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The following article is being pushed by Reuters to show that even in a slumping market the demand for Real Estate sites is growing as most consumers are going online to browse before they go out looking at houses.

As a Realtor you job is to get into the head of your customers future and current before they go out looking.

Home buyers and home sellers alike can find more innovative and useful features than ever on real estate Web sites, which are nimbly adapting to the U.S. housing slump.

For those poking around the real estate market, it might be worthwhile to check out sites like buysiderealty.com, iggyshouse.com, zillow.com and trulia.com to see just how much online home shopping has changed lately.

In the past, most real estate sites primarily offered property listing services. That’s no longer the case thanks to improved online mapping services and the spread of broadband connections, which have allowed sites to take advantage of new technology.

What’s more, as a means to drum up business, real estate sites have looked to expand their features to include services like alerts, “heat maps” showing active sales areas, video postings, home estimates and Q&A forums. Some are even offering rebates to home buyers.

Chuck Cole, for instance, recently bought a home in Oakland, California, worth almost $450,000 — and met his realtor just once through the entire month-long process.

Cole used the multiple listing service tool on buysiderealty.com to pick the properties he wanted to visit. Later, after deciding on a house and submitting an offer, he had a realtor from buysiderealty.com handle the transaction.

For doing all the groundwork himself and bypassing a traditional realtor, Cole was rewarded with a rebate of over $8,000, or 75 percent of the buyer’s commission that buysiderealty.com earned from the deal.

“We liked that everything was done pretty much by e-mail and phone. When we’ve worked with realtors in the past it was a big pain in the neck to try to connect with people in person and to have to go to their office,” said Cole.

MARKET SLUMP SPURS BOOM

If you’re looking to sell your house without using a real estate agent, consider a visit to iggyshouse.com, a sister concern of buysiderealty.com.

The site lures sellers with freebies like a multiple listing service, a listing on realtor.com and posts on other sites. Home sellers once paid agents a premium for such services.

Iggyshouse.com also lets sellers and real estate agents post photographs, videos and details about the property for sale — at no cost.

“With 75 or 80 percent of sellers (also) being buyers, we know that if we give them this free service and they are self directed enough to sell on their own, there is a pretty good chance that they’d want to use (the) buyside,” said Joe Fox, chief executive of iggyshouse.com and buysiderealty.com.

“We’re basically giving a free service to educate consumers about another service that pays them to use it and that’s exactly what is happening today,” said Fox.

Another Web site that has entered this increasingly crowded space is zillow.com, which launched in early 2006. It not only offers free property listings, but also gives away a home valuation service it calls Zestimate.

Pete Flint, CEO of trulia.com, says the housing market’s downturn has played to the strengths of real estate Web sites.

“Although it’s unfortunate what’s going on in the housing market, it’s really the online sites that are benefiting because consumers are spending a little bit more time before they make decisions and traditional real estate brokers are rethinking the way they’re marketing themselves,” Flint said.

“So the change in the housing market has forced a change both in consumer behavior and forced a change within marketing activity for real estate professionals and we are a perfect platform for them both,” he added.

Trulia.com, which launched in 2005, has signed agreements with thousands of agencies that post all their available property listings on the site. Trulia.com, in turn, generates revenue through advertisements placed on its site.

On the site you’ll find services like trulia voices, which allows you to pose questions to local residents and agents on subjects as unexpected as the location of the nearest dog park.

If you’d like to be alerted every time a property in a particular neighborhood goes on sale, trulia.com also sends you free alerts. Another feature is “heat maps” that help you gauge the demand and average price of properties in certain spots.

“The reality is that the actual (real estate) transaction is not changing, so people are still going to go to open houses and drive around neighborhoods, but the actual process of research for the real estate transaction has radically changed,” said Flint.

I always find that Realtors are some of the worst businesspeople for offloading work. Perhaps it is part of the can do attitude, or the idea that we kind of work in an office, or that the individual commissions are so high that every job has to be done by one person. No matter what the reason it is important that you find the parts of the business that you should offload and quickly get a process in place to outsource.

