Real Estate Marketing Blog

Real Estate advertising

Only 4% of Real Estate advertising is going into the internet. This is appalling when 78% of real estate buyers and sellers begin their search online. (NAR).

It is even more ironic that CAR has found that the average Internet home buyer looks at six houses and takes only two weeks to purchase, compared to the traditional real estate buyers that look at 15 houses and take seven weeks to purchase.

The California Association of Realtors also found that internet real estate leads are the best source of real estate leads overall, second only to yard signs.

The internet is only a medium. However, it is a medium that is attracting most of your real estate prospects. And as the GenX'ers start buying real estate, it will be more and more necessary to figure out how to make a successful internet marketing campaign.

So why is only 4% going online? Personally I believe part of it is fear of the unknown and not knowing where to go for help.

At Spider Workz, we are offering you a white paper called the 5 Steps to a Successful Real Estate Website.

A warning though, it is not for the newbie agent. If you are new to the business and do not have an established track record, please don't waste too much of your resources online. You should spend most of your time marketing "old school", while establishing a future budget.

I will have a piece soon that will explain in detail the process of getting from the newbie stage to an online guerilla realtor soon.

Thanks to Bernice Ross of the RealEstateCoach.com for inspiring this article.

Real Estate Workers Compensation

In the you gotta be kidding me column!

The State of California in their infinite and broke wisdom is forcing California Real Estate Brokers to offer Workers Compensation for their independent contractors.

Now when the average broker makes less than $200 per side, I wonder how long before brokers close their doors.

Hey I understand. The state of California is broke and they need money. State Fund (the workers comp company that runs California's comp monopoly) is broke. This is after a roofer must pay over a dollar into the fund for every dollar he pays out. But, don't get me started.

So the Brokers are forced into signing off under penalty of law that they are providing workers comp.

So let me get this right. You don't provide workers comp. But you say you do for the silly reason that you want to keep your doors open. Then you can go to jail?

This is a clear case of the state picking on an industry.

Recently the Sacramento Bee reported that" little has happened in the seven weeks since Jose Millan, deputy secretary for enforcement at the Labor and Workforce Development Agency, said his agency was poised to cite a "sizable percentage" of California's 20 largest residential real-estate brokers for not having workers' compensation insurance for sales agents."

Real Estate Boom or Bubble

I will never forget sitting around the holiday table. Everyone was there. Uncles, Aunts, and cousins.

My Uncle Benny, a huge man with a booming voice that rivals James Earl Jones deep bone rattling authority was leading the chat about the real estate market.

As the conversation turned into local real estate, Uncle Benny winced as he shared that he had the opportunity to buy Lake Arrowhead water front acreage for less than $40,000. Today, this area is Beverly Hills on a Lake. It is where Oscar De La Hoya resides and trains for his championship fights.

The ironic thing about this family gathering is that it took place in the mid 1980's. My good Uncle Benny was referring to a chance he had going back to the 1950's. Heck, I wish I would have bough Arrowhead property in the mid 80's. Any long time Angelino with family roots in Southern California has either had or has heard this real estate related conversation at several times while in L.A. residency.

Why I Believe that real estate is a good deal

The above story is true. Those that bought at those prices have no doubt passed on a legacy of wealth to their children.

I believe that real estate over time is a good deal. Interest rates are relatively low, compared to the last real estate jump which was boomed while at 10%. We are whining over 6.5%. How soon we forget.

Because of historically low rates, we have had the greatest real estate boom in our nation's history. Therefore, we have the largest rate of home ownership ever. It is for this reason that the market has slowed down. You great Realtors have sold everyone a house!

Meanwhile, an overabundance of home sellers have put their homes on the market, while the demand has softened. It has only softened because buyers are grappling between a higher fixed rate (which is still historically low), and Adjustable Rate Mortgages. At some point, they will figure it out and deal with it that 5% fixed is gone and will again swallow Adjustables as a viable way to finance a new home.

We are also moving into a stronger economy (which this real estate boom has fueled). It is hard to believe that real estate will burst while the general economy explodes.

There are more reasons that we do not have a real estate bust.

~Inflation is still low. One way to stop inflation from going lower is to keep rates low. Two sectors have kept inflation steady, while preventing a Japanese style deflation. Housing and Oil.
~Demand in many metro areas (including California) is still high and steady. Here, in many neighborhoods of Los Angeles, developers are splitting lots into two such that they build two or three unit townhomes.
~When you adjust for inflation, U.S. home prices are not up much at all since 1980… a gain of less than 2% a year.

Thus, I believe over the long run real estate is a good bet.

One Armed Economists

There is a story that economist Paul Pilzer shares about President Truman and his Top Economic advisor.

It seems that Truman wanted to know the state of the economy.

His Economist authoritatively exclaimed, "well on the one hand if GNP stays at its current levels we should come out of this recession, on the other hand if...."

