Guest blog post by Matthew Shadbolt, Director of Interactive Product & Marketing, The Corcoran Group, New York

Some thoughts on mobile marketing for real estate…

Many of us, over the past few years, have transitioned much of our advertising and marketing from print to online. Many of us still have not. I’d argue that most of us have not. But as that transition continues to take place, there’s another one going on simultaneously, that of a massive shift in web use from the desktop to the mobile device. Whereas advertisers used to upsell online with print buys, today they are doing the same with mobile as part of online buys. It’s a fascinating thing to watch.

When we say ‘being online’, it no longer just means clicking away at the big screen attached to the whirring box on your desk that’s plugged into the wall.

It means finding things near you, sharing where you are with your friends, video chat from the grocery store (“is this the one I should get?”) and so much more, but what’s common amongst all those use cases is that increasingly our use of the web is being informed by our location. Who better to capitalize on this trend than the real estate industry?

Last week, Corcoran launched an update to its popular iPhone app which allows you to search for homes in and around New York. One of the key differences in this app is the wealth of information that’s populated outside of the actual listing information. Corcoran calls this ‘going beyond the four walls’, and the concept is baked deep into its brand premise. It means sharing things to do nearby, places to go, restaurants to try, things to do at night – a better sense of what it’s really like there – can you get this from a shot of the outside of the property? Or the kitchen? Last week’s update added the ability for the user to now see local news for real estate, shopping and restaurant stories near properties, powered by Curbed, Eater , and Racked – 3 very popular blogs here in Manhattan.

You can read more about the project here on Corcoran’s Facebook page.

One of the main benefits that the phone brings to real estate searches is that it pushes the idea of contextual content around search. It begins to answer the question, ‘what is it really like to live there?’, and by providing a detailed, hyperlocal and comprehensive set of information, that has nothing to do with the specifics of the property but everything to do with living in a neighborhood, Corcoran’s app attempts to achieve this. Think about how this works versus how most online sites allow you to search for homes – it’s very poor in comparison. First, you usually have to ‘fill out’ a search page that consists of drop downs, checkboxes, perhaps even something as vague as a simple text entry box, then hit the all important ‘GO’ button. In mobile it can be automatic and simply ‘near me now’.

What gets returned, I believe, is not how people search for homes. Real estate search results usually consist of 2 things – pages and pages of list-based, thumbnail driven content, which forces the user to wade through the results in an unfocused way – this is the Google model of helping people find things, and that model is under some serious review this year. The second way is to plot those same results on a map. There’s been much talk recently about the effectiveness of map-based searches, and while they do provide some minor level of context in terms of ‘it’s near that road’, it still doesn’t answer the question, ‘what is it like to live there?’

The home buying process is at its core, an emotional one. Time and again, we hear our clients say “I bought with my heart, not my head”, or “I just knew as soon as I walked through the front door”. I’m not arguing that it isn’t a big financial consideration as well (of course it is) but do checkboxes and drop downs, or hundreds of properties plotted on a map, match what these people are telling us? Or is something like “here’s the latest news in the immediate neighborhood, combined with some great places to eat, some things to do, and a sense of what happens here at night” around each and every step of the process, a more person-centric way of doing it?

Of course, for the larger real estate portals, providing this curated, local and insightful information around every listing is a very difficult challenge to do at scale, and I fully accept that we are very spoiled for content here in Manhattan. But, the idea of ‘freeing’ real estate search from the desktop model, and putting it into people’s hands in a geographically specific way, which puts THEM in the middle of the map, I’d argue is a more effective and fun way of finding a home. Pair this idea with the filter of your network (perhaps through social media), and the Google model of search starts to evaporate rapidly. Being able to find homes based on your interests, hobbies, and goals, through the filter of your friends, is a very different experience from the ‘Enter your price range’ criteria so heavily used online, and mirrors that of how people truly find homes offline.

The best online experiences are the ones that most closely mirror offline ones. Facebook is great at keeping me in touch with my friends. Amazon allows me to get exactly what I’m looking for without wading through the shelves at the mall. These platforms solve problems. Who does the same thing in real estate? The first thing an agent does when they meet a customer is get to know them, not ask them the precise specifics of what they are looking for and dump hundreds of ‘results’ upon them. They curate the homes they show based on a thorough understanding of their client, combined with their expertise. Where is that concept online?

