I felt so strongly about it, I decided it was time to reach out and develop a niche market. I have a new website to market as an Atlanta short sale agent and I have incorporated and Atlanta short sales page on my website. With the training, I can now do more research, understand the process and incorporate systems that I otherwise would have been unable to set up.

This in turn allows me to represent new clients who may need a short sale or just homeowners who need some help figuring it out because I am taking the time to develop the skill set needed to be effective.

Utilize Niche Marketing in Your Business

Over the last few years, I have developed some very effective online marketing strategies. In years past, “internet leads” would have been considered a niche market, but there are few people left who believe that to be the case. It is no longer “niche” and the competition for internet leads demonstrates just how crowded this space is.

However, short sale business is one niche that most agents shy away from and for this reason, much of the competition is eliminated. Whether you select short sales as your niche or geotarget a smaller area within a city as your niche, you should know that becoming an expert in your niche will allow you to have higher conversions than casting a wide net. Think of it more as a rifle approach to lead generating as opposed to a shotgun approach.

I will probably get more total visitors looking for “Atlanta real estate” on my flagship website than I will on my short sale website, but my conversion percentages will be much higher.

Such was the case for me when we transformed from ryanwardrealestate.com to premieratlantarealestate.com. The new branding was meant to direct us to a more upscale market. For us that is Buckhead real estate and Atlanta luxury real estate.

I turned to http://logotournament.com for our logo. Here is our page on the site. From there you can navigate to see the 295 logo options offered by numerous designers. What’s even better is that during the contest you can communicate with designers in pretty close to real time and they can make changes and add new logos while you re-rank entries as new ones become available from a number of designers. It was a great opportunity to get what you are really looking for. Here is my winning design:

The blog themes on the site have been gone for a while now, but, I’ am ready to release a new updated keller Williams Blog theme. Slowly, I’ll get all of them re-released wioth more of a 2.0 feel. The new KW theme is in the final phases of testing on a live site that I created for my market center. You can view the working model here and if you would like an early copy, just post a comment and I’ll make it happen. I’ll replace the logo at the top left of that theme with one that does not have the office affiliation on it like the one you see there and it will come with a readme file that will get you up and going in no time. You can leave that slideshow or replace it with a picture – whatever you want. Just let me know.

A useful technique is to think of home prices in terms of “brackets”. $150,000 to $200,000 might be a bracket in your market. For others, this may only be a $25,000 change instead of $50,000. Either way, buyers will typically be looking in their bracket. They may browse outside of the bracket, but, they will  look in their bracket. This is something that should be easily conveyed to a seller. Here are some good examples of bracketing:

No matter which of these sites you would use or even if a buyer was to use a site like realtor.com where you actually enter exact numbers, it’s still going to be a bracketed number. Okay, so what’s the point of going through the idea of bracketing? Well, if you have that listing I talked about above for $329,000, do you really think a price reduction of $10,000 is going to get you more showings? How many more buyers are going to see that home at $319,000 than saw it at $329,000? Few if any. If you are going to get more or even just new buyers to view that home, you are going to need to get the price at or below $300,000 (think buyers looking from $250,000 – $300,000 vs. $300,000 – $350,000).

As for whether or not $499,000, $499,900 or $500,000 is a better price, I don’t think there is any difference between the first two numbers, but, I do think there is a benefit to $500,000 over the other two numbers. Again, think about bracketing again here. If you are searching homes for sale in Atlanta on my website, the brackets go to the even numbers. That means two different brackets will get to view that listing at $500,000 instead of one bracket if you list at $499,000 or $499,900. If that’s not reason enough, if you have enhanced listings on realtor.com (and yes, they are valuable – but that is for another post), the listings are typically displayed from highest to lowest so my $500,000 listing will be viewed more frequently than your listing at $499,900 listing.

To summarize, it’s always better to price at even numbers, but, if you can’t price at even numbers, at least price at something different. If you are in an area with competing listings and there are several homes at $499,000 then list yours at $495,000. t least it will stand out from all of the others at $499,000. While a pricing strategy like these will not by itself sell a home, it can get you the needed traffic that leads to an offer.

We just did 2 new ones; one for Crooked Creek – we are going for “Crooked Creek homes for sale” because as I searched for a domain name for a listing we have in this golf and country club neighborhood, I found crookedcreekhomesforsale.com was still available. Many neighborhoods in communities all around the country have domain names like this that are still available. We have no links to it, it’s only two weeks old and ranks #4 on Google for “crooked creek homes for sale”. We have a sign rider with the domain name on it to help reinforce that we are serious about marketing in the neighborhood. In short order, this single property website will be #1 for the term as we add more relevant content about the neighborhood so that it becomes the best resource. The other one we were even more fortunate to find – we will be marketing “brookhaven homes for sale” with it. Unlike Crooked Creek, this is a city – with a good bit of traffic to it so if we can get this website to rank high, we can really add a superior service for our clients in Brookhaven, but, pick up some new ones along the way and over time, we will add more keyword phrases to rank for more traffic and more marketing value for future clients. It’s not hard if you care about it and you try.

