Entries Tagged 'Real Estate Internet' ↓

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This advertisement from Nike is so dead on. For agents and non agents, to be the best you have to be willing to fail publicly. As Michael Jordon said, “26 times I have been trusted to take the game winning shot and I have missed.”

Are you willing to step up and take the game winning shot even if there is a chance you will fail?

Congratulations Zillow and Trulia for their victories in the Webby Awards For 2008. Both companies are leaders not just in the online real estate space but also showing other industries how to harness the web to change the playing field.

Press Release:

Hailed as the “Internet’s highest honor” by the New York Times, The Webby Awards is the leading international award honoring excellence on the Internet, including Websites, online film and video, interactive advertising, and mobile Websites. The Academy unveiled winners today in over 100 categories from over 60 countries and a full list of winners can be found at http://www.webbyawards.com. < ?xml:namespace prefix ="" o ns ="" "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

 Reflecting the incredible caliber of Real Estate sites on the web, the winner in the category is:

•  Zillow.com                                                                   

http://www.zillow.com

In addition, nearly 500,000 votes were cast by people around the world for their favorite sites, videos, and ads in The Webby People’s Voice Awards presented by Nokia. A full list of both Webby Awards and People’s Voice Awards winners can be found at www.webbyawards.com

 The Webby People’s Voice Award for Best Real Estate Site is:

• Trulia                                                                           

http://www.trulia.com

My apologies to UB40 for the title, but this is not something you would want to see when you are hearing noises downstairs in the middle of the night.

An 8 foot alligator sitting in your kitchen who chased your cat into the house after pushing in the screen porch door. Florida living can be a wonderful experience but alligators in the kitchen is a bit much.

Sandra Frosti went into her kitchen to see what was causing the noises and found an 2.4-metre alligator thrashing around on the floor.
The 69-year-old had returned from an evening out to hear scratching sounds in her home, near Tampa.
When she discovered what was causing them, she ran to her bedroom to call emergency services, who had to be convinced that the creature had got in to her house. The operator taking her call asked whether what she had seen was actually an iguana.
Police and a specialist wildlife trapper eventually arrived to catch the alligator. Gouges from the creature’s claws were left in Frosti’s floor.
It is thought the reptile may have been chasing her cat when it came into the house.  via  guardian.co.uk.

Video from MSNBC

In the past if you developed websites you aimed not to alienate the dial up user and those with smaller monitors. Well with the new information out that websites have tripled in size since 2003 and the number of objects on a page doubling, don’t get hung up on those metrics anymore.

The size of the average web page has more than tripled since 2003. From 2003 to 2008 the average web page grew from 93.7K to over 312K (see Figure 1), some 233% (Domenech et al. 2007, Flinn & Betcher 2008). During the same five-year period, the number of objects in the average web page nearly doubled from 25.7 to 49.9 objects per page. Longer term statistics show that since 1995 the size of the average web page has increased by 22 times, and the number of objects per page has grown by 21.7 times. via WebSiteOptimization

If you are still worried about creating your website for those with a dial up connection or a smaller screen you are going to be left far behind with those very same users. Broadband is where we are now and not utilizing the features that broadband offers is going to hurt you, especially if you are a real estate agent. Design for a 1024×768 screen size and use that bandwidth to tell your story as best you can.

If you are like me, Google Calendar has become a major part of your life. Our family all uses it and it has made scheduling issues much easier to deal with as my wife has her calendar, I have mine, and then we have the massive one with the boys schedules on it.

We really have pushed much of our lives onto Google Calendar and it is almost scary that someone could make a mess of it.

Well according to Mashable, folks are now spamming the calendar by pushing invites to you. Fortunately there is a quick fix which I have now implemented.

The spam itself apparently comes to your gmail as an appointment schedule, in the form of an .ics file. Luckily, there is a solution, straight from official Google Calendar group:

“If you’ve enabled notifications for “New invitations,” you can
configure your Google Calendar settings to only show events you’ve
created or accepted:

1. Click on “Settings” at the top of any Google Calendar page
2. Select the “General” tab if it isn’t selected already.
3. In the “Automatically add invitations to my calendar” section,
select “No, only show invitations to which I have responded.”
4. Click on “Save.”“

On a positive note for Google Calendar it now allows you to sync with Microsoft Outlook’s calendar. That will be a project as many of my milestone dates and schedules have been programmed into Outlook over the years. Combining the two should be very beneficial.

