Cash for Clunkers, for Real Estate Agents!

So we watched all that money spent by the government to stimulate the auto industry. While I don’t believe in false stimulation of economies, giving away tax dollars to bail out industries, at least we got rid of thousands of highly polluting vehicles.

While watching that we came up with the idea of removing other pollution as well: Low end Real Estate Website Clunkers.

The campaign went very well indeed! We have rid the earth of under designed, under featured real estate websites that did nothing for agents and replaced with environmentally friendly full featured high performance websites!

Whatever site you get, make sure it has an easy to use IDX system, it is 90% of why a Customer would go to your site, to search for homes!

Richard Uzelac, CEO RealtyTech

Why be on the Internet?

I had a discussion last night with a dear friend of mine about advertising on the Internet. She was going into real estate and since I run a Real Estate services company, I wanted to give her my two cents.

She was aghast at how much it cost to get her website high on the Internet. She wondered why a RealtyTech website and IDX can cost as low as $39/month, but the Internet Marketing of that system can $120 to $1,000 per month!  Why not just pay for a newspaper ad instead?

The answer is we are living in 2009.  Almost everyone is now on the Internet daily, especially real estate buyers and sellers.  Also, almost every real estate agent in the country has a website or a web page on the Internet.

Newspaper subscriptions are falling off a cliff, all those advertising dollars are now being redirected to the Internet. While only ten percent of real estate agents are Internet marketing, those agents control 90% of all the Internet leads in 2009.

The future is here and all agents of vision need to Internet market to keep pace with how society searches for real estate in 2009.

I told her she needed to Internet market so that her website would show up on the first page of Google or Yahoo.

Short Sales and Foreclosures, You’ve Adjusted, Now What Lies Ahead?

Hi Everyone, this is Richard Uzelac, President of RealtyTech Inc. Trying to digest what has happened to the real estate market, especially the California market is not easy. For years we all kept talking about the ‘Real Estate Bubble’ and that it was going to burst. We all knew it. Even though RealtyTech doesn’t sell real estate, we are very close to those that do and we had felt the uneasiness of it all.

I remember speaking at the Southland Association of Realtors in the San Fernando Valley of California and someone in the financial industry informing all of us that in Los Angeles county only 17% of all families could afford to buy a home in LA county!

With 83% of all families locked out of home ownership, we all knew something big had to give. Well something BIG did give and here we are now after the bubble burst.

If you are still in this business of selling homes and listing homes, you know that the market is now dominated by Bank Repos and very little else.  Homes are listed at very low unrealistic prices to entice offers then the Realtors go to the Bank and try to sell the deal.  Where once Realtors dealt with homeowners, they now deal with banks. My my have times changed!

We have thousands of Clients at RealtyTech Inc. and I get to meet many of them. I’ve noticed something; some agents are doing better than they ever had before! These agents have aligned themselves with Banks and Note holders and Investors and they are listing all the properties in default or up for a short sale.

What was once the 80/20 rule, ‘feels’ like the 95/5 rule, that is, 5% of the agents control 95% of the repo market. For those agents, these are complex, but profitable times.

What if you are one of the agents left standing in the musical chairs of foreclosures and bank relationships?  What can you do?

This is my humble suggestion: Plan for the Future!  Be a Realtor and get out there and farm your farms and meet people. Put in your ground work now so that when this market turns, and it will, you will reap the benefits of the relationships you create today.

Use your website to help your farm area and contact and prospects to stay in tune with what is happening. Sign everyone up for Automated Listing Alerts , even those that do not want to sell now, so that they can feel informed and connected to you now and in the future.

Learn about Short Sales and Foreclosures and Loan Mods and give that information to your Contacts. Be their one steady solid source of quality real estate information and they will come to you when it is time to sell and buy.  This way, when the market rebounds, you’ll have the advantage this time.

 

Richard Uzelac, President, RealtyTech Inc.

Southern California CARETS: MLS data combined and presented on Broker and Agent Websites

Most of the Southern California MLS’s have agreed to offer their listing data on all real estate listings to be compiled together and offered to Realtors, Brokers, and Real Estate Offices to present on their websites so that buyers and sellers can search the properties.

