Have you been Zapd yet?

One of my favorite new apps is one that allows you to create a completely mobile optimized website from your iPhone in literally seconds.

Zapd (a new service from Seattle-based Pressplane) is a free app and is available from the Apple App store. Snap some photos, pick a theme, add a little text and then voila! Your site is done. Zapd reminds me a lot of Posterous and Tumblr, but the biggest difference is that you can create the entire site from your iPhone. Once a site is published you can share it directly to Twitter or Facebook or via email. Every website created with Zapd is optimized for smartphones and tablets.

I’ve been chatting with Pressplane CEO and founder Kelly Smith for a few weeks now about this new application and personally, I think Zapd is an awesome application for real estate agents.

Here are some ideas on how to use real estate agents could use Zapd:

1. Property websites
2. Neighborhood websites (photos of types of homes, schools, parks, restaurants)
3. Buyers tour (i.e. “10 great homes to check out” – great if you are previewing a number of homes for a client)
4. Landscaping ideas
5. Home improvement ideas
6. Before and After (for staging)
7. Educational events and conferences (a quick and easy way to share photos)

Here are some examples of real estate professionals and Zapd sites they have created on the fly:

• 28490 Florence, Garden City, MI
• Real Estate with Allisa D. Young
• Park Avenue Properties

Here is a video from Zapd that explains how quick and easy it is to use:

What do you think? Have you used Zapd yet? I’d love your feedback, leave me a comment below!

Katie Lance, Social Media Director, Inman News, @katielance

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Guest post by Joe Salcedo with Chase International in Reno, Nevada.

Imagine a business – a real world business – that offers ABC service, where “ABC” is something very specific and unambiguous.  Whenever this new business introduces themselves to new clients, they always explain “we’re in the ABC business” or “we offer ABC” and the text on their website, print marketing and elsewhere reflects this.

Now consider that this business has competitors.

Likely, thousands of them and all those competitors are also saying “we’re in the ABC business” because, well, that is THE way to describe what they’re offering.

At that point, the company that owns ABC.com or ABC.appropriateCCTLD (country code top level domain) has a MASSIVE advantage.

Never in the history of real estate can an unknown agent catapult herself into the arms of a pre-determined market need.

This is where prime real estate domains give you unprecedented edge, because these terms are what home buyers are searching for via search engines.

After all, their URL matches what they do, so whenever somebody sees the URL they already know what service they can expect to find there. There’s no need to start the marketing dialogue with “We’re coined-brand-name, and we offer ABC”.  Suddenly, you’ve slashed your marketing budget, as you’re piggybacking on the “train of thought” of their new and existing customers, who are looking for a company that offers “ABC”. 

In 2007, a very well known and respected agent in Reno ushered me into her office to prod me why I wasn’t advertising at Homes and Land.  She told me that people needed to know about the brand “Joe Salcedo” and if people didn’t know I was still in the market, how can they do business with me. She made sense; problem was it costs $800 to get a full page ad that ran for only two months.  I didn’t have a budget but it got me thinking: “in the presence of our colleagues here in the office there’s no way I could compete with the brand of this well known, loved and respected agent, but outside our office doors she really didn’t have much of an advantage over me.  Nobody really knew who we were.”

That same day, I dropped all my print advertising and marketing projects and decided to go all-or- nothing in building my online presence.  My goal was to build my brand, at the same time target generic real estate searches that buyers typed in search engines. 

My plan was three-fold:

1. Research what my potential buyers were actively searching for
2. Build remarkable content around it
3. Make every effort for people to find it.

Hence, my first site: “A Reno real estate agent who lost $50,000 is on a mission to understand the market just a little bit better.”    I wrote every day and pretended that people were actually reading it.  I researched about keywords, links and later on invested in a new site design.  It took me a year before I got the leads; but boy was it quality.

But one thing I learned that I wish I knew when I started: invest in the best domain you can find. It’s worth it.  It’s market defining.  It’s instant respect.  And because a successful real estate site is achieved through great content and marketing it, a solid domain name can cut your marketing expenses by half.

It’s also important never to lose sight of the fact that a URL is not just useful online. It could be used to show up in TV and radio ads, newspaper and magazine ads, press releases, news stories, on invoices and packing slips, on the side of vans and fleet vehicles, on billboards and posters, and in potentially hundreds of other distinct types of location.

In every single instance, it will be easier for a new customer (who’s got the idea of needing ABC in the back of their mind) to remember ABC.com/ABC.cctld than ANY other conceivable URL! Basically, you’re dropping the seven repetitions that are typically needed to make a marketing message sink in down to one.

How to search for demand:

• Seobook keyword suggestion tool (free, but requires registration).
• Google adwords tool
  

Note: real world testing is a lot better, these tools could give misleading numbers.

Here’s where you can start finding domains

• Godaddy.com (sometimes you can still find decent domains for $9, only for low to medium competitive markets)
• Robert Schilling’s massive inventory (expensive but he has some of the best names in the business. Reno realestate.net’s asking price was $24,000)
• Sedo.com (has some good names for reasonable prices.  Most of the names you can bid on)
• Buydomains.com (good secondary market seller.  Can give great discounts if company owns the name)
• Afternic.com (can help you search for the sellers who owns domains you like)
• Memorable domains (some of the best .co.uk domain names for $2,000)

Additional thoughts:

• Let the domain age. Start building now. Put up a basic WordPress site, host it on your host server (like pair.com), put up decent content and point a dozen links to it (directory and blogs).  Google trusts older domains.
• If you’re curious what American Real Estate terms are usually searched for: (city name and area precedes these terms):    “__Homes”, “ _____Real Estate”, “ _______Homes For Sale.”  “Real Estate” seems to be the most expensive and sought after.
• In moderately competitive markets you don’t necessarily have to invest in generic real estate terms.  In many low to medium competitive markets you can build a branded name and point targeted links to it (“Boise Foreclosures Guy”).  And that could pull rank.
• Long tail keywords (“Reno Short Sale Expert”) are the most profitable and easy to rank for.

