I recently read an article published by Dr. Geoffrey Hewings in the January 2013 edition of Illinois Realtor which had some encouraging statistics in what we all hope will be a bounceback year for real estate. Here are some of Dr. Hewings findings… Throughout the country and in Illinois specifically, jobless rates have fallen to 7.9% and 8.8% respectively, which represents about a 1% drop from 2011. Unemployment drives pretty much everything that we do in today’s economy. Pending home […]
Happy New Year! As we enter 2013, we may or may not be aware of the far reaching impact of the internet in all phases of our lives. Whether it be a job search, love search, a search for a new and healthy recipe, or as it pertains to real estate, the search for our next home. Check out these statistics from the NAR’s 2012 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers: – Married couples were a driving force in 2012, […]
October 5, 2012 | Author: Thom Disch The answer to this question is relatively simple. While Google has a very complex algorithm it can be simplified into three critical components. Google wants: 1) Unique content that searches and visitors find useful. 2) Content that is considered by other webmasters in your community to be credible/valuable (back-links are one of the tools for achieving this). 3) A website infrastructure must be user friendly so that Google can find and understand the […]
Tags: Google and Real Estate, Real Estate SEO
September 21, 2012 | Author: Randy Pickard The following article is a reprint of a post by BethAnn Long. We liked it so much that we judged it to be well worthy of being reposted. Published with permission: My business is split about 60/40 between: Category A: People I know and their referrals (60%) these are warm sources and Category B: Internet leads and online sources, and what I call cold sources (FSBO, Open House)(40%) With Category […]
September 14, 2012 | Author: Randy Pickard It required a couple of years to pass for me to get over my anger at Yahoo for totally scrambling up a 40,000 keyword account during the Panama update. But over the past year or so, Yahoo has gradually become my preferred source for PPC advertising. Now I am sorry to learn that Yahoo Search Marketing is going to be swallowed up by MSN Adcenter. Yahoo has become my preferred PPC advertising vehicle for […]
Tags: real estate PPC, real estate SEM, Yahoo PPC
Internet leads are different. They tend to be self directed, better informed, and don’t need to be chauffeured to as many viewings. On the other hand, they can be challenging to close because often they are simply in the information gathering process and months away from conducting a transaction. Also, despite the fact that they will take longer to close, they demand greater responsiveness. Failure to respond to a fresh Internet lead within 15 minutes diminishes the likelihood of closing […]
There has been some buzz lately suggesting that online real estate leads must be responded to within 5 minutes. However, research that I conducted on thousands of online real estate leads suggested that the time frame is a bit longer than just 5 minutes, if not all that much longer. While it certainly is not a bad thing to respond to an online lead within five minutes, the results that I reviewed indicated that the value of the lead did […]
Anyone that has even the slightest involvement with real estate lead generation has some interaction with search engines. The search engine landscape in the US has changed dramatically with Yahoo search indexing now being powered by MSN. Yahoo’s pay per click program is also in the process of transitioning to being powered by MSN. While a case can be made that Ask is a third player, their share 2.14% of US searches (as reported by Hitwise) makes them so minor […]
There has been a lot of buzz lately in the real estate community about adding QR codes to marketing materials. QR codes (short for quick response) are two-dimensional images that can be read by smart phones, using technology that is similar to that of store checkout bar code scanners. When a prospect with a camera equipped smartphone loaded with a QR reader points and clicks at the code, they are served up a mobile site with your listing and contact […]