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Author: Galen Ward (page 1 of 1)

Mapping Technology Entrepreneur

June 2, 2010

Calorie-free Purple Cows

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Mapping Technology Entrepreneur

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I am speaking at BuzzRE in Portland tomorrow. Why? I’m not exactly sure: unlike nearly every company at the conference, we don’t sell anything to real estate agents.

The subject of my talk is Seven Ways to Convert Online Leads Better… And to Be a Better Agent. I hate the word lead – it commoditizes people in a way that is only detrimental to customer service – but I’m using it in the talk because I want to talk about service as marketing.

The talk is a response to myriad win-lose or win-neutral lead conversion talks that I see pitched at conferences like these (the consumer is on the neutral- or lose-side of the equation). I’ll describe seven things I think agents can do to actually work with more clients while providing better service. I want to create a win-win.

We’ve posted a preview of the underlying theme for the talk on the Estately Blog. In an industry where service should be king, the industry’s focus on a shallow interpretation of the purple cow allegory is a waste of energy and resources. Agents should primarily focus on beating the competition through superior service.

September 11, 2008

Rate-a-Realtor is for Ding-a-Lings

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Mapping Technology Entrepreneur

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Techie agent types have probably googled their name (or the name of a competitor) only to find a agent review website that says something like:

Barbie Baker is a San Diego real estate agent. Barbie Baker has no reviews. Click here to review Barbie Baker.

If you’re uncommonly lucky, you’ll hit an agent with a review:

1 person has reviewed Barbi Baker. Phoenix Rand said the following about Barbie Baker: “Barbie was a fantastic agent to work with and helped us find the right house! Wow!”

Now, if you’re an agent, you’re saying to yourself “I wish they had a phone number at least,” but if you’re a consumer with half a brain, you’re saying to yourself “One rave review – I bet Barbie wrote it herself.” And, no offense to San Diego Realtors, but odds are she did. It’s easy and jeez – who’s going to catch you?

Everyone likes to compare real estate to other industries (travel anyone?), and the clear direct comparison here is business / restaurant review – sites like City Search / Urban Spoon / Yelp / Menuism. But the comparison is only valid in the most superficial sense.

How many customers will write a review?

Take one of my favorite lunch spots: Kau Kau in Seattle. Say they serve 10 people an hour from noon until 8. That’s 80 people a day or 29,200 people a year. Urban Spoon has four reviews of Kau Kau. Menuism has two reviews of Kau Kau. That’s one review for every 7,300 or so transactions on Urban Spoon and twice that many on Menuism.

That means that the average agent should not have a single review – even Russell Shaw does not do that many transactions per year. And agents who have more than one review are suspect. They’re either reviewing themselves or they’re sitting down with their favorite clients and “helping” them write a review.

Do you see value in these sites for consumers?

April 29, 2008

Truliamazing tricks of the trade: don’t link to your trusted partners

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Mapping Technology Entrepreneur

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Greg is impressed how Trulia so dominates the search results for “714 West Culver Street”. Heck – they got the listing from somewhere, right? Why does Trulia show up above the original sources of data? In this case, two reasons: the original source doesn’t even display the address on the page (dude – MLS rules are stupid, but they usually let you display your own property’s address at least – you gotta fix that!). But the much more common reason is that Trulia blocks Google from following their links.

How do I know? Go to any listing on Trulia. See that “See more photos and details” button? Hover over it and look at the bar at the bottom of your screen. See how it says something like http://www.trulia.com/transfer.php?s_id=10424505&feat=1&p_id=1053500646&t_id=fdpt3 ? That gobbledygook links internally to a page on Trulia that instantly passes you on to the listing broker. However it tells Google that it is a temporary redirect (a 302 redirect), which Google has explicitly stated does not pass any PageRank. That means while you move on to the listing broker, Google goes no further than that internal page.

