How Could Ray White Improve Their Marketing To Make ‘The Edge’ An Even More Impressive Event?

One of the biggest real estate auction events in the Southern Hemisphere is about to happen on the Gold Coast.

Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach are holding ‘The Edge’ on Saturday 17^th April 2010 at the Gold Coast Convention Centre.

Brett Clements from PropVid sent me the ‘Hot Off The Press’ promo video yesterday.

Now for such a big event I’m sure that there has already been a lot of promotion done by the Gold Coast Network in the lead up till now & it looks like there is going to be a whole lot more promotion done between now and ‘The Edge’.

But I thought I might throw my 2 cents worth in & share some ideas on how Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach could leverage Social Media & the web more effectively to help spread the word.

Here’s ‘The Edge’ video promo.

The video went live on the PlatinumHD.tv site a few days ago & was uploaded onto YouTube 3 days ago. Whilst I think the video is really powerful there are a couple of things that could be changed to improve its conversion.

Changes to the Video: Within the video I’d have the agents website address GoldCoastNetwork.com.au appearing underneath the Ray White Broadbeach, Ray White Commercial Broadbeach, Ray White Mermaid Beach slide (which appears at the 2 minute mark within the video).

Also, towards the end of the video a slide appears saying “Spaces Limited Book Now”

Whilst I think it’s great to include a call to action. It’s important to define what you want people to do. Are they wanting vendors to book their property in now for the auction? Or do they want buyers to book their seat now? Or both?

On the web there is no room for confusion. It’s important that people watching the video know how to Book Now.

Improve Online Conversion: One suggestion could be that if you include the agency website address within the video, then on the home page of the Ray White website they could embed ‘The Edge’ promo video into the top right hand corner (probably cutting out the end of the surf life saving flag or surfer image) and then have a button underneath to say Click Here to Book Now for ‘The Edge’.

I would then send them to a long copy sales page that features some of the benefits of why they should be involved in ‘The Edge’ and provide an opt-in section which identifies if they are a buyer or a seller.

This will allow Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach to leverage the traffic that they already get to their website from Google and their other marketing, plus improve conversion from the people who view their professionally produced ‘The Edge’ promo video.

Obviously, with only 6 weeks to go till ‘The Edge’, to allow for the 4 week cut-through marketing campaign that they mention in the video, all sellers would need to be contacted straight away to include their listing in ‘The Edge’ marketing campaign.

I can imagine that the agency will need to have all properties listed by 20^th March, but due to the size of the promotion & the incredible exposure there’s a possibility that they could include a few extra listings within a few days after this cut-off date. But, that’s obviously up to them.

Here’s a few other suggestions…

YouTube: One of the first things I noticed is that the video could also be optimised a lot better on YouTube. The wording used in the description & tagging has no chance of being found on Google by someone searching for real estate on the Gold Coast & I’m not sure that having it uploaded under the Entertainment category is going to help either?

Blogging: They should integrate a WordPress blog within their company website. This will not only help to market ‘The Edge’ but it will help with their SEO.

They should write a daily blog post about some of the build up towards ‘The Edge’ and ask all the staff to tweet or share each article with their followers on Twitter & their friends on Facebook.

When sharing the articles on these sites they could also ask people to click the like button when uploading onto Facebook and ask the followers to ‘Please RT’ their tweets on Twitter.

When posting daily updates on the blog it’s important to leave the comments section open on the articles because this may get people asking questions about how to be involved & could provide an additional lead generation strategy.

This could also provide an opportunity to set a deadline for the last day before properties will be allowed to be submitted & could create an extra sense of urgency for potential sellers and/or could encourage friends to tell friends to contact the agency so they don’t miss out on ‘The Edge’.

To protect the integrity of the event, Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach are the administrators of the blog so they have control to monitor comments too.

Facebook: I also noticed that Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach have a personal profile on Facebook. Whilst they currently have 67 friends, they should really have this as a Fan Page, because Facebook has a limit and once you get to 5,000 friends you have to change to a Fan Page.

Any company thinking about creating a presence on Facebook should start off with a Fan Page. They are better for business.

Celebrities, etc should also create a Fan Page. eg. One of my friends on facebook, Jack Canfield sent me an email the other day to ask me to join him at his fan page because he had reached his limit of friends.

Jack now has the task of getting all 5,000 of his friends that he has built up on his personal Facebook profile to go over & connect with him on his new Facebook Fan Page.

( Update: I found their company Facebook Fan Page – See Update at bottom of this article )

Twitter: With regards to Twitter I can’t seem to locate a company profile for them. At this point there appears to be no Twitter account linked to their site & no blog within their site.

Whilst ‘The Edge’ is an amazing concept, there are so many different things that Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach could do to make this the most incredible real estate event ever through Social Media.

