realestatepointeblog.com

As we head into the second quarter of 2010 the vast majority of Brokers still find themselves in uncertain circumstances.  Some are beginning to see light at the end of the tunnel, while others continue to struggle to hang on.  Regardless of where you find yourself, now is the time to ask the right questions and revisit some basic business rules.

One of the most fundamental business tactics is a good financial forecast . . . not a projection of “what ifs”, but what you truly believe will happen.  Create a forecast with a balance sheet, income statement and, most importantly, a statement of cash flows, on a monthly basis for the next few years. 

Most businesses fail, regardless of profitability, because of cash flow issues.  The banks that used to “love” to lend you money are now shutting off your credit lines, even if you were never late on a payment.  You must ensure you have the cash on hand to balance out the ups and downs of your business.

Although most brokers have long stopped frivolous spending (does it even exist anymore, anywhere?), here are a couple of things to consider for additional cost-cutting.

1.  Is your insurance protection appropriate for your situation?  If your sales and payroll are down and if you have equipment that you are no longer using, it’s a worthwhile exercise to review your insurance coverage and make adjustments to reflect your current situation and save money on your premium.

2.  Are you providing health insurance for your employees?  Why not ensure you are getting the most out of your policy by reviewing alternative options for structuring employee costs or learning if other changes will decrease premiums.

3.  Are you still overstaffed?  An avoidance to downsize may lead to unhealthy financial situations for everyone.  If your staff is not busy and effective you will have to make some tough decisions.  Go through the exercise of reviewing everything you are doing and then decide which of those things are no longer important to do.  It is better to cut a few people than for everyone to be out of a job (including you).

As is the case with any good advice, preparing a financial forecast is always relevant and important, and allows you to make business decisions from a position of strength.

Outsourcing can be a very smart move for some real estate brokerages and should be considered to some degree in all our business strategies.

We are already accustomed to having sales functions performed by independent contractors. Perhaps thinking creatively how other independent contractors can handle some of the customer service, front and back office operations is a good exercise.

Does corporate relocation, leads management, payroll administration, accounting, data input, etc. etc. need to be done by employees in your offices? Perhaps it’s worthwhile to spend some time researching outsourcing alternatives and their impact on your bottom line.

Some obvious advantages are (1) independent contractor vs employee cost, (2) can more easily handle peaks and valleys in revenue, (3) avoid paying workers who will have to be paid whether or not there is enough work to do year-round, (4) the use of office space for more productive pursuits, and more.

The disadvantages may be the possibility of loss of quality and schedule control. These potential weaknesses can usually be overcome with strong management involvement.

In today’s economic environment, all options should be examined. There are small one-person home-based businesses springing up all over the place. People with excellent skills are offering them on a contractural basis, which may be a better, more efficient and more cost effective alternative for your business than maintaining your current employees.

Are you outsourcing some of your operations? What impact is it having on your company, your employees, and your bottom line?

Are you blogging?  Are you connecting and conversing with people on the social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, ActiveRain, or others?  Do you want to control content on your website so you can make your own text changes, place videos, post your company activities and news, create new pages and topics, place links and create back links, even change some design elements on your own?

If you answered yes to these questions then you’re ready! 

The consumer has been ready for a long time.  They’ve been waiting patiently (or not) for you to catch up.  The real estate industry is a little behind in this movement mostly because most brokers are pretty broke (I’m allowed to say that because I’m a broker, it’s fun to say, and also because it’s true).  Even though you’re a little behind, I bet your competitors aren’t there yet either which would mean you would actually be ahead!

Unless you are a complete geek, you will need to hire a professional real estate web developer to create the website with the design elements, original content, all the features, the IDX integration, and all the ways the data interactions take place.  Then you will need training so you learn how to begin adding your own ’stuff’. 

If you can commit to some extra time for developing good relevant content on your own, or you have a staffer that can take this on, you won’t have to pay a professional to continue to do everything for you after delivery.  As your company grows and changes you can keep your website completely up to date mostly on your own, except for adding additional MLS IDX feeds, completely new features, or other complicated techie things.