There are a few reasons that people are resistant to moving out some of the work that they do.

First is that “If I get someone else to do this they may not do a good job”, well no one cares about your business more than you but if you give people guidance and control over a process then they will do a job possibly better than you.

Second excuse is “I can’t afford to outsource” This is the farthest thing from the truth. If you are looking for a way to make money then it is by doing your core competencies, finding buyers and sellers, showing properties, listing appointments, and negotiating deals are you most important jobs and the ones that make you money. You do not outsource these jobs.

So if you are going to agree with me that outsourcing is good for you business, what can you outsource?

Listing packages – share an assistant with some other Realtors to put together any listing presentations.

Booking showings – never do this yourself it is definitely low value work

Flyer and newsletter creation – there is no reason to think that you would be best at this.

Supplies and busywork – this eats up more time than anything. Get an unlicensed assistant to do this.

I have already hinted at how to get this new system to work for you and that is to share and assistant between a few Realtors in the office and to leverage the staff that the office already has. One of the great books that I have read on this is the 4 hour work week where the author, Tim Ferriss goes into detail on what does and does not matter as far as your work goes.

I have taken part in a top five tips contest over at problogger.net and found the following long but very informative article about the important parts of listing dominance for Realtors

Five steps to total real estate listing dominance

The article goes into depth on what parts of the listing process are and how best to tackle them. Out of all of the articles that I have read as part of the contest over the last few days this one has been the best one so far.

Realtor Marketing has changed quite a bit over the last few months and because of this I thought it would be a good time to come up with an update on what you’re most important priorities should be right now in the middle of 2006. I put these things as a list and not as a priority list as you yourself should be able to evaluate where your shortcomings are and what the most important things are for you to be working on today in your quest for realtor marketing success.

Website content updates – Most Realtors reading this already have a website but if you set up that website a year or more ago take a look at it again. Look at each page, what is the focus of the text on this page. Each page of your website should be focused on one or two keyword terms MAX. Remember that when a search engine spider looks at a page it has to figure out what the page is about and in Realtor Marketing you will definitely want to make sure that you are more focused than your competition.

Weblog updates – Right now there is no excuse not to have a weblog as a Realtor. Your weblog is a chance to start a relationship with your customers past, present, and future. There is also no shortage of what you can write about. Real estate stats, market conditions, city news, national trends. Remember focus on one thing per post just like the search engines and your readers would like to read it.

Posting to other weblogs – Be a part of the blogosphere. It is important from a link perspective to add comments to other weblogs. And, to get all of the info that you can from other blogs as well as post your own opinions so that the conversation can continue to be vibrant, alive and with perspectives. Heck you can even post hate comments to my ideas and attitudes here if you would like.

Using social bookmarking sites – You may remember just a while back I posted that I had started my own Realtor related social bookmarking site but this is just a targeted site. From a marketing standpoint there is no reason not to be posting up your own links to the myriad of bookmarking sites such as Delicious, Delirious or Simpy just to name a few. Also as you write great articles on your weblog you should post those articles up to Reddit, Digg and Shoutwire.

Writing articles – There is a good reason to write articles and that is for backlinks back to your website that will get you ranking in the search engines. This is how it works: You write a 500 -800 word article about something that is important in real estate and after you have written this you post the article into exinearticles, goarticles and many other article directories. After this article gets published other webmasters will pick up the article and the resource box to post to their site and this will give you another all important backlinks that will give you greatness in the search engines.

Setting up autoresponders – Realtor marketing is a series of processes and this is one of them. I see a lot of people not bothering with this as it is a lot of work initially and let’s face it, we are all busy. The process is this: Get a series of five to eight articles and set up an account with an autoresponder service, put those articles into an autoresponder service and then using a Google Adwords account drive traffic to your site and funnel these people to a webpage where they can subscribe to this series of articles and eventually become your customers. This should take 4 hours to write the articles, 1 hour to set up the Google Adwords campaign, one hour to set up your squeeze / subscribe page and then it is all on autopilot for about $50-$80 per month total.