SOCALMLS, SRAR, MRMLS, ITech, and CLAW Are all in CARETS. They represent Orange County, LA County, Riverside/San Bernardino County and Pasadena area listings.  RealtyTech is offering CARETS Plus! to all it’s Clients. CARETS Plus! allows RealtyTech.com to offer all the CARETS listings, plus, San Diego listings (Sandicor), Conejo Valley Listings (CVAR), and Ventura County Listings into the mix!   CARETS Plus! represents the largest IDX in the country.

The new RealtyTech IDX offers the ability to search for foreclosures and short sales as well.

While the actual CARETS feed is limited at this time, the RealtyTech feed if complete and will offer more data on more areas than the standard CARETS systems.

Real Estate Website Search Engine Marketing and Promotion

Fine Tune Your Online Marketing with SEO

If you’re a real estate professional with a beautiful website but no visitors to it, search engine optimization (SEO) can fix that.

SEO means you have researched the keywords people use in search engines to find information about a topic or service or product in which they have an interest and you have included those keywords in your website’s content.

For example, someone looking to purchase a home in Baldwin Park may do a search at Google or Yahoo! with the keyword phrase “real estate Baldwin Park,” or “Realtor Baldwin Park,” or even “Baldwin Park homes.” If you’re a realtor who sells homes in Baldwin Park you’d want the pages on your website to have those keyword terms. If you do, links to your pages will turn up in the search engine results higher than your competitors’. If you don’t have those keywords, your potential customers will be clicking on the links of the savvy Realtors who do.

And I don’t think you want that to happen.

To optimize your web pages, try this:

If you’re an agent in Texas, for example, you don’t want to target or sellers in Idaho. You want sellers and buyers looking to sell or buy in Texas. In fact, if you’re in Amarillo, you’ll want to target those folks selling or purchasing homes in Amarillo, not Houston. (Or perhaps you do – you’re looking to attract a wide range of potential customers.)

So to attract Amarillo-only buyers and sellers, you should sprinkle within any keyword rich pages or articles on your site words that are Amarillo-focused.

Other keywords to use include ZIP codes, county names, city names, street names. A nifty trick is to add these keywords to the header and/or footer of your pages, rather than just on your home or landing page.

If you have the time and the desire, you can research the best keywords for each of your site’s pages. There’s plenty of free information on the World Wide Web that will help you.

Or – and here’s where I toot my company’s horn – a good search engine optimization company such as RealtyTech.com can help you craft an SEO campaign that will specifically target the audience you want.

We can localize your SEO campaign as narrow or as broad as you desire. In addition to keywords optimized on your website, we can provide you with optimized news releases, blogs, articles for distribution to article sites and much more.
I hope you’ll contact us today for a free consultation. You can reach RealtyTech.com at 1-877-TECH-498 or by filling out our online query form and one of my colleagues will contact you as soon as possible.

Real Estate Web Site Promotion and Intenet Marketing

Got a Website But No Traffic?

As a real estate agent or realtor, chances are you have a website.

But what are the chances that you have your “own” website, with your own url (www.janesmithrealtor.com)? Are you still using your real estate company’s web sites?

That needs to change.

But let’s say you do have your own website – and big points for you, seriously, if you do. Are you using it, are you marketing it, are potential home buyers or sellers finding you when they do Google or Yahoo! searches for “realtor Westlake” or “homes for sale Culver City” (or whatever town or region in which you market your services)?

No?

Then, that needs to change, as well.

There’s nothing worse for a realtor today to spend the time and the money on a beautiful site that gets no visitors. To take an old metaphysical question and use it for my purposes here: “If there’s a real estate website on the Internet but no one sees it, does the Realtor make a sale?”

We both know the answer: No.

Let me repeat that, capitalize it, shade it boldface and put an exclamation point behind it: NO!

Don’t let that be you.

Instead, here are some quick tips to help you with your Internet marketing:

1) Article Marketing. Write articles about the real estate industry as a whole, about the housing market in your region, about descriptions of your listings, about just about anything that has to do with selling and purchasing homes. They needn’t be long – 500 words or so is fine (the equivalent of a two-page term paper). Then post them on the free article directory sites such as Ezinearticles.com; GoArticles.com; AssociatedContent.com. At the end of the article you will have your “resource” paragraph with a bit more information about you, and – and this is very important – a link back to your website. Write one and post one article a day. In three months – 90 articles later – you’ll start seeing dozens of visitors to your site. Keep it up and within just a few months you’ll have hundreds. Hundreds of warm leads at your doorstep.

