I am always impressed with a company that has a unique idea and value proposition.

Home improvement is always a hot topic – and usually something that Realtors know a good deal about. As a Realtor, you know how important an upgraded kitchen or bath can be when listing a home, or how it pays to scrape the “popcorn” off your ceiling, or even the power of new lighting throughout the home to make it “light and bright.” When a home is picture perfect it makes it that much easier to sell, and to sell for the best price possible.

Fixr is a home improvement site that I was first introduced to on LinkedIn. Described by the press as an “ebay for contractors”, fixR is a Home Improvement, Renovations & Repair services marketplace.

How Fixr works:

1. Describe your project and post it 100% free
2. Get estimates from qualified pros in your area (love the local feature!)
3. Pick the best based on quality, reputation and price

Pretty cool concept! I really like this for a home owner but also for the agent.

In my past job, working in a residential real estate firm as their marketing manager, I can not tell you how many times I saw emails going out asking for qualified contractors for specific projects for clients. Although most agents have relationships with key local contractors, sometimes you are up against a tight deadline, or have a really uniqe project and aren’t sure who to turn to. I think this site could be a great solution.

In addition, One thing that really caught my eye for Realtors, was this infograph they posted: 2010 Home Buying Guide to Tax Credits. They created a really easy to understand graph and easily supplied the HTML code for you to copy and paste it into your Web site or blog. Is this helpful to you? Is this something you’d use?

Would love your feedback or comments – please post below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

Share on Facebook

yellowed pages by wizmo

Is there any doubt any longer than print advertising is a dying medium? A recent study by TMP finds:

33% of all consumers still consider print yellow pages as their primary source of local business info…

What that really means is 67 percent of people are looking for services online these days. Greg Sterling at Screenwerk calls this survey “the tipping point everyone has been talking about.”

Local search is hitting its stride and businesses (including real estate professionals) will need to keep up. It’s now more crucial than even to start a local Internet advertising campaign.

Overwhelming? Perhaps. Scary? Maybe. But here’s three things you can do right now to help you get a handle on this.

Be found. Start a blog. Join ActiveRain. Both will give you decent visibility in search results if you stick with it. More than enough has been written about this elsewhere… Check out Real Estate Weblogging 101 for pointers.

Use a service like MerchantCircle (see MerchantCircle Launches Social Networking for Business) to manage your identity. I got a note from MerchantCircle yesterday saying they had just passed 200,000 small business owners signing up for their service. Services like MerchantCircle are going to be increasingly useful as local search becomes even more prevalent and having a local advertising presence online becomes more critical – largely because it helps you control and syndicate your online identity. Check out this example of an Associate Broker in Mount Pleasant, Michigan who has put their business online with MerchantCircle.

Start Listening. Monitor the Web. Setup a Google Blog Search for your name – and subscribe to the alerts via email.

Start Engaging. Don’t fear the User Review sites. Pat Kitano at Transparent RE gives a pretty good run down of which sites you need to be paying attention to in his piece, Online Reputation Management for Realtors.

Like many others, Yelp is one of my favorite new sites to find new restaurants and local service providers. So, if you’re not in their database – why not? Add yourself. Closed a deal? Encourage your clients to review you on Yelp and hopefully stimulate new business. Put a link to your Yelp profile on your business card. You get the picture.

This was me last year, in The Rise of the User Review

Marketing has been traditionally about broadcasting your message – what I like to call the ‘Spray-and-Pray’ model. But that’s changing in the face of these new social patterns. The future of marketing is about listening to the community, tailoring your message and narrowcasting to your audience.

Even more important as time goes by, but the best part is – most of this can be done at little to no cost. Now that’s a real win for everyone.

Share on Facebook

It seems that city level real estate search is so thoroughly saturated now (Trulia, Shackprices, Move.com, Homegain, even Zillow getting in the game) that next great trend for web 2.0 services is a virtual land rush to cover your neighborhood, even your street.

