RealTown's RealTalk

So what is the verdict Mike, is all this IDX and nauseating "repositioning" of our future really panning out. Or is this the same old crap just in a different package that lines the pockets of the AFFILIATES?

Robert, the verdict is that it pays off, if you properly address the clients who are searching. They want their space and only want information. They will contact you in good time by taking a permission marketing approach. Yes, I have been to the closing table 4-5 times this year as a result of Internet marketing. Most of my business comes as a result of 30 years in the business and repeat and referral business, however that's 4-5 closings I would not have had if I was not doing the work. Is it worth it? I think it is.

I am also banking on the idea that most real estate agents are too un-willing to put the time and effort into Internet marketing and have a poor attitude about the changes taking place in our industry. As I said in the post, Blogging, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Squidoo, and HubPages seem to be organic and easier on the pocketbook, but take work.

"Expect the Best" Mike

Excuse me GREG, I guess I stand corrected.  I had no idea I was complaining.  I just asked a simple logical question.  Show us the results?  I agree, there are a few who are capitalizing on the misery index that prevails in this market, short sales, pre-foreclosures, lead generators.  I guess that's what this business has become.  Right? 

But you still haven't answered the question.  It seems as if everybody wants to ride the band wagon of techonological change, kind of like what the Islamics want us Westerners to do unfortunately they perfer to blow themselves up to achieve their objectives.  I look at the changes taking place in our industry and I fail to see equity growth without tremendous pain from all the manipulation.  What ever happend to a roof over your head?  You have a choice rent or own.  Why has Real Estate turned from a Residential to Investment reality?  The last 8 years have been driven by the "greater fool theory".  Value has not even entered the equation.  People were of the opinion due to the WWW that there will always be a bigger fool to by my investment mentality.  Now the chickens are coming home to roust.  That's just an observation.  It doesn't have to be that way.  I think we need to look at the evidence and examine our actions through something we gave up on many years ago, CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS.  All I'm asking is for evidence to be examined!  Is that to much to ask?  What's it going to take more of the same retoric? 

Think about if for a second if it hadn't been for IDX there would have never been a Zillow or any other internet lead generator.  The hen that lays the golden eggs is the MLS. Without IDX these rouge and approved vendors wouldn't be muscling in on our profession.  Now it's all about WEB PRESENTS and jocking for position.  If you don't know how to do, pay somebody else attitude is they way to success. 

I was very successful with my website prior to IDX.  When IDX came into being, I was all for it until I realized we were giving all the information away for free.  You need to examine the results SINCE IDX.  I've been licensed for 30 years, as a Broker since 1988.  I was into web presents since the beginning of 2000.  I've come to the conclusion through thorough examination, allowing the consumer FREE access is not the best means to achieve our objectives.  I think we need to reaccess our objectives before there is nothing left but the Internet rouges.

So just answer the question. What has all this done for you?  Why not write a book, isn't that what everybody does AFTER THE FACTS and the MISERY?

Catherine Myers, REALTOR
<<

Catherine,

This is my first time writing in the blog,hope I do it right! I have also had good response from my web site in the past, but have had few inquires over the past 6 months. The cost of paying for clicks was getting overwhelming, so I paused my campaign. Do you pay for clicks or do you get your rank just from keywords, blogs, etc.

Thanks so much,

Shirley Rupp

RE/MAX Majestic

Tucson, AZ

866-877-9450

First off, thanks to all of you for responding to this thread,
positive and negative. I think it's time that this "SEO leads to
CLOSING" discussion takes place, instead, of the "SEO leads to site
traffic", or "SEO leads to leads". After all, closings are what
matter in this business. They are the undeniable benchmark.
 

Mike Bowler said:
"I am also banking on the idea that most real estate agents are too
un-willing to put the time and effort into Internet marketing and
have a poor attitude about the changes taking place in our industry."
 

I hear that same attitude all the time, usually accompanied by
outright amazement that this opportunity is so wide-open and
unchallenged, locally. Agents with good search rankings are,
generally, slicing out an ever larger piece of the "lead pie chart"
for themselves. Which leaves everyone else to scramble for a smaller
piece of everything else. Those Web-generated leads are coming
directly at the expense of all the other lead generation methods that
have been around for years.
 

