Recent HomeGain surveys reveal the top marketing practices and preferences of real estate professionals in 2010- 2011; Referrals ranked number one; Real estate professionals preferred marketing via open houses and postcards/mailings vs. social media; blogging as a marketing preference wanes.

Emeryville, CA – May 19, 2011 – HomeGain®, a leading website that connects real estate agents with home buyers and sellers, today announced the results of its Real Estate Professionals Marketing Practices and Preferences survey, reflecting the cumulative data from HomeGain’s May and August 2010, and April 2011 surveys.

Based on responses from over 700 real estate agents and brokers nationwide, referrals ranked the number one marketing preference among real estate professionals for acquiring new clients, with a cumulative overall score of 8.7 out of a possible 10 for effectiveness. Referrals also ranked number one in the February 2010 HomeGain Real Estate Professionals Marketing Practices and Preferences Surveys.

Leads from brokers and events (including open houses) ranked second and third, respectively, as most effective marketing strategies, replacing featured listings and email campaigns as indicated in the February 2010 HomeGain survey.

Postcards and mailers were bumped down from fourth in the February 2010 survey to sixth. Print ads fell from 10th in the February survey to 11th.
The most recent results show a substantial decline in agents’ marketing preferences for blogging (moving from fifth to thirteenth since February 2010), as well as a slight decrease in preference for social media.

“It comes as no surprise that real estate professionals once again noted that referrals are the most effective and most preferred form of marketing” said Louis Cammarosano, General Manager of HomeGain. “It is surprising, however, that social media and blogging as marketing strategies lost some favor with real estate professionals over the past year.”

Top Effective Marketing Strategies for Real Estate Professionals:
Continue reading this post

Social Media has become one of the most effective tools in a real estate agent’s repertoire in engaging their target audience. And now, according to search engine guru, Danny Sullivan, data shared through Twitter and Facebook has a direct effect on a search engine results page placement (SERP). Although it had long been suspected in the SEO community, this announcement further confirms the weight being placed on social media interaction.

Long held to be of utmost importance in search engine algorithms, Google’s PageRank has been a benchmark of trust by which a website/domain can be easily measured. How does this translate into Social Media? ‘SocialRank’ (Danny’s term, not confirmed lingo used by the SE’s) could very well be the next level of social measurement, which takes an individual and calculates THEIR level of authority on various networks (independent of the PageRank of the page to which he/she is associated). Factors taken into account in calculating ‘SocialRank’ could include number followed/followers, number of friends, number of ‘Likes’, etc.

Continue reading this post

Maintaining a daily blog content schedule is challenging for full-time real estate agents who dedicate most of their energy to serving the needs of their clients, which is why it’s a good idea to tap the expertise of your local transactional partners for guest posts.

While there are literally thousands of topics real estate agents can blog about that may answer important home buying questions, it’s nearly impossible to publish a complete guide to home ownership without leaning on some of your business partners for a little help.

One of the main benefits of having a comprehensive real estate blog is being able to email quick answers to clients and prospects with a link to an article you’ve written on your own site.

However, as we know, one simple Q&A can easily lead to 10 additional questions as your clients start to realize that every scenario comes with its own unique set of circumstances.

A major frustration many agents have with their lending partners is their lack of communication or timeliness in responding to important questions that may mean the difference between investing a weekend showing homes or waiting a few extra business days for a full underwritten loan approval letter.

The last thing you want is for a client to start searching around the Internet for credit or down payment related answers and then have them end up in another agent’s marketing web. Continue reading this post

HomeGain just added a Home Search tab to its Facebook Fan Page.

Now fans can read the Wall tab for timely, interesting and relevant real estate articles and news, as well as visit the Home Search tab and start searching for homes for sale, get a home’s value, and find a Realtor®.

Feedback?

If you are interested in the HomeGain Blog’s weekly email that alerts you of new posts, subscribe.

Real estate agents should value blogging if they want to develop a perpetual business model based on a specific type of client that is well informed, loyal and trusting.

While it has already been proven that a real estate company can be established solely around a successful Internet presence, most agents new to the web get caught up chasing social media shiny objects before they clarify their true purpose for getting online.

One of the first misconceptions agents make about blogging is that they approach their business blog like it’s an all-encompassing forum to journal their personal thoughts about life or evolution through social media technology.

However, the business-minded industry professionals that are able to keep their online content focused on providing valuable information for clients are actually quite successful at integrating an Internet presence into their daily office routine.

Quick Overview Of The Basics:

Simply put, a blog is just a type of website platform that is designed for the purpose of quickly publishing content to the Internet.

Categories, Tags, RSS Feeds, Page / Post structure, Widgets, Sidebar / Footer Areas and Custom Menus are some of the technical components of a blog that allow a publisher to easily organize their content in whatever manner best suites the needs of their target audience. Continue reading this post

With over 400 million people using Facebook, you start to recognize how important it is to have your business brand on Facebook. For real estate, a business fan page is critical, but the fact is, most real estate professionals do not utilize the features and functionality of the page to the best of their ability.

One of the most important things you can do extend your brand on Facebook is to use the FBML application to create a custom look for your page.

Add a custom welcome page and/or IDX search page by adding the FBML application.

Landing on a Facebook “wall” is just boring. It is a wall of information that really doesn’t give people the full picture of your real estate business.

And let’s face it, most of the real estate content out there is somewhat boring, so create a custom Welcome page that uses proven conversion psychology to call visitors to action to fan your page and push over to your website and lead generators.

See the Arbour Realty example here on the right (and notice the new tab to the right of Wall and Info called “Welcome”). Here are my 2 real estate specific templates. See another real estate FBML example. Here is a live demo for you to view as an example.

Include a brief bio, all your contact information and call to actions to your lead generation tools like property search, market reports, contact form and even community profiles. Resources for buyers and sellers would also be helpful.

Disclaimer:

For Technical Information (Templates): You MUST have some knowledge of HTML and CSS (box model table-less design) in order to properly customize these templates. You will want to host images on your own server or a service like Photobucket. You will also want to include at least 250 words of keyword rich text, add ALT tags to images and keyword rich anchor text into any links for SEO purposes as Facebook Fan Pages are fully indexed by Google. You will also need to use this tutorial to fix an outstanding bug Facebook introduced in IE8 which requires you to load the CSS externally.
Tutorial: Fix to Facebook’s CSS Issues with Internet Explorer 8
All Tutorials: Tutorial Category
Video Tutorials: All Videos.
Size of templates conform to new Facebook business page size requirements of 520 pixels.

Tutorial: Continue reading this post