The statewide MLS system for Connecticut has launched a new portal for the general public to search their listings. While it is not the most glamorous site, it is groundbreaking none the less. Instead of watching their franchise erode as almost all of the other MLS systems across the country are doing, they are proactively entering the market.

And it must be hard for MLS systems. In the deepest part of their ethos is the concept of secrecy. The guild’s hoarder of information main job was to keep this information out of the hands of the general public at all costs. Special passwords, extra tight security features are the lifeblood of MLS types.

And then these progressive agents started asking for hooks into the data. Don’t they know that it is the holy grail of real estate. DO NOT SHARE IT are the words that reverberate most MLS offices.

But that is not what earns an agent their commission anymore. Now it is how the information is packaged and the services that the agents provide. And the Connecticut MLS has broken from the old way of thinking by getting ahead of the curve for their agents.

Instead of waiting for others to package the information, they are getting it out and allowing the public to see this information as soon as it is entered. So I hope this is successful and beneficial for the MLS and the agents it serves.

CTreal.com allows users to search listings, open houses and sold
properties, take virtual tours of properties, and contact listing
REALTORS(R). Since data for all properties is shown in the same format,
comparisons are easy and always up to date.

“CTreal.com is the new way to find homes in Connecticut,” said Mary Ann
Hebert, President of CTMLS. “The site instantly exposes listings posted by
our members to the maximum number of REALTORS(R) and potential buyers
possible. With greater exposure can come less time on the market and
multiple offers. via Press Release

Hattip to Dustin at 4Realz.net

If you are using Google Adwords to drive traffic to your real estate site it would make a great deal of sense to sit down with your web designer and slim down your page (send them this post as it will help them).

Google Adwords uses a quality score to determine how much you are paying when your ads are clicked. A higher quality score will save you money.

One of the components to the quality score is the load time on your landing page. Google has released a FAQ in their help center to explain how this works which can be found here.

The key thing to think about is according to Google are:

• Use fewer redirects.
• Reduce the page size by using fewer, smaller, and more highly-compressed images.
• Do not use interstitial pages.
• Minimize the use of iframes on your landing page.

All of these factors if they are addressed can end up saving you some serious money (and improve customer satisfaction) if Adwords is part of your marketing plan.

Microsoft has announced the Internet Explorer 8 Readiness Toolkit has been released.

Some of the new features include:

Activities
WebSlices
Favorites Bar
Automatic Crash Recovery
Improved Phishing Filter

With real estate sales being so online dependent I would expect those forward thinking real estate agents and brokers to start working on innovations that will capitalize on these tools.

The Wall Street Journal Development Blog has an interesting post on the age gap that is occurring between buyers and agents. The average age of real estate agents in the United States is 51 while the average buyer was 39.

Mostly this is a non issue and I was glossing over the post until I read the comments. There was anger in them about the disconnect between what the agents perceived their role was and what the young buyers are looking for.

Here is a sample comment:

I have to admit that old school agents make me nuts. Half the time they come at me with a couple NAR talking points, not realizing that us younger buyers are running the numbers and doing the research online. It makes them sound archaic and I always wonder if they really think we’re that dumb?

If you are reading this post odds are you are not caught in the old school way of selling real estate, but I will bet that someone in your office is. If they have a young client there is a good chance they are hurting the firms reputation and are are not giving the service that is needed, or worse, the client thinks they are being insulted. 

I wonder if this is a wide open niche that can be exploited. Instead of taking the traditional route in your marketing, aim it directly at the twenty something buyers. Build you web site out as they want to use it and use the tools that they use.

I bet just offering  services that fit the clients needs and wants would create a great long term business for you.

So you think that being first or second in Google is not that important? This study from Cornell done in 2006 shows that just holding the 1^st position in Google will get you more than half of the clicks on a given search. And the difference between holding 1^st and 2^nd position?

Being first in Google will get you 4 times the clicks that the second position will. So pay attention to your search optimization strategies. For example if you are getting 100 clicks in 2^nd position a week for your top search term you could be getting 400 clicks if you got into the 1^st position.

That extra little bit of work can make a huge difference in your business.

As you can see from the graph below and a SERP ‘heat-map’ based on it, the first two listings capture over a half of the user’s attention in terms of time of the eye fixation. Whereas the attention is shared almost equally, the difference in number of click between the first two listings is much more surprising: over four times! via SeoResearcher.

Hat tip to Jon Warass SEO Blog for finding the chart.

Tags: SEO, SEO+Real+Estate, Google+1st+Position, Google+Real+Estate