Social Media Workshop – NAR 2009

December 8, 2009

Notes from Dustin Luther’s Session – Defining the Social Me
(John Hall agents can listen to it here.)

You have to be knowledgeable about what you’re doing. The social media world will not hide your ignorance.

Critical piece of social media is to be able to recognize opportunity and make it work for you.

The HUB
You need to have a hub for all your social media efforts. Dustin says your hub is made up of four components.

1. Website (blog or not) – You need to have your own domain name.  Create a nice logical base

2. Dynamic Content – How am I going create content that is going to engage? Most commonly it’s a blog, but it doesn’t have to be – just have constant content that people will engage with.

3. Home Search – you have to have a good home search.

4. Lead Management – The real estate agents that are doing well are the ones that have good lead management systems.  Personal opinion – this separates the good from the great.

The STRATEGY
You have to promote yourself – don’t rely on others to get the word out about your content for you. Tell everyone about it.

FOF Marketing (Friend of Friends, Followers, Fans).  Create interesting content – promote it to your friends and they will share it with their friends. This is the magic of social media.

How can I get my friends to market for me?  It’s not about what you tell your friends, it’s about what are your friends going to tell their friends.

Social media marketing is all about getting your network to share – you figure out what they want to share and you’ve figured out social media marketing.

Twitter and Facebook are pulling ahead – not sure how to crack Linkedin.

Facebook Connect for blog comments – automagically shares comments with their friends.

You have to create content about what is interesting to you otherwise you won’t stick with it. People can tell when you’re writing about something with no passion.

My take on this session:
I like that Dustin had an entire section about the HUB. It’s the major piece that is going to be able to convert traffic to business. I feel NAR/AAR should have as many classes on how to set up an effective HUB as they have on how to interact in social media. Without a good hub, you are cutting into the amount of leads that you could be generating from your social media efforts.

Moral of the story, social media marketing is dependent on multiple pieces. Once you get your HUB working properly and you develop systems to handle the leads effectively/efficiently, social media becomes one (potentially great) avenue of traffic generation.  Figure out what your friends want to share with their friends and you’ve got it made!

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Posted by Phil Sexton

What is MongoFax?

December 7, 2009

Only the newest $FREE.99 tool all Arizona REALTORS® are authorized to use.  MongoFax turns faxed documents into emails.  There are no accounts to set up.  No passwords to remember.  All you need is this cover page. Fill in the appropriate email addresses (hand-written or typed) and use it as your fax cover page.  MongoFax does the rest.

When the cover page is used correctly, MongoFax turns your entire fax into a PDF document and sends it to the email address specified on the cover page.  Fill in coverpage, put on top of documents to fax, send to the fax number on the cover page.  Your work is done.  Then the email address you specified on the cover page receives an email with the documents attached as a pdf.  Make sense?

Who benefits?  AZ REALTORS® that have a fax machine, but are not comfortable with or don’t have a scanner.

In a sense, the AAR / MongoFax relationship just turned all our fax machines into fax quality scanners.  If you have anything you would like scanned to a pdf simply fill in the cover page with your email address and fax to the number on the coverpage.  Within seconds of faxing, you’ll receive a pdf of the documents.

Paper faxing (insert sigh) soon to be a thing of the past.  Just in case you are looking for a more robust electronic faxing tool, check out onesuite.com. Their plans start at $1/month.

2 Comments | Arizona, Real Estate, Technology | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Phil Sexton

Greater Phoenix Real Estate Market in 2010

November 30, 2009

*Originally posted on ABC15.com*

First let’s look at the factors that will greatly impact Phoenix real estate next year:

1) National Government Intervention: The extended tax credit for contracts signed before 4/30/10, which now includes a move up buyer provision with higher income levels, will definitely have a positive effect on our market for the first 2 quarters next year.

2) Low Mortgage Interest Rates: Anything below 6% will allow for a steady market recovery.

3) Lender Owned Properties (REO’s): The percent of REO’s will continue to decline from the 65% of all closings’ peak in May of 2009, but will be replaced by Short Sales.  REO’s will account for approx 55% of all closings in 2009.  I expect the percent of REO’s sales to decrease to under 40% for 2010.

4) Short Sale Properties (SS): SS’s started 2009 at about 5 or 6% of all closings and has risen to 15% YTD.  SS’s will at least double that number for 2010.

5) New Home Construction: New home sales should increase from 2009 levels, not a lot but a start in the right direction.

So with these factors identified as having a significant impact on predictions for 2010, let’s examine where the Greater Phoenix Market is now and where it will be going in the next 12 months.

