Back at the dawn of the creation of the HomeGain Guest Blogger program, Kevin Boer was one of the first bloggers to sign on.

We knew Mr. Boer was a busy and important persona in the online real estate world and we were delighted that he had agreed to contribute his insight, wisdom and wit to the HomeGain Real Estate Blog.

Over the course of the past six months, however, while his partner at Domus Consulting, Pat Kitano also one of HomeGain’s first guest bloggers, dutifully contributed posts, we heard nothing from Kevin.

Last week we finally tracked down Kevin at Inman Connect in San Francisco. We discovered that Kevin had been suffering from Continue reading this post

I have 120 agents in my office. Which means that there are at LEAST that many business plans going on all around me every day. When you throw in the Search Engine Optimization clients that I do work for at EricOnSearch (many outside of the real estate industry), that is a tremendous number of folks I meet whose livelihood depends on marketing and leads. Many of these good businesspeople have had it tough in the past year. Many have had less business than they would have liked. This past weekend, I went through my rolodex of clients, friends and agents in our office. I found something interesting and want to share it with you.

Of the people who were doing TRULY poorly this year, ALL of them had relied on a single source of leads and/or a single marketing channel to drive leads to their business. Seriously.
Many of these good folks had become complacent in getting a lot of leads from a single source, month after month and then it went away and their livelihood was jeopardized. For the record, this included folks who had not continued to invest in their SEO efforts, which is a high risk, high reward sort of thing. I often hear so many people on the web say “Don’t do that, it is a waste of time.” …”Don’t use these guys, they don’t work.” I have heard that…even about HomeGain quite a bit. (Confession time: Used to say it myself…grin). No matter where your business is or how you market, if you are not diverse, you are one market shift away from having a bad year (or even a bad couple of months). Continue reading this post

An Interview with Dr. Pangloss

I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Pangloss by phone recently to find out how the Westphalia market was doing. Dr. Pangloss, formerly associate broker at Cunegund Realty Associates in Westphalia, which closed its doors last week due to adverse market conditions, was happy to speak to me to give his views on the state of the Westphalia real estate market.

HomeGain: Dr. Pangloss thanks for taking the time to speak with me.

Dr. Pangloss: You are welcome.

HG: Let’s start by talking about the demise and bankruptcy of Cunegund Realty Associates or CRA. It seems your once thriving real estate practice fell on hard times in the past 12-18 months.

Dr. P : Ah, it is demonstrable that things cannot be otherwise, there is no effect without a cause and that the closing of CRA is the best of all possible worlds.

HG: How so? Continue reading this post

I recently read an excellent article published by Baylor University, “Lead Generation: What Really Works”, which articulately discusses lead generation. The three categories the writers included in this article were lead generation, conversion of the lead to an appointment, and closure of the appointment to a transaction.

One of the studies I found particularly interesting was finding out the extent that real estate agents and brokers take to keep records of their lead generation efforts. And for those who keep records, how detailed the records are that they keep.

For “conversion to appointment” only 23% of the respondents reported their records as Moderately Detailed or Extremely Detailed. With a mere 32% reporting moderately or extremely detailed for “closure to a transaction”.
With a reported 17% of the respondents marketing budget allocated on the Internet or Website activities, unfortunately, or fortunately for us, the online world remains this big black hole. And, without keeping detailed records, it shall likely remain this ominous, monstrosity, money pit for many but it doesn’t need to be this way.

HomeGain’s BuyerLink does a great job of tracking your advertising budget. I’ve been using BuyerLink for years now. The concept is that it’s up to you to keep on tracking your results from the initial lead generation, to conversion through close.

Regardless of your preferred marketing method, they discuss how are you attracting your leads? Are you “seeking” or “attracting” your leads? In today’s tough market the survey results reflected that more seek oriented (60/40) for highest lead conversion in a tough market.

Of the leads generated 58% were buyers and 42% sellers. Many brokers, including myself, consider home buyers a premium in this Continue reading this post