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5 FREE Web Applications to Increase Workplace Productivity

Join Nathan Fernandez, Technology Trainer at Matthew Ferrara & Company, as he reviews 5 FREE Web Based Applications that will improve your productivity and make you more efficient on the job.

MORE THAN 97 PERCENT OF THE U.S. ONLINE POPULATION USES INTERNET APPLICATIONS, ACCORDING TO A SURVEY CONDUCTED BY FACETIME COMMUNCATIONS

Internet applications are the wave of the future!  Grab your surfboard and ride the wave - learn how to increase your workplace productivity with 5 FREE web applications.
 
Discover tools that will allow you to:

• Collaborate more effectively with teams, departments or your committees
• Improve client service by sharing, enhancing and editing digital photography
• Increase workplace effieciency by creating digital notes, to-do items and reminders
• Respond to inquiries quicker by having phone messages transformed electronically

Webinar Tuition: $24.99

Register today and reserve your seat now:

• July 13th: 1:00pm - 2:00pm EST
• July 20th: 11:00am - 12:00pm EST
• August 10th: 2:30pm - 3:30pm EST

Ten Reasons why MLS is Dead Already

Once again, as REALTORS converged last week for their MidYear meetings in Washington, D.C., the forces of stability and sameness were present, coming up with last-gasp-ways to protect the tattered vestiges of Real Estate, the Last Generation. New white-papers and shiny-Powerpoint presentations proclaimed the “we-can-renovate” mentality of Gen 2.0 MLS systems struggling to enter the 3.0 version of the industry. Much like Google and Yahoo - who refuse to admit their advertising model is crumbling in the face of social networks - MLS’s are trying one last time to burnish a brand that has already worn off the chrome. What’s left underneath are the mostly rusted pieces of a structure whose time has come and gone, even if some REALTORS still believe the Comparables Book will someday make a comeback.

It’s time for the real estate industry to implode the MLS model so they can build something better suited to the next generation of real estate practices. Read more

The Listing Sheet is (Still) Pathetic

A while ago I wrote a short article comparing some of the “standard” real estate marketing tools with those of other industries. I remember commenting how REALTORS, who sell commodities in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range, try to entice buyers with printouts made from an off-the-shelf inkjet printer on recycled paper, while automobile companies readily offer super-glossy-multi-page professional brochures to promote their lowliest of models. Of course, times change: When Baby Boomers invented the real estate industry, printing anything was a mimeographic achievement, so the small office printer was a revolutionary upgrade in marketing in the 1990s. Yet today’s buyers and sellers increasingly come from the Gen X and Gen Y demographics.

Does anyone still think we’re going to re-start the housing market by handing out listing sheets?

Let’s review some basic facts: Last year the average first time buyer was 31 years old, smack-in-the-middle of the Gen X/Y profile. This means many buyers were in their early twenties, while some lagged into old-age-thirties. Even the average seller was only 45 - the tail end of the Boomers, even if they try to pass themselves off as early X’ers. Either way we’re talking consumers who entertain on YouTube, read the news on their iPhones and post video clips to their Facebook page with their eyes closed. Whether it’s a kitchen faucet from Kohler or a new laptop from DELL, the way to attract these consumers is modern multimedia.

Of course, some printed items still work to provide information about products and services. For example, luxury products like the LearJet - comparable in price to some premier homes around the country - feature downloadable PDF spec-sheets complementing their virtual tour and video marketing. not completely unlike a property listing sheet found on some better real estate websites. Still, even LearJet could improve its printed marketing tools compared to a travel site like Abercrombie and Kent, whose Royal Scotsman Train Holiday offers an eight-page brochure online for a $7000-10,000 product. Even an inexpensive piece of software like ACT by Sage offers a multi-page full color product brochure.

The bottom line: One-page property listing sheets are simply pathetic.

To be fair, it’s not just the one page printout that’s awful; it’s the one-page information presentation that most real estate websites provide as well. Whether it’s a jet or a vacation or a software program, all of which have stiff competition in their price range, the marketing tools on their websites offer much more than a single page. Yet most real estate presentations stick to an address, a couple of photos, a few bullet points and a paragraph describing the product. Forget about the huge gap in multimedia - the Learjet site is NASA-like in it’s design while the ACT site offers a full-product video demonstration and a trial mini-site. It seems nearly impossible that real estate would ever reach that level of product marketing, considering the continuing challenge to get agents to put more than a half-dozen photos on every listing. Yet you have to wonder if the real estate industry has some other reason why it continues to propagate the one-page minimalist approach to marketing its products.