Number of Sales: We certainly won’t see the 50% increase in unit sales that we’ll end 2009 with (2008 had 60,000 closed sales-2009 will have about 90,000).  I think a 5-10% increase in sales is attainable, and that figure will be the 3rd highest number of closings- all time for our market.

Prices: Prices get measured in a number of ways.  The most quoted measures are Median Price, Average Sales Price (ASP) and Price per square foot ($SF).  Let’s look at how these measures are stacking up for 2009.

a) The Median Price of homes sold will show a drop of 18% in 2009 to $130,000.  The flaw of this method of comparison-is that the lower priced homes, i.e. REO’s, overly influence the number.

b) The ASP should end the year at $172,000-down 17% for the year.  The weakness of the ASP measure is that it is overly impacted by high priced sales, i.e. the $3 million sale brings everyone’s ASP up.

c) The $SF should end the year at $90 a square foot, which is down 14% in the last 12 months.  This measure is the least susceptible to low and high sale price fluctuations.

All of these price measures are showing improvement for the past 6 months, which I believe will continue.  Expect the annual comparison numbers to show a year over year improvement (appreciation) by April of 2010.  The tricky part is attaching a number to that improvement.  I think 10% is reasonable, as we have already improved 10% from the bottom earlier this year.  Based on the percent of SS’s and REO’s still in the market, I wouldn’t expect any additional run up in prices.   Both the SS and REO sales prices are usually viewed as ‘rock bottom’ since the lender wants to sell not hold and has no emotional or sentimental attachment to the property.  It’s an asset not a home to a lender, and a Toxic or troubled asset at that.

Let’s discuss other characteristics of our 2010 market.  Again as we’ve experienced in 2009, we will see a ‘Tale of 2 Cities’ or markets.  Our 2009 market has seen dramatic improvement initially in the less than $250,000 price range and is gradually improving to the less than $500,000 market.  The +$600,000 price range has not completely adjusted to the impact of SS’s and REO’s (bank competition) and the prices are still coming down as the number of sales continue to lag in these price ranges.  At this time the +$600,000 market still has over a 1 year supply of active listings, which according to supply and demand 101 principles-is a buyer’s market with downward pressure on the prices.  As a contrast, the supply of active listings less than $150,000 has only a 3-month supply, which is a seller’s market and the buyers in this price range are seeing prices rise.

So let me summarize my predictions for 2010; we will see a market that performs a lot like 2009 especially the second half of 2009, in terms of number of sales and price improvements.  We will see a majority of sales still in the distress category-SS and REO, with an increasing number and percentage of normal sales (owner occupied).  Luxury properties will still have downward price pressure as too many sellers compete with lenders for too few buyers in this price range.

I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge The Cromford Report as a major source of my analysis of the market and the statistics that I referenced.  The numbers quoted are taken from the Arizona Regional Multiple Listing Service (ARMLS).

Jim Sexton, Designated Broker John Hall & Associates

2 Comments | Arizona, Interest Rates, John Hall and Associates, Real Estate, Real Estate Statistics | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Phil Sexton

Advanced Facebook

November 24, 2009

RE Barcamp San Diego session: Advanced Facebook

Last but certainly not least is the Advanced Facebook session.  Thankfully it was in the same place as the previous Posterous session (it was a long day!).  Even though I was easily distracted at this point, the golden nugget I got from it was how REALTORS® should be using fan pages.  No, it has nothing to do with the real estate agent that sets it up.  It has everything to do with what people are already fans of – their communities!

If REALTORS® want to create facebook fan pages, they should set them up for their geographic farming areas instead of for themselves. If you are a Desert Ridge REALTOR®, set up a fan page for Desert Ridge homeowners. Don’t make it about you. It’s rarely an effective strategy to have a fan page about an individual REALTOR®. If you set up a fan page for a community you’ll find your fans start to create the content for you.

You’re simply facilitating a place for neighbors to talk with neighbors.  Allow fans to do practically anything on the page – the best thing that could happen is they take it over!  You’ll have to jump start the page with your own content, there’s no doubt about that.  If there is no content there, people aren’t going to use it.

Add pictures of the neighborhood to the photos section.  Include links to sites the community would be interested in – HOA, Sex Offenders, etc.  If you see weekend garage sales – post them. If neighbors are offering various services – post them. If you know of lost dog signs – post them.  Encourage the fans to add there own events!

