Is Video the Answer?

I  just finished reading an article on how using video to market properties can increase lead generation for properties.  Some of the results are quite fascinating.

According to an article by For Rent Media Solutions, taken from Adpropertyguru.com,  video marketing has been shown to increase leads for property managers by “an average of 30 percent and as much as 309 percent in some markets.”

One might attribute the staggering increase to advances in mobile media, allowing more and more people to gain access to such content, as video, right from the palm of their hand.

Check out the rest of the article here:

http://propertyadguru.com/2009/09/using-video-increases-leads/

Eye-Fi’s iPhone app. Send photos on your iPhone to PropertyPreviews.com

Eye-Fi announced at Macworld that they will be releasing a free iPhone app for users that currently own a Eye-Fi card.  PropertyPreviews happens to be a distribution site for Eye-Fi users.  If you have not tried Eye-Fi it is certainly a great product. If you are taking a lot of photos on the run and would like to streamline your photo upload process, give it a try.  Better yet give it a try with PropertyPreviews.com!!

The new application will let users aggregate all of their photos – from both an iPhone and a digital camera – into organized folders on a computer and to one of 25 online photo sharing and social networking Web sites. iPhone users who own an Eye-Fi card can download the free application from Apple’s App Store up

on release.

“Whether you’re snapping pictures on-the-go with an iPhone or capturing life’s important moments with a digital camera, Eye-Fi will offer one easy way to manage and share all your photos – without docking a gadget or fussing with software,” said Jef Holove, CEO for Eye-Fi. “We are solving another real-world frustration for anyone who takes photos with both devices.”

Using the Eye-Fi application, users can select which iPhone photos to upload and where to share them. As with the Eye-Fi Explore card, photos taken on an iPhone can be automatically tagged with information about where the picture was taken. Users can then view geotagged photos on a digital map and organize photos by location.

Embracing Technology – Will It Really Help You Sell More?

I was at the NAR conference last month.  I am a newbie to the real estate space so it was a great opportunity for me to learn more about the service providers in this industry and to chat with agents and brokers.  My background is in technology so I spent a lot of time learning more about the latest and greatest tools that are out there for real estate professionals.

I’ll bet if I walked the show floor some 10 years ago, I would not be seeing the number of vendors promoting some type of computer technology, hardware, online databases and multimedia products.   And looking at the session topics, I’m sure the whole idea of social media would have made most brokers and agents heads spin back then.  But welcome to 2008 and the onslaught of technology – where the NAR session on Blogging 101 was packed and had to be repeated the next day because of all the interest.  And like Carrie in Sex in the City writes – “Will technology really help you sell more?”

If you ask the more seasoned top producers (like I did), the answer would be “No”.   They know how to sell, they know how to reach the buyers and sellers, and they don’t need all these fancy tools that are out there now to help them do any more business.  It’s all about the relationships they tell me.

If you ask those that have less experience, the answer is “If you don’t embrace technology, you won’t survive in this business.”

I guess there is no right or wrong answer here – but after attending many sessions and talking to many people, my conclusion is – “It certainly can’t hurt”.

Do you need a Web site in this day and age?  Probably.  It just makes sense given that the highest majority of buyers now are Gen X and Gen Y and guess what, they know what a computer is and they know how to surf the Internet.  You know the number – 84% of home buyers begin their search on the Internet.

Do you need all this social media stuff?  Blogging, twittering, Facebook-ing?  It may help you get exposure to more people, but like the more seasoned pros would tell me, it doesn’t necessarily help you build that one-on-one relationship that will help you get referrals and gain repeat business.  If you have the time, go for it – but I wouldn’t expect to measure the return on your efforts.

Do you need more ways to expose your listings to more people – Yes.  Because it will help you sell more?  Maybe, but primarily because you are demonstrating  to your seller that you are doing all you can to actively promote their property.    YouTube, GoogleBase, Trulia, Zillow, Oodle, Yahoo, Homescape and the list goes on.

You can do it yourself or certainly go the free route – it’s all about putting a dollar value on your time.