Why would I tell you about this and let you know that it really is easy? Simple. Because it’s probably the best thing that you can do to separate you from your local competition. It’s cheap, doesn’t take very long and can pay rewards for years in terms of more listings, sales and clients! I’ve talked about the traffic these sites can generate many times before so I won’t go into that again, but, when I sit down with a seller, I’m almost certain that I will always be able to demonstrate that I can out market everyone else they might interview.

Do you think the agent for Crooked Creek that owns the domain crookedcreekhomesforsale.com has thought about marketing in the neighborhood? Don’t you think that would look good on the sign in the front yard? Absolutely! and when you walk in to your next listing appointment, you can show them statistics that demonstrate that you are the expert marketer. Of course, this won’t necessarily get you the listing – you still need to be competent and you still have to connect with and understand your potential client, but, all things being equal, I will win the listing because I can out market you. We have done this time and time again and it will continue to be more and more effective as more and more sellers understand the importance of internet marketing. We have been compiling domain names for some time now and will continue to do so.

So, get on board, Dave Smith has been writing about them for years. He does them a little different than I do, but, the premise is the same. Use WordPress, host yourself and you can improve your marketing ability in a real way to add more value than your competition. There are tutorials – maybe I’ll write a real estate tutorial and re-release my single property website template for people to start with. Anyway, it’s been a while since I’ve talked about them and I’m excited about the 2 new ones. Read what you can or make some comments on Dave’s posts or here on mine and we’ll get you started in the right direction.

I posted a little of my outline for classess as well as quite a bit more information and photos from Gary Keller’s presentation so it should have quite a bit more staying power than on photo and no content from Flickr. I think Google may be waiting flickr a little bit too high for it’s relevancy. Take a look at the two posts and let me know which one is better on its merit. Just Google “keller williams family reunion”. My post is on the realestatewebmasters domain and the one above me and just below kw is a flickr photo. Seriouly. That’s an algo that needs to be fixed in my opinion.

Enter 2009 and video is become more and more important so I have revisited the issue and the WordPress video plugin has imporved tremendously. Below is a video that was actually shot and put together by one of my clients. I have had the video for some time and uploaded it, but, I thought now as god of a time as any to see what was new in the world of real self hosted video technolgy. The new video plugin has numerous skins to choos from that look much better than those in the past and I thought I would check it out. Below is what I came up with.

 
Get the Flash Player to see this player.

Marketing Sandy Springs homes for sale in the current market is a monumnetal task so with my new player, I will try to see if I can integrate it into my website, which, is not WordPress. That technical challenge will be something for itself, but, for those on WordPress, this might be worth a shot.

I’ve posted in the past that bringing your own lighting with you to a home to shoot interior photos is important. I usually bring 2 lights with me – one to add light from behind me and another smaller light off in the distance and out of sight where the camera doesn’t pick up enough light so that I can add the necessary depth to the picture. I may still bring the lights with me, but, my life is certainly going to be a lot easier now and the pictures, well, there will be no comparison.

I’ve only had this camera for one day and the sun has yet to come out from behind the clouds so I can’t actually get outside and do any shooting, but there is no question – if you are not using a digital SLR to shoot photos of listings (or hiring a photographer who will) you are not doing your job as well as you should be.

Take a look at this photo – it is an absolutely unedited photo that has simply been cropped (it was about 6 megs so I cropped it to only see the detail I wanted) and it was point and shoot in the auto setting. No tripod or anything. Simply On/Aim/Shoot. The same way you would shoot from a little camera. It was also the thrid picture I took so I didn’t hadn’t even read the manual all the way through. My point being is that if you buy the right camera, it isn’t any more difficult. Here is the photo. The photo should enlarge when you click on it. No way you get that much true color and detail from a little point and shoot.

I know, it’s a flower – not exactly someone’s living room, but, try that with your little point and shoot and it won’t take long to see the difference. My point and shoot camera wouldn’t even take the picture for a comparison shot! There is more and I’ll post a quick blurb with a couple of links to actual comparisons (I’m not shooting pictures of my house the day after Christmas).

Now imagine. You have a nice new listing that is well cared for and staged properly. You walk in with your little pocket camera (like I used to) and set up this elaborate mess of cords and lights to take your photos only to get home to see that the photos are overexposed on one part, glare from the lights is somewhere else and another part is completely washed out by the flash. This camera doesn’t even need a flash for most interior shots. You get home to edit the photos only to find that many of them just don’t really show the house off well and the colors aren’t as vivid as they were when you were at the house. But there’s more. This camera comes with a lense that will take a wider shot than your a point and shoot so you will be able to get more of the room in the picture. Have you ever backed out of a doorway to try to get a wide enough shot to get the whole room only to find that the door frame gets in the sides of the picture? Not with this camera.

This next week, I’ll be getting out to all of my listings to take new photos. No matter what part of the country you are in, your listings need to have the best pictures you can take. Unless you are using an SLR, you are not going to get them and the Nikon D60 is the perfect SLR camera because it is simple enough for any of us to use.

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