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

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: Just under $4K

Business problem: Too much business to handle!

John Jones

www.JohnCJones.com

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.

Real Pro Gold comes with your own integrated agent blog.  No need to go out and purchase or create a separate blogging system, you can turn on your own blog with a click of a mouse.  Use your blog to establish your local expertise, personalize your business and enhance your search engine optimization. 

How Does Blogging Help My SEO? Search engines are continually searching for new content to index and one of the fastest ways to add unique, fresh content to your site is by using an integrated blog.  The more often search engines find new content on your site, the faster they will come back next time and the higher the ranking in the search result.  Blogging is a fast, easy way to help you with your organic search rankings.

Site Map Submission Service We submit your website’s site map to the search engines after each blog post.  We submit to MSN live, Google, Google blogs, Ask.com and Yahoo! 

Blog Directory Pinging Service In addition to submitting your site map we also send out an electronic signal, or ping to several blog directories to let them know you have a new blog post to index.  We ping:  Ping-o-Matic, Feedburner, Technorati, Weblogs and Twingly.

Need Help with What to Write? We know that coming up with things to write about on your blog can be almost as challenging as writing the blog itself; which is why we have included a list of 100 topics to blog about build right into the Real Pro Gold admin panel. 

Do You Tweet? Since Twitter has become more popular as an online social networking tool in the real estate industry, we thought it would be nice to integrate your blog and your Twitter account. Just click a box and your new posts will be posted to your Twitter account. 

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.

As a SEO professional you rarely find a website provider that takes in the full spectrum of their clients’ needs including those of the search engines. Real Pro Systems does just that.  I provide SEO services for the real estate industry, and Real Pro Systems hands down offers the best value for the industry's needs. I've seen real estate website providers that actually hinder their clients search engine rankings. Real Pro Systems has taken SEO friendliness to a whole new level.  The architecture and customizability make it my platform of choice. I can get my clients better search engine placement by using Real Pro Gold or Real Pro Silver, which means better ROI for the client.  Lee West, SEO Professional Services.

Today I spoke with a client of ours that said, since he has used Lee to optimize his website, he is now #5 on Google for the number 1 search phrase in his area.

Great job Lee.

You may have heard the term “Stealth Website”, but you may not be sure as to what it is exactly and how you would use stealth marketing or stealth websites in your business.

A stealth site is simply a site that offers a service or information that a buyer or seller is searching for. If you ask yourself, “why do buyers and sellers go online?” The answer is surprisingly simple; to start the information gathering process.

Seth Godin, author of the book “Permission Marketing”, explains the marketing concept of giving valuable information and asking in exchange for contact information. The concept of stealth marketing follows that ideology. When a buyer goes online, they are looking for listings or conversely if a seller goes online, they are seeking the value of their home. If you are going to have any chance of getting the buyers/sellers contact information, you need to first offer them what they are looking for and in exchange, they may be willing to give you what you are looking for, i.e., their contact information.  Once you have their contact information give you both a means, either an email address or a phone number and a legitimate reason to follow up.

Most agents attempt advertise these offerings on a website that not only offers these services, but is also filled with other information such as buyer and seller tips/reports, area information, links to schools and usually highlights the agents/teams many qualifications. What is wrong with that approach? Well, nothing if the buyer or seller knows the agent or is ready to talk with an agent. In the mind of the buyer or seller just looking for area listings or a home valuation, this type of website can deter them from leaving contact information and making a request because they are simply not ready to engage with an agent. They are thinking, “if I register on this website, I’m sure that agent will call me.”  So they leave the site and you’ve lost the valuable opportunity to capture and cultivate that lead.

Stealth marketing or using stealth sites helps agents to lower the barriers of entry so that agents can make a connection with a prospect at the beginning stages of the transaction process when they are seeking information.  Real Pro Systems provides a unique web strategy by creating consumer centric websites that allow you (the agent) to target a buyer or seller by advertising for the services the agents has to offer. If you would like to see an example of a buyers’ stealth site visit www.rpshomesearch.com.

Benefit 1. Buyers and sellers can easily identify “what’s in it for them”

Benefit 2. There is not a lot of information required. The buyers or sellers fear of being contacted is all but alleviated.

Benefit 3. The buyers and sellers get what they want, information and the agent gets an opportunity to turn an internet lead into a client!

I love the way top producing agent, Mike Parker of Huff Realty in Northern Kentucky, explains the concept of stealth sites.  He talks about with marketing you have a front door, side door, and back door. He uses this analogy to explain that the front door is your agent branded website, buyers and sellers looking for Mike Parker. The side door is a website used to capture clients looking for homes and not an agent (the stealth site approach). The back door would be a buyer or seller looking for general information could be community info, schools, parks, etc. This content could be on your branded site as well as in your blog. Ah yes, blogging… very important, but we will save that topic for anther time.

I narrowed it down to my top five favorites in no particular order. I hope you find this useful.