Whereby Truman interrupted and commanded, "what we need is less two armed economists!"

There are always at least two sides to an economic opinion. I will offer you resources that say we will continue to have a real estate boom (or at least stay flat) and others that swear we will have a real estate bubble bust.

Real Estate Boom

Talk of Housing Bubble Has Fears Rising, but in Reality It's a Lot of Hot Air

In this article by James Flanigan, we get sources proving that "Nothing extraordinary will happen in the business of buying and selling houses," says Raphael Bostic of USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, one of the more sober analysts around. Home sales and prices don't move dramatically — much less pop, Bostic explains — unless a major downdraft occurs in the larger economy.

Flanigan goes onto explain that incoming immigrants are helped to fuel the new and used home sales.

"Newcomers to the U.S. are boosting the nation's population by 1.3 million annually, according to the Census Bureau, bringing the overall increase to 2.8 million. Along with easier credit, the trend helps explain why the housing market saw 7 million new and existing homes sold last year, up from 3 million 25 years ago."

"Meanwhile, single women also have added to housing demand in the last decade — a phenomenon sure to continue. Over the next 10 years, retiring baby boomers also will swell the market for second homes."

Harry Dent: Dent is an economic forecaster who wrote "The Roaring 2000's". He also has penned his most recent, "The Coming Bubble Boom".

Dent called this current real estate boom. He believes that the real estate is being driven to a great extent by the great wealth of the Baby Boom Generation.

Purchase Originations Should Stay Strong ...

There is no real-estate bubble about to burst, experts saying

Real Estate Bubble and Bust

TAMU: Real Estate Center's News Release No. 66.At the beginning of the 20th century, less than half of all Americans owned their own homes. Today, low interest rates have pushed homeownership rates to a record 68 percent, and that figure is still climbing. Experts say it will exceed 70 percent by 2013. ... Millions more new homeowners are coming down the road. As many as 1.63 million new households could be formed every year for the next decade. That translates to 2.17 million new homes needed annually.

Real Estate Bubble

Getting Ready for the End of the Housing Bubble

UCLA Anderson Real Estate Forcast
UCLA economists predict reasonably smooth sailing for California's economy - but also warn that another national recession could be looming as early as next year. Anderson believes in a real estate downturn, which will cause a recession.

Las Vegas Cools - Aug. 26, 2004

U.S. Real Estate Bubble Nears Its End

Why home prices are about to plummet--and take the recovery with them
"Only in about 20 metro areas, mostly located in eight states, does the relationship of home price to income defy logic. The bad news is that those areas contain roughly half the housing wealth of the country. In California, the price of a home stands at 8.3 times the annual family income of its occupants; in Massachusetts, the ratio is 5.9:1; in Hawaii, a stunning, 10.1:1. To some extent, there are sound and basic economic reasons for this anomaly: supply and demand. Salaries in these areas have been going up faster than in the nation as a whole. The other is supply: These metro areas are "built out," with zoning ordinances that limit the ability of developers to add new homes. But at some point, incomes simply can't sustain the prices. That point has now been reached. In California, a middle-class family with two earners each making $50,000 a year now owns, on average, an $830,000 home. In the late 80s, the last time these eight states saw price-to-income ratios this high, the real estate market collapsed. "

The Real Estate Bubble

Is the Real Estate "Bubble" Going to Burst?

Housing Boom Threatens American Dream

The Who, What, When, Where and Why about Web-Logs (BLOGS)

From A Talk I gave at the Master Mind Conference
Las Vegas, NV

What is a Blog?

In the beginning:

Programmer A		Programmer B		Programmer C
New York		Denver		Los Angeles

In the old days of the web, programmers would share code they were trying to solve. It made it easy to keep an ongoing log of their work.
Visual Examples:

Political

• David Horowitz-Conservative Columnist
• George W Bush-President of The United States
• John Kerry-Democratic Nominee-President of The United States 2004
• Michael Moore-"Documentarian"
• Blog For America-Part of the Howard Dean organization and what helped helped to inspire the above candidates to Blog.

Business:

• Bold Approach-Public Relations Firm
  Example of a single blog that teaches
• Travel Agency Blog
• RoundTable Communications Blog
• Real Estate Online Marketing Blog-by yours truely: HouseBlogger.com
• Real Estate Agent Blog

Everyone is blogging. From Journalists, Businesses, Politicians, Musicians to Gen X Diary logs.

Why Have A Blog?

A. Authority-

From Cialdini's 7 Influencers: Authority

We are likely to comply when we believe someone to be an authority.

Authority can provide a shortcut to decision -making. If we accept someone as an authority, and that person advocates certain behaviors, then we do not have to go through what might otherwise be a difficult decision-making process.