I argue that the mobile device will be the platform that solves this question for the real estate industry, simply because it has the ability to contextualize not only ‘results’, but what the customer is interested in, in a vastly better way than the desktop. We’re living in incredibly exciting times for our industry – some are embracing the changes and figuring out what needs to happen. Most are not. I call on you to spread the word.

To find out more about Corcoran’s app for real estate, visit www.corcoran.com/iphone or www.corcoran.com/android

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I can’t believe it is almost the end of the year – and what a year we had in real estate and technology. As I look back over the last 12 months there was certainly a lot to discuss – online marketing, the role of technology in real estate, social media, mobile technology, blogging and so much more. We were very excited to see a huge number of people coming to FOREM week in and week out – responding to posts, re-tweeting, commenting and subscribing to our blog via email and RSS.

2010 marked an exciting year for Inman News as well. In July at our Real Estate Connect conference, we launched our first Agent Reboot. From there, we put on 11 more Agent Reboots all across the United States. Now, we are less than two weeks away from Real Estate Connect NYC and Agent Reboot NYC, and we are about to kick off our 24-city Agent Reboot tour. WOW!! We learned that now, more than ever, agents are hungry to learn about the technologies that can make their lives easier and more productive.

For this last post of 2011, I decided to compile a list of what I consider to be some of the best posts from 2010 – based on Google Analytics, number of comments and re-tweets, and the feedback I received.

I hope you enjoy revisiting some of these blog posts as I did.

I also want to take this moment to thank you – our readers. I consider myself very lucky to be able to write for FOREM and meet the wonderful fans that we have. I read each and every one of your blog comments and I think we have one of the best and smartest audiences in the industry. I know in this day and age there are thousands of blogs you could read – but you choose to read FOREM, and for that I want to give you a big THANK YOU!!

Here are the best of FOREM for 2010 (in no particular order):

Tip Tuesday: 5 Things Every Realtor Must do to Be Successful on Facebook

4 Free Google Tools You Must Use in Your Business

Top 4 Cool Things About the NEW iPhone4

REALTORS® and Smartphones – 2010 Survey Results

8 Ways Real Estate Agents Can Generate Referrals for Free

3 Social Media Mistakes Real Estate Agents & Brokers Make

9 Intelligent Ways Every REALTOR® Should be Using Google

25 Killer Resources – Blog Content for Realtors

Seven Important Ways for Real Estate Agents to Get Started with Internet Marketing of Their Business

5 Essential Social Media Instincts Real Estate Agents Should Implement

Facebook… Coming to a Theater Near You!

5 Ways Realtors Can Use Technology to Save Time and Money

5 Ways Build Your Personal Brand the Right Way

Hope you have a wonderful and prosperous new year – I’ll see you in 2011!

Written by: Katie Lance, Senior Marketing Manager, Inman News @katielance

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Matthew Shadbolt is the Director of Internet Marketing for The Corcoran Group, Manhattan’s largest real estate brokerage.

Follow Matthew on Twitter at @corcoran_group

One thing social media comes with a lot of, is advice. And perhaps big numbers. Very, very big numbers. I hear the word ’should’ a lot in conversations about how real estate professionals are shifting their thinking about their online marketing. There’s a lot of conflicting conversations directed at them from ‘gurus’, ‘evangelists’ ‘jedis’ and ‘ninjas’. I was recently presented with a business card that read ‘Sales Assassin’. Really? I asked if it was supposed to read ‘Sales Association’ and if there’d been a mix-up at the printers. I received an eye roll for my curiosity.

I hear that “your blog is the cornerstone of your business” or “you really should get into the foursquare thing”, even “if you’re not on Twitter your business is dead in 3 years”. Very often the agent is left feeling confused, overwhelmed and simply not knowing where to start. Is this you?