- The move advocate www.moveadvocate.com
The offer a personal assistant to your clients that research, coordinate, and manage all the details associated with moving. The best part.... it is a free service. They get paid by their business partners which are name brand moving companies. Contact Mickey Matteson

- PreVisite www.previsite.com
These guys get the WOW factor. With the click of their camera you can take one photo and capture an entire room, upload photos online and automatically create a virtual tour. No stitching or distortion. Contact Angela Marshall

- EcoBroker www.echobroker.com
With the trend of going green, EcoBroker offers a certification program as well as a ton of information related to going green. They have an extensive list of Green products and other useful information. Contact Linda Besler

- Aspen Grove www.aspengrove.net
I can't quite put my head around their offering, but if you need help with managing REO properties, it may be worth researching. Contact Aisling McElligott

- Arch Telecom www.archtelecom.com 
Arch offers IVR systems,as well as a list of FSBO leads. They offer FSBO leads within a 50 mile radius of any zip code. You can also see if the FSBO's are investors, real estate agents, or assisted FSBO's. This could be a good complement to our FSBO system. Contact Michael Underwood

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.

Jim Markland

 We are focusing on transitioning  Mayes Harris Realty from the traditional realtor marketing programs to taking advantage of the many web marketing tools available today.  The Inman News webinar sponsored by Real Pro this week provided us with many great ideas, and confirmed similar ideas presented to us at a recent Star Power program here in Charlotte.  Thanks so much for your help in getting us started with Real Pro. 

 Tom Ingram

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!

I love you. thank you so much!!!!!!!! You mentioned several times yesterday in the webinar that you value our business and it shows from how you treat us and improve your products. Thank you!

Sara D.
San Diego, CA

Yes, Real Pro Systems is here to support our agents. Your success is our success.

Thanks Nancy!

'Frannie' bailout makes money cheaper, not easier

Interest rates already down on takeover

By Matt Carter, Monday, September 8, 2008.

The government takeover of mortgage financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could mean lower interest rates for many borrowers but is unlikely to solve one of the biggest problems of the credit crunch: the shrinking number of people who can get a loan in the first place.

Fannie and Freddie will be permitted to expand their direct investments in mortgage-backed securities from $1.5 trillion to $1.7 trillion over the next year. With the government standing behind their debts, investors are also expected to be more willing to buy mortgage-backed securities guaranteed by Fannie and Freddie.

That could push the rate for a 30-year fixed-rate conforming mortgage down from 6.35 percent last week to "well below" 6 percent, according to Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Economy.com.

Rates are already coming down to around 6 percent today, but it will take 30 to 45 days to get a sense of how the takeover will ultimately affect rates, said John Courson, chief operating officer of the mortgage Bankers Association.

Today's lower rates "could be a one-day reaction," Courson warned. But the Treasury's actions have "put a safety net under (secondary markets where mortgages are sold) that restores investor confidence ... that should be a driver that leads to lower rates."

In a commentary for Moody's Economy.com's Dismal Scientist newsletter, Zandi said lower interest rates won't stop further house-price declines, but "raises the odds" that those declines will not exceed 5 percent to 10 percent of current levels.

Columbia Business School real estate professor Chris Mayer has estimated that higher borrowing costs -- as reflected by the unusually wide spread between mortgage rates and Treasurys -- has increased the cost of owning a home by 10 percent to 20 percent (see story).

With the government's explicit backing of Fannie and Freddie's debt, Zandi and others think the spread will return to levels more in line with historic norms.

"The immediate impact, already in evidence today, is clearly that the spreads between U.S. Treasurys and Fannie and Freddie securities have gotten a lot narrower," said Robert Satnick, chairman of the California mortgage Bankers Association. "A tremendous amount of uncertainty has been taken out of the conforming mortgage market."

Dan Green, a loan officer for Chicago-based Mobium mortgage Group Inc., sees mortgage rates improving in the short term, which will make homes more affordable by lowering borrowers' monthly payments. But Green, the author of The Mortgage Reports Blog, sees a recovery in housing markets tied less to mortgage rates than to the availability of credit.

Until would-be home buyers and homeowners who have been "frozen out of the mortgage market in the last 12 months" have access to money, "a recovery won't be as quick as it should be," Green said.

While Congress has raised the conforming loan limit -- the ceiling for mortgages eligible for purchase or guarantee by Fannie and Freddie -- many borrowers in high-cost markets remain in "jumbo loan" territory.

Congress and the Bush administration have been allowing Fannie and Freddie to purchase and guarantee mortgages of up to $729,750 in high-cost markets until the end of the year. But the cap will be lowered to $625,550 on Jan. 1, and in markets where home prices didn't head into the stratosphere the old $417,000 conforming loan limit has remained in place.

So far, Fannie and Freddie haven't done much with the authority they were granted to purchase and guarantee mortgages above the old conforming loan limit. But with an infusion of capital from the Treasury, "they will have the financial muscle to do what Congress originally intended," Zandi said.

Because Fannie and Freddie aren't allowed to turn jumbo loans into guaranteed securities that are purchased by investors, those loans are costlier and harder to obtain. That's an especially acute problem in high-cost markets like California, where many homes are priced well above the conforming loan limit.

Satnick said it's too early to judge the impact of the takeover on the "nonconforming" (jumbo) loan market, but he doesn't expect the spread between the rates for conforming and jumbo loans to grow any wider. That means that if rates on conforming loans do come down, jumbo rates should follow suit.

