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.

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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.

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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.

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Who Would Have Ever Dreamt It Possible?

When Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile he set a whole new mindset for a world of possibilities and now Google has made yet another major announcement that could change the internet world as we know it.

Do you remember dial-up internet & how time consuming it was to sit there waiting for a website to appear on the computer screen or heaven forbid, trying to watch a video?

Well, if you ever had any doubts about the importance that video will play in the world of real estate marketing you may want to sit up and take notice of what Google are about to embark upon. Read the rest of this article »

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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.

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Will Your Agency Be A ‘Favourite Place’ On Google?

Google has recently developed Favourite Places on Google, which incorporates the use of QR Code technology to help customers get information about businesses via their mobile phones and drive visitors across to the reviews on their site.

Whilst the use of QR Codes hasn’t really taken off as yet, they should start to become more and more popular now that Google has jumped on board.

With Google’s Favourite Places, the reviews that appear on Google about a real estate agency will also continue to grow in importance.

Google have said that “We have not yet made a decision about plans for this program beyond the U.S.” but they have already expanded the service into Vancouver, so it looks like it could end up coming to Australia some time soon.

Businesses don’t have to pay anything to become a part of Google’s Favourite Places, but they must have signed up for a free account with the Google Local Business Centre.

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10 Ways Real Estate Agents Could Use The Apple iPad

Will the recent launch of the Apple iPad mean the end of the Listing Presentation Folder or FlipChart style presentation? Will we see agents showing off their listings via the iPad? Or perhaps they’ll be using it to watch real estate training sessions or live streamed sales meetings? Either way, could it be a Game Changer? Read the rest of this article »

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Trend for 2010: “It’s Mobile, stoopid”

Remember the iconic 1980s movie ‘Wall Street’ in which Michael Douglas walks along a beach watching the sun rise while talking into his mobile phone? The thing was about as big as his head (which was big), yet was the symbol of power, wealth, technology and cool. Looking back at it now, the device forces a smile, just like those beige box-like floppy drive PCs of the same era.

Fast forward nearly a quarter of a century, and the current generation of mobile phones are really pocket PCs, things that might have impressed Flash Gordon or Captain Kirk in earlier eras. We check our emails, surf the web, listen to music, take pictures, download and pay for apps – from anywhere. It slips into our pocket, we own it, it’s ours. With the iPhone, it’s stylish to be a geek, and if you’re a newcomer to all this, welcome to the party.

A year ago, mobile traffic to web sites, and real estate sites in particular, did not rate. Yet already 23% of Australians with mobiles use them to access the internet, even though total internet traffic is estimated to be less than 1% through a mobile device (ABS). Still early days.

Part of this could be the catch up of consumers, part of this could be the lack of mobile-ready websites and the small number of ‘real estate’ apps in the iphone App Store. A recent search of “real estate” apps turned up only 5 Australian ones (plenty of American), among these a couple of multi-office real estate agencies, and among the main portals only Domain are present.

In the States, Zillow.com were reported as saying up to 35% of their weekend traffic comes from mobile devices. Pete Flint, CEO of Trulia.com, claims (more believably) their mobile traffic is in the “5 to 10% range”, while a year ago “it was negligible”. Although iphones account for only 8% of our mobile devices, 50% of mobile traffic is coming from iphone apps. Realestate.com.au, in Australia, reported “exponential growth” to its mobile site in December (150,000 unique visitors), claiming this to be “additional” traffic.

Whatever the claims and stats being bandied about, it would appear that mobile is going to be the trend of 2010. Social media is “…like, so 2009”.

It makes intuitive sense that mobile traffic should figure more this year – the technology is here, you can be walking down that beach watching the sunrise and getting your real estate fix. There are apps being developed where you point your camera phone at a building and can see which properties are for sale, at what price and what has sold recently. Househunting is an activity that still takes us out and about, checking into home opens, trawling suburbs in our cars, walking down streets. With the mobile in our pocket, do we really need anything else?

So get ready for the upsurge of mobile web designers and iphone app developers. (There will be snake oil salesmen among them.) And with that, the question – do we “mobilise” our web site or get an iphone app developed, or both, or neither? The former allows your site to be accessible on most, if not all net-ready mobiles (much more fiddly to have coded than you might think). The latter allows people to download your app, have it in their menu making it easily accessible. Apps are sexy and cool, great PR spin, but are more expensive to develop. And how do you get YOUR app downloaded, especially when (in say a year or two’s time) there are hundreds of Australian real estate apps in the iStore, rather than 5? This is the brave new world we seem to be moving into.

Photo Credit – Jamie Riddell, http://www.flickr.com/photos/jamieriddell/2166586104/

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Video Tutorial: How to Create a Free Real Estate Blog in 25 minutes

The word Blog is short for the word “web log”.  Blogs first started in the late 1990’s but really became popular around the year 2000 and today there are hundreds of millions of blogs around the world. You are even  reading a blog right now.

Social Networking followed blogs by about 5 years and started gaining momentum soon after the millennium. Websites like Facebook and Twitter have gained hugely in popularity and proactive agents have been early adopters of social networking.

The problem with social networking from a marketing perspective is that their instantaneous nature means that they are very much like throwing handfulls of snow in a snowball fight and hoping some of them hit home. Stop throwing and you will stop hitting people. This means that to get great results you have to be constantly posting which can be very time consuming for many agents.