(Update: I found their company Twitter account as well see Update at bottom of this article. I searched both facebook and Twitter for Ray White Broadbeach and Ray White Mermaid Beach. I finally found them under the Gold Coast Network.)

Print Media: Having seen the magnitude of the print media campaign from last years event, Ray White Broadbeach-Mermaid Beach should be advertising something like,

“For the daily inside scoop on ‘The Edge’ become a Fan on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter” within their campaign.

This could help them to build a huge network of people connected to their company who live within their service.

It’s never too late: Even though ‘The Edge’ is only 6 weeks away, when you think about the real-time nature of Web 2.0, there is still a lot of time available for Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach to leverage the power of the internet & use this impressive Video Production from PropVid to generate the most amazing impression within their marketplace.

2 last things: A geo-targeted Pay Per Click campaign on Google could help overcome some SEO issues, plus a targeted Facebook Ads Campaign would help drive targeted traffic to their video campaign and/or their Facebook Fan Page.

The amount of ‘Free’ online PR that could be generated around ‘The Edge’ could be massive.

If Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach get this right, ‘The Edge’ could become so much bigger than they could have ever imagined.

And, if you tallied up every strategy that I’ve mentioned, they could make a huge difference to their whole campaign for around $500 – $1,000 plus time spent writing a daily update on their blog about ‘The Edge’.

PS: There’s a few more ideas I have about what they could do on realestate.com.au and other strategies, but at this point I just wanted to paint the picture of what is really possible, if a real estate agency embraces Social Media and uses the power of the internet the right way.

Please feel welcome to share your thoughts & ideas.

UPDATE: After writing this article I noticed that Ray White Broadbeach – Mermaid Beach do in fact have a Facebook Fan Page under ‘Gold Coast Network‘ and a Twitter account at Twitter.com/raywhitebroad with their username as ‘Gold Coast Network’. It’s great to see that they have established a fan page and a Twitter account.

At the time of posting this update, they have 97 fans on Facebook and 23 followers on Twitter, but unfortunately all the company seem to be posting is there sold listings & providing a link to the Open Homes that they have on each weekend.

Their Gold Coast Network Fan Page could become so much more engaging and simply because of its name, Gold Coast Network, it has the potential to become one of the biggest real estate fan pages on Facebook if they shared some other information about what’s happening on the Gold Coast as well.

20 Comments »

Google Real Estate will force the portals to embrace, open and innovate or die!

Slowly but surely Google Real Estate is making inroads into the Australian real estate market with the recent signing of LJ Hooker on top of most of the major players in real estate in Australia. It will take longer for all of the smaller independent agents to come onboard, however it is clear that this is the beginning of a new era and it is time REA and Domain stepped up to the plate and opened themselves up to the Google way of life!

Why? Because not doing so will slowly end their dominance and when the decline occurs it will be so fast that no maneuvering will make a difference.

Some may argue that Google Real Estate has not made a difference as yet, but these people live in complete denial and it will only be a matter of time before visitor numbers begin declining and Google Real Estate begins its upward March.

Remember, Google only has to get comparative data to make a difference. Google also have a far greater capacity to let people know about it than all other real estate portals in the world combined.

Recently a number of videos have been produced that well and truly show how serious Google is about maps and real estate.

Finding a house on Google Real Estate Maps

Here is one to showcase real estate listings throughout Australia

Here is one on how to refine your real estate search on Google Real Estate.

Real Estate API’s
Realestate.com.au and domain.com.au must open their databases up to the general public to create a whole new wave of web and mobile applications.

I have been pushing API’s with these portals for over 2 years and yet we still have nothing. Maybe Realestate.com.au’s big announcement will include an API?

What can an API do?
As an example any website would be able to carry listings through this API, so community websites, industry websites, councils, agents, even business2.com.au would be able to carry listings, sales data etc. Portals do not need agents permission as agents have signed away all rights to the data when they join these sites.

Signing up should be simple and approval rapid and it should be accompanied by rapidly evolving documentation and examples.

Boon for portals
One other thing we will see is innovation across the board, even things we have not even thought of will take us by surprise, but the biggest boon will be for the portals. It will extend their listings and sales data reach and allow that data to be ingrained across 10’s of thousands of websites across Australia and the world.

Versions
There should be two versions of the API, the free version which carries 3rd parties adverts from the portals and is a little limited and then a paid version that carries no advertising and allows the user to do whatever they want with the data!

Flow on
The flow on effect of this will flow across the industries to jobs, cars and classifieds.

Will this happen?
Don’t hold your breath, large organisations are slow at moving on these opportunities, usually waiting until it is too late. We are fast approaching a time where I think realestate.com.au and domain.com.au will start going backwards unless they really innovate with API’s.

One only has to look at the music industry and the movie industry to see how stubborn incumbents completely ruin their own industries by not embracing and innovating.