Oh, right: They want to force the customer to call.

Does providing less information lead customers to call, email or otherwise contact the “broker” of a product? Possibly. But has anyone ever wondered how many people simply don’t reach out at all, when so little marketing information is presented? Why do so many buyers who visit an open house fail to call for a second appointment? Was it because they didn’t like the house the first time - or that the listing sheet was such a poor “sales support piece” that it failed to inspire them to consider a second look? What percentage of online leads never inquire on a listing - or at best, delay that inquiry because the presentation of home information is flat, one-dimensional, and mostly organized like an IRS form?

Could the listing sheet actually be harming sales?

Any of this could be possible. But perhaps it’s not even that complicated. Maybe it’s just another example of how the Gen X / Gen Y consumer has moved far beyond the Baby Boomer modality of the real estate sales industry (I almost typed “stales” industry - what an interesting slip that would have been…) Listing sheets aren’t just a bad marketing piece; they are a bad marketing mentality. They reduce homes to uniform, tabular experiences that mostly fail to excite, entice or even adequately inform the potential buyer. The “just the facts” approach to room sizes, amenities and taxes smothers emotional excitement about buying a home.  Everything about the listing sheet presentation is dull, rough, plain-paper-bag.

Where are the download-ready multi-page flyers, with edge-to-edge high quality photography? Who is handing out CD’s or flash drives at open houses with dozens of photos, documents and videos to help the buyer learn as much as possible? Have you ever seen an agent offer to SMS a video clip from their smartphone to the buyer’s smartphone after touring a home? I’m guessing these aren’t the ordinary experiences that real estate agents are offering to their customers today.

Think about a great product experience. Perhaps it’s the thrill of flying on a private jet. The luxurious feeling of a train ride through the Scottish Highlands. The creativity of a powerful, intuitive piece of software. There’s no way those emotional responses can be conveyed on a single web page or printout. Complex sales take complex marketing tools. Capturing the value proposition of these products simply can’t be done in a sanitized one-page format.

Real estate is perhaps one of the most complex transactions - emotionally, financially, intellectually. Trying to excite buyers by handing them a single piece of paper seems - well - just a little pathetic.

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Numbers and Sense: Social Networking in Real Estate

As part of a new ongoing series of posts on our blog, we’re going to apply our brainpower here at Matthew Ferrara & Company to looking at the latest numbers from real estate industry research and helping our readers make sense out of their meaning. Many organizations from NAR to Case-Schiller to research firms and universities worldwide study consumers, agents, brokers and the business of real estate. They release “findings” - lots of numbers - but rarely interpret their meaning. Of course, that’s where we have always been helpful to our clients: leveraging the research facts about the marketplace to make sensible decisions - not gut reactions - to be one step ahead of the consumer.

And forget about the competition - since they’re mostly not really competition, when you look at the numbers. In that spirit, let’s start with some startling numbers that may indicate that NOBODY in this business is really in competition for the online consumer: The sorry state of social networking usage by real estate professionals. Read more

Resolve To Follow Your Business Plan

Every year at this time, most of us are making “resolutions” of how to improve ourselves for the upcoming year. We resolve to go on a diet, save more money, take time off with the kids, and so on. Business people usually take it one step further, resolving to do all the things they “put off” in the last year because they ran out of money, or opportunity knocked, or they just forgot. We all do this - while conveniently forgetting the most common thing about New Year’s Resolutions is that we usually forget about them by the end of January!

So this year, why don’t we resolve NOT to make any resolutions, and try something much better, instead…

Read more

Why IDX is a Really Bad Idea

Sometimes, you just have to learn the hard way. That seems to be the real estate industry’s preferred method of implementing technology tools - at least for the last twenty years or so. A herald comes over the hill, the masses become excited, everyone just starts doing it: And that’s when the highest risk to sound business principles usually occurs. Which is exactly where we are today with IDX - the “sharing” of listing inventory between competing brokers’ websites. It sounds like a good idea, except for one small snag:

Your million dollar website now looks awful because the data from your friendly cooperating brokers sucks.