What was that?  Did I just hear you ask how this would benefit your real estate business?  Here’s where the marketing hat gets put back on.  As you may or may not know, fan pages have multiple tabs across the top that you control.  You should have one of those tabs say MLS or Homes for Sale.  That way if people are interested in homes for sale in their neighborhood they simply click the tab at the top.  FBML is the fan page application that will allow you create a custom tab with links to listings, your website, or whatever lead generation tools you use!

Since you can create an unlimited number of fan pages in FB – get out there and help your community communicate!

3 Comments | Presentation, REALTOR® Marketing, Real Estate, Real Estate Education, Technology | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Phil Sexton

Attention Agents: We have a new John Hall & Associates’ Intranet

November 23, 2009

As we’ve written about here on the blog and in the last two Broker Updates the intranet is changing.  Our dates were slightly off, but it’s here now!  Welcome emails started last week and will continue through this week.  Chances are the email will get blocked by your spam filter, so please be on the look-out.  Print or save the email for future reference.

The email will contain New User Details and the new intranet web address.

If you have the old intranet saved in your favorites be sure to update it!  The new intranet web address is http://www.johnhall.com/intranet. The old John Hall & Associates intranet will be shut off at the end of the month.

Your login information will be different than the old intranet.  If you would like to customize your password, after you are logged in with the username and password from the email you can go to Members, My Profile, Change email or password.

If you would like to check to see if you have been added yet, please click here and enter your email address.  If you have been added it will send you an email with your username, if you haven’t been added it will say, “Your username reminder failed…”.  We should have everyone in the system by the end of this week.

This Thanksgiving, Phil and Bill are very thankful for your patience as we all make the switch together.

Have a Happy Turkey Day!

Leave a Comment » | Real Estate | Permalink
Posted by Phil Sexton

Posterous: Converts emails to blog posts and more…

November 22, 2009

RE Barcamp San Diego session: Posterous

The first session I joined when I came back from lunch was about a website called Posterous. Honestly, I’ve heard about it a few times, but didn’t get the value.  Basically, it’s a simple blogging platform and content syndicator.  Even at barcamp, I heard the posterous talk, but it didn’t really sink in until I slept on it. The next morning – ding! The two reasons I think real estate agents will find it of value: The ease of use (after it’s set up) and having it feed your lead generation systems.

So what is Posterous? For the record, I haven’t spent much time using it, but some say it’s the best tech tool of 2009. It’s a website that you can post content to – just like a blog, or facebook, or twitter, or flickr, or youtube, or [____]. You know how you can take pictures and post them to flickr? Well, you can take pictures and post them to posterous. You know how you can write an article and post it to your blog? You can write an article and post it to posterous.

One of the cool things about posterous is that after it posts your content to your page, it will forward the content to flickr or twitter or wherever you tell it – with a link back to your posterous page included.  Why is that important? Because your posterous page is designed to match your website (including links to your lead generation systems).

How do you add content to posterous?  Via email. Write an email to posterous, click send. Done. The content in your email, including attachments, are posted to your posterous page and forwarded to the social networks you’ve set-up. It knows which updates to add to which networks.  However, you can manually control the syndication by changing the email address you send to. There are several different email address combinations that tell posterous where you want the content sent after it’s posted.

Bottom line it’s a cool tool.  It does require programming skills to design the page to match your website.  If you’re planning on using it, factor in hiring a programmer to set it up correctly.  And my thoughts on syndication remain unchanged – don’t let it be the only way you participate in a community.  It’s always better to go into your social networks and engage others rather than having a robot auto-post everything.  A healthy mix of both can be effective, but you’ll build a stronger, more loyal community if you talk with people instead of always talking to them.  I’ve yet to see an effective tool that automates engagement.

I think posterous is next level compared to it’s competitors.  I recommend re-reading this post, let it sink in. Go and play with it (while it’s still free).

(Next session: Advanced Facebook. You like?  Subscribe with your email or RSS reader.)

3 Comments | REALTOR® Marketing, Technology | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Phil Sexton

Why are you looking at your website traffic?

November 21, 2009

RE Barcamp San Diego session: Google Analytics

On to the last session before lunch, I say that because at times it was hard to hear the presenters over my stomach, but I still got some golden nuggets I’d like to share.  Google Analytics (GA) was presented by Arizona REALTORS® (woot!) Kelley Koehler (@housechick) and Dave Smith (@daveintucson).  Y’already know GA tracks website traffic – we can move past that and get to the good ways to use it.  My lesson learned - set goals or you’re wasting your time.