53 Comments »

You Lost Me At ‘Hello’

This article is ‘Part 3 of How to Get More From RealEstate.com.au Without Paying Extra Money.’

In Part 1 of this series, I covered how to get the best coverage for your agency within the Find An Agent Section settings and in Part 2 I discussed an important internet marketing strategy where you can improve the number of visits you can get to your listings.

In that article I also covered 3 simple internet marketing concepts, the first of which was ‘The Image Catches Their Eye’ which leads me to…

You Lost Me At ‘Hello’

Have you ever seen that part in the movie Jerry Maguire where Renee Zellweger says to Tom Cruise “You had me at Hello?” If not, here’s a quick snippet from the movie.

Well, with this phrase in mind, I can not stress how important it is to grab a buyer or sellers attention over the web, especially on realestate.com.au.

Ultimately, you want to aim to ‘Have them at hello too’ which means that they will continue to keep reading about your listing.

The ‘Hello’ part is so important over the web, because with a woman you have somewhere between 2 – 4 seconds to grab their attention, whereas for a male, it’s 5 – 7 seconds, yet unbelievably there are still a number of agents who are committing the cardinal sin on realestate.com.au.

What’s the cardinal sin on realestate.com.au?

I find it astounding in today’s world of digital photography, that some agents are still uploading their listings onto realestate.com.au without any images of the property at all.

What’s more, realestate.com.au don’t allow listings to be uploaded to their site unless their is an image & some agents actually go out of their way to upload a generic image instead, just to get the listing up onto the realestate.com.au site.

Some agents must be in such a hurry to get the property uploaded onto the web on a Friday afternoon, before the receptionist goes home, that they upload the listing without photos, without considering the damaging consequences.

Maybe the owner is super keen to have the property uploaded before the weekend, but uploading any listing onto realestate.com.au without photos of the property is a huge mistake.

The image is such a big attention grabber and having no image could actually put the ideal buyer off.

Plus, lots of potential sellers subscribe to email alerts and if they see a property that is poorly marketed by an agent then they could easily be put off from listing with that agent.

It’s the biggest database in Australian real estate – Use it.

REA has the biggest real estate database within Australia & they have hundreds of thousands of people who have subscribed to receive email alerts when new listings come onto the market within their chosen criteria.

Realestate.com.au include the first email notification via their email alert service at no extra cost to the agent. It’s part of the subscription fees & is a very affective part of an agent’s marketing strategy for matching properties to suitable buyers.

Now, if an agent uploads a listing without the property photos & wants to access the REA’s database to re-send the property details out with photos now uploaded, they have to pay (normally hundreds of dollars) to send out one of REA’s e-Brochures.

Even though you could always pay to re-send the property out to REA’s database via the e-Brochure in an attempt to try to rectify the initial mistake, you’ll never get a second chance to create that great first impression.

No matter what the circumstances, an agent should ‘never’ upload a listing onto realestate.com.au without photos of the property.

Quick Tip: To get the greatest exposure for your listing as it is emailed out as an email alert to the REA database, make sure you set your price guides within the admin section as far apart as you feel that you comfortably can without misrepresenting the price.

This will allow you to broaden your marketing out to potential buyers in a lower price range who may end up deciding to increase their spending range and/or market to buyers in a higher price bracket that may consider reducing the amount they want to spend on a property.

But, make sure you reset the price range within the system within the first week after the first email alert has been sent, as by this time you’ll probably have direct feedback from buyers and you should have an even better indication of the properties real price point in the market.

Obviously, use your common sense, sending an $800,000 listing to buyers with $300,000 to spend isn’t going to win you any friends.

6 Comments »

Listing Fundamentals To Get More From Your Online Strategy

With talk of search, social media and mobile, real estate agencies are starting to invest in building an online presence. But whilst all of these strategies are important to any agency strategy, it is important to make sure you are getting the basics right. Our recent consumer research has confirmed our initial thoughts, and that is that agents need to focus on always providing the core information in a listing. By doing so agents will be able to attract more buyers to the properties they have listed on the market.

Content and information make the web go around, and it is detailed information that consumers are looking for when they are viewing property listings online. Consumers are using this information to make preliminary decisions about property from the comfort of their own home. The process of elimination starts here and it is your one opportunity to convert browsers to inspectors. So what do you need to provide in your listings to get people off the couch and at the inspection?

1) Floorplans; Equally as important as images, floor plans are one of the first elements consumers look for when viewing a listing. However some agents are still not providing what should be a core component of any property advertisement online.

2) Images; Making a property decision from your computer is a visual process. Consumers have a limited amount of time to go to open for inspections and as many overlap, your property may be making it onto the “no time to see list”. Images are the crucial factor swaying a users decision, and providing 2 or 3 images to look at is hardly going to entice buyers to the property. With property portals providing the capacity for up to showcase 26 images, agents need to make better use of this facility and increase the portfolio of photos for their properties.