• Compliance professionals seek to create the appearance of authority to gain our compliance: e.g.
  • trappings
  • titles (GRI, ABR, CRS )

Information Articles, Press Releases, speaking seminars and even Radio and TV programming has been in the Guerilla Realtor arsenal for years. All done to create Authority and Leadership over the marketplace and to make competition obsolete.

Thru the magic of RSS (Real Simple Syndication), we can have our authority syndicated across the web for other's with Blogs or traditional websites to feed our content into their website. This is an example of someone feeding my article.

It can make you a Star!

Blogging can allow you to become the authority in one or more of you local marketplaces.

B. Search Engines

Google in particular loves Blogs because of their:

• Constantly updated content
• Fresh Links

Many believe that registering your website with Google will get you into Google. On the contrary, Google will only list you if they find you from another link (s). Thus, it is more important than ever to have ample links pointing into your website in order to create what is called link popularity.

The way to get link popularity in the past was thru :

• Link Exchanges
• Directories
• Article Syndication
• Posting in Forums
• Cross Linking
• Etc.

Now with Blogs you are able to add another weapon in your link popularity campaign.

With seasoned blogs we are seeing same day indexing and possibly even faster inclusion into the Google results.

More Proof that the engines love Blogs:

• Google owns Blogger an online Blogging Host.
• Google Blog
• Yahoo Blog

C. Avoidance of Functional Obsolescence

Dave Lakhani President of Bold Approach told me that in three to five years we won't recognize the current websites. "Everyone will have a Blog."

The next two to three years will be like five years ago. Those who had a website were above the crowd. Now when you say you have a Blog, you are elevating yourself above your competition. And with the Search Engines in your favor, a Blog is a strategic move that can position you to dominate your online market.

Proof:

2nd Generation real estate web searchers are seeing more and more of the same templated websites everywhere they go. Studies have confirmed in most cases that the searcher is not finding what he/she wants. Which is generally information about their search subject.  Specifically, they are looking to see houses for sale. Including pictures of homes and the houses detailed written information.  (Based on Keyword Search Behavior & Industry studies)

D. Demographics

How old are you? Who is your older audience?

They are dieing or dead.

Who is your younger audience? Looking for a Realtor that they can relate to that's who. The same grassroots that bought into the Howard Dean Web Machine is your Gen X -young webbies. They are your younger home buyers and sellers. They are the one's demanding and driving the Blog movement. They are your present and future web marketplace.

The Day of Reckoning

Duplicated, over syndicated, generalized-branded real estate content is all over the web. For the most part it is not topical and timely. It does little to influence the real estate consumer (your visitor) and the way it is coded by most Web Design Houses, does little to help in search engine placement.

The day is here to start creating your own content. Blogs allow you to do this very easily. Those with duplicated, un-original content will fall into the trash heaps of digital oblivion.

How to Have a Blog?

They are from Free to $19.95 a month for templated solutions. And more for custom solutions.  The one(s) you pick depends on your goals.

Blogger and Typepad are two that free and cheap. Many webhosts such as SpiderWorkz.com offer blogging as part of their web hosting services.

A Blog can hit more than two birds with one stone.

A Blog offers you the opportunity to gain market Authority, Give Google and Yahoo exactly what it wants, and create an archive of your insights, tips, articles, newsletters, press releases, market updates, local news and alerts, amongst much more information that safely lets your online personality permeate and dominate your marketplace.

When To Get A Blog?

NOW!

Where to Get a Blog?

Spider Juice Technologies offers Blogging strategic implementation to help you meet your online marketing objectives.

Reservations to Blogging

Time...

Time undoubtedly is against you. While you debate weather you have the time, another brokerage is finding the time to implement their blog.

Spider Juice Technologies can help you develop content building strategies that help you easily and quickly generate onsite content on your site, and for you to develop your own content on your blog that can be syndicated and used to help your link popularity and authority building process.

We Have Run Out of the Web

According to Forbes, we may be running out of space on the internet. Hard to believe, but as third world countries come on board, experts worry about the internets architecture.

USP Unique Selling Proposition

The Unique Selling Proposition is an idea first discussed by Rosser Reeves in his 1970 book,"Reality in Advertising".

According to Reeves, there are three components in a successful USP:

1. Each ad must make a proposition to the consumer. Each advertisement must say to the reader: "Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit."

So there must be a compelling benefit.

2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer. It must be unique; either a uniqueness of brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field.

This also can work with your niche. "Specializing in St. Pauls Loft homes", "25% rebated back at close of escrow with our patented paperless transaction".

3. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions.

This means the unique proposition cannot be a trivial difference. It has to be something important, something the customer really cares about.

"By using paperless escrows you save space, save time and perhaps you even save a tree."

Once your USP gains it position in your customers mind, it is difficult for anyone else to make those claims.

This was inspired by Bob Bly, an expert and long respected copywriter. He says to ask yourself the following before launching a campaign:
1. Does the ad project a strong benefit?
2. Is the benefit unique?
3. Does it sell?