loudog's Blog: Real Estate Tech Tips

I want to apologize in advance for getting a little ranty, but I have to get this out.

I was shut down by my email marketing vendor for the second time because I exceeded an abuse threshold of .04 percent. What constitutes  abuse you ask? According to my vendor, abuse is when a user flags an email as spam using either an independent anti-spam software or built in protection provided by the ISP handling the mail. The abuse rate has nothing to do with the users who use the UNSUBSCRIBE link located at the end of the email. Now the next question on your mind is how bad did you exceed the threshold. My level of abuse was .08 (double the maximum allowance).

Just so you know . . .

I am well aware of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 compliance requirements and adhere…

Pilfering through Google Analytics

So yesterday I was doing my thing, going through my GA reports @ 100 MPH when my mouse wheel came to a screeching halt (well maybe not screeching).   Usually when reviewing my keyword analysis I skip right over all the keywords that match or partially match my company name.  Today I took a closer look at that group of keywords and couldn't believe how much traffic was coming through those terms.  Currently, I rank #1 for the most popular term in my market and I am between 1 and 5 for the next 14 most popular (volume).  It turns out that I am getting more traffic for people typing my company name than some of the most trafficked (is that a word) keyword terms in my market.  Immediately, I run reports for 4 other web…

Penetrating Affluent Markets

For those listing agents that deal with the affluent market segments in their area one thing consistently rings true no matter what area of the country you work in . . . high-end listings usually come through word of mouth.  With every high end listing we get, we as real estate agents do almost as much to impress the client as we do to market the listing.  This ensure that we are talked about among the circles of the elite.  During the staging process, it is common to setup a decorative kiosk of relevant listing information and advertising materials.  One effective additive to your display is an album of photographs showing the detail of property in every perspective i.e summer, winter, fall, early morning, late evening,…

Technorati Profile

This is my post to verify my Technorati Profile.  If any of you come across it and have some experience or advice with this please comment.

When training new agents, one of the things they have the most difficulty with is, planning the route of the homes they are showing.  Our market exists within a rural area with a senseless system of dirt roads, back roads, secondary roads, highways and roads that look like driveways.  Making your way around can some times be difficult, let alone keeping a schedule.

The problem . . .

The way it works here is that a buyer agent would have to call the listing office of each listing he or she plans to show, make an appointment for each and hope to arrive at each listing around the time the appointment was made (or the seller usually gets upset).  To do this correctly the buyer's agent would first have to geographically select the properties in a logical…

I think signatures are a great tool for real estate agents. I train my agents to use them as a method of response to an otherwise daunting task of replying to large volumes of website leads (thanks to REW).

Our email system (Outlook on an in-house Exchange server) has the capability of creating several signatures per email account. With this feature we have our agents create several signatures with canned response content based on the most common requests for information we recieve via the website. That way if a website request on land comes in, the agent has a canned response for land he or she can use to reply to it. The same could be done with condos, single family, etc. What makes this great is that you can take your time and come up with a very… Read Full Post

I recently did a training with a handful of my agents on digital camera use.  It is my opinion and the opinion of a lot of other real estate professionals that good listing photos demonstrate professionalism.

The training worked out great.  Agents were excited to bring their personal cameras into the office so that the tech guy (me) can actually show them how to use them.  After a morning of shooting dozens of photos of a listing we had close to the office we came back to the office to see what we had.

The second part of the training was organizing and getting the photos ready for use.  Enter Picasa!  Probably not a big secret at this point but if you haven't heard or used this free software, you should download it immediately.

One of the biggest…