown apartments back out to the burbs.

As people work more out of their homes, he predicts office space will be become harder to lease. 

Know how hard it is to find a contractor?  Help is on the way - technical schools are full and have waiting lists of Gen Y’ers waiting to get in. 

 Check out his website at http://www.kgcdirect.com/

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What’s old any more? Who knows? The basic delineation is email. Can they open them, read them and respond? My parents can’t. They try, but just can’t. They are not one of the 80 year olds that get it. But I found a great solution - MyCelery. This device is a state of the art color fax machine. Friends and family email them at their mycelery.com account. The phone rings and tells them they are getting an email . . . over their fax. It prints out the email and the pictures. If they want to respond, they hand write the email with the persons name at the top. The software recognizes the email address and emails the person the handwritten note back . . . as an email. My parents love letters. They print out emails now (when they can figure it out) and reread those emails over and over.

So - all the grand kids are ready to email their grand parents at least once a week with a photo or two, so are the kids. We are really excited to keep the generations connected with this device. With a great grandchildren here, we will keep the photos and emails coming.

Here is a video demonstrating the product.

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I recently updated to Microsoft Office 2007 and have been playing around and getting comfortable with Word, PowerPoint and Excel. I found a great new feature in Word 2007. When you open a new document it asks if it is a document or a blog post. You can now create a blog post and publish it right to your blog from your computer. You can use the features of Word, to add hyperlinks and pictures, which has quite a comfort level for many of us. It works with many of the popular Blog software platforms. I found a great video on CNET that explains it very well. Click here to view. A great feature if you want to blog and you are not online, or if you just don’t feel like Jotting!

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Social Networking, one of the new buzz words, and most likely if you are reading this blog, you are involved in other social networks other than blogs, like Linked In, Plaxo, Flickr, Digg, etc. etc. There are connections, plain and simple. Ways to connect with others who have the same interests and may be interested in doing business with you. More of social networks that WORK for Realtors later . . . but for now, another great video from CommonCraft.

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