Which brings up this subject:
<http://www.realtown.com/community/RealTalk//community/RealTalk/view/00CJD0>Do
you need a Mentor Evaluation?
 

Best regards,
 

Dirk Johnson
Partner - Operations
DomainDrivers LLC
djohnson@domaindrivers.com
703-406-4698
http://domaindrivers.realtown.com
We're an approved RealTalk/RealTown vendor:
http://DomainDrivers.InternetCrusade.com

Excuse me GREG, I guess I stand corrected. I had no idea I was complaining. I just asked a simple logical question. Show us the results? I agree, there are a few who are capitalizing on the misery index that prevails in this market, short sales, pre-foreclosures, lead generators. I guess that's what this business has become. Right?>>>>>>>>>>>>

Robert, I believe you have some good points although, I think everyone is a little overwhelmed with the changes taking place in our industry. However, IDX is nothing more than what happened many years ago when we put all our listings in a MLS Book and began to co-op with other Brokers. Although now we have many gate-keepers and Yes, some bottom feeders who are not actually Realtors promoting our listings. It's all about perception, the glass is either half full or half empty.

You are correct that IDX will net get you leads if nobody finds your website to search all the listings. SEO, is important, however, I believe organic SEO is your best alternative. Here's and example:

Go to Google and search: delta township, real estate - you will see I appear 4-6 times on page one of Google. This is a result of Blogging, using the correct keywords and having good content. My whole purpose of doing this is to drive prospects to www.mikebowler.com I have much to learn about this type of marketing, however at this point I have bought into this paradigm shift and it's working.

You and I have many things in common with both having 30 years in this business. I plan to spend the rest of my life marketing real estate, training and mentoring agents and enjoying the fruits of my labor. This is a great place for all of us to continue our learning curve in an upward position while others fall by the wayside.

Best to you in the 2nd half of 2008.

Mike Bowler Sr. ePRO, CRB, GRI, SRES
Coldwell Banker Hubbell Briarwood
1020 S. Creyts Road, Lansing, MI 48917
Phone: 517-492-3400 Fax: 888-832-6203
email:
Website for Clients:
Search ListingsMikeBowler.comMike@MikeBowler.com

Website for Agents:
Take the ePRO Class MikeBowler.net

I have been doing some research the last week or so... googling all kinds of ways people may look for a home in my area then using worktracker, and Alexa amoung other sites to determine how words and phrases are being used and which are the most popular, but the interesting thing is, if anybody does a search on ANYTHING other than find an agent in ------   the top rankings (which I consider to be the first page) are all going to heavy hitters like homes.com, homegain.com, trulia, yahoo, aol... you name it.... but 1 agent did make it and her site was so laden with buttons and bells that it was impossible to read and made me dizzy.  (Interesting side note... in my Yahoo and Google travels Realtor.com was not on the first page at all...) Certainly she must have someone doing all the work for her or she couldn't be as successful and AWARD winning as her site tells everyone she is..  she wouldn't have time for real estate.

There were plenty of individual agents paying per click's though.... no wonder so many of us are going broke.   The average person searching the net has NO IDEA that when they click on the right column somebody just got charged money for them to click, not find what they want and leave in 3 seconds...  I feel like I am a speck of sand in the desert... ( I would say a needle in a hay stack but that  would be easier to find..!!)   Maybe so many people are having luck because they are in smaller markets?? 

Lastly, I didn't get my real estate license to be a search engine optimizer.. nor a web site designer, or a blogger or an internet geek...  and now I am faced with a task that is outside of what I do best and its completely overwhelming...  Social media, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, youtube, audios, videos, MySpace...  on and on and on..  and its not like I am opposed to learning about this stuff and doing some or all of it... but I have been getting internet leads for years from various places, some of my own, some I have paid for and the bottom line is they aren't easy or quick conversions, most are looky Lue's who have nothing better to do but take my time.  I keep thinking I must be doing something wrong so I work harder at it, change my systems, learn more, adjust more, change my scripts and auto responders, be quicker to respond.... ughhh...  nothing seems to work. 