Read more

Another Cool Outlook Tool from Xobni

Recently a friend in the business send me an email suggesting I try out Xobni, a ‘must have’ plug-in for Microsoft Outlook. I always get a little skeptical about Outlook plug-ins, usually because they always end up causing my Outlook to “go funny.” Maybe there some code Microsoft puts in the program that says, “If anyone tries to add on a piece of software that REALLY makes Outlook work well, then sabotage it!” But in this case, it looks like the only quirks come during shut down, and even then I can’t be sure it’s Xobni’s fault.

I can say this: Xobni is something every busy Outlook user needs to check out!

Read more

More Meaningless Marketing

When I read this headline this morning, I immediately thought of that Britney Spears song, “Oops! I did it again!” Once again, another real estate company is reporting some “numbers” designed to get people - consumers, agents, Martians - to gasp. Seems like their website has generated some few millions of “leads” to their agents. You know, buyers who go on their website and ask for more information. It’s another orchestrated PR campaign to get the public to say, “Wow! That’s a lot! It must mean they are really good!”

Too bad, then, that it’s just another example of totally meaningless marketing. What’s worse: Generation X and Y know it.

Read more

The Future of Real Estate Prospecting

Here’s an idea to make any agent’s day: If you’re finally fed up with the poor results and high costs of postcard mailings, newspaper ads and cold calls, and you’ve come to the conclusion that blind mass-email marketing makes you more annoying than maybe it’s time to get LinkedIn.

Or MySpaced. Or RealTowned. Or Facebooked. Or a member of just about any of the hundred or so major social networking sites. No matter how you look at it, the opportunities just add up.

First, look at the research. No, not the online web blather: of course the social network sites are going to “claim” they are the next greatest thing to croutons (which recently replaced sliced bread as the next greatest thing). We mean the consumer research. It looks like this: Baby Boomers are quickly losing ground as the “largest” source of real estate business to the combined numbers of Gen X and Gen Y. With more than 100 million X and Y’ers still in the market - yes, they are, and going to be the driving force for the next 30-40 years - it’s time to start propsecting on their turf.

In the “olden days” prospecting for sellers and buyers meant going to the Boomers’ watering holes: television, radio, newspapers and mailboxes. Yet fully 40% of homes were sold to first-time buyers last year, and the majority fo those were Gen X and Y’ers. Who don’t read newspapers, watch television on their computers, listen to satellite radio or download commercial-free podcasts and don’t ever check their U.S. mailboxes (they receive and pay their bills online, not with stamps!).

Now, if you’re just getting around to social networking, you’re pretty late to the game - by about 3 years. That’s still par for the course for most REALTORS and technology, though, so if you do it after reading this blog post, you’ll likely be ahead of the curve for most of your competition anyway. If we really wanted to turn social networking into real estate’s next money-making frontier, however, we’d get managers to start mandating it for every agent. Yeah, pretty impossible; managers can’t even get them to show up at an office meeting.

No question about it: Social networking will be a key method for contacting future buyers and sellers. A large source of sellers in the next 5 years will be Gen X’ers who are about ready to move up. They only work within friends or vendors who are referred to them through their sphere of influence. They think all REALTOR marketing - and marketing in general - is baloney (and they are mostly right). So you’re only going to get their attention if you can leverage their sphere of influence. That means someone they know knows someone you know who can put in a good word for you. Like LinkedIn’s “Recommend Me” function. Maybe even just an email. But it’s certainly not going to be an air-brushed glam-shot on a postcard that catches their eye…

Making eye contact with Gen Y’ers is going to be even harder. That group of attention-deficit, multi-tasking, wireless networking socially shy first time buyers (and we do love them!) doesn’t pause long enough to read your e-newsletter (who gets email these days? send them an IM!) And since they’re co-dependent purchasers using Mommy and Daddy’s money (ie., Bank of Baby Boomers) you’re going to have a double-deficit to work from when creating relationships. So once again, they’ll want to get to know you - which doesn’t mean your ego-centric website of awards and typed testimonials. It means they’ll check out your “real-ness” on your social networking page, look at who’s connected to you (and do they trust them) and maybe throw a virtual martini at you. And then, maybe just then, they’ll write something on your virtual “wall” and accept a “friend connection” from you and bingo! You’re making friends in cyberspace.

