Liveblogging again from the general session. Today is mostly a look at the economic indicators and predictions for the market. The feeling I’ve been getting from all of these chats is that we probably won’t see much increase this year, but next year should be our turn-around. The finance/economic experts here are a bit more negative than the people in real estate, so I’m trying to conclude an average.
My mind is reeling with all of the new information regarding social networks, blogging, video for real estate, lead generation and contact management.
Social networks and blogging are definitely here to stay. Facebook is still an unknown but everyone here I’ve talked to imagines great potential with it. Many of the people here are managing brokers/owners, so you can be sure they’ll be taking this information back to their agents and forcing some of them to get into it. Right now, NAR claims only 4% of Realtors have a blog. In one session yesterday, a broker asked “Isn’t it too late to get started blogging?” The panel all vehemently said NO. Blogs (used correctly) tend to rank quickly and maintain their rank easily. What this means is you want to be one of the first 10 real estate bloggers for a given search term/geographic area, that way you are on the first page of Google.
Video is definitely here and staying. Virtual tours using still photos are standard, just like inserting the listing in RMLS. There are some creative ways to spice things up, which I’ll cover more later, but video is the new way to stand out. I will hopefully be able to put together a class within the next month or two showing how to get started in video for less than $200. For your higher end properties you’ll still probably want to pay for a professional videographer. Being a Generation Y member, I can say I have no intentions of ever attending an open house. I also never look at your postcards. I want a web site with lots of photos and a video tour would be great too.
Lead generation is going through a revolution. I need to synthesize this a bit more before going into it, so check back.
Contact management has been something I’ve looked for at all of the conferences I’ve attended in the last year. Unfortunately there is no perfect solution. You will always make trade-offs. The people making robust systems are web based, so if you don’t have an internet connection (or maybe their site goes down), you have no access to your contacts. Or you can use Outlook, which gives you great email/calendar/contact capabilities, but no real transaction management. There are plugins available, but none of them are perfect. So it all really depends on which aspects you value most.
I will probably be changing the name of my site as soon as I can figure out something new. Several respected bloggers made comments to the tune of not using your name because it’s not as easy to brand. Plus, if I ever end up getting someone to help me, they’re not Nick Bostic, so that makes it a little odd. Just as soon as someone figures out how to squeeze an extra hour in the day or day in the week…
Related posts:
Comments on this entry are closed.