3) Pricing; Many properties are still listed without a price guide associated with them. Whether a property sells for the price it is listed at on the day will of course depend on the market. However a price guide helps consumers to determine if a property possibly sits within their budget, and is worth a trip to the inspection.

4) A full valid address; When inputting data, it is important that agents ensure an accurate full address is provided. Without it, map functionality, on portals and your own site, are unable to accurately pinpoint the location of a property within a particular suburb. After understanding what the property looks like, consumers want to know where it is located and what it is close to, so make sure they don’t have to traipse around the web to find it. If you focus on getting these fundamentals right, and combine it with some investment in attracting users to your site through online channels such as search and social media you are well on the way to attracting more buyers for your listed properties.

18 Comments »

REA Major Announcement in March

There are strong rumours circulating that Realestate.com.au will be launching a new site in early March 2010. What this site will look like is any one’s guess?

REA have come under criticism in the past that the realestate.com.au website is more about selling 3rd party services than actually marketing real estate agents listings, so it will be interesting to see how much of the feedback they have received over the years gets put into place.

Given that REA are the leader, I am be expecting something special, no excuses, I mean the site has had some minor adjustments over years, but this is 2010 and I would expect nothing short of brilliance from this team after this period of time. I am sure the hype will build up and can’t wait to get a sneak peak and report back to all.

Here are some of the things i will be looking for:

Make the Home Page Customisable

If you want registrations and repeat customers, make it so I can fully customize the home page. I should be able to login and set what types of listings I am looking for. The home page should then become ‘my home page’, with relevant listings, sales data, advertising and real estate news and media from my areas. I should be able to login with my Google, Facebook accounts and I should be to set up watch lists for local properties, agents etc.

Agents Listings First

95% or more of realestate.com.au’s visitors would be people looking to buy, sell, rent or have their properties managed, so it beggars belief that so many real estate sites make it difficult to contact an agent on a listing page. This should be prominent at top left of listings page (where eyes first look) and not hidden away down the left or right side.

Give me what I search for

I don’t care if a listing is one year old or one day old, I want to get accurate results for what I search for. Today agents need to re-list properties (which can get you barred on REA) on some sites every ninety days, otherwise they are not found.

Agents are commissioned to sell a property for the vendor. It makes it hard to sell if it cannot be found, it is just so pathetic that only the first 200 listings are displayed, load and data cannot be the excuse, especially when there is so much junk thrown in the users face on each page.

3rd Party Advertising

REA should by now have realised that pop up ads are a pain in the proverbial, just give me non-intrusive, relevant advertising and I am happy. Surely by now they would have some control over their advertising market.

API

Yes this is 2010 and not one of the major portals has an API (Application Program Interface) That allows anyone to mash data up and create just about anything you could think of and many things we hadn’t. This is why Google is such a threat, to companies like REA and Domain – because it likes to share and makes billlions from it!

Comments

We should be able to make comments on a property, agents should be able to choose whether the comments and their responses are public. This would provide great information to other prospectives! It could also separate the productive hard working agents from the rest. Maybe some kind of comment/feedback all star agent.

What are you expecting to see?

30 Comments »

Real Estate Portals Costs – It Could Always Be Worse!

In the past month I have purchased a new Subaru Liberty 3.6R MY10 model and I took some time out during that process to check out how the internet, emarketing and social media is effecting the motor vehicle industry and I was genuinely surprised by the results.

First I tried to do some research on the make and model I was looking to purchase and found very very little information on the car itself outside of the standard manufacturers blurb. Even all the online driving reviews were only 10 to 20% original and the rest was padded out with the manufacturers press releases word for word.

I visited a number of dealer websites and they were flashy enough but provided very little substance or information.  I found only one business based site that went to the trouble of creating unique content and conducted significant research. The only other websites that provided anything original were the enthusiast websites and forums.

I could not find any blogs run by Subaru dealers, nobody on Twitter tweeting the latest news for that manufacturer or any dealer fan pages on Facebook. No matter what I tried emarketing seemed to be non existent.

I started searching outside of Australia and found excellent examples of Motor Dealers embracing social media. Austin Subaru for instance has around 4000 facebook fans. Every time they post something to their facebook page 4000 local subaru enthusiasts get the message and when one of those 4000 fans comment or click on the “like” button all their friends get the message too.

The next thing for me to check out was the Portals. The motor industry online is dominated by several portals the same as the real estate industry but that is where the similarities stop. What I did not notice at first was that you do not see on the portals any dealer contact information anywhere. The portals completely control all contact between the dealer and the interested party. To make a phone enquiry you have to dial a number and punch in the car ID to be connected.

