Here’s a quick video to share with your company on the latest trends in buyers, featuring Matthew Ferrara for Real Estate Brainchain Market Reports. Data from the National Association of REALTORS 2010 Annual Survey of Buyers and Sellers.
According to research by the National Association of REALTORS, buyers habits are changing when it comes to real estate. The report, recently released by NAR, asked more than 100,000 consumers to rank the usefulness of information sources to their efforts to learn more about the marketplace. The good news was that for the first time in years, the real estate agent edged-out the internet for top-spot as “very useful” (81% vs 77%). The bad news is that, by a factor of 4, most buyers think open houses suck.
Hindsight is always 20/20, they say. Unless, of course, you spend most of your time navel gazing. So it’s almost myopic to point out that some ideas’ time has come. And other ideas’ time has passed. On one hand, it’s time for every sale to include in-house ancillary sales. On the other hand, it’s time for NAR to give up the dream of one HAL-like central database. Didn’t they find the bellybutton lint the last time they tried it? Read more…
Download a copy of the latest survey of REALTORS by the Center for REALTOR Technology and you’re certain to be fascinated – startled, perhaps – at what’s happening on the Bat-belts of modern agents trying to make buying and selling homes a twenty-first century experience. While the report is no page-turner – in fact, it looks a bit like it was produced on a Commodore 64 with dot-matrix fonts – a few facts stand out, highlighting just how easy it should be for serious salespeople to scoop up market share in the months to come. And all they really need would be a Blackberry and a thousand bucks.
According to everyone with a microphone, now’s the best time to buy a home in decades. The recession has pushed home prices and mortgage interest rates so low that affordability has never been better. We’ll even throw in a few free Bernanke Bucks to help you cover closing and commission costs, and rebate you the remaining dollars even if you didn’t pay them in taxes. Between all the rebates, freebies, price reductions and home inventory options, doesn’t it seem strange that the market isn’t roaring? Sure, there’s a bit of unemployment rising here and there, but 9 out of 10 Americans still have jobs. So why are consumer still struggling to take advantage of the sales of the century?
The real estate industry is ripe for a serious game changer. By that, I don’t mean some company that comes along fiddling with commissions or cutesy technology marketing. I’m talking something that causes customers to stand up and say, Wow! I’m definitely working with that company. We’ve talked about this before in our blog, but the timing is better than ever. In fact, I’m thinking of making an appointment with Richard Branson, in the hopes that he’ll take up my suggestion and do for real estate what he’s done for the airline industry. It’s time for him to open Virgin Real Estate.
According to the Wall Street Journal real estate blog, a “W” or “U” shaped recovery is shaping up to be the most likely curve for the real estate industry, if not the economy as a whole. According to one property mortgage insurance group, there’s still another 12% drop to go in most markets. And even though some economists think prices will remain flat as inventory stabilizes – and we all know that’s also to be tempered with regional biases, since some housing markets have remained reasonably healthy – the chance for another full year of slow or flat growth will pose serious challenges for real estate agents and brokers who have barely hung on this year.
Real estate is essentially a research industry: trouble is, most agents and brokers think the most important research is about houses, prices, square footage and such. Considering the data that sits in most MLS systems – unverified and incomplete – you’d think they would know better by now. In fact, the best research for any sales industry isn’t the commodity data but the customer specs and competition capabilities. Knowing everything there is to know about the consumer – and the competitors who are trying to beat you to their door – is far more fascinating. And given the state of the housing industry, also more revealing.
Peter Drucker said that the purpose of marketing is to make sales superfluous. That should come as welcome wisdom to the real estate industry that is comprised of so many reluctant salespeople who won’t telemarket, interact at open houses or even join Facebook (latest numbers show less than 35% of REALTORS with a social networking presence). So what can be done to improve the pathetic listing sheets, the photo-less listings or sea-sick virtual tours that are undermining so many sales? Perhaps a quick art lesson could help.
Blogging is both art and tax. Good blogging means turning a steady flow of useful ideas into interesting content. Bloggers must be good writers. And developing a readership takes a lot of time each day and week. So it’s not unusual for busy salespeople to worry that they’ll never really leverage the medium, tending instead to go for quick contributions in their Facebook updates. Yet there is opportunity in between the blog and the burst, providing ample opportunity to show off your knowledge, influence your contacts and develop new business. It’s called LinkedIn Answers, and it may just be the answer you need. Read more…
For some time now, I’ve been asking myself if I’d missed the point about Twitter. Give it some time, I told myself. Sometimes these new technologies just need to shake themselves out. Originally, Motorola shelved the mouse as an input device, only to have someone dust it off years later and make it the tool of choice for personal computers. So I gave Twitter a chance. I tried it myself, and even started to “follow” some people online. Alas, with the release of a new study, I now know that I should have stuck with my initial reaction. Twitter is really dumb.
A recent Businessweek article featuring Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz should be required reading for REALTORS. Its main point – that the Starbucks that told its employees “do anything you feel like” has finally met the cold reality of customer expectations. With sales dropping and stores closing, the Seattle-based giant has had to wake up and smell the coffee. Gone are the boom years, when Starbucks opened a store a week, hired “partners” not employees, and left it up to them to “organically” figure out how to pour coffee and make customers happy. Turns out that was a stupid business model. Not unlike another industry that was only profitable during a credit boom.
Making mountains out of molehills seems to be a favorite activity in the real estate industry. First, it was the “internet” going to put brokers out of business. Then, it was websites who were “selling” real estate consumers back to agents as leads. Along the way the industry even ate its own, claiming REALTOR.COM was “stealing” the value of brokers’ data because they used it to create a profit selling ads. None of these issues turned out to really be anything more than a few busybodies being, well, busy. So it’s no surprise that over at Inman, they’ve been humping another non-issue for some months now: The great debate over whether agents compensation is at the heart of the industry’s failings. We can tell you right now this is another non-issue because, in order for it to be a problem, agents would have to be being compensated – something not really happening in the business these days. But do let’s go on…
Readers of our column know that we called the beginning of the end of search engines some time ago, when we noted that Facebook and MySpace had already started to generate more ad views and targeted traffic than Yahoo and Google. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn’t seem to have read our post, and went ahead with Bing. Microsoft calls it a “decision engine” and it certainly works differently than the traditional search sites. Yet technology improvements aside, none of the search engine players have considered the basic question: Do people really “search” for things on the internet any more?
Two seemingly different mediums collided in my brain last night. First, I was reading a front-page story about a home that was struck by lightning and burned down the night before. I didn’t recognize the street name: Was it nearby or across town. My first inclination was to look for a map. Of course, there was none in the newspaper. My second inclination was to right-click something and Google-up a map. My fingers actually flexed for the mouse. Frustrated, I threw down the newspaper. Switching on the television, I fired up my new favorite show “Real Estate Intervention” on HGTV from the digital recorder. The show features real estate agents showing sellers comparable homes in their marketplace, to provide market perspective on how their home is competitively situated – especially on price. I like this show particularly, because I had a similar idea suggestion for REALTORS recently, and also because it shows how anyone who fails to ask, “What does my customer want?” is doomed to failure.
After the end of the show, I looked back down at the newspaper on the table and then back to the freeze-framed screen and declared out loud: “Newspapers and sellers just don’t get it!”
