Exploring alternatives to the Status Quo in real estate
I am so pleased. I’ve been checking Help-U-Sell office listings in Google Places and many are now claimed, edited and verified. Thank you all.
Now: do you want to see one that’s really done right? Check out Tiffany and Sonny Bulaj’s listing for Help-U-Sell Hometown in York, PA. Notice the photos! The $1,000 offer! The Testimonial! Wow! Here’s the link:
Help-U-Sell Hometown.
A couple of years ago we talked with our team about claiming their businesses and editing the information on Google Places. Earlier this week I decided to check up and see who had actually done this. I’m sorry to report that I looked at almost 20 brokers’ pages before I found one that had been claimed, edited and verified.
This is important. It’s a FREE online listing for your business. It’s there already . . . it’s just that the content is only what Google was able to glean from your most basic information. If you will Claim, Edit and Verify your information – plus spice it up with some photos and even a video – this listing will actually help people find you online.
Let’s do an experiment: go to www.google.com and search for your city and State and the word ‘REALTORS’. I just did it for Honolulu, Hi, and here’s what I got:
Of course the first few listings are paid, but right after that – where the listings relate to the map on the right – all of that information comes straight from Google Places. The same thing happens when you do a similar search on Google Maps:
Taking charge of this is very easy, but I want to show you what your place probably looks like today:
You can see there is lots of space to strut your stuff in print, photos and even video (I know so many of you are putting together short intro videos for your websites – why not let them do double duty?
Taking charge is very simple: just go to www.google.com/places and click on the ‘Get Started’ button on the right side of the screen. If you need help, there is great documentation here.
Now there is one quirk in all of this: Google recommends you use Chrome, Firefox or Safari to update your profile. They warn that using Internet Explorer may produce unpredictable results. If you are an IE person, I think I’d try it anyway and see what happens. If the result is unacceptable, they you can download a free version of Chrome and do a re-do. The important thing is to JUST DO IT . . . because I’m going to be checking to see who has and who hasn’t verified their listings!
That was Tears for Fears, wasn’t it? Everybody wants to rule the world . . . So, the real estate world is waking up right now. We’re having a bit of a spring thaw and the buyer-bears are stretching and yawning from five years of hibernation. It’s the kind of climate where you really can rule the real estate world. That’s why I went back a couple of years and decided to resurrect some thoughts that found the page back then. If you are into gearing up to be much bigger than you already are, read all 10 pieces, and then do them, one at a time . . . your business will thank you the best way a business can: with profits. Enjoy!
START HERE.
Nick Taylor from Zillow spoke to the Help-U-Sell team at our Success Summit last November. He brought a wealth of good information, not only about Zillow but also about online marketing in general. In the four months since I’ve heard from several brokers who have increased their lead generation success using what they learned. Nick just revised that presentation and posted it online. It’s still a presentation – and would be best with a presenter (Nick), but the slides are full of good information if you simply read them. Here it is:
Nick Taylor’s Online Marketing Presentation
On today’s Power Hour Web Conference, I asked all Help-U-Sell brokers to do a little analysis. I asked them to see just how accurate the big real estate aggregation sites (Trulia, Zillow, et al) are in their local marketplaces. I asked that they search for homes for sale in a reasonable, manageable price range in their own Zip Code on, say, Zillow and then to compare those results with the same search done on the MLS. This is the same experiment the broker mentioned in my last post did – the one where she found 159 bad or questionable listings out of the 220 her search turned up on the aggregator site. But I’m asking Help-U-Sell people to go one step further: identify which listings on the aggregator site are not in MLS and then find out why. Are they duplicates? Old sold listings that have not been purged? Are they FSBOs or broker listings not on MLS? It’s probably an hour’s worth of effort but I think it will pay big dividends.
See, the aggregators are getting slammed right now for having bad or stale data. It is my belief that the housing information available on your own Help-U-Sell website with an IDX feed from the local MLS is far more up to date and accurate than anything a national site could offer. What I want to do is document that – locally, office by office. We can then start talking with consumers about this and (hopefully) switch them off the national sites (where they are vulnerable to any agent) and on to our own.
Please, Help-U-Sell Brokers: Get Busy! Do this book work and share your results with me. And if you’d like a little inspiration, check out this article from today’s Inman News