RSSThe CDPE Designation and Niche Marketing
Last week I sat down to earn my CDPE designation. If you haven’t looked into it, this might be the next set of skills you sharpen. In this market, understanding short sales, the foreclosure process and helping homeowners who may be able to stay in their homes with loan modifications may be the best way to not only help people with your real estate skills, but, add additional income to your bottom line.
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.
Category: Marketing | 1 Comment »
LogoTournament Kicks Out Some Great Options
How is your real estate logo? If you are like many of us, we try to do it on our own. However, when you get serious and you want to make your appearance look more professional, you need to hire a pro to help with your image and a new logo might be in order.
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:
Category: Marketing | 1 Comment »
Pricing Theories to Help Sell Homes
$499,000, $499,900, $500,000…what’s the difference? Or, how about when you have a home listed at $329,000 and you know you need a price reduction, but, can’t seem to find the right way to convey it to a client? What’s the right way to go about getting a price reduction? First, I presume that you aren’t getting a price reduction “just to make a commission” as many sellers may think….the reason you should be asking for that reduction is because you have reworked a market analysis, you have held caravans and you have received feedback that all indicate that you can’t get an offer at your current list price.
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.
Category: Marketing | No Comments »
Integrating Google Maps to Advertise Listings
I’ve been usig some custom Google maps on my website for some time for a standard IDX map search, but, I have found that they can easily be used to integrate an easy to use Open house tool. Here is how I have it implemented to advertise Atlanta open houses on a page of my website:
Here is the code:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:v="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html charset=UTF-8"/>
<title>Atlanta Open Houses</title>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2&key=ABQIAAAAkGkNKtD-s2q61G6j_APHThQeHGlUq97mBStWwakmxOCYH8eSjhQqcJByc20fLPliGoyayjJT8Ly29A"></script>
</head>
<body onunload="GUnload()">
<div id="map" style="width: 500px height: 450px"></div>
<noscript><b>JavaScript must be enabled in order for you to use Google Maps.</b>
However, it seems JavaScript is either disabled or not supported by your browser.
To view Google Maps, enable JavaScript by changing your browser options, and then
try again.
</noscript>
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
// Create our "tiny" marker icon
var startList=function(){
var blueIcon = new GIcon(G_DEFAULT_ICON)
blueIcon.image = "http://www.ryanwardrealestate.com/images/house.png"
blueIcon.shadow = 'http://www.ryanwardrealestate.com/images/shadow.png'
blueIcon.iconSize = new GSize(28, 36)
blueIcon.shadowSize = new GSize(60, 30)
// Set up our GMarkerOptions objectmarkerOptions = { icon:blueIcon }
function createMarker(point,html) {
var marker = new GMarker(point, {icon: blueIcon})
// The new marker "mouseover" listener
GEvent.addListener(marker,"mouseover", function() {
marker.openInfoWindowHtml(html)
})
return marker
}
function load() {
if (GBrowserIsCompatible()) {
var map = new GMap2(document.getElementById("map"))
map.addControl(new GSmallMapControl())
map.addControl(new GMapTypeControl())
map.setCenter(new GLatLng(34.085365,-84.297581),12)
// Create the location of each house with lat/long as well as the information to be displayed in the info window
var point = new GLatLng(34.092562,-84.361417)
var marker = createMarker(point,'<table><tr><td><img src="http://www.realestatetestblog.com/wp-content/gallery/open-houses/12695-new-providence.JPG" height="80" width="100"/></td><td>12695 New Providence<br />$369,000 - Sunday<br /> October 19th,<br /> 2 p.m to 4 p.m.</td></tr></table>')
map.addOverlay(marker)
var point = new GLatLng(34.11136,-84.264235)
var marker = createMarker(point,'<table><tr><td><img src="http://www.realestatetestblog.com/wp-content/gallery/open-houses/600-alstonefield.JPG" height="80" width="100"/></td><td>600 Alstonefield Dr<br />$239,900 - Sunday<br /> October 19th,<br /> 2 p.m to 4 p.m.<br /><a href="http://600alstonefield.homesinmiltonga.com/" target="blank"/>View Details</a></td></tr></table>')
map.addOverlay(marker)
}
}
load()
}
window.onload=startList
//]]>
</script>
</body>
</html> If you have any questions about how to implement this, just reply in the comments, but, make sure that you have a Google maps API key or you won’t get anywhere.
Category: Marketing | No Comments »
Featured Homes Using NextGen Gallery
I’ve started using NextGen to feature all of our Atlanta Homes for sale with small slideshows on our homepage in “feature boxes”. The link opens a new window to each homes single property website. Here’s a screenshot:
These are different than most because the photos you see are actually slideshow. I think it brings a little more life to the page and helps to get consumers to notice them and click them a bit more frequesntly.
The process to create them is quite simple if you are familiar with NextGen. Simply create a gallery of images and insert it into a draft post. Preview that post and view the source code. Take the source code and copy it into a design that you can create using on page divs. These are created using 3 seperate “featured Atlanta homes” divs with tables to hold the information. The code for one of the featured listings boxes looks like this:
<div id="featured-slide"> <table border="0" cellpadding="3" width="145" align="left"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <div id="ngg_slideshow21" class="slideshow">The <a href="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">Flash Player</a> and <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/">a browser with Javascript support</a> are needed..</div> <script type="text/javascript"><!--mce:0--></script></td> </tr> <tr> <td align="center"><strong><span style="text-decoration: underline">Featured Home</span></strong></td> </tr> <tr> <td> <ul><strong>Price: </strong>$650,000</ul> <ul><strong>Beds: </strong>4</ul> <ul><strong>Baths:</strong> 3 full, 2 half</ul> <a href="http://www.sandyspringsopenhouses.com" target="blank">View Details</a></td> </tr> </tbody></table> </div>
That’s it…
Category: Marketing | 1 Comment »
Plugins to Help People and Search Engines For A WordPress Blog
WordPress out of the box offers an excellent platform for search engines, but, there are a number of free plugins to improve upon the out-of-the-box platform. I use a number of plugins, but, there are others and some may be better than the ones I use so if you have any recommendations, please reply in the comments below. Here are the ones I use:
- All in one SEO pack- This plugin allows you to use the title of the post as the title displayed as well as allows you to add meta keywords and a unique meta description for each post.
- Dagon Sitemap Generator- This plugin allows you to create a page that will dynamically index your posts and pages automatically.
- Feedburner Feedsmith- You need this to install Feedburner.
- Google Sitemap Generator- This one generates an XML sitemap for Google.
- Subscribe to Comments - If you want people to communicate on your blog, this one notifies them that someone else has commented on a post that they have also commented on automatically.
- WP-Cache - Helps to get your blog and posts to load more quickly.
There are other really good plugins for WordPress and because it is open source, there are new ones coming out all the time. You may be interested in making your blog comments dofollow so that they pass link juice back to the commenter, but, that is up to you. just Google for one and there are a handful. There are pros and cons to doing this. You will get more commenters, but, you might get more spam as well.
One of the most important things that you can do does not involve a plugin at all. In tyour CMS, go to: Options then Permalinks. Select custom, specify below and enter: /%postname%/ and then click update permalink structure. What this will do is automatically make the title of each post the url, so for this post it you be: realestatetestblog.com/plugins-to-help-people-and-search-engines-for-a-wordpress-blog
O.K. So that is my list. Please feel free to add your recommendations…
Category: SEO | 2 Comments »