Photography and videos – Yes.   The stats are out there – 12% increase in perceived value with photography and almost a 6% increase in perceived value by using a video.  There are so many inexpensive options out there that can give you a quality product – and quite frankly, your sellers should be demanding it.

Lead management systems, contact management systems?   In this market, would be a luxury to have.  I wonder how well these particular vendors did at this year’s show.

All in all, embracing technology is probably a good thing.    And if you invest your time and efforts wisely in the right technologies, chances are that you will become more efficient and more effective over the long haul – and yes, that will probably translate for more sales.

iPhone/Android Versions of our blog

Do you use an iPhone, or one of the new Android-based phones?  We here at PP HQ are fans of these nifty devices, and are happy to let like-minded users of these phones in on a cool feature of this blog.   By bookmarking our blog page, when you visit our blog on your phone, you’ll automatically see something like what’s shown on the right.

No iTunes application store mess, just point and browse.

Kudos to our social media masters who got this going.   Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Using Facebook Targeted Ads to Better Market Your Business

Facebook’s ad targeting system is among the best targeting system out there in terms of deliverability and cost effectiveness.  Through Facebook Pages, Real Estate professionals can directly market to their target demographic by placing ads within their prospective client’s Facebook interface.  With 80% of home buying interest today starting online, it would seem reasonable to make an effort to get to the word out on your property through a platform that has become respected among all social circles and walks of life.  It is for this reason that Facebook is the reasonable choice above other social networks.

Though Facebook is technically the second largest social networking site with 100 million active users (News Corporation’s MySpace still holds the first place title), it has become the cleaner alternative to the corporate-backed, ad-ridden, unprofessional landscape of MySpace.  This puts Facebook in a position to learn from MySpace’s mistakes – let everyone market on the platform instead of just larger companies.
Everyone from photographers to real estate professionals to vendors have started to use Facebook’s easy-to-use ad developer to place ads directly into a desired user’s homepage.

The site allows for advance targeting – target by age, gender, location, interests, whatever you want.  It also allows for you to attach friend-to-friend interactions about your ads; friends of the target will show up as referring your business to them through your ad, which helps attract attention and credibility.
Facebook is also flexible on how your purchase ads.  Their system allows for both CPC (purchase clicks) or CPM (purchase impressions) styles of payment.  Their CPC method allows you to bid on a cost-per-click, with the higher the bid equaling more impressions on the site.  They also let you set a limit per day on each ad, allowing you to increase and decrease the ad rate according to your budget.

A great feature of this ad system is Facebook’s “trusted referral” option.

From Facebook.com: “The ads can also be shown to users whose friends have recently engaged with your Facebook Page or engaged with your application. Facebook Ads are more likely to influence users when they appear next to a story about a friend’s interaction with your business.”

This is great if you want to start building within a network of friends who have shared interests.  So say you’re a photographer and you have a business selling real estate photography.  If you tell your clients to become fans of your business on Facebook, you can advertise directly to their associates, using your clients as referrals.
The end result of these targeted ads is delivering your message directly onto a prospect’s facebook homepage, which means (depending on your bidding settings) that your prospects can see your ad every time they refresh their homepage.  This is a great way to advertise yourself as a professional in your field.

Facebook Advertising Info

Free Online Photo Editor-FotoFlexer

The standard for photo editing still remains Adobe Photoshop.  However, using Photoshop does require a learning curve to use and it is expensive.  Photoshop elements $99 & Photoshop CS3 $999.  My favorite webapp for editing photos is FotoFlexer and it is FREE!!!.

FotoFlexer is a free online we application that allows you to upload images from you computer or other online photo applications like (Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket, and more)  to FotoFlex for editing.  There are no programs to buy and no subscribtions costs.  The user interface is easy to navigate.  Once your photo is uploaded there are options to crop, resize, add text, and many more.  What is also an advantage is you are able to save the file as a jpeg or png back to any destination you choose. (Desktop, Facebook, etc.)  Give it a try, I think you will find it useful for when you need a quick photo modification.

Remember to subscribe to our RSS feed or email updates to get all of our latest posts.  Happy Selling!!

Whiz Bang! Great technology enhances video creation

We love that you love how easy PropertyPreviews.com is to create free real estate video.   There’s a way to make it even easier.   Perhaps you’ve seen references to Eye-Fi on our site, and paid it no attention.