Look, you don’t get to write the rules. So stop writing ads. No, you’re not going to need an avatar and some virtual dollars, or go walking through a 3-D fanstasy world to find future customers: That’s kids stuff and it’s going to remain that way as long as human beings don’t live in bubbles. But as long as the party stays online - and it’s only getting bigger - you’re going to need to work the room. No more going “to the club” to rub elbows with future customers. For the future - starting today - you’re going to have to social network online.

Now, get to it!

Just Shoot Me

I know, I probably deserve it. I’m the one who’s constantly poking and pushing and prodding the REALTOR population to put more property video online. I should have learned my lesson, though, after I cajoled the industry into putting more photos online, only to have ended up with the creepy, scary stuff we’re seeing today.

I thought I’d seen it all. I could even get used to the bad photos. Now it has moved into video - and if this is what we’re going to get from REALTORS, I’m thinking I might do better herding cats.

Read more

Boost your Blackberry with a Powerful RSS Reader

Here’s a cool tool I’ve been playing with for a few weeks. It’s called Viigo and it’s a RSS reader for your Smartphone. I’ve been testing it on my Blackberry Pearl (which still continues to leave my students in awe at the fact that they don’t need to carry around lunch-box sized smartphones unless their cranky old MLS mandates it) and it has worked flawlessly. So it’s time to share the product with all of you.

Oh, yes. And it’s free!

Read more

When Companies Listen to the Customers, it’s Magic

Well, I don’t know what took so long, but Microsoft finally seems to have read its emails, listened to its voice mail and talked to its customers. According to a headline over at Engadget, Microsoft is going to support Windows XP until 2013. It’s about time!

Customers worldwide are breathing a sigh of relief as the Redmond Behemoth seems to have remembered a fundamental premise of running a good business: Listen to your customers!

There’s no magic in that premise. Your customers will tell you everything you need to know to be successful. After Microsoft launched Vista, both customers and industry reviewers provided it feedback. As expected, some people hated it (usually those whose computers were manufactured by Henry Ford Senior) and some loved it (those of us who understood that an OS change means, well, some things are actually going to be different). But more and more, especially amongst corporate clients with large installations, lots of proprietary software and sometimes older hardware in the field, the message was simple: Please don’t take Windows XP away. We might get to Vista in the future, but right now, we’re happy (and in a recession, without extra finances) still using XP.

Unfortunately, Microsoft, whose engineers and sales people are rightly enamored with their own products, just wasn’t listening. They were so certain they were right, so sure they could push the change through, that they turned a deaf ear to their clients. Even after giving a little - pushing back the mandatory cut-over date for computer vendors to sell machines with Vista only - Microsoft continued on the path of most resistance. They said: Vista or Nothing!

Read more

REALTOR Marketing Challenged by Gas Pumps

According to the NAR Survey of Home Buyers and Sellers (2007), buyers who search online real estate want to see the following (In order of importance):

1. Pictures
2. Property Descriptions
3. Virtual Tours
4. Area info
5. Maps
6. Agent Info

Now, most real estate agents look at this list and immediately see #6 and get all upset. What? It’s not about me? They don’t want to see my high-school photo? Oh no!

Read more

Lights, Camera, Video on your Website

Part 1 of a 3 Part Series on Video and Real Estate by Amy Chorew.

You have less than 6 seconds to capture a visitor to your website. Can video be the key to engage the consumer? Could be, if your video is professional looking and polished. Creating good video is an art form - it gives a good first impression each and every time. If you ever need to be reminded of how bad real estate video can be, just visit YouTube and search for some real estate videos there…. Okay, real estate video is evolving…

What can we learn from industries who have already made video on their websites standard fare? First off, the types of videos we should have on our websites. Consider:

• Welcome message
• Testimonials from Top Clients saying
• Property Showcase of particular listings
• Town Profiles and other “informational” video

Read more

If Zillow Zestimates are Zilly, why is REALTOR.COM doing them too?

Listen to this blog entry by clicking the play button above.
You can also click the podcast icon to listen in your default mp3 player.

Been having a great discussion with the fellow over at 4REALZ.NET over the new REALTOR.COM Home Estimator tool just released - and quite quietly, we might add, since even we techhies missed the press release (so we suspect the public did too…. and about half the REALTORS who don’t even know REALTOR.COM exists…)

Read more

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