2) Blogging. Head over to the free blogging sites – Blogger.com, WordPress.com, Typepad.com and start writing. Write about the housing industry. Write about the housing bubble. The housing burst. The mortgage industry. How to get a mortgage in a tight credit market. How to keep a home from foreclosure. About the prices of homes in your area. About what it’s like to be working in the real estate industry tody. Just write. Place a link to your blog on your website, and vice versa. Blog regularly, at least two or three times a week. If you do so consistently, in about three months you’ll start seeing traffic to your blog. Keep it up and within a few months you could have hundreds of readers. You’ll be seen as a real estate expert. Someone trustworthy. Savvy in the ways of marketplace. A knowledgable friend, yet professional.

You will watch your warm leads grow hot. You will watch as you gain listings and buyers for homes. It will happen.

Article marketing and blogging cost you nothing but your time. If you don’t have time, we can write and submit the articles for you; we can pen and post your blog entries. We’re not free, of course, but the return on your investment is little short of incredible.

Article marketing and blogging are just two ways to market your website. We know of more. Won’t you contact us today so that we may bring you qualified leads?

Search Engine Optimized Press Releases

Let’s talk news. As in press releases.

As I wrote earlier, optimized press releases can go a long way toward helping people find your company and/or the services you offer.

And what’s really terrific about the Internet – you can write a press release, submit it to online release distribution service such as PRWeb,  PRNewswire and others and then watch the inquiries to your website roll in – even if you never receive one phone call from a reporter.

I kid you not. Once your optimized press release hits the World Wide Web, it will show up in search engines such as Google and Yahoo. It will. Particularly if you have had it search engine optimized for the keywords people use when searching for the things your company sells or the services you offer.

Let’s say you’re a mortgage firm in Houston, TX. When people search for “Mortgages Houston” or “Houston Mortgages,” and if you’ve optimized your news release for those keywords, your optimized press release will show up in their keyword search for months, if not years. You easily could receive hundreds of inquires over time from just one press release – not just the one-shot instance when a reporter from your local paper calls to interview you and subsequently runs the article in the paper.

Submit a press release to the online PR distribution companies, and people will continue to find you. You spent the time (or perhaps the money if you asked GOiMarketing to write the press release for you), but that release still works for you.

Can an article in your local rag do that for you? Probably not. Nope, the newsprint that article was printed on was sent to the recycling bin long ago. The chances of someone finding that article in that newspaper months or years later is virtually nil. (That said, however, almost all newspapers place many – but not all – of their articles on their website. But what were the chances that that print reporter wrote that article with optimized keywords in mind? None, more than likely.)

So I recommend you spend your PR money wisely. By all means, send your release to your local and regional newspapers, but I would spend the bulk of my time putting together an Search Engine Optimized Press Release and submitting it the online distribution companies. You’ll get a lot more return on your investment (of time and money) online.

And one final note (and, yes, you bet this is a shameless plug!), all the SEO press releases we write here at GOiMarketing are written also to catch the eyes of journalists. So don’t be surprised if that optimized press release we wrote for you does garner you some ink in your local newspaper.

The Perfect Storm Never Came.

RealtyTech Inc. has about 9,000 subscriptions active nationwide. During the recent slowdown of the market place, I met with fellow CEOs in the Real Estate Tools and Vendors industry.

 Since we make our money selling products and services to the real estate professional and companies, we were preparing for the worst. Some CEOs estimate up to 50% of our Clients would quit our services and products to cut costs in the slower market. Sure, most of us realized that the time real estate agents and companies MOST need our services is NOW, during a slow market. Still all in all, we were concerned that agents would panic and cut the lifelines to their business to save a few dollars a month on our products.

 I personally wasn’t as pessimistic as most but I still made my plans to weather a storm of cancellations and a slowing of business, especially for January 2008.  January is traditionally when Realtors get their renewal notices for subscriptions and MLS fees and Association fees.  We saw January as potentially being the ‘Perfect Storm’ for cancellations as all these bill became due.

Guess what? It didn’t happen. Cancellations were average and we booked more new revenue than ever! How does that happen? Why did that happen?

