We have polled home buyers and sellers once again and we’re sharing the results in order to help our AgentEvaluator® agent members better meet the needs of prospects.

We sent our survey to more than 14,000 home buyers and sellers who came through AgentEvaluator in the last year -– some who closed with a HomeGain agent and some who did not choose a HomeGain agent.

5 Useful takeaways from the survey that all AgentEvaluator members should read:

1. Consumer Feedback on agents is one of the top things homebuyers and sellers are looking for when they use AgentEvaluator.

• Takeaway: If you don’t have consumer feedback (reviews to say what a great job you’ve done as a Realtor) entered in your profile, get some entered today. To upload reviews, go to the Consumer Feedback section of your Proposal Templates page.

2. Most of the consumers who worked with a HomeGain agent chose that agent because of their personal response.

• Takeaway: As shown in both this year’s and last year’s survey, personalization has consistently been the most important reason consumers select HomeGain agents. If you ARE NOT personalizing EACH proposal to address the specific situation of the prospect you’re responding to, you should start today.

3. Most consumers expect to receive their proposals within 1 to 3 days. Continue reading this post

A Realtor’s story about how he went from being a skeptic to a raving fan of blogging, online marketing and HomeGain’s AgentView program

I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Brian Kinkade of Cherry Creek Professionals Realty in Colorado to get his insight about the AgentView real estate marketing program and how it has increased his ability to connect with new clients and expand his business.

Hear our brief HomeGain Radio Clip:

Highlights: Continue reading this post

We are pleased to announce the addition of another fine writer to the HomeGain Real Estate Blog, Eric Bramlett. Eric comes to us from Austin Texas where he is the broker of record and co-owner of One Source Realty.

Eric brings a special brand of commitment to his customers. From his website : “I will offer you the latest in Real Estate marketing, and I am available to my clients 24/7. I believe in the Austin Texas Real Estate Market and I am personally invested.”

Eric also writes on the Bloodhound Blog and maintains his own Austin centric blog.

We look forward to Eric’s first post! Continue reading this post

Eric Blackwell who is the Director of Technology for RE/MAX Properties East in Louisville, Kentucky, spoke with me yesterday from British Columbia where he is speaking at the Real Estate Web Masters Conference to other real estate professionals about SEO.

Listen to our interview about SEO:

Highlights:

J: Eric, what’s the main message that you want to get across to other real estate professionals about SEO (search engine optimization)?

E: I think there is some mystery attached to the term SEO but what it really is creating a website that Google and other search engines would want it to be. It’s a lot of hard work to build a site that has both the reputation and authority that search engines are looking for. A lot of times people think you need to trick the search engines but that’s not necessarily true.

J: Have you found that there common threads between leads and traffic that come from HomeGain, and Pay per Click, and natural search engine traffic?

E: The common thread is that there are best practices that work to effectively “convert” them to clients and then to lifetime customers. Whether you get the lead from HomeGain or other source, the lead has to come into your site and you need to be able to get them to contact you or to be able to contact them – and be able to convert those clients. The more effective you are at that, the better off you’ll be and the more profitable things will be for you.

J: What are some common traps that Realtors might fall into when trying to do SEO marketing?
Continue reading this post

It seems that any substantive discussion these days about real estate is focused on one subject: Marketing.

How does one get attention and the right kind? Well, you can blog, Twitter, Facebook, join social networks, use LinkedIn, buy leads, post your listings everywhere, participate in Trulia Voices, optimize your blog or web site for SEO, buy EZ ads on Zillow, subscribe to HomeGain’s AgentEvaluator, Buyerlink or AgentView, engage in pay per click on Google or Yahoo, use lead “capture” or not etc. The marketing debate rages on the blogs and on the panels at the major conferences.

While marketing is important, it seems to have reached the point of an obsession with a diminishing return. Continue reading this post

When showing a home, it’s often easiest to run through the particular set of features within the home, but, you may be missing the best opportunity to show off differences that can help a home sell.

Benefit marketing plays a fundamental role in separating the good from the great in sales and real estate is no different. Just about everyone can walk into a home and see the features, but, buyers are often trying to take everything in quickly when visiting a home so running down a list of features that they can already see does not help them discern why a particular feature may be important. This is where benefit marketing comes in to play.

As you walk through a home with a client, explaining the benefit of a feature can greatly improve the desirability of the home.

For example: a home has a tankless hot water heater. Many buyers today know that this is a new technology, but, not necessarily what it means to them. Taking a moment when highlighting the feature by explaining how that feature benefits the home buyer gives a meaning to that feature. In this case, it means lower monthly utility bills and endless hot water for a shower. For a family of 5, this would be a significant benefit and could be the difference maker between two similar homes.

Another example of benefit marketing might be explaining why new windows in an older home are important rather than simply stating that there are new windows. “Green” building is one area where benefit marketing is important, but, it encompasses just about all features within a home. Continue reading this post