Tweets on Twitter have a lifespan measured in minutes and will normally be most effective within 10 to 15 minutes of posting. Facebook posts are a little longer lasting but their effectiveness is still measured in days. Blogs posts on the other hand keeps on giving days, weeks, months and even years later.

At Nerang First National we have had our blog going for a little over a year now and during that time we have posted up 57 articles which equates to around 1 article per week. Posts that I made in the first month are still being read and attracting visitors over a year later.

In the context of our snowball fight think of blog posts like rolling your snowballs down the hill at the opposition. You write an article just once and every day it’s readership is just getting bigger and bigger with no further work from yourself.

To illustrate  this here is the statistics for two o four posts.

Funny Real Estate Photos was posted in July 2009 and has been one of our more popular articles.

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Thinking About a career in Real Estate? was written in late August and even with a limited audience that this subject would appeal to the views have been very good.

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Then you get more time sensitive posts like “Local Christmas Lights on Display” which attracted about 400 views in just the few weeks before Christmas.

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The first two articles were written when the readership was only a fraction of what it is today. If they were written today they would have much bigger peak in the first few weeks.

Every month the readership of our blog increases and in the past year we have had close to 10,000 views on the website. If the month on month growth continues we should see well over double that traffic over the next 12 months. But blog readership is not all about web visitors as articles can be read a few other ways including an RSS reader like Google Reader, and through email subscription. Unfortunately tracking those views is far more difficult.

In addition to our own readership we have also been lucky enough for about 7 or 8 of our blog articles to be picked up and republished in the Gold Coast Bulletins Lifestyle Guide with full credit back to our agency. We also use many of the blog articles on our facebook page and in our email and printed newsletters.

I talk with other agents all the time who want a start a blog but are often put off because they believe that it costs a lot or is beyond their technical skills to setup. So to show people just how easy it is I decided to take setup a blog another First National member and use screen capture software to capture the process and offer it up as a video tutorial.

The Blog I set up was for Bushby First National in Tasmania.

I asked them to provide me with just three things

1. Create an account on Wordpress.com. I could have done this as part of the process but this way they get to select their username, password and email that they want.
2. A header image  to suit the theme I was going to use which was 770 pixels x 140 pixels
3. Copy of a first article with matching pictures.

Using just those resources I was able to setup a blog on Wordpress.com and post the first article in around 25 minutes and it was all absolutely free. I took a couple of calls in between so you may see the video jump around where I stopped and started a few times.

Now what you will not see is an amazing professional Propvid style special effects, professional voice overs or mind blowing editing. What you (hopefully) will see is a quick and easy way to get your first blog up and running today. So be kind with my video skills… even you Brett!! :)

Wordpress.com is not the only free blogging service around but it is the one I recommend. The services uses the Wordpress blogging platform albeit a very locked down version to provide a free blogging service.

Wordpress is the underlying blogging platform that runs the Business2 blog and in a followup article I will cover options of how to upgrade your blog. This will cover domain mapping and even upgrading to a self hosted wordpress solution just like Business2 or my personal blog at glennbatten.com. A self hosted version of Wordpress allows you to install your own plugins and themes and provides greater functionality but you need to crawl before you walk and so a Wordpress.com blog is the perfect start that provides you with access to a powerful upgrade path for the future.

Anyway on with the show. The whole tutorial covers three separate videos thanks to Youtubes 10 minute limitation.

You will notice that the address of the blog in the video is bushbyfn.wordpress.com. Since creating the site Bushby First National has since purchased their own domain bushbyblog.com.au and used the Domain mapping upgrade on Wordpress.com (about $US10 per year) to map this new domain to their wordpress blog.

If you follow the tutorial and use it to setup your own blog please share it’s address with everyone in the comments section. Also, if  you are a real estate agent and already operate a blog for your agency then please share its address and your experiences to date so those considering setting up a blog can be inspired and learn from your experiences.

I would highly recommend any agency who wants to interact with their community, increase their brand profile and leverage more visitors to their main website consider starting up a blog. You don’t have  to go into as much detail in your articles as I have  on some of them.  Keeping it topical, opinionated and up to date is far more important.

Anybody who has been reading my articles on this site will notice the occasional cross over articles on our blog where I have written on the same subject but just from different angles. The article titled “Google Real Estate and Nerang, Highland Park, Carrara and Worongary” is the perfect example. Just write whatever comes into your head that you want to share. At first it may seem a bit foreign but you will soon be knocking out articles with ease.

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GOLD COAST FOR SALE. On Network Ten

http://www.goldcoastforsale.tv Or. The questions, and issues surrounding aggregating ‘content’ and giving new relevance to old media.

A lot us talk about doing stuff. And certainly there’s a 101 great ideas for shows of all types and sizes on property. I’ve had about a dozen myself.

But there’s a country mile between the talking and the doing.

The ‘doing’ is called going ‘the extra mile’ – and there’s not a lot of traffic on it.

Which is why I raise my ‘cowboy’ hat to a guy called Shane Gore, who’s managed to pull together a two-hour show on Gold Coast real estate – with rates, Shane explains, that go head-to-head with The Gold Coast Bulletin.

I don’t understand media buying, as I’m not in that game. So I can’t comment.

But