For those of you who make frequent use of PropertyPreviews, and we know there’s a lot of you, this is something you may want to learn more about.

What if you could take pictures of a house, then stop at McDonalds for a bite to eat, and when you got home, all your photos were in your PropertyPreviews account waiting for you.   That’s right.  You NEVER connected your camera or memory card to your computer.   In fact, they’d also be waiting for you on your computer as well.   Sound impressive?  It is!  That’s what an Eye-Fi card does.  If you have a camera that uses an SD memory card, you can replace it with an Eye-Fi card, and all this magic can happen.

Here’s what’s happening.  The Eye-Fi card not only is a 2 GB memory card that stores your pictures, it’s also a wireless transmitter that will send your photos over the Internet to your computer and to PropertyPreviews, all via your pre-designated wireless network (like home or office network).   Some versions of the card come with one-year free Wayport Hot Spot access, which allows you to transmit at some public hot-spots, such as McDonalds.   Once configured, when you’re camera is on in range of one of these pre-selected networks, it automatically uploads photos.

I’ve personally used it, and there’s even more whiz-bang stuff, like geo-coding where the photo was taken.  That means, in addition to storing data like shutter speed, and date/time taken, it can also approximate the latitude and longitude of where it was taken.  This allows you to map the location of it on a map like Google Maps.   This feature is not available on all Eye-Fi models.

For those of you that like focusing your time on buyers, sellers and prospects, and not on labor-intensive marketing (hey, isn’t that why you use PropertyPreviews.com in the first place?), then consider adding an Eye-Fi card to your tool bag.   Once you try it, we think you’ll be as impressed as we are.  PropertyPreviews is proud to be the first real estate partner of Eye-Fi, and we think you’ll be excited when you learn what it can do.   Others think it’s impressive as well.  Eye-Fi has garnered numerous awards, including PC World’s “The 100 Best Products of 2008″ and Yahoo! Tech’s “Last Gadget Standing 2008.”

Learn more by clicking here.

If you’ve tried it, let us know by leaving a comment below.

Why Twitter?

Twitter is becoming the go-to tool to answer the one question on everyone’s mind: What are you doing right now? The two-year-old micro-blogging platform is quickly becoming known as an app that many people have heard of, but only a handful have mastered.

For those who don’t know, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that allows its users to send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets).  Updates are displayed on the user’s profile page and delivered to other users who have signed up to receive them.  Users can receive updates Twitter’s website, SMS, RSS, email, or through an application such as Twitterrific or Facebook.

The question that real estate professional should be asking is: How can this be useful in selling a property? Twitter can be used to take a pulse of the home-buying community. Agents can search twitter to find real estate buyers in the area and get a sense of exactly what they’re looking for – thoughts, opinions, open house, time preferences, whatever.

Once you’ve found out what your prospects are saying, start a conversation. Set up a profile. Get a nice looking picture and fill out the required fields so that people can get a sense of who you are. Next, start following people. Following people allows for other people’s “tweets” (twitter language for messages) to automatically update to your home page. This lets you see exactly what someone is looking for.

You can search other people’s tweets by using tools such as TweetScan. Search for “Open House” or “Trulia” to see who is looking for property information or homes for sale. If someone is looking for a home, they might be posting their thoughts on their home-buying process. Use this to help them find the property they need…

If you have an iPhone, get one of the free twitter applications built specifically for iPhone users.  This will help agents who are constantly on the move showing properties.  You can even sync your twitter account to interact with your Facebook status, enabling you to reach an even larger audience with information on property locations and local real estate news.

This method of interaction with clients also puts a friendly face on a stressful buying process — It allows clients to get a better sense of who is helping them to make what will most likely be one of the more expensive purchases of their life.

Use your own profile to act as a real-time advertising platform; let your followers know what properties you’re showing and give some juicy details. Have fun with it! Twitter is a great way to get into the head of clients and find out what they’re really looking for.

PP.com’s Twitter Profile

Twitter Home

Click here to check out a great example of how Twitter can be used with to interact with customers in real-time — from seomoz.org