Goals can be based on different measurements from the GA data, Kelley gave some examples.  One highlighted the difference between the Visitors stat compared to the Unique Visitors stat.  Let’s say your goal is to get lots of fresh traffic onto your site, but you have a low amount of unique visitors - chances are you’re not promoting your site enough to new people.  Get out there in new arenas and engage new people and create new ways for people to find your site.

Another way they talked about using the analytics is to see how well their call to actions are working.  GA allows you to watch the navigation path a visitor takes on your site. This is useful when you are testing different buttons, phrases, or whatever your call to actions may be.  When you  make a change you can see whether it was for better or worse.  Since website analytics will easily show you the highest ranking posts or pages on your website or blog – tweaking those pages will get you the most significant data.  Don’t be afraid to make changes to help drive traffic to specific destinations.

Their advice was not to worry about the time on site stat because with tabbed browsers, people leave pages open even though they are not using or looking at them.  They also recommended telling GA to ignore your IP address so your own visits don’t skew the stats.  And bottom line, if you’re not going to do anything but look at the analytics data, don’t waste your time.  Here’s some more analytics help to get you going.

Lunch!

(Next session: Posterous. You like?  Subscribe with your email or RSS reader.)

2 Comments | REALTOR® Marketing, Technology | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Phil Sexton

Printing Listing Details Reports and Listing Input Forms – Flexmls Feature Friday

November 20, 2009

I’ve heard about it quite a bit lately, greater Phoenix real estate agents are wasting paper printing practically blank pages from flexmls.  Nothing erks me more than chopping down innocent trees to fuel our wasteful printing – what did the trees do to deserve this!?!? [regaining composure] The two print jobs I’ve received the most feedback about are the Listing Input Forms and the Listing Detail Report.  I’m on a flexmls feature friday mission: To Teach You How To Use Your Internet Browser Print Options.  (For some crazy reason I’ve accepted this mission.)

Here’s the hitch in my get along – you and I use different internet browsers and different printers which has the potential of creating different results.  But if your take away from this article is learning how to adjust your settings, you will be empowered to curb wasteful printing.  Since I use both Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3ish, I can at least share the settings in both of those that work for me.

Are you a firefox user? Check out this tutorial (with pictures!) on how to access and change your settings right from the print preview screen.  The reason I like working from the print preview screen is because as soon as you make the changes and click OK you can see the results.  This is important because the forms you are trying to print are dynamic – meaning the length of them depends on the information in the listing.  Is there one setting that will work every time?  Probably not, but here’s what I find works for most.

  • Listing Detail Report & Listing Input Forms
    • Scale = 90%
    • Top, Bottom, Right, and Left Margins = .1
    • Header & Footers = –blank–

Are you an Internet Explorer user? Check out this tutorial (sans pictures) on how to access and change your page settings.  Again, I like accessing Page Setup from the Print Preview screen because you can see your changes immediately.  As mentioned above, the forms’ length will vary depending on the information entered, but I find these settings to work most of the time.

  • Property Details Page & Listing Input Forms
    • Top, Bottom, Right, and Left Margins = .25
    • Header and Footer = -Empty-

Researching this post has enlightened me.  It’s rare that I prefer the work of Internet Explorer, but it happened today.  When I printed the Listing Input Forms using Internet Explorer – they were much easier to read.  The check boxes in the dual column boxes didn’t overlap like they do when using Firefox.  IE8 win.

I wish you good luck with becoming familiar with your Page Setup options.  It’s a handy one to know since we’re printing from the web more and more.

Happy Flexmls Feature Friday!

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Posted by Phil Sexton

Search Engine Optimizing Your WordPress

November 20, 2009

RE Barcamp San Diego session: WordPress SEO Tips and Tricks

This session was run by three guys that know a lot more about this stuff than I do. Bob Wilson was the one whose name I caught – and the one I got a chance to talk with more at the after barcamp bar.  The guy is definitely knowledgeable about search engine optimization.  Here are my notes from all three of the presenters…

