Selling real estate the engenu way: Because I can make content-rich web sites so easily, I can make my points more convincingly

Can premium rental homes in suburban Phoenix throw off positive cash-flow at 75% of market rents?

An investor asked me that question the other day. It’s an academic problem, really, a matter of costing out typical homes to see how they perform under that scenario.

I can do that much standing on my head, but answering a question like that with a spreadsheet is not terribly satisfying. We live in a data-rich world, and I wanted for my investor to understand exactly what we were talking about. So not just the spreadsheet, but also MLS listings of typical homes. And not just the listings, but also detailed photos of those homes, with descriptions of what might be wrong with each one.

In fact, I could have answered the question any way I wanted, from tap-dancing on the telephone to an attempt to set a showing appointment. But I know from experience that the more questions I can answer in a completely credible fashion, the greater my chances of forging a long-term client relationship.

And that’s a big “Duh!” — isn’t it? How would I want to be treated if I were thinking of dropping some substantial fraction of a million dollars on investment real estate?

And this is where engenu comes in. I can shoot the spreadsheet across immediately, as an appetizer. But I’m not selling spreadsheets, I’m selling houses, so I put together a list of houses that I thought might be financially impressive. I toured each one, taking photos of everything, then came home and built an engenu web site from my findings.

I’ve been talking about engenu for nearly a year, but I’m not sure I’ve ever gotten the point all the way across. We use engenu to build our single-property web sites and to provide supporting documentation when we blog about homes for sale. We use it as a way of previewing homes for out-of-town buyers and investors, and as a way of communicating staging advice to our sellers. The language of real estate is photography, and engenu enables us to build (and rebuild) large, photo-rich web sites with minimal effort.

So: I came back to the office with my photos, sorted them into folders by home address, threw those seven folders into an encapsulating folder called “Coldwater_Springs_Bargains.” I tossed the PDF of my spreadsheet in there, too, along with a PDF file of the MLS listings. Then I uploaded everything to our file server.

From there, all I had to do was run engenu. Look at the web site I built. One master page leads to nine sub-pages. Two of those are the PDF files, but the other seven are photo slide shows. All of it is linked together into an easily-navigated hierarchy — and the pages are SEO-optimized to boot.

So how long did it take to build that site?

Less than ten minutes. It only took that long because I wrote copy and captioned some of the photos. Had I taken the structure just the way I had it built, I could have inherited the whole site in less than a second. You can see me demonstrating this kind of automated web site creation in The Way of the Farmer from last May’s BloodhoundBlog Unchained.

So what do I end up with? A very elaborate web site to answer my investor’s question, for one thing. There is no one he can talk to in Phoenix — or anywhere — who will provide this level of documentation. Moreover, I’m building my own credibility by being completely transparent about the claims I am making about rental properties in the Phoenix area.

But wait. There’s more. I now have a site that I can share with other investors. Facts are facts, and my facts are backed up with numbers, listings and photos. So, of course, I wrote a blog post about the web site. We sell a lot of rental homes, and I want to sell a lot more. This is a very effective demonstration of why investors should be putting their money into properties in suburban Phoenix — and doing it with me.

And all of this is made possible by engenu.

There are 146 photos in that site, which is not a lot by our standards. There is no way you would email 146 photos, and, even if your client received them, they would have no way of making sense of them. engenu makes it easy to communicate vast quantities of information — photos, PDFs, off-site links, YouTube videos, Google maps — while sending your client nothing but a single web-site link.

Cathleen and I built over 1,500 engenu pages in 2008. That’s in addition to blog posts or WordPress Pages. This is a permanent, highly-relevant, highly-searchable improvement to our inventory of on-line content, all done in seconds or minutes per page.

At Christmas, I pointed out that Realtors have a publishing problem. engenu is one way we have come up with of solving our publishing problem.

And what does all this have to do with you?

I’m going to teach engenu at BloodhoundBlog Unchained in Phoenix. I’ve talked about this software plenty enough, but Teri has convinced me that people won’t really get it until we go through it again and again, engenu in action, engenu in real life.

I’ll be teaching tech stuff because it’s what I’m good at, but Unchained is about breaking all of the chains that are holding you back. We’ll be doing Social Media Marketing and Search Engine Marketing, all that geek stuff. But we’ll also be covering Direct Marketing and belly-to-belly sales techniques. We’re not about weblogging or (god help me) Twittering, we’re about converting the sale.

If you want to learn how to convert more sales in the coming wired world of real estate, we’re the only game in town.

So: Commit yourself. I’ll show you how to make ten wicked-slick web pages in ten minutes, but that will be just one of the classes you’ll take with us.

Click the appropriate button below to sign up now.

CyberProfessionals: $397

Unchained Alumnus: $597

Regular Price: $697

Every session will be taught by an expert, by a working real estate professional balanced on the bleeding edge of hi-tech marketing. We’re building this curriculum for our own self-improvement, too, so we know there is simply no better investment you can make in your career this year.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in Phoenix!

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