 After discussing it, we all came to the realization that it had to do with the “80/20 rule” of  real estate sales. That rule states that 20% of all agents end up earning 80% of the commissions.  We all knew this to be true. What we didn’t realize until now was that RealtyTech clients are “Twenty-Percenters!”

Twenty-Percenters rule the market, make the money and set the trends. Our Client Avatar (or profile) is a Twenty-Percenter! This realization has explained so much to us. For years our loyalty rate was over 95% while our competitors were between 50% and 70%.  That trend has continued and will continue despite the market.

Our Website, IDX and SEO Clients are Winners and winners are not Quiters. So how has RealtyTech attracted so many Twenty-Percenters?

 This is how:

1. Our Team: Regardless of Product, if agents don’t like you, they won’t deal with you. Our Support staff is the best in the business. Our staff cares about its Clients. We work hard to help train the Client to be more successful. We respond quickly to issues and concerns.

2. Product: We offer the best most ‘BUSINESS ORIENTED’ products on the market. Our mantra is, “We build products for our CLIENT’s Clients: the End Users.  If End Users, Consumers, Prospects don’t want to use the products, the Agent will suffer. We always concentrate on fulfilling actual business needs over perceived needs.

3. Commitment to Excellence: Our business is a fluid one, the Internet changes daily, most of our development is dedicated to updating and adjusting our products and services to match the exact needs of the market TODAY.

 Thank-you for being a Twenty-Percenter and a Client of RealtyTech, we honor the relationship!

Love Letter

On occasion the everyday march of your job is interrupted with the response from a Client on the impact you have made for them.

 Our esteemed customer service Manager, Jeff Plaminig received this email from a new Client:

Jeff,

So…I go to my website to see how things are going and I’m totally blown away!  I’d even hire me!

The website is truly amazing  – if I were shopping – I’d have one and only one resource.

The phone isn’t ringing off the hook just yet – but I did reach a client who let me know that he selected me because of my website – so, if we do a deal together, I definitely owe you and your troops a lunch on me!

 

Thanks again.
–
Rebeca (Beca) Elliott
(805) 729 3115 (Cell)
(805) 981 2523 (fax)
www.camarillofinehomes.com

We need to remind Beca that SEO can take at least six months of hard work before the results show up in leads. Real Estate Websites with Internet marketing packages are big business for us these days, and with happy clients like this, the days fly by happily.

Sit Back and Relax, We control the Vertical and the Horizontal

Every go to one of those real estate motivational seminars?

 You get there and kinda look around for the vats of kool-aid because everyone gets so hyped up and  into those presentations and the next thing you know you’re buying some books and some DVDs for $400 and you come home just KNOWING that life will be different!  Tomorrow is the first day of the rest of your life and lookout world! I’m gonna roar!!

Two weeks later the books and DVDs are collecting dust near the travel books on your shelf and you wonder how the hell you could be so silly as to spend that kind of money when the market’s rough and there’s nothing in escrow.

Sound familiar? Sound like someone you know if not actually you?

Well, It’s kinda like that with real estate websites, and with IDX. We present great products to agents every week at office meetings and over the phone and agents get excited about the products, pricing, etc.

 But some agents we call the next month to check in on them haven’t touched their sites! Sometimes it’s a lot of work to coax them into using the new tools they have.

 That’s why the SMP’s are so popular right now. SMPs or Success Marketing Programs are basically a bundled group of tools including: Agent123 website, IDX123 MLS search system, Virtual Tours, custom header, calculators, and even a Blog setup.   All of that and: SPECIAL SAUCE!

Special Sauce?  Actually it’s: SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION AND MARKETING! Ta Da!!

 ZZzzzzzzzzz is the usual response. We say, “All these tools! Agent123 website, IDX123 MLS search system, Virtual Tours, custom header, calculators, and even a Blog setup. BLAH! BLAH! BLAH!

It’s ONLY when we say, ” WE DO ALL THE WORK FOR YOU!”  Then we get a response?

 Agents: “Huh? You do the work? I get this site and stuff and you market it FOR me? I really don’t need to do it?”

Yes, it’s true, we do all the work for you. Isn’t that great?

 Wouldn’t it be great if one of those Real Estate Gurus actually went out there and set up your appointments for you? At RealtyTech and our SMPs, we do it for you! We’ll get you the leads and the contacts and the visitors to your website, you just need to close the deal after they contact you.