  • Always use pictures in blog posts and make sure to label the pictures appropriately. Instead of uploading an image with filename IMG_8098.jpg and adding it to your post (or page) about Phoenix homes for sale. Rename it to something like Front-of-home-in-Phoenix.jpg. Google gives your file names credit – so you should name them appropriately.
  • When you rename your files, be sure to use hyphens or underscores to separate the words. One of the presenters said hyphens are good if you want google to read the words individually. Underscores are better for phrases.
  • Make sure to change your permalink structure. Permalinks are the URL or unique web address associated with each individual blog post. By default, wordpress sets them to use the post ID which is numerical and provides no value to google. Instead, go into the Settings (from the Admin panel), click Permalinks and choose an option that includes the title of the post. He said there was no real google value to have the date and recommends the custom option which allows you to remove it.
  • Some themes allow you to add a meta-description to each post – if yours does, use it every time. The meta description is what will show up in google 9 times out of 10. Plus it’s another opportunity to use keyword variations associated with the specific post.  You can be more specific and more accurate – search engines (and readers) like specific, accurate descriptions!
  • As for the title of your blog – they do not recommend using an image for the entire header. You can set an image to the background, but they say have your text title overlay on top of the image for maximum SEO benefit.
  • Ready to talk heading tags? Like h1, h2, and h3? One presenter said he tags the first sentence of each post with h2 tags. Then if he has sub-headers within a post he uses h3. Google scans header tags first to see what the page is about. This is documented in Google’s Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (free PDF) and well worth the read if you are trying to get your website to show up higher in search results.
  • A tangent on design – set a static page as your homepage. So many authors keep their blogs as the homepage because they are proud of the articles they write.  Some may think that’s what their visitors care most about, but if your goal is to create leads, you should have a static page with a crystal clear way to search for homes, get market statistics, and some way for them to figure out what their home is worth. Widget Me was a recommended plug-in.
  • Some themes allow you to choose noindex for archive pages and category pages – this is a good idea to avoid duplicate content penalties. However, if your category pages show excerpts instead of full-posts and you write unique excerpts for each post (not auto-generated or first paragraph copy and pasted) then you can allow google to index those pages because there is no duplicate content. If that makes no sense, set your category pages to noindex.  Regardless of noindex, it’s recommended to add a content block to the top of the each of the category pages explaining more about the … category.

Thesis was the most recommended wordpress theme, Headway followed.

(Next session: Google Analytics. You like?  Subscribe with your email or RSS reader.)

4 Comments | REALTOR® Marketing, Real Estate, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Phil Sexton

REALTORS® Property Resource

November 19, 2009

RE Barcamp San Diego session: Introduction to RPR

The first session I sat through really wasn’t a technology session at all, but more of an informational session about the newly announced NAR program called RPR (REALTORS® Property Resource).  If you haven’t heard of RPR, I recommend reading the information NAR posted on REALTOR.org.  There you will find a press release, fact sheet, and webinar that goes through some of the screen shots I’ll include below.  Then, if you are a fan of intelligent writing from the dark side, check out Rob Hahn’s post about the Death of RPR.  To tell you the truth, there is much more to learned from those readings than what I can explain here or what was explained at barcamp.  No worries, I’d like to give you a flavor of the session.

Reggie Nicolay (Director of Social Media for RPR), Neil Pinchin (Web-designer for RPR), and Todd Carpenter (Social Media Manager for the NAR) were on the hot seat fielding questions for about half an hour.  They didn’t get too many beginner level questions.  Instead they they got CEO, COO, and MLS Consultant level questions. It seemed to me the majority of the questioneers were looking for definitive answers on, what pieces of the RPR database can be shared and how? Given that RPR was announced about a week prior to this event, it was no surprise that there were a lot of unanswered questions.

Unfortunately, there were no visual aids that could be used to help focus the presentation on the benefits to the REALTORS®.  The most basic way to explain what RPR plans to do is merge MLS data with all the public records data they can get their hands on for the entire country. After the creation of this massive database of information that includes every parcel in the US of A, REALTORS® will be able to login and gain access to an extremely slick portal of information.

With a tool of this magnitude comes fears of a National MLS, among other things. RPR has repeated in several places they have no intention of turning this into an MLS – there will be no offers of compensation within the system.

Once RPR has parcel information for the entire country they are going to have quite the unique product to sell.  Some MLS’s would like to be included in some of the profit sharing.

Like all things, there are pros and cons.  Like all change, it’s scary. The way I look at, I’m glad the NAR is involved some how some way.  To tell you the truth, I’ve gone back and forth on whether I think this is a good idea, but from what I know now – I’m for it.  As local broker Jay Thompson says, “I don’t get, at all, why an agent wouldn’t want as much RE data as possible.”

I’m sure we’ll have more to talk about down the road.  Until then here are a couple of screen shots from the webinar posted on REALTOR.org.

(Next Session: SEO for WordPress. You like?  Subscribe with your email or RSS reader.)

2 Comments | NAR, Presentation, REALTOR® Marketing, Real Estate, Real Estate Education, Technology | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Phil Sexton

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