Why would you want to do this?  (1) Because doing these things will make a significant difference in the ability for consumers to find you on the web . . . significant!  Content is King! . . . Humans are the new black! . . . You’ve heard these things, so I don’t need to repeat the importance of search engine rankings to you, (2) Consumers crave information and the more relevant information you provide them the more often they will come back for a fix, (3) You will have much more control over your image . . . you can do cool fun things on your website . . . I don’t know . . . you’ll think of all kinds of cool things.  You can become a resource for community information and events and even a community blog if you can handle it.  I get excited just thinking of all the possibilities!

Looking into the future you shouldn’t see the need to scrap your old website and start over in a couple of years.  It’s not as disposable as your static site.  It can grow and change right along with you.

We are moving into a new platform built on a content management system as the base for new real estate website development, and are offering a significant discount on initial design and development services (below our actual cost) for qualifying brokerages who are willing to be “Early Adopters”.  What is the qualifying criteria? 

In order to be a good candidate as an “Early Adopter” the broker must be (1) a nice person to work with . . . we’re nice folks and we like to work with nice folks, and you know what they say about mean people! (2) be willing to give testimonials and be featured in our marketing campaigns. 

Our goal is to have one real estate brokerage website representing each of the major franchises, a couple independent brokers and a few special market niche websites up on the new platform by the end of the first quarter.  Once we get enough commitments to fill our first quarter schedule we will no longer be offering the “Early Adopter” program.

We’re not newbies by any means.  We are one of the original IDX data specialists, and have been making broker websites, as well as providing office management and leads management systems to the real estate industry for over 10 years . . . pretty much from the beginning of the Internet age for real estate.  So, I guess that makes us old pros.

We’ve been through all the different technology developments that have altered how real estate brokers market themselves on the Internet.  This is our favorite movement since the concept of actually displaying other broker’s listings on your website and getting their leads . . . that is my all-time favorite . . . what a concept! . . . it still makes me smile. 

If you are interested in being one of our “Early Adopters” please email me at patty@realestatepointe.com , give me a call on my direct line at 330-727-1851, or call me at the office at 330-729-3555.

Thanks for reading!  I appreciate it!

Patty Massare          www.realestatepointe.com

Once you are ready to apply for a home loan check your credit before ‘they’ do. If there is any inaccurate or out of date information on your credit report, you will want to know about it before your lender does. You may be able to rectify some of the inaccuracies before they become a problem and cause a delay in your home buying process.

The Fair Credit Reporting Act, part of the FACT ACT requires credit agencies to provide a free credit report to you every 12 months upon request. There are also several other events that can trigger your right to receive your credit report. For example if you are unemployed and are seeking employment within the next 60 days, or have recently been denied credit.

The on-line system for the free report required by the FACT ACT is located here. https://www.annualcreditreport.com/cra/index.jsp

This web site collects some basic information from you and then loops through all three of the credit reporting agencies web sites. It is very convenient for you to start at one place on the web, but be prepared, it takes about 30 minutes to complete the process and you will be asked some 9 different security related questions during the process. I would advise having some of your personal account information available to you before you begin.

Some of the questions will be about where you have worked in the last 15 years, I had trouble with this one! My last employers information was abbreviated in their records and I couldn’t get it right after 4 tries! It didn’t lock me out, so I had to enter an employer from about 15 years ago to get past that screen. If you have loan account information with you that is more accurate because there is no room for mis-spellings or abbreviations.

Load your printer with paper! You’ve got to love technology, I didn’t have to wait 8 weeks and wait for the mail, however, I did run out of paper and had to print on the back of old paper. All three reports will take about 50 pieces of paper. (Maybe I will order some paper on-line too!)

At every turn I was baited by offers to purchase extra services like identity theft protection, and so on. There is an extra fee if you want to see your actual credit score. I made it all the way to the last one, Equifix, before they got me for $7.95. I just couldn’t resist being able to see my score after using up all the printer paper. Perhaps you can do better and click ‘No Thanks’ one more time than I did.

An important aspect of your web marketing strategy is the domain name that you choose for your main web site, and the sub sites you will be using in your broad marketing effort. When choosing a domain name you should keep in mind the purpose of the site, the keywords that are likely to be entered to find the site, and the geography of your business. I say the geography because as you know in real estate, it’s all about location. The geographical nature of your business goes from beginning to end in your web marketing strategies.

So when I am registering domain names here are some of the guidelines that I follow. Please do not share this information with anyone or there won’t be any domain names left for the rest of us to register!