As a prospective purchaser this was downright annoying but it wasn’t till I realised that the portals were controlling every single enquiry so they could charge an enquiry rate that I was really disgusted as it made the whole enquiry experience very frustrating.

So how much was a dealer being charged for a single enquiry? What would you think would be fair? I was thinking $2 or $3 maybe. I naturally asked my dealer and was shocked with the answer. They told me car dealers are paying well over $30 per enquiry and apparently many are paying much more than that as well. That’s $30 for every phone call or email generated by the portal. Apparently it’s not unusual for a potential customer to continue to use the portals phone number to contact the dealer again which just magnifies the whole cost.

As you can imagine large car dealers are paying a serious amount of money to these portals every single month. It appears to me that because they have not created their own online presence or invested in other forms of emarketing they are locked into using these portals and their extortionate prices.

Now this is the part that really confused me. The keyword tools in my Google Adwords account tells me that the average CPC rate for  keywords like subaru, subaru liberty and subaru impreza is under 40 cents so if you are going to pay that much for each enquiry from the dealers why dont they invest in pay per click campaigns targeted specifically at new car purchasers. Google Adwords allow you to geographically target your ads down to a particular town or city which is perfect for the car industry. Real Estate agents generally operate in much smaller areas, as small in some cases as one or two suburbs of a whole city. This means that geographic targetting can have mixed results for our industry but not so with car dealers.

I ran a few searches online for Subaru cars and all the ad slots were filled with the different car portals including carsales.com.au, carpoint.com.au, privatefleet.com.au and carsguide.com.au. Not one local dealer trying to generate enquiries at a fraction of what the portals would charge.

Now real estate portals use adwords too but because of the per enquiry charge rate  of the car portals they are effectively engaging in a form of “Enquiry Arbitrage”.   They buy an enquiry or a click for $1 from Google then they sell it to a dealer for $30. Now not all those clicks will convert to an enquiry but what if they get just a 10% conversion rate that’s still a 300% return on their investment.

Too often we look back and say that real estate agents as an industry have not done enough to insulate themselves against the sheer market strength of the real estate portals. But in light of how the motor industry are treated maybe we should be looking at the glass half full not half empty.

On another note, maybe REA should look at the motor industry. A corporation has to be constantly growing or its share prices suffer. Because they have saturated the Australian market they tried to expand overseas but was obviously no success and they ended up retreating out of some markets and blowing their investment. So instead of ramping the prices up on agents why dont they diversify in the motor industry. They have the experience in online classified advertising and their model would compete well against the per enquiry models.

Now I am the first to admit that my experience with the motor industry online is pretty limited so if anybody has anything to add on the subject I would love to hear it.

15 Comments »

Google to buy up real estate sites!

When Google ventured into real estate listings many of us thought it would signal the end of annual fee increases being charged by the likes of realestate.com.au and domain.com.au. I mentioned how it will eventually force these organisations to change their business models and build simpler, smarter platforms and I still do!

Despite making it clear that it will take time, some industry heavies quickly began commenting on how little effect Google was having on sites like realestate.com.au with increased share prices /revenues traffic figures. The most vigorous of these was writing on just about every single notable real estate blog (including his own) how it wasn’t making a jot of difference, I thought at the time, it was pretty short sighted from a person who should know better!

I also made it clear that it will take time for Google’s impact to occur. Only when Google Real Estate has similar volumes of listings and only when they include the searchability of these listings directly within the search engine will it begin to have an impact on the majors.

Now it seems Google is stepping it up a gear……..is this an aggressive phase for Google?

During a session at the 2010 Inman Real Estate Connect conference in New York, Sam Sebastian, Google’s director of local and business-to-business markets, was quoted as saying “We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.”

Read this again………
“We’re actively looking to acquire one to two small real estate companies a month.” This statement speaks volumes of just how important Google thinks real estate is to their overall search strategy. It tells me they really do think it is one of the most popular search markets. Many people are talking of Google purchasing the likes of Trulia, Roost and some other independent companies. Personally, I think they will buy into products that compliment and drive traffic to their search and real estate website rather than buy other search engines and portals, they will also more than likely delve into products to compliment their Andriod operating system and new phone offerings.

Life without Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au?
One thing is for sure, in a few years the real estate landscape will be completely different. Once Google has comparable listings and if it is confident it has a faster way to search then all that needs to happen is for consumers to become aware and use the systems and things will get tough for the portals.

Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au continue to provide a decent service to agents, however it is the control that agents are wary of – no one likes having monopolies or duopolies, it only serves the few and each and every time hurts too many businesses and stifles innovation. Google’s involvement in any major industry allows a fair price to be charged for services, forces innovation and will make companies like Realestate.com.au and Domain.com.au offer better support and services for their money.