Neighborhood Crossing launched this week (see Bringing neighbors together with NeighborhoodCrossing.com) by offering to help you connect with your neighbors online. The motivation behind the site? Neighborhood Crossing says:

It’s strange: these days, you can know people across the world, and not know who lives two houses down the street. That’s why we made neighborhoodcrossing.com.Our mission is to help you turn your neighborhood into a vibrant, well-connected place.

It’s a good pitch. In my post Niche Networks and Marketing Real Estate, I wrote how home owner associations or condo stratas could build out a social network of home owners. And I still think that may have merit as an interesting marketing gimmick for developer or builder. Especially if it were built on an existing platform (Facebook, Ning) that could be quickly scaled up.

Neighborhood Crossing strikes me as service whose heart is in the right place but I just can’t see it going very far. It didn’t help that I got numerous ‘Error processing your request’ messages across the site either.

Ultimately a successful web site solves a problem. Finding an good aggregated source of real estate listings online was a problem (still is, arguably) and the web gods have responded by giving us umpteen different options to choose from these days.

Personally though, I’ve never had a problem talking to my neighbors. And even if I wanted/needed to connect with them I’m not sure it isn’t something that couldn’t be accomplished with a Yahoo Group or even a shared Gmail calendar.

StreetAdvisor, on the other hand, takes the neighborhood concept even further (see the post on Realty Thoughts) allowing people to rate your neighbors, the nightlife, noise levels, even the quality of mobile reception and internet speeds.

Interesting concept – I’m thinking of moving right now and access to decent broadband is definitely an important criteria in a neighborhood for me. The site is usable and designed nicely enough though it suffers from a definite lack of content. Nothing worse than when you go to a site and find nothing but the crickets chirping.

They were giving away iPods to stimulate street reviews – no sure that will help. They’d do well to seed the site with content, but that’s a pretty big challenge when you’re hoping to compile data on every street in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. It’s a lofty goal that might be better realized if they just focused on one city. How about Portland?

Share on Facebook

Popular heatmap mashup Neighboroo (see Top 10 Real Estate 2.0 Sites) rolled out a new version of their site today, adding a slew of new features and rolling in a couple new data sources and overall, a much tighter design.

In its previous form, Neighboroo took publicly available data (largely from census data) and plotted it visually on a Google Maps interface. In its latest incarnation, it adds property data (housing costs) from Trulia, real time market activity (in select markets) from Altos Research and neighborhood video from Turnhere.

All of this content makes researching a neighborhood on Neighboroo a particularly rich experience. I could definitely see this site being useful to someone facing a major relocation or looking to move to a new city.

A search can start with a zip code or just by navigating the map interface. There is a secondary search page that allows you to break down a search into numerous color coded criteria, but unfortunately I found this kind of confusing and overly complex. An interesting concept that just doesn’t translate into a particularly usable interface, in my opinion.

In this release they’ve also rolled out Local Sponsorship opportunities, presumably for small businesses to advertise on individual zip codes. The setup apes Zillow’s new EZAds and are just a good a deal; sponsorship is little more than $1/day. Pretty affordable advertising really and a reasonable revenue stream for the young company.

This is just the type of site that one of the major real estate portals, someone like Yahoo! Real Estate, MSN or AOL would do well to acquire. Neighboroo, with scrappy attitude and some smart partnerships has built a compelling, sticky research tool that beats out most of what those mainstream media portals currently offer.

More coverage: Inman News Blog

Share on Facebook

I listened in on the Inman News Audio Conference today that focused online marketing strategies. It was well worth it and if you have the chance, I’d highly recommend sitting in on one of the calls in the future.

The panel discussed many of the themes that I have been writing about on this blog and I was very interested to hear two of the panel members explain how their companies are integrating local content into the property search functions of their web sites. Both are taking slightly different approaches.

Charlie Young from Coldwell Banker explained how they are layering neighborhood information (local shops, schools etc.) into their map search at ColdwellBanker.com.

Kaira Sturdivant Rouda of Real Living talked about how they have integrated local data into their listings through partnerships with Onboard LLC and Schoolmatters.com. (You can see an example on one of their listings).

Being that I was not familiar with either of these new initiatives, I thought I’d check them out. As tentative first steps, they are impressive – but overall they do little to add to the overall usefulness of the sites.

