Please welcome Tom Townsend as our next guest blogger!

Tom has over 20 years experience in engineering and technology in companies that include Synopsis and TransDataNet Corp, and has solid insight into the real estate industry from being the former VP of IT for New Homes Realty, Inc. out of Tampa, Florida.

Today Tom is the owner of Virtual Interactive Systems and blogs regularly on his wife’s real estate blog, The Greater Tampa Bay Real Estate Blog.

So, in addition to Tom writing about current real estate trends in local markets in Florida, he will be contributing quite a bit on the technology side. He’ll also cover the Media side of the Social Networking spectrum with a niche area devoted to the real estate industry, which I’m really looking forward to.

Stay tuned for Tom’s first post tomorrow! Continue reading this post

Zillow Becomes a Lead Vendor

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Well, those Zany folks at Zillow are at it again.

First they borrow HomeGain’s concept of the web-based instant Home Values tool, a product HomeGain first launched back in 2000.

From HomeGain’s March 9, 2000 press release: “HomeGain’s highly popular valuation tool, for example, gives home sellers an estimated home price value range of their home for free in just 10 seconds, including comparable sales figures for homes in their neighborhood.”

Six years later Zillow introduces “the Zestimate” and wraps it in a big “Z” to much fanfare, press notices and blogging adoration.

Today we learn that Zillow has taken another page out of HomeGain’s book with their launch of the Zillow Mortgage MarketPlace.

Take a look: the concept looks suspiciously like HomeGain’s AgentEvaluator program originally launched in 1999. The major difference being that Zillow’s lead generation program is for mortgage lenders.

Thank you, Zillow, we are truly flattered….. Continue reading this post

So most of you know by now that I am all about leads. I can talk with the best of them about lead conversion, lead capture and basically anything lead based.

Today I want to talk to you about the human part of what we do. You can drive a million people to your site and get 10,000 leads, but if you don’t understand the human aspect of what we do as Real Estate professionals, this is all for not.

To me, and my staff, leads are a God send. We are constantly working and currently our Florida office is averaging 130+ different customers per month and we just grew to our final number of 22 agents.

Even though the market is tough right now, we are still selling 15-25 homes per month. Not very stellar for the amount of people we are showing, but if you understand our Florida market the past couple of years, you would think that is great!

If it weren’t for leads, my company would have been gone a long time ago, which has been the fate of about 20% of our Realtors and many Brokerages.

So you have a lead, what happens then? I’m not going to talk about your drip campaign or for that fact anything computer or tech related…except maybe having a good CRM system to insure your great follow up.

Firstly, if you are not picking up the phone and calling your new customer within 24 hours, preferably within a few hours, then you are wasting money. Continue reading this post