Setting up newsletters – Another use for your autoresponder service is to send out a newsletter to your past and present clients and this should be sent out monthly and should not take more than an hour to two hours once a month.

These are the most important things I believe at this point on the internet for Realtor Marketing to succeed. Look through the list and if you need more info on one or more of these subjects I would be happy to write more articles that have more depth on the individual items.

Sometimes you can get lucky and even a post that you have low expectations for will become todays big internet story. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger Blog Tips had exactly this happen to hime and has some great tips on how to deal with and take advantage of having a post that you would expect 10 people to see suddenly get 30,000 page views in a day.

Also Darren lets you know how to write a post that has a better chance of becoming that popular.

I have seen a few of these types of products on the market but none specifically for Real Estate. The following is a listing video that you can have buyers or sellers play directly from your webiste. The application looks very cool to the end user as they can see a picture of a house and by clicking on the play button they can see a video of the property. As great as this is you will want to make sure that you have lots of visitors coming to your site as the product is only good if you have the traffic checking it out. This feature I do not believe beyond being a great listing presentation selling point is going to get anyone to your site on it’s own.

Buying a home is an exasperating experience for buyers, who are already anxious before they ever pick up the phone to call an agent; so anything a broker can do to create confidence and impart critical decision-making information will give that agency a competitive edge.

Whether selling resale homes, new developments, or even commercial properties, potential buyers need information. The more compelling the property descriptions, the easier it is for buyers to digest, and more leads will be generated.

By creating voice-over descriptions of properties, brokers attract more listings as potential sellers will see that firm as the ‘go-to’ real estate broker.

MRPwebmedia provides ‘Real Estate AudioTours’ of real estate listings: new home developments with AudioTours of the new community and its advantages, or AudioTours of individual resale properties. A text listing that merely states specifications just won’t generate a call-to-action; by telling a story with a human voice brokers will attract more listings, more leads, and more sales.

MRPwebmedia delivers ‘Real Estate AudioTours’ using signature voices from a talent pool of hundreds of talented voice-over professionals. MRPwebmedia offers free, no obligation auditions plus other services ranging from complete website design to creation of direct marketing email campaigns utilizing the latest audio, video, and interactive Flash techniques.

A demo is avaiable for you to check out at mrpwebmedia.

After writing the post a few days ago on social bookmarking I sat up half the night thinking about what is good and bad about sites like delicious or digg or slashdot and then it hit me:

These news and social bookmarking sites are the kind of sites that I like because they are more about technology than anything else.They do not differentiate anyting more than the yellow pages with ranking and social trust would.

So I decided that maybe it was time for a new kind of website and I believe that I may have created an entirely new kind of community site that pieces of which have laways been around but all has never been thrown together. I have built a Realtor social bookmarking site just for the industry itself.

Now I have been playing with this idea for a few days but here is how it would work. Just like any existing bookmarking site you can go and see what other people find interesting, but unlike any other bookmarking site the tags that you use would be real estate related so a tag of “books” would just be Real estate books, a tag of directory would be only realtor directories, a tag of weblog would only be for realtor related weblogs.

If you want to do more than just view and you would like to add sites…maybe your own for example or others that you can not live without then you just create an account by putting in your name, username you would like, password and your email address (only for retrieving your password if you forget it) and you can immediately post your sites, tagged how you wish and you will become a part of the community as easy as that.

Come and visit the site, I am just now getting some sites in there so that there is some organization to how the site is unfolding but it is much more everyones site than just mine.

I have posted a few articles about internet marketing for Realtors that refer to articles in Realtor Magazine. I just ran across it on the Amazon website and thought I would just post a quick article about it. This magazine has a lot of great information, is a tax write off and looks really good. If your are looking for a nice casual way to keep up with the latest news and the newest trends then Realtor Magazine is a must read.

