Real Estate Information Archive

Our development team recently enhanced our Silver, Gold and Platinum systems to include the ability to generate a Craig’s List post, in HTML, promoting your listings. All you have to do is copy the code and add it to Craig’s list.

Step one- Log in to your admin.

Step two- Go to “My Website” then your featured Property section and view all listings. You will see a link under a new column called “Craigslist ad” Click the “View” link.

Step three- Copy and paste the code into your Craig’s List post.

Here is an example of what the ad looks like.

Jason O'Neil gave me an update with regard to my previous post. "313 CMA requests in 24 hours."

Hi Charlee,

We received a total of 768 CMA requests on a mailing of 62,000. Not bad percentages. That was the last week in February and we have had 6 appointments 2 listings and one closed deal.

Jason

I think Jason had great timing with is marketing efforts. It was right before spring, just when sellers are starting to interview agents and prepare for the Spring and Summer markets.

Nice job Jason and thanks for sharing!

www.oneilrealtors.com

See previous post - 313 CMA requests in 24 hours.

I recently read a post on Michael Russer's Online Dominance blog, in which Carie Gable, of RealSupport gave a great summary of some simple enhancements that a virtual assistant can do to your website that will make it more engaging to your visitors.

 “Your VA can easily slim down or beef up the stock content, re-name the pages, write SEO’d content tailored for your market and even add in all of your social networking links. Make the site more than a marketing gimmick. Make it a resource with community pages, dining suggestions, tax credit updates, loan tutorials – whatever appeals most to YOUR ideal client. The result is a site map that fits your target market’s needs and interests as well as a website that you can guarantee no one else has”

Hiring a Virtual Assistant has several advantages:

1) Utilize a Virtual Assistant only when you need them.

2) A Virtual Assistant is an independent contractor with their own equipment - no overhead, no benefits, no payroll tax, no insurance.

3) You will not pay for the learning curve of a Real Estate Virtual Assistant.  They will already be trained on the tools you require.

4) Hire an expert - Real Estate Agents are being asked to wear too many hats.  They are spread way too thin and because of technology, they don't always know how to accomplish what needs to be done to stay on top.  A Real Estate Virtual Assistant is an expert and specializes in Marketing for Real Estate and Social Networking.

5) Utilizing a Virtual Assistant will free up your time to SELL Property or work reasonable hours.  

Rob Levy was recently interviewed by Maria Patterson of RISMEDIA. This interviw has some great points I know you will enjoy. Read Rob’s interview, click here.

I’m a big fan of Rob’s, not only because of his involvement with Real Pro Systems, but because all his interviews are informative.

Rob is know as the ”Tech Guru” amongst many of the top player in the industry. If you ever had a chance to listen to his 2006 interview Star Power interview with Howard Brinton, you would understand why so many look up to him for tech tips. Check out his website at www.roblevy.com.

Don’t know about Star Power? Go to www.gostarpower.com and take advantage of an amazing network of top producing real estate agents that are willing to share their secrets of success.

Are you looking for listings? Jason O'Neil used a postcard from our marketing library and had tremendous results! Here is his email below.

Real Pro,
Just a note to let you know that I have received 313 Seller CMA requests in just over 24 hours! I inserted the card into a local newspaper that gets direct mailed to a portion of my county. Total cost was just under $2900. 

I know you love to hear the stories! In fact, this is way too many to efficiently handle.

I trust that all is well. 

Jason O'neil
www.oneilrealtors.com

Action: Used a postcard template from our marketing gallery to create the add for the local newspaper.

Results:314 Seller CMA requests in the first 24 Hrs. (definitely more will follow)

Cost: $2900

Business problem: Too much business to handle!

See updated results

Here at Real Pro Systems we know how valuable it can be to have a truly integrated IDX solution available to you. Our IDX integration means that when the listing information is loaded onto your site, you get SEO credit for the content, and you can market your listings with confidence.

There are time saving benefits to an integrated IDX as well. Since integration means that your listing information is pulled directly from the MLS to populate your site it means no more loading listings to the MLS and then entering them a second time on your website! Are you tired of setting up visitors on recurring searches day in and day out? IDX integration automates the process of setting up of recurring searches, so you don't have to!

To learn more, click here.

My colleague, Gwyneth Iredale, and I were recently interview by Kathy Goughenour of www.leadboosterclub.com. The topic of the call was drip email campaigns. I'm always amazed when someone says, "those don't really work" or I don't need them." I can tell you from experience, that they are an essential part of your business. But, not all email campaigns are created equally. 

To have an effective email campaign, you need to know your target audience adn a few other key elements. If you you already have a grasp of the benefits of email campaigns, this call can serve as a great review. If you would like a better understanding of the value of email campaigns, this cal will be well worth your time.

Click here to listen.

Enjoy.

If you have a lot of listings for sale, it can be frustrating for website visitors to page through them all while looking for homes of interest.  Does your website provide the ability to sort them by price or city or other characteristics? 

If you work properties in markets that differ markedly such as investment Property vs. vacation Property, REOs or even rentals, this can be especially important.  Consider grouping them together by category, and then creating a specific sub-menu entry that brings up only that group of properties.

Instead of one “Featured Properties” page and menu, you could have a top-level menu “Featured Properties” and then sub-menus that appear and describe groups of properties; rentals, vacation homes, luxury homes, condos, and the like.  Each of those sub-menus can then point to a page or list of just those properties.

Your site visitors will find this far more intuitive and easy to navigate.  They can easily key in on just what they are looking for.  This may sound hard to do, but it is very easy to set up in Real Pro Gold.  I created a tag for rental listings. Under my menu item “properties for sale” you will find a dropdown item for rentals. Any Property I tag “rental” will appear on the page. See for your self.

People throw around the phrase “Search Engine Optimization” without really knowing what it means or how it fits their business. 

Simply defined by Wikipedia, Search Engine Optimization (or SEO) is “the process of improving volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via ‘natural’ (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. 

Now what does that mean?  Search engines like Yahoo, MSN, Google etc offer information at our fingertips, all we have to do is tell them what we are looking for.  Your goal is to get more people to the pages of your website that provide the information they are looking for.  The closer your website is to the first page of the results they return, the better chance you have of being found online when someone is searching for what you offer. 

Optimizing your site is the process taken to improve your positioning without using paid advertising.  There are a handful of things that you can do on your own without having to pay someone an arm and a leg to do for you.  Here are a few:
• Making sure your site is “visible” or “crawl-able” by the search engine spiders that determine page rank.

• Being clear on your search term strategy.  What search terms are you expecting your website visitors to search on?

• Choosing page titles, meta-tags, meta-descriptions and keywords that are relevant to your business and relevant to the content on the page.

• Adding fresh content to your site regularly, continually giving the robots “fresh reading material.”

• Establishing inbound links relevant to your site’s content.

Now understanding all of the ins and outs of SEO is much more complicated than that but there are some very basic things that can be done to help with your positioning.

Real Pro Systems knows how important optimizing your web site is.  We have built our sites on a search engine friendly architecture, provided built-in tools to set your page titles, meta-descriptions and key words, provided an integrated Blog, and provide initial site optimization at no extra charge!

Here is a tip from Star Power Star, Nancy Jenkins. On a recent webinar, she shared a couple of valuable tips that are easy to implement in your business.  

Thanks Nancy!