Which brings up this subject:
<http://www.realtown.com/community/RealTalk//community/RealTalk/view/00CJD0>Do
you need a Mentor Evaluation?
 

Dirk Johnson

I am not able to open your subject.

 

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG.
Version: 7.5.524 / Virus Database: 270.4.3/1528 - Release Date: 7/1/2008 7:26 AM
 

Hi Gloria!

Sorry if this is long, but you brought up lots of different topics. You wrote in part -

"... if anybody does a search on ANYTHING other than find an agent in ------ the top rankings (which I consider to be the first page) are all going to heavy hitters like homes.com, homegain.com, trulia, yahoo, aol... you name it.... "

You're right... Google does give lots of credibility and top positioning to the listing aggregate sites. However, I am not exactly sure how you were performing your searches because when I search for "Chandler Arizona Real Estate" in Google, I see coming up organically - Hunt Real Estate, ERA and Paul Roth in the Top 1 - 10 organic listings, then Mario Romero, Amy Jones and The Curtis Johnson Team in the Top 11 - 20. So those 5 agents or company sites have figured out how to get optimized to achieve that positioning.

"There were plenty of individual agents paying per click's though.... no wonder so many of us are going broke. The average person searching the net has NO IDEA that when they click on the right column somebody just got charged money for them to click, not find what they want and leave in 3 seconds... Maybe so many people are having luck because they are in smaller markets??"

Yes, Pay Per Click can be a waste of time and money. A recent study showed that 95% of Google's search advertisers on the right hand side never get clicked on. And when search engine research was conducted with human testers where eye tests were done to track where they focused on the computer screen viewing search results pages, the test subjects never really paid any attention to the "ads" on the right side, but went right to looking at the organic listings down the left side. When asked at the exit interview why they didn't pay attention to the "sponsored links" on the right, the overwhelming response was, "Oh, those are just ads." Ha!

And no this doesn't just work in smaller markets. With proper search engine optimization, sites can do very well in large metropolitan markets too. I have too many web clients having success!

"Lastly, I didn't get my real estate license to be a search engine optimizer.. nor a web site designer, or a blogger or an internet geek... and now I am faced with a task that is outside of what I do best and its completely overwhelming... Social media, blogging, LinkedIn, Facebook, youtube, audios, videos, MySpace... on and on and on.. "

You don't have to do that stuff at all, (unless of course, you want to for fun.) ;-) That too is somewhat a myth. Many good real estate agent sites rank in the Top 30 in the 3 major search engines without having to do all of that to get found and they get good, solid real estate leads as a result. But what almost all of these top ranking sites have done is to use reliable web professionals to help them get there... so that the real estate agent site owner can, as you say, do what they do best - list and sell houses! In the real world, the good agent doesn't try to also be the lender, the home inspector, and handle the closing too. The transaction is just too complex and takes other people to bring it all together. Instead, the smart agents make sure that they surround themselves with other top professionals for those parts of the real estate transaction... and if those people do their jobs right, they can make the agent look great in the eyes of his clients! "Wow, you made our real estate transaction go so smoothly!"

So why don't agents do the same in the "virtual" world and utilize other professionals? That certainly is a mystery! Maybe it's because agents keep wanting "something for nothing". They don't pay for the lender, the home inspector or the closing in a real estate transaction - the client does. If agents had to pay for those other services, instead of their clients, probably many agents would try to do it on "cheap" there too. "Hey Bob, where can I hire a home inspector for $50?" Ha!