Here’s why.

Coldwell Banker’s solution only works on a hyper hyper-local basis. That is, the neighborhood icons only show up when you’re zoomed in so far you can only see a few streets. If I’m looking to see how far my new home is from the airport for example, this does me very little good. Furthermore, the map implementation in its current incarnation seemed overly buggy, sometimes the icons showed up – other times they don’t. It was also frustratingly slow.

Real Living’s implementation, on the other hand, is less reliant on technology but also less consumer friendly as a result – which is strange because the company is usually so consumer-focused. Clicking on the community tab on one of their listing pages reveals all kinds of data, but in this case it’s still data without context.

It’s left up to the consumer to interpret the reams of statistics that are presented. In this case, I would think that it would have been better to pick out some of the more meaningful data and display it in chart form or graphically like Neighboroo – right now it’s just a big headache.

This technology is obviously still in its infancy and I’m sure we’ll see both companies’ products evolve over time. In the mean time, I applaud them for being amongst the first out there to take the plunge.

(Full disclosure: I work for a competitor of both companies)

Share on Facebook

Last week, my local Yellow Pages was dropped off at the end of my driveway. It was still there this morning, abandoned and soaking wet after a weekend of pounding rain.

I can’t even remember the last time I flipped open a phone book.

These days, my instinct is to go straight to the Internet to find whatever I need. If I’m looking for a dry cleaners, Chinese food or even a real estate agent, I’d head straight for Google Local, Windows Live or Yahoo! Local before even touching a printed page.

Research shows I’m not alone, Greg Sterling reports on a recent study that found:

• 70% had used the Internet to search for a local service business in the past three months. (Roughly 78% of the US adult population is online.)
• 89% found search to be “somewhat effectiveâ€? or “very effectiveâ€? in finding local services in their area.
• 68% said they would most likely use the phone number on the website to contact a vendor.

The final bullet is especially relevant when you consider Google has just launched a Click-to-Call feature on all its listings, something Windows Live did earlier this year.

This is why I think local search is going to be such a crucial part of any real estate advertising plan.

So where can you start?

Patricia Hursh from Clickz gives an excellent overview of how to initiate a local search campaign and outlines the following tactics as critical components:

1. Geotargeted search campaigns
2. Local keyword campaigns
3. Ads on local search engines
4. Ads on search result maps

Numbers 1 and 2 primarily focus on optimizing your Pay-Per-Click advertising buys and I’ve already written about targeting local search engines like Outside.In with locally relevant advertising – so I thought I’d focus on #4 and how, through paid advertising, you can ensure your business is featured prominently on the results for map based searches.

Both local search leaders (Google and Yahoo – Windows Live runs a distant third, despite an impressive product) have adopted slightly different strategies towards implementing local search. In a recent issue of AdAge, Yahoo! said Local Search is like Social Networking.

local is expanding from a look-up use case or the old Yellow Pages approach to a browse-type use case, where you want to bring in user-generated content elements to make a decision. … It’s more of a research and comparison shopping case.

Yahoo!’s search results return more like a traditional directory, but come complete with ratings and user recommended results. Results can be sorted by several criteria including distance and rating and business owners can claim existing listings or add their business using their Yahoo! member ID. Yahoo! also offers premium listings that ensure your name is seen at the top of the search results page.

Google, for their part, has a slightly different approach – focusing instead overlaying search results geographically on top of a Google Maps mashup. Local business owners can add their listings through the Google Local Business Center, sponsored links which add an image and contact number can can be purchased through their AdWords program.

At the absolute minimum, every real estate agent or small business owner in business today should be maintaining a basic (free) listing on these local search engines. Why would you want to potentially miss a hot lead?

The more adventurous out there might consider springing for a paid listing. You’ll be on the cutting edge of a new advertising medium so results might vary and hey, if you sign up before the end of the year, Yahoo! will even give you your first month free.

Me, I have to go recycle my soggy Yellow Pages.

Update: Looks like Google has had to pull Click-to-Call due to prank phonecalls. Not terribly surprising. The technology is in its infancy and will surely resurface in some other form soon.

Share on Facebook