27 Comments »

How To Get More From RealEstate.com.au Without Paying Extra Money – Part 2

Before uploading your listings onto realestate.com.au, it’s important to look at what you are trying to achieve within each part of the site. Plus, it’s important to look at realestate.com.au from an internet marketing perspective, rather than simply uploading your listings and hoping.

With this in mind, this article takes a look at how agents could improve their results from the perspective of an internet marketer and achieve the best click-thru rate that they possibly can from realestate.com.au.

In the first article on ‘How to Get More From RealEstate.com.au Without Paying Extra Money’ I discussed the Find An Agent Section of the site, in today’s session we’ll look at how to get the best results out of the Search Results Pages of realestate.com.au

The Search Results Pages are that part of the site where someone does a search for property within your area and all your listings plus your competitors’ listings appear all together under an area search, price range search or both.

For example, here’s the Search Results Pages for a search on the suburb Balmain.  http://www.realestate.com.au/cgi-bin/rsearch?id=balmain&a=qfp&cu=fn-rea&t=res

Within the Search Results Pages of the realestate.com.au site, 10 listings are displayed per page, (except for the first page where the ‘Guaranteed Top Spot’ listing appears, to make it 11 listings).

When looking at how to market your listings effectively within the Search Results Pages, it’s important to learn 3 simple internet marketing concepts.

1.    The Image Catches Their Eye
2.    The Heading Grabs Their Attention
3.    The Text Makes The Sale

Now there are a lot of agents who write ads that may look alright on paper, but these ads don’t actually convert very well once they are uploaded onto the web.

Plus, normally the same ad that is placed in print is also used online, which means that typically the same AIDA method of advertising ends up being adopted onto the web.

A = Attention
I = Interest
D = Desire
A = Action

Whilst the AIDA method still works online, to get the most out of your advertising on realestate.com.au it’s important to use AIDA twice within the same advertisement.

You see, with a typical AIDA style advertisement the call to action is left at the very end of the copy, which ends up appearing on the Property Details Page.

On realestate.com.au it’s absolutely critical to capture Attention, create Interest, develop Desire and include a call to Action within the very first part of the advertisement, because this is what the majority of people will see within the Search Results Pages.

Now you may be thinking that’s too hard or even impossible. I can assure you it’s not, because when you look at what the first call to action really is, you’ll discover that your job as a marketer within the Search Results Pages is simply to ‘Sell The Click’.

That’s right! Your listing within these Search Results Pages of realestate.com.au is racked up side by side with 9 other listings (or 10 other listings in the first page ) and your strategy at this point should be simply to ‘Sell The Click’ because once the browser has clicked open your listing, that’s where all the magic happens.

At this point the browser has not only opened the Property Details Page but at this point…

• That’s when you get a visit registered against that listing

• It’s where the client can find out your contact details

• Where they can see how professionally you promote a property

• View videos, virtual tours, floor plans & see more photos, etc

• They can share the listing with their friends on Facebook

• Send you an email enquiry or email the listing to a friend

• Print out a brochure of your listing

• See how many visits the listing has had

• View a map, get local sales information & write a street review

• Gateway to them finding out more about you & your company

• And, if you use a strategy that I’ll be teaching in an upcoming article in this series, there’s a good chance that more people will end up clicking through to your company website as well.

But, none of this happens unless they click the red ‘View Property Details’ button in the Search Results Page & open up your listing.

Here’s How To ‘Sell The Click’

There are a number of ways that you can ‘Sell The Click’ from within the Search Results Pages.

Firstly, upload the best photo of the best part of the home as the main photo (or Hero Photo as some like to call it). The main photo should preferably be an interior photo or an enticing outdoor entertaining area photo.

By using internal images, you’ll stand a better chance of catching the browsers eye because people love looking inside other peoples places. Also, you’ll find that your listing will not only stand out from your competition, but browsers will also have a tendency to click open the listing to see what the front of the property looks like too.

Additionally, selecting the right main photo to use for your listings will also have an impact on the number of visits you generate from the new Gallery section within realestate.com.au.

In the new Gallery section 10 listings appear per page, displaying only an image, property address, price, icons for number of bed – bath – garage & a red “View Details” button.

Secondly, use a great headline, not the same old boring copy like ‘4 BR Home + Pool’ or ‘Don’t Miss This One’. Put some real thought into it.

Thirdly, remember what I said earlier, that “The Text Makes The Sale”. You’ve got approx. 300 characters to write some copy at the beginning of the advertisement that can help you to ‘Sell The Click’.

You’ll find that’s plenty of space to build Desire, Interest & include a call to Action.

Finally, you may not get this right the very first time & it may take some practice but that is the beauty of the internet, you can easily make changes as you go.

I hope this helps you to drive lots more traffic to your listings on realestate.com.au without costing you any extra money.