In conclusion, real estate has been depressed the past 4 years. Realtors and brokers are gun shy and have remained passive in their marketing.  Now is the time to search for good deals.  I just bought a Nevada related major keyword for less than $700.  It has an estimated 800 searches a day on Google alone (broad search).  Even at less than 10% of that volume, I still can get 80 searches/day on just one keyword.

About the author: Joe is more fascinated with business models than supermodels.  He writes for a Reno real estate blog since 2007 and is currently experimenting on his brand new domain Lake Tahoe Real Estate.

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I’ve had a few days to de-compress from Real Estate Connect SF – what a fantastic event! After looking through my notebook, I wanted to share with FOREM fans one of my favorite sessions.

Designing Great Experiences - Kevin Hoffman, User Experience Director, HappyCog, @kevinmhoffman

This session was the first session in the Digital Marketing Workshop at Connect. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but this was one of the most informative sessions during the show!

During the presentation, Kevin showed a variety of screen shots of websites from different industries. He showed some great examples of what works and what is confusing to the consumer. Happy Cog mantra is this:

“Happy Cog delivers beautiful websites that never lose sight of the human being using them.”

I love this. So many times in real estate we get caught up in terms and phrases that we know and understand but forget to take a step back to think of someone looking at the site for the 1st time.

One of the things I really enjoyed about Kevin’s presentation was that he is not in the real estate industry. He brought some really fresh insights on why website fail or don’t convert like they should. I thought he was very well prepared, easy to listen to, and had some fantastic points!

Kevin suggests asking yourself several questions when you put your site together. He says,

“Great user experiences are easy when you ask the right questions!”

Does your site answer the questions:

• What can I do for you?
• Who are you?
• What does your audience want to do when they get to your site?
• Is your site as easy as it should be?
• Can I trust you?

Here are some great takeaways I took from his presentation:

• You don’t need to put ‘click here’ on a website – they know to click, they are ONLINE!
• Is their consistency in your website (i.e. verbiage, fonts, style)?
• Don’t use different words that mean the same to you but are confusing to a user of our site (i.e. ‘log in,’ ’sign up,’ ‘premium homes,’ ‘fine homes’) – this was my ‘a-ha’ moment. How many times have you looked at a real estate site and have seen things called a variety of names? What is a fine home? A premium home? What is a map search versus a home finder? Things that make total sense to us – may not make sense to the average consumer.
• If you have comments enabled in your site – make sure you have comments! Comments = social proof. This is one of the reasons Digg is so successful!
• Your site should move someone from being a stranger to engaging in your business.

You can view Kevin’s presentation slides here >>

Kevin’s video (along with all conference videos) will be available soon to Inman Premium Members. Sign up now for only $99 and get a 1 year Inman Premium Membership which includes ALL post-conference video.

Would love your comments and feedback – leave me a comment below!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

@inmannews @katielance

Facebook – Inman News | Facebook – FOREM

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Terabitz has been very quiet lately.

A refresher for those of you might not have heard of the company – they launched in 2007 to much fanfare (see Terabitz Gives You Loads of Data) — as a sort of “Netvibes for real estate” — but the company made hard tack to starboard in the years since and have reinvented themselves as a platform for real estate brokerages.

It’s a crowded marketplace in that space, but certainly one that is always ripe for innovation. This week they’ve pulled the up the curtain on what they’ve been up too, with a new release of their platform.

It includes a number of back-end features that build off their data aggregation chops to allow brokers to create content rich web sites. From their press release:

Neighborhood and Community pages featuring business reviews, photos and school reports (via implementation of the Yelp, Flickr, and Education.com APIs) as well as hyperlocal news content (via implementation of Yahoo Pipes).

Real estate market reports featuring data and trends derived from live MLS (Multiple Listing Service) data and displayed in a way the average user can understand at a glance. Market reports are provided at the neighborhood and community level, which makes them far more useful than typical city or county-level views.

Property search that better merchandizes listings through a “gallery” view that enables the user to view large photos in the search results display.

Explore the Neighborhood™, a map-based tool that enables users to view amenities in the area of their home search – businesses, places of worship, recreational facilities and more – in order to better understand what it is like to live in a place.

Terabitz One-to-One™, a prospecting tool that enables agents to create dedicated, automatically updating Websites for homeowners that display recent sales, new listings and a dynamic home value estimate.

The Terabitz platform is modeled on the relaunch of Chicago brokerage @properties‘ web site. @properties is a company that’s proved its willing to invest in potentially game-changing ideas (see Real Estate Search Stores – Coming Soon?) so it seems like a natural fit.

The redesign is clean, simple and well executed. But I’m not a fan of having to register in order to search for a home — so I didn’t get a chance to test out the search tool. And it was doubly annoying that every listing I clicked on I had to create an account… how about a couple freebies guys?

Nevertheless, I did like Terabitz platform’s neighborhood and community pages (like this one for Lincoln Park, for example) which were a nice collection of a series of different data sources. My only suggestion would be to add more media; more photos (the Flickr stream pulls in some pretty random stuff) – professionally produced neighborhood videos would be a fantastic addition to those pages too.

In any case, it seems this release is why we hadn’t heard much from Terabitz recently. It turns out they’ve had their heads down coding.

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From the guys at 1000Watt Consulting.

real estate brokerage, real estate websites, real estate 2.0, real estate

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