Why would Trulia withold PageRank from their trusted partners? They might argue that they need to track the number of people they are referring to brokers. However, Trulia appears to be very technically savvy and there are a number of other search-engine friendly ways to accomplish that including javascript onunloads or 301 redirects (which do pass PageRank). Why else would anyone withhold a link from the original source? Because in doing so, Trulia becomes the original source for properties in the eyes of Google. If Trulia were to link back to trusted broker partners, particularly if they were to use relevant text like the address (instead of an image link), they risk telling Google that they are borrowing that information from somewhere else – an original source – and Google might rank the original source higher in the search results.

Why would brokers who share their listings allow this? My best guess is they aren’t tech savvy enough to identify that this could be a problem. Read more

April 17, 2008

What do gambling, pornography and real estate have in common?

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A: A lot of “SEO masters” trying to scam their way to the top of Google and Yahoo.

Is there an inverse relationship between an industry’s reputation and the number of “SEO masters” offering sage advice? It seems to hold true for gambling, pornography, payday loans, trial lawyers, mortgage brokers and real estate agents. You know you’re entering a shady industry when your industry has forums and contests devoted to industry-specific SEO (here is an awesomely not safe-for-work example).

Note to “SEO masters:” if this is true, helping politicians rank for searches is the next big thing.

February 1, 2008

The upside of exclusives

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Mapping Technology Entrepreneur

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What if sellers could list with anyone and everyone and what if only the party that brought the buyer got paid? Online listing search paralysis: no agent will disclose the address to a buyer unless they can show it.   

Sounds like the ideal place to go direct-to-sellers to list their house on the web; they’re already distributing their listing all over the place. 

It also sounds like agents really provide no service to help consumers get more for their listing there; no staging, pricing advice, etc. They’re just trying to find buyers and get it sold. Note to Spanish agents: the internet eats information withholding middlemen for lunch. Provide valuable services or die.

January 28, 2008

Write more

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Mapping Technology Entrepreneur

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Selling your home is a big deal; as many verbose real estate bloggers will attest, people are willing to read a lot to learn abut the process. I hate to kiss up to my new host here at Bloodhound, but I would wager that a good long-scroll “who I am and how I work” sections are much more valuable than three paragraph essays that above average agents have on their websites. Heck, a multi-page “who I am and how I work” about page was the most effective for SEOMoz (seriously – long), an SEO (and stuff) company. And deciding to buy a subscription to SEOmoz is a much smaller than deciding to buy a home.

January 21, 2008

Descriptive text as benefit, not feature

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Mapping Technology Entrepreneur

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Over the course of developing Estately, Doug and I have looked at a lot of listings. We’ve seen humorous irregularities, things like the neighborhood called “Seattle” that has been carved out of adjacent cities or the neighborhoods of large cities that are promoted to city status by agents who apparently want no one to ever find their property on traditional, select-your-city-from-a-list real estate search sites.

After the awful photos, which are well documented by Athol, the most painful part of viewing listing after listing for me is the “descriptive text.” Of the dozens of boxes agents fill for every property, this is the one where a listing agent can sing the praises of the listings benefits and go beyond the laundry list of features.

Or at least it should be the box that is about benefits.

But all too often it is either meaningless filler or a relisting of selected features. It’s like real estate agents, people who are steeped in personal marketing strategies, who bandy about marketing words like conversions and leads, had never heard of benefits.

The following are a few of the regulars; the features buffed with flowery adjectives and sent off to the ether, and my amateurish reworking of them. I don’t market for a living, so I’m sure (positive!) we’ll see better reworkings in the comments.

Feature: Beautiful view, huge picture window
Benefit: Watch the sunrise through the picture window from anywhere in the living room

Feature: only 15 minutes from downtown, hot tub
Benefit: relax in the hot tub after a short (less than 10 minute) commute from downtown

Feature (barely): You’ll love this floor plan!
Benefit: hallway-free floor plan maximizes living space OR open floor plan maximizes feng-shui

Things I wouldn’t put in a public description because they aren’t features or benefits:

  • all appliances stay+washer/dryer (that’s in the amenities)
  • close to all schools (really? every single school?)
  • Move in Now! (no!)
  • 2 cats and a lrg dog that live here (transparency is good, but that makes me think “pet odor!”)

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Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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