Back soon with the next instalment. Cheers. :)

PS: If you’re not great at writing short copy that converts well, try using Twitter where you only have 140 characters to ‘Sell The Click’ or seek out a professional copywriter for some help.

No Comments »

How To Get More From RealEstate.com.au Without Paying Extra Money

If I was starting a real estate agency within Australia, one of the first online subscription based services I’d probably sign up for would be realestate.com.au simply because I know that I would need to be able to offer this service out to potential Sellers, Landlords, Buyers & Tenants to compete in the marketplace.

Maybe, some agents or suppliers may disagree & think that there would be something more important to sign up for, but in the early stages I’d put REA ahead of even creating my own website (a very close 2nd), simply because that’s where I believe the majority of client’s would want their property advertised & it’s also where I could generate the fastest exposure, enquiry & revenue stream online.

So with this in mind, I went out on a fact finding mission & visited the team at REA in their Sydney office to learn more about using their site better.

Let’s face it if you have to pay for a subscription to realestate.com.au, wouldn’t you want to know how to get the best bang for your buck out of their site? I know I would.

And that’s why I’ve decided to share a series of tips that I hope will help agents use their site more effectively, without having to pay them any extra money.

Here goes with Tip #1

Tip # 1 – Find Agent Search.

As part of setting up your realestate.com.au account, each agent gets an allocation of 10 suburbs where the agent’s details can appear within the Find Agent Search part of the realestate.com.au site.

This is where the agents appear in alphabetical order with your logo & agency name under each selected suburb.

This is an extremely important part of the realestate.com.au site, because if someone is considering selling or renting their property, then there is a high possibility that they will use the Find Agent part of the site to locate an agent.

And, as I often say during my seminars, “if a client can’t find you online then they won’t be able to do business with you.”

So, with this in mind, it’s important to make sure your company name appears in as many suburbs as you can in the Find Agent Search for your service area & also for the suburbs immediately surrounding your service area.

It appears that some agents may not be aware of this, but when setting up your account, from what realestate.com.au have told me you don’t have to include the suburb your agency is in within the suburbs you nominate.

Apparently, your agency immediately appears within the Find Agent Search section under your suburb anyway.

I don’t have a current realestate.com.au account to test this on, but I have it on good authority from the powers that be back at realestate.com.au HQ that this is correct.

Which means that if you’re not already doing this, you can now cover 11 suburbs (that’s one whole extra suburb) within the Find Agent Search & maximize your reach out to potential sellers, landlords, etc who may be searching for an agent within that extra suburb in your Service Area at no extra cost.

I hope you’ve found this first tip helpful. I’ll be back soon with Tip # 2.

Action Step # 1: Login to your admin section of realestate.com.au & check what suburbs you have allocated for your account & if you have included the suburb that your office is located in, remove it & insert an extra suburb. Once you’ve made the changes, make sure you check your work by typing in all 11 suburbs (including your office suburb) into the Find Agent Search section of the realestate.com.au site to see that your office appears within every suburb that you have identified as well as the suburb that your office exists in.

If my information from REA is correct, you should be able to have 11 suburbs covered instead of the standard 10 that many agents may currently have.

6 Comments »

Price Freeze Over: Can Realestate.com.au Justify a Price Rise?

Last February Realestate.com.au CEO Jaimie Pride announced that “I am pleased to announce that realestate.com.au is freezing residential subscription prices until February 2010*.”

It turns out of course it was not so much of a price freeze but a price cap as many agents who were below the prevailing price at that time were still increased to the higher price. Some people reported that because of an extra increase in September 2008 their number of actual prices rises didn’t actually reduce. All this means  the great gift of a price freeze in February 2009 was not as good as realestate.com.au would have you believe.

During the past year many of realestate.com.au’s add-on products have continued to increase at an amazing rate.  In August 2008 you could get a  Feature Property for $75. In the past 15 months we have seen three prices rises so that a feature property now costs an incredible $105.  Email is suppose to be free right? Not at realestate.com.au where ebrochures will actually cost you close to double of what it would to physically post a letter.

So the traditional subscription increase is back on the cards for February 2010 but can realestate.com.au justify an increase?

Lets look at a few things before we answer that.

Industry Performance

The industry has had a very bad year during 2009. Reports coming out of many of the real estate groups as they all completed their yearly awards were that many offices have experienced revenue drops of 40 to 60%.

In the midst of so much economic uncertainty people have decided to stay put and just “see what happens” when in the past they would have moved or relocated. As sales started to climb as the year rolled on another problem has reared its head and that’s a lack of salable stock. The listings are just not coming in fast enough for most agents.