Courson also expects jumbo and conforming rates to move in sync, although the margin between conforming and jumbo loans won't necessarily narrow, he said.

Those seeking a loan that falls within Fannie and Freddie's limits must still cope with higher fees and tightened underwriting standards instituted during the downturn. Many borrowers are being told to bring larger down payments to the table, if they can get a loan at all. Fannie and Freddie have eliminated zero-down loans, and many private mortgage insurers are requiring minimum down payments of 5 percent in declining markets.

Green said many of the changes Fannie Mae instituted in its latest version of its automated underwriting system, Desktop Underwriter 7.0, are more subtle and have not been widely publicized, but have a real impact on housing markets. When purchasing investment properties, for example, borrowers can't use rental income from the Property to qualify unless their loan-to-value (LTV) ratio is 70 percent or less.

"If you are getting $2,500 a month in rent, and making a 20 percent down payment, to Fannie and Freddie that $2,500 doesn't exist," Green said. "When you get into the deep, dark changes in the guidelines, it goes beyond (loan-to-value ratio), but to a desire of having a risk-free loan."

In announcing a $2.3 billion quarterly loss last month, Fannie Mae officials said the changes they've made to Desktop Underwriter helped reduce by 80 percent purchases and guarantees of the kind of mortgages that accounted for most of their losses. Fannie Mae said it would stop buying Alt-A mortgages -- riskier loans often made with little or no documentation -- altogether by the end of the year.

While critics have derided Alt-A mortgages as "liar loans," they can be the only option for some buyers, including investors and the self-employed. Alt-A loans aren't inherently bad, but did perform poorly when other risks were "layered" on top of them, Courson said.

"It's the risk layering -- high LTV, no income verification, no FICO -- that's where those loans get into trouble," Courson said. Although the MBA does not advocate a return to "some of the ill-conceived credit practices" that helped produce the current crisis, it would encourage the government, in its role as conservator of Fannie and Freddie, to reconsider some of the recent guideline changes.

One reason Fannie and Freddie instituted new fees and tightened guidelines was the need to generate revenue and raise capital, Courson said. With the government preparing to provide $100 billion each in backing for Fannie and Freddie, that's a less immediate concern.

"I think there were some loans they made a decision not to make that may well become available" again, Courson said.

The government takeover is viewed as a short-term solution -- the Treasury Department's authority to backstop Fannie and Freddie expires at the end of next year. It will be up to the next administration to determine whether the government will step in and take over the role Fannie and Freddie played in the mortgage markets, or perhaps spin them off as private companies once they return to health.

Courson said the crisis presents an opportunity to take a step back and look not only at how Fannie and Freddie might be fixed, but at the secondary mortgage market as a whole. One question to consider, he said, is whether the Federal Home Loan Banks could be allowed to purchase and securitize loans made or purchased by their member banks.

"This is an opportunity to take a blank sheet of paper, and ask what is the best structure, without limiting ourselves to what we've got," Courson said.

In announcing the takeover Sunday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said there is an inherent conflict in the way Fannie and Freddie are structured -- as private companies that aim not only to generate profits for shareholders but fulfill a public mission as defined by Congress.

Charlee,

I've been using RPS for just over a year now. I partnered with a local Real Estate agent who uses the Real Pro Systems as well. We share marketing dollars to generate leads through a program called ProLeads that Real Pro Systems manages. Over the last year I've received over 100 leads and have closed over 10 of them.

In addition, I use the system to send the eNewsletter to other Realtors in my area (I have over 1100 of them on my list). I've gotten great response. It helps keep me top of mind and I get a lot of referral business.

My goals were to find an easy to use system that was affordable, was easy to use, included a website, follow-up tools (newsletter and drip campaigns) and great customer service.

I made a great choice.

Thanks Real Pro Systems

Carl Bulgini III

"After sending the newsletter out one evening, we received 4 seller leads, of those 1 appointment request and 3 CMA requests, and 15 buyer registration leads the next morning. 

Real Pro has helped us manage and track our internet leads.  We use the Real Pro drip campaign for all website registrations and leads this past year.  I like having a system that my team members can easily use and understand.  I have the reassurance that we are not losing valuable leads through lack of follow up.  We track our leads using the notes section for each Prospect.  Any team member can review notes for a lead with dates of contact and communication all in one place. 

We have learned that quick responses to our internet leads helped us double out lead conversion to appointments. 

In addition, now we are able to track our leads more specifically using the Visitstat feature offered through Real Pro.  I really like the feature of being able to track more specifically the website traffic with the help of the Visistat feature."

Karen Jolley

The Buckley Jolley Real Estate Team

I know you are always looking for ways to generate leads. I received an email form an agent that sent out a blast to his database and I thought is was clever.  For those of you looking for ways to get prospects to take action on something like Market Snapshot from Top Producer, this is a good example of what to say.

"One of the things I really do not accomplish as well as I would prefer is to keep you up to date on all the services that are available to my customers and friends that are not "in the transactional mode".  With the market a little slower these days I am trying to catch up and do a better job of keeping you informed.