The National Association of Realtos publishes this magazine and even though you have probably seen it laying around the office, why not get a copy delivered to your home.

Buy it from Amazon today!

I just ran across a page that list a number of Social Bookmarking Top Sites. If you have not heard of a social bookmarking sites yet you will likely see them become very popular over the next year as developers start rolling out their version of Web 2.0 which is really just a way of having people interact even more on the internet instead of just by viewing web pages.

Social Bookmarking sites are websites where you can bookmark webpages and then they become public so other people can see your recommendations. This is great for a person as this will allow you to be able to see your favorite sites by logging in from any computer that is connected to the internet. Also as a marketer social bookmakring allows you to get you word out about your webpages, articles and views that otherwise can just get lost in the noise of the internet

Of all of the Social Bookmarking sites, and you have to believe that there are more coming out every week, there are a few that are more popular than others and you will have to test them out to see which features, crowd and penetration that the various services have but here are a few of my favorites.

 del.icio.us

 digg

 de.lirio.us

 BlogMarks.net

Yahoo Search myweb2 beta

 reddit

 BlinkList

 Furl

 jots

 Simpy

 Spurl

 StumbleUpon

technorati tags: web+2.0, social+bookmarks

Realtor Magazine just did a big story on internet marketing and here are seven tips that the article ended with. Although the leads swirling around the Internet seem limitless, it takes skill and persistence to turn them into customers. Here are strategies that are reaping returns.

• Add more photos to your listing.
A study by REALTOR.com found that a home listing with six photos got 300 percent more views than a property with one or no photos, says REALTOR.com President and CEO Allan Dalton.

• Improve the content portion of your Web site,
even if you use a pay-per-click model, says Justin McCarthy, Google Inc.’s business development manager for real estate. This top search engine determines search rankings half on what you’re willing to pay and half on the depth and quality of your site’s information.

• Make your site sticky—with deep content and free offers—and visitors will stay.
Because he sells second homes and retirement properties in a rural area, Charlie Winfree’s site
(www.mtnhome4u.com)includes not only listings and maps but also a “You’re in the Country Now” section that tells city dwellers how to test well water and septic tanks and cope with other mysteries of rural living. The results are more than 400 unique visitors a day and first-page positions on top search engines for the sales associate at Coldwell Banker Home Town Realty in Keyser, W. Va.

• Offer high-quality information—such as listings—
and then ask visitors to fill out a form for more in-depth data or other benefits, says Joel MacIntosh, CEO of Web and technology vendor WolfNet Technologies (www.wolfnettech.com). Require only a name and e-mail address, but give visitors the option of completing other fields. A surprising number will provide additional information.

• Multiply your chances of being found online
by developing Web sites targeted for various niches. Thomas Cowan III, CRS®, e-PRO®, of RE/MAX Professionals in Atlanta, has Web sites geared to renters, foreclosure investors, lease-purchase buyers, and traditional buyers. Together, they net him 7,000 to 8,000 unique visitors each month. With the help of three assistants and an average monthly Web site investment of $3,000, he converted that traffic into 200 sales in 2005. Cowan estimates the Web consumes 90 percent of his marketing budget.

• Lower your keyword costs for paid searches by focusing on a niche
where there won’t be so many bidders, suggests Veronica Hicks of Condos Etc. in Irvine, Calif. The broker, who used to be a marketing director at Coca-Cola Co., found that 90 percent of her sales last year came from Internet leads. After spending “a ton of money” using words targeting renters, Hicks says, she now chooses the names of particular condo communities in her area.

• Blog it.
The almost daily updates of real estate news and sales data at Dewita Soeharjono’s blog on urban living in Washington, D.C. (http://metrodcliving.com)has netted her free placements as high as fourth in Google searches and about 25 percent of her business (see “Blog World,”).