A side effect of this conflicting advice is the multiplication of problems that never existed before. Many agents feel like they have to ‘be everywhere’ in order to reach as many people as possible, so they start a blog, set up a fan page, begin a twitter account, upload videos, check-in everywhere, and generally do as many things as they possibly can to distract themselves from the process of helping people find homes. What happens is the multiplication and syndication of bad content. Poorly maintained blogs, fan pages that cry out to be hidden, adding open houses to Foursquare, or video tours that speak more about the agent than the home are unfortunately rampant within online real estate.

What’s missing in this conversation is consideration of the unfortunate recipient. The value of your content is not its value to you as the creator, but its value to those people RECEIVING those messages. It’s an old idea, but one very much brought to light recently through social media. If you’re not solving business problems through doing this, why are you really doing it?

Take status updates in Facebook or Twitter. If you’ve elected to use those platforms to build your business, what is the real, lasting value of what you’re writing? Is there one? How interesting is it REALLY that you have an open house this Sunday? Or that you checked-in at your office and blasted that announcement to all your connected social platforms?

It’s one of the hardest things we struggle with as marketers – the transition from ’selling’ to ‘helping’ as the key metric for your marketing success. It’s not a print vs. web thing, or even a web vs. mobile thing. It’s not how many fans you have, but what they’re doing, especially amongst themselves. It’s ‘how many people did we really help today’. We often hear the discussion of attempting to quantify the ROI of social media. Helping people isn’t the same as a transaction, and this makes people understandably nervous. Helping people doesn’t immediately pay the bills.

But which is more powerful for your business in the long-term? Answering someone’s question about a neighborhood, or showing them the same banner ad 50 times? Sharing information about where to buy the groceries they love nearby to an apartment they’re interested in, or a 4 line open house announcement in the newspaper?

Banner programs will drive a large volume of people into your site, especially if you buy them in a smart way. But what happens to those visitors once they arrive? Think about the metrics you look at when dissecting an ad program. A 0.2% click through rate is considered very, very healthy. 0.2%! And the likelihood of those people simply bouncing in and out of your site as they go between brokerage and syndication sites is all too common.

In many ways what we see make strong online presences is what real estate professionals have always done best. Sharing local expertise, personalized customer service, and the notion of genuinely helping someone find a fantastic home. Working online is no different, whatever the platform. So the idea of doing one thing well instead of 20 things poorly becomes something that many have begun to think about. Stretched too thin from a content perspective, many have elected to pick a platform, and build their businesses in a more focused, strategic and problem solving way.

Ask yourself, you’re doing a lot of things that are sucking your time right now. What problems are you really solving by doing this work?

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Do you live in Seattle or the surrounding areas? It’s not too late to make it to Agent Reboot™ Seattle!

Don’t miss the incredible ONE-DAY event devoted to teaching agents the hottest new trends and ‘how-to’s’ in social media, online marketing and mobile technology. Also ALL attendees will receive the Inman News 30-Day Social Media Plan FREE!

Date: Wed. Aug. 18th

Time: 9 am – 3 pm

Location: Meydenbauer Convention Center – Bellevue

View program and speakers >>

FOREM fans – save $20 off off your ticket!

REGISTER TODAY >> (use code: ‘FOREM0812′ and pay only $79)

Check out this ROCKIN’ video from our emcee Nicole Nicolay! Nicole talks about what to expect at Agent Reboot and what speakers you will hear from. (Click this link if you can not view the video)

Who is Nicole?

As an industry educator, consultant, and innovator, Nicole Nicolay “@nik_nik” has equipped real estate professionals, brokerages, and title companies with progressive marketing techniques and best practices for generating business. Nicole has trained thousands of agents nationwide and speaks regularly at industry leading events including: Inman Connect, REtechSouth, REBarCamps, C.A.R.- Tech Tuesday, BizTechDay, New Media Atlanta, Triple Play, REBlogWorld, and the BlogWorld New Media Expo.

FOREM fans – save $20 off off your ticket!

REGISTER TODAY >> (use code: ‘FOREM0812′ and pay only $79)

*tickets regularly $99 and will be $149 at the door.

Questions? Contact registration@inman.com

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Been thinking you might want to do video?

No better time than the present.