- When creating a listing web site you can use the address, for example 100-maple-ave-brookpark-ohio.com

- If you want a site that can be used for one or more listings try besthomeinyourtown.com, besthomeincanfield, besthomeinbrookpark, etc.

- If you are creating a blog site use names like hersheyrealestateblog.com.

- Be sure to get a few regional names like myregionalhomesforsale.com, raleighnchomes.com and raleighnchomesforsale.com are surely already taken but…

- Try raleigh-nc-homes-for-sale.com (actually this one is already taken too! someone in Raleigh is paying attention, but the .net version of this name is still available as of this posting!)

These domain names can be used for listing web sites, your main site, subdivision specific sites, and stealth sites. Three years ago these names were wide open but today you need to be a little more imaginative to get a name that will work for you.

In order to know which are the best search phrases to choose, you will need to hire and SEO expert, or wait until I write my article and search for the terms yourself. I know some of you are already on board and doing it yourself - keep up the good work if that’s the case.

Web Design in a Search Driven World

In the world of web sites we often ask ourselves the question ‘Who’s looking at our site?’, and based on that answer we can design the site. This fundamental question needs to be changed to ‘Who or What is looking at our site?’. Why do I say What? What - are robots, and on some web sites I have seen more robots visiting than actual people.

My company sells web sites to real estate professionals, and during the design process it is easy to fall into the trap of designing the site according to what the broker wants. After all the broker is our customer, and he or she needs to like how the site looks and navigates according to their taste. These types of designs look good to brokers, agents and the home owners, but these designs tend to be laden with ‘eye-candy’ or other fancy looking things that do not provide much functionality. Most of the people coming to your site are people searching for listings, and they will skip right past a lot of flashy eye candy.

So in order to make a great real estate web site we need to balance between ‘eye-candy’ and listing search functionality right? Hold your horses, we are forgetting the robots, bots, or spiders depending on what your favorite term is for these non-breathing web crawling, page slurping creatures. The spiders are looking at your site with a keener eye than any of your home owners or potential customers have. They can see all the things you can’t, and are indexing and cataloging your site based on what they see. So the new web design and layout needs to be based on three primary considerations. The design should be first and foremost ’spider friendly’, second it needs to serve the needs of home buyers, and third is needs to look good. Now the real trick is satisfy the first two simultaneously. You can do this because the purpose of the search engine is to find the sites that best suit the needs of the person doing the searching. If you have a real estate web site, that means home buyers, and theoretically speaking if the site satisfies the home buyers, the spiders should love your site and rank your site accordingly.

Now is a great time to look at your home page. Does it look nice? Is it easy for buyers to find listings quickly? Is it spider friendly? You need to be able to answer ‘yes’ to all three of these questions. The next time you look at your home page I want you to think about WHAT is looking at your site before you think about who.

For more tips and information about real estate web site optimization please visit http://www.realestatepointe.com/trafficpointe.html

Jim Komara

If you catch your employees spending time on MySpace and Facebook, that might be a reason to fire them. But if the person in charge of marketing isn’t on Facebook, send them packing. At this point social networking isn’t new, but it’s recent growth in the marketing sector is earthshaking.

One of my favorite uses of social marketing is gathering intelligence about your industry. In civilian terms, this means find out what your competition is doing, and who they are doing it with. This sort of information is invaluable in this day and age when data travels across the country at the speed of light. (Sorry Pony Express)

Social networking fits tightly with all of your other marketing efforts. Web sites members should be getting a newsletter, the newsletter should be linked to your blog, and that blog should link to your Twitter account. The more linked in you are, the more friendly the Internet will be to your business ventures.

Personality is what it’s all about. In the 80’s, it was about the COMPANY. You called the company, they routed you to someone, maybe you got a hold of the sales person. When you did, this person was mostly just a representative of the company. Now - the Internet has completely changed this dynamic. Yes your company name is still important, but so are you! The individual professional is the face customers want to work with, and whether they are in Buffalo or San Diego, they can see your face, and see that you like to fish on the weekends. Building rapport with customers has never been so efficient. (Or destructive if your customers are ethically opposed to fishing! so be careful.)

Tech savvy marketing managers are the MVPs of the Internet age.  Be sure that marketing guru is all over the net and the winning the game for you.

Cheers!

Jim