Google openly shares some of its search analytics which provides us with an amazing overview of the levels of real estate interest on the web. Traditionally real estate interest on the web has 4 separate peaks every year. The biggest in January, then another around March, another around the end of the financial year and then there is the all important Spring peak. Its the spring peak where appraisal and listings numbers soar that stocks the larder for the post Christmas rush.

Here is the Google Insights graph for the Real Estate Category and as you can see the 2009 year is very different from past years.  There is no peak around March and even worse the Spring traffic actually dropped!

---

But that’s the industry as a whole.. what about realestate.com.au’s actual performance?

As any agent knows every month we get an update from the company with a new and added spin on why realestate.com.au is performing better than the past and better than their opposition.

The topic of Realestate.com.au stats was raised again in August and kicked off some interesting debate. During many phone calls Realestate.com.au was adamant that their figures were monthly uniques and even “suggested” that I run all articles I post on them  through their office for checking first…. YEAH RIGHT!

At the heart of the matter was realestate.com.au (and others) changing metrics they receive from their analytics company and renaming them as “Property Seekers”. This implies that these are people when nothing could be further from the truth.

After repeatedly asking for confirmation on their position to be provided in writing the realestate.com.au PR machine eventually provided me with an email that claimed  ”“We report on monthly unique browsers, not daily unique visitors.”

Now it got interesting… as Neilsen’s themselves decided to wade into the mix and confirmed that “the official metric that Nielsen uses to determine rankings in Market Intelligence (our cookie centric product) is actually “Average Daily Unique Browsers”.

One of the big problems I raised with the figures was cookie deletion caused figures to be exaggerated. Neilsen’s also commented on this with “That is not to say we do not report the monthly unique browsers for clients (for some it is an accurate figure due to their low frequency of visitation which means cookie deletion doesn’t have an effect) it is just that we acknowledge they are potentially overstated (especially in websites that have frequent visitation) due to cookie deletion and use from multiple locations”.

So in short,  Neilsens official metric is worked on Average Daily Unique Browsers  but they also do provide monthly figures however in websites with frequent visitation the monthly figures are potentially overstated.  Which one realestate.com.au change to be “property seekers” is still not clear  but if it is monthly as they contend then Neilsens has confirmed that the higher the number of repeat visitors the higher the overstating of the figures would be.

Regardless of what figures are used I contend that the use of the word “Property Seekers” is misleading and pure marketing spin. During a phone call I received from a realestate.com.au PR rep I asked why they changed the name to “Property Seekers” and the response I got was that stats needed to be “dumbed down” for agents to understand.

It should not be any surprise that agents can’t trust the portals own performance statistics.  In our area we have 11 local agencies and over the course of the last 12 months 8 of those agencies have claimed to be the market leader.  Puffery and boasting is one thing, I would just like to see better transparency on offer for the statistics they quote. Dumb them down but refrain from twisting the definitions and  provide the full data for those that don’t need the simpler version.

So how is the performance of realestate.com.au really going right now?

Using Google Trends for Websites we can see that not surprisingly realestate.com.au traffic has dropped significantly over the past 12 months.

---

In fact it looks as though the traffic figures are down by as much as 40% from last year alone.  I should say that this is typical of the industry and most of the portals will show similar drops.

Another metric that comes into play is the number of enquiries that the portal generates but that is not an easy figure to get a hold of.  Each office should look at their own enquiry levels  but I would think that with the industry traffic down and realestate.com.au’s traffic down that the vast majority of agents would also be experiencing drops in the number of enquiries from all portals including realestate.com.au.

So What Increase Can They Justify?

Realestate.com.au have been rolling out a few changes recently but nothing adds value and in fact many people will argue that their feature set has gone backwards.  Agents contact details are no no longer on display so when a potential buyer prints the browser page there is no easy way to contact the agent and those agents with a standard subscription now no longer have their salespersons details on display.

In fact the whole concept of a premium subscription has gone out the window with 85% of agents now on premium.  This means that premium is now the standard and this has created that many feature properties in popular suburbs that when combined with the 200 property limit for searches  and high levels of property under contract it is possible for a non feature property listing to last only a matter of days in suburb based searches.

The changes made to the phone numbers are trying to detect when a visitor looks for the phone details. It does not take too much stretching of the imagination to see that realestate.com.au is going to use this information to justify the next price increase.

Many people will probably argue the should not increase their subscription fees at all … but costs go up.. so I could understand an increase up to the current inflation levels but if we see an  increase with double digits like previous years I would not want to be one of the realestate.com.au account managers on the frontline.  Life for them will get real difficult real quick as they are the ones who often bear the brunt of agents frustrations. Maybe they should be given danger pay!!

Still, all in all I am pretty sure they will not hike the price as much as Domain tried on us this year. We cancelled our Domain subscription when they wanted to increase their subscription for our office by 170%… and that’s not a typo. That’s an INCREASE of 170% so nearly three times what we were paying before.

52 Comments »