So rather than working with a team of web professionals - a good web site designer, someone who specializes in how to optimize the site for the search engines, and a specialist who can work on obtaining back links for the site (that carry so much weight currently with Google), agents and brokers insist on going it alone and doing it all themselves... most with very little success. How long did it take someone to become a successful real estate agent? Most new agents are still just learning our business even a year or two later. Yet so many agents think they can become instant webmasters in no time? And the template providers capitalize on this myth too - "Hey, you too can get a web site for just $49.95 a month! That's all you really need because we give you all this "cool" (lousy) content to fill up the site and even a choice of many different colors."  Can this work, usually done by web specialists, be done by an individual agent? Of course. Should it be done by the vast majority of agent site owners? The answer is "No!" For every success story of "how I did it all by myself", there are dozens of stories about the failures. (Can a home owner sell his own house by himself? Sure! Should the majority try it themselves? No!)

"... I have been getting internet leads for years from various places, some of my own, some I have paid for and the bottom line is they aren't easy or quick conversions, most are looky Lue's who have nothing better to do but take my time."

Leads from the Internet are really no different than leads from any other source. Did everyone who called on a For Sale sign turn into a client? Did every person who responded to a Just Listed card become a client? Did every ad call result in an appointment? The Web can only generate leads. It takes the professionally trained sales person to convert those into becoming prospects who may become clients.

"I keep thinking I must be doing something wrong so I work harder at it, change my systems, learn more, adjust more, change my scripts and auto responders, be quicker to respond.... ughhh... nothing seems to work."

As I wrote here the other day, I am happy to share with my peers my 12 years' experience in how to make a web site better. All you have to do is ask. I have helped many other REALTORS in my classes and here on RealTalk, even if they never used my services. And I am tired of watching my peers get "ripped off" buying web stuff that just won't work!  I know web sites can get found that will generate leads resulting in many new transactions.

Win

************************
Win Singleton, CRB, e-PRO
Summit Web Design
(703) 536-7631
wins@summitweb.com
http://Summitweb.InternetCrusade.com
an Internet Crusade Approved Vendor
"Custom web site design that gets results!"
************************

Gloria said:
" ------ the top rankings (which I consider to be the first page) are
all going to heavy hitters like homes.com, homegain.com, trulia,
yahoo, aol... you name it...."
 

Gloria,
 

I hear this a lot. I will provide another perspective, though, since
I've looked at real estate search results in detail, in over one
thousand metro areas, in the course of my work, over several years.
 

When the lead generator sites dominate the rankings for local real
estate terms, that generally indicates that the local agents are
simply not doing their SEO homework. These lead generator sites can
be displaced with good optimization and linking policies. We see
that happening all the time.
 

In fact, we use the number of lead generator sites on the first page
of search results as a general rule of thumb to indicate the level of
local search competition. Metro areas with more than 7 lead gen sites
on the first page indicate to us an area that is wide open to a local
agent that wants to commit to it.
 

Gloria, as you mentioned, the real estate market has changed
dramatically, in the sense that property buyers now generally start
their search on the Web. Capturing leads from that paradigm shift in
buyer habits does demand a new approach that was not necessary
through the boom years. The boom times may have masked the fact the
WWW has changed the way property is bought and sold, irrevocably. How
individual agents react to that fact will likely play a big role in
their success going forward, in a much more unforgiving market.
 

I continue to be amazed at the number of large metro areas that
appear to have no local agents addressing SEO and search rankings in
any sort of meaningful manner. Their lack of attention allows the
lead gen sites to dominate the results. It is lost opportunity, on a
massive scale. Who will step into that void? That is the question.
 

Many agents who do address their SEO work effectively appear to be
breaking through, and closing sales, based upon good rankings. That
was the point of my starting this thread. To shed some light on the
fact that the Web is now where buyers go to find real estate, and
that agents that address that fact head on are often managing to
close deals, even through these leans times.
 

We're all on the learning curve somewhere. For those who are
determined to start the process, here's a multi-page document that
was specifically written for real estate professionals, using real
estate examples:
Search Engine Optimization Basics For Real Estate-Related Websites
http://www.domaindrivers.com/seobasics-realestate-main.htm
 

I hope it helps.
 

Best regards,
 

Dirk Johnson
Partner - Operations
DomainDrivers LLC
djohnson@domaindrivers.com
703-406-4698
http://domaindrivers.realtown.com
We're an approved RealTalk/RealTown vendor:
http://DomainDrivers.InternetCrusade.com