Print Quality Photos
Real Estate Marketing just became even faster and easier with our brand new system to help you manage your photos, which builds upon our Fast-Foto™ system.
The new enhancements mean that the process of uploading high-resolution digital images is now faster than ever before.
Using Fast-Foto, browse to locate your print-quality images, then select “all” at once - then “click” to upload. The Fast-Foto system optimizes and re-sizes them all perfectly for you - you won’t even have time to sip your coffee!
The new system also makes typical marketing activities such as photo annotation, re-sequencing and deleting considerably easier and faster.
The “How to Upload Photos (SPS-103) ” Movie (see the “HOW TO” Menu) has been updated to provide a brief tutorial and overview of the new system.
The 2008 Report from National Association of REALTORS provides some interesting perspectives and lessons in real estate marketing.
If you click the table to the right then you will see a larger version.
Drive-by Buyers Remain Consistent
Whilst other aspects of the industry move up and down, the proportion of buyers who seem to jump in their car and essentially drive around the neighborhood to find a house they like is remaining constant at around 15%.. Of all the methods that were measured this is the only one that remains constant.
Found via a Realtor - down 29%
Whilst this may seem cause for alarm, I don’t think it is. This is really just a result of the explosion in use of the internet and buyers searching for their own homes. I have always said that a REALTOR’s value is aiding the transaction and offering advice, not necessarily performing home searches for their clients. This, of course, is why IDX websites that allow consumers to do their own searches are now the norm.
Print, newspaper advertisement - down 50%
This was always a very small proportion of the market. However, its probably not wise to write-off these approaches completely, especially for Brokers who need a broad marketing strategy for branding their services. Also, I feel certain that the concept of ‘print advertising’ is pretty much the same - its just that its now done on craigslist.
Conclusions
Consumers will continue to demand access to information and services via the Internet.
Using Single Property Sites for your Real Estate Marketing will help you to take advantage of the changes in the market as SPS will automate much of your Internet marketing.
Always make sure you have a SIGN RIDER on every property to capture the interest of drive by buyers - they are not going away!
With SPS Free-View(tm), Real Estate Professionals and Marketers can present their prospective clients (sellers) with a fully functioning Single Property Site as part of their PRE-sales process .. and this is a free service from SPS.
The Free-View system has been significantly upgraded to make it even easier to use and more flexible.
The key enhacement is that when a Free-View link is created, although it is ON for 5 days, it can be Re-Started at anytime. This means that in cases where your clients had not yet been able to preview your marketing handi-work, rather than re-generating a new link and having to re-send it etc etc, now all you need to do is click a button to ‘Re-start the Free-View” and it will work immediately.
The SPS HOW TO Movie has now been updated (reference SPS 106) - but this is also available here …
We have updated all SPS sites to have a new enhanced “Property Flyer” capability which includes a faster system for automatically creating PDF flyers and presenting them to site visitors. The new enhancements also include design improvements.
You can see a sample - click “Flyers” menu link at our demo site http://www.1122mainStreet.com
As well improving the speed and capability of our automated designs, the Manage Flyers system also allows you to upload your own PDF property flyers and brochures.
We have created a 2-3 minute movie overview (Reference: SPS-209) that explains how to use this system, which can viewed in the HOW TO section when you are logged in to your account.
Knowing how to communicate the value of SPS to Sellers can give you a marketing advantage and help you win more listings. If your seller understands the dynamics of the market, then you will be able to use SPS as an effective tool for demonstrating your marketing skills, and your value to your clients.. and winning the listing!
In a listing Presentation you will want to highlight your superior Internet Marketing skills, and for your main website you can certainly explain your SEO strategy and all things related.
It’s very important that the seller knows that buyers will find your “main” website by searching search engines like Google, for keywords like ‘homes for sale in san diego’ for example, - and your main website needs to pop up!
However, this does not apply when selling the benefits of Single Property Sites.
You should start by making sure your seller understands how the real estate market works.. that is to say HOW a buyer actually conducts a search, and WHERE they search - so that they are clear about how and where Buyers are looking for properties.
Buyers searches will generally be in specialized real estate search portals, Broker websites and similar marketplaces that focus on ‘homes for sale’. In other words, NOT the general search engines.
For example, I would not go to Google and expect to find homes for sale in San Diego, or a street in San Diego, by doing a general GOOGLE search… there are too many specialized portals and agent websites out there that that have been around for a long time that would come up first .. I know I might get some results… but that’s clearly not the best resource out there for finding homes for sale!
I am often asked - “but this is a website, shouldn’t it be performing with SEO etc, like a regular website?” Well the answer is ‘maybe… possibly…’ - but to what purpose? At the end of the day it doesn’t matter because there are specialized market places created for selling houses that we need to take advantage of. Google, Yahoo and others are not used by consumers to search for a specific property or “houses for sale” in a specified street or city etc.
The same concept applies to automobiles - you could advertise your vehicle with a special website and hope people find it on Google - but that would not be a “primary” reason for doing it, because sites like VEHIX.com and Craigslist are where people are actually looking.
So - the bottom line is that it’s important to get your listings placed in the specialized portals.
Today, this means CRAIGSLIST, Realtor.com, GoogleBASE, Trulia, Zillow and others.
And that, of course, is a key part of the SPS Listings Marketing System (a.k.a. Single Property Sites).
So, to answer the question that the Seller might have .. “I cannot find the property site? Where is it” - I would say, OK, well lets conduct a search as a Buyer might - lets go to CRAIGSLIST - perhaps do a search in google and identify TRULIA or Realtor.com as a place where we can search for homes - do a search there and show them their listing website via these routes.
Also - if you have a Street Address Domain name (e.g. www.1122MainStreet.com) and Sign Rider, then for the “drive-by” buyer (or if reading in a newspaper advert), they are going to find your listing straight away by typing in the domain name that is branded to the sellers street address - so they will get to the listing data faster than than any other method.
So - next time you do a listing presentation, don’t just show the seller the Free-View(tm) of their Single Property Site, make sure you build up to this with a simple overview of how and where Buyers are looking for homes, then you will find closing the deal and winning the listing as easy as flipping the switch that turns on the SIngle Property Site!
SPS is not just for Residential FOR SALE property! SPS supports many types of markets - for example
On top of this it doesn’t matter where you are selling you property - in Mexico or France, you can always correctly state the price using the appropriate currency symbol for YEN, MXN or EURO - all are supported!
With the SPS widget system you can easily create a custom showcase widget to show JUST your rentals, or, JUST your Vacation Rentals, or JUST your SOLDS.. widgets make it easy to market your properties, no matter what type of property and where they are, to all your target markets.
As a Denver Resident I have to say I was extremely pleased to see the sun finally came out today after the 3 days of rain and cloud! Yea!
Thank you to all of you who came up and said HELLO! We really do appreciate all your support and endorsements! We have met a lot of top producing Brokers from all over the country and its been tremendous fun to talk to everyone.
The speakers we great - Michael Russer with Online Dominance giving our great ideas for online marketing - and I also got a lot from the Garland Haas / Rob Levy Session on Web Lead Generation and Conversion - these guys really know their stuff!
I would definitely recommend the STAR POWER organization and it was great to be here - particularly as it was run in the Denver area, which sort of just made it a little easier for us to get home again.
I do hope the lady looking for a lift to Boulder got one in the end!
