Technology Strategies for Real Estate

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Great post from Technology for Real Estate on free mobile tools.  This article has a great list free mobile searches included FreeMobile411, Google Maps,  and others, Click here to read.

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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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Been traveling, speaking for the last two months non stop and not enough time to stop and blog. So I decided I will blog about where i am and what I am speaking about.

This week - in the fine state of Georgia. Stopped to have lunch with Bennett Hutt of Eneighborhoods. He turned me on to a great new product and a legendary restaurant in Atlanta. We ate a power breakfast at the OK Cafe. It is located on Rt 75 N right outside of Atlanta and I had a great omelet and GRITS.

Benett turned me on to SendOutCards. This product is perfect for the marketing you do to your sphere. Everyone opens a real greeting card. The novelty is there. What me advocating PRINT?

A recent study carried out by the National Association of Realtors® revealed that 85% of home buyers responded that they are likely to buy from their agent again or recommend them to others. In addition, 40% of home buyers choose an agent based on a personal referral. We need a simple way to keep in touch with our sphere and past customers.

Why not consider one of your contacts to be a greeting card personalized by you. Go to www.soclink.com/buildrelationships to see how this system works. The system will allow you to:

•·         Upload any images to create your own custom cards

•·         Write your personal message to your clients in your own handwriting

•·         Sign the card in your own signature

•·         Print a physical copy of the card

•·         Print and address the envelope

•·         Apply the correct first class postage

•·         And ship the card in the mail  for about $1.00

Go to www.soclink.com/buildrelationships to learn more.

See you from the road!

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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