Turnhere has a great special going on right now that gets you a full 1 minute business profile for only $499. Regular price is $899 and the offer is good until June 30. That also gets you a player with embed code, a year’s worth of hosting and distribution to all the major video portals.

Here’s an example of what Turnhere can produce:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_l_R-85TzzY[/youtube]

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m a big fan of Internet video and at the risk of this whole post coming across as a total pitch, (which, frankly, it’s turning in to), I think Turnhere creates some of the very best videos on the web.

But up until now there really hasn’t been any way to work with them, as their model dictated that they work largely with folks who would buy videos in bulk. This move however is especially interesting since now even the small guys can get in the game.

I stand by my prediction that the adoption of video in real estate stands to radically change the way consumers and the industry interact with each other (see Video Isn’t Just About Your Listings). So there’s still time to hop on this bandwagon.

Of course, you could grab a Flip and shoot this yourself – but personally I’ll bet Turnhere’s “Soup to Nuts” approach is worth the 500 bones. Finally if you’re less of a DIYer but still want some more control over the production; check out WellcomeMat to hook up with a video pro in your area.

Full disclosure: Turnhere is owned by Brad Inman, founder of Inman News.

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Yahoo! Inc., just released the results of a study they did on how the Internet influences home buyers and sellers and specifically how it influences consumers when it comes to selecting a real estate agent.

No great surprises in the results (which were tabulated from a survey of 500 participants)… Yahoo’s found that… Yes… the Internet plays a “pivotal role in the selection process and was central in helping consumers identify agents”.

The numbers are good brain fodder though.. here’s what Yahoo! found:

• Home buyers and sellers consider approximately two agents on average before making a final decision.
• The Internet impacts consumer trust. Forty percent of respondents credited a site in increasing their trust in the agent.
• 74 percent of people who accessed an agent Web site got there with the help of a search engine. [emphasis mine]
• The online research process is quick and intense: consumers spent an average of 12 hours online researching agents and 75 percent selected an agent within one week of starting their search.
• 45 percent of respondents used the Internet to learn about agents they didn’t know existed.
• 41 percent discovered special deals and promotions offered from an agent through the Internet.

Struck me that maintaining a blog might still be the best way for Realtors to deal with the discovery and introduction process.

But the biggest find reinforces what many of the online search sites are banking on (see Trulia Gets Beaucoup Bucks) – there is still a massive disconnect between Realtor’s advertising budgets and where consumers are looking for information. According to Yahoo! (bias noted) 77 percent of respondents searched the Internet for information during their research process compared to 34 percent for print.

And guess where Realtors are still spending the most of their money? A Borrell Associates report quoted by Yahoo says that newspapers continue to get biggest share of Realtor advertising dollars at 40 percent (though online is catching up – and now stands at 32 percent).

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by danihernanz

RealTyger is the new product from the minds at RealEspace (see RealEspace Launching Soon), led by Jeff Corbett, The XBroker. Both will be launching next week at Real Estate Connect.

So what is it? In a recent blog post, Jeff reveals it is:

An exclusive online real estate community, or social network, by Professionals for Consumers.

Sounds an awful lot like ActiveRain…

RealEspace itself however, turns out to be a suite of tools and ‘dashboard’ package that will help real estate professionals manage all aspects of their web presence, Jeff gives us a sneak peak today of their “blog-site publishing platform and backend office manager”. Some of the features include:

• Post Editor
• Spread Sheets
• Email
• Feed Reader
• RateSpeed Mortgage Search Engine
• Video Listing Suite
• Listing Manager
• Listing Map Mash-Up with Multiple Layers of Information
• All SEO, all the time…

Definitely an intriguing product mix. It seems RealEspace and RealTyger are lining up themselves up to be the single destination for web-bound real estate practitioners.

RealEspace is heading squarely into a very crowded marketplace; Point2NLS, Incredible Agent and VREO (among many) already do much of what is being promised.

That said, few of these vendors tie it all up nicely into a single experience for an agent and if RealTyger and RealEspace perform as hoped, then they stand a chance of cornering a good chunk of the market.

Only a week to go till we see the whole package. Until then, we’ll see about getting some Beta invites for FOREM readers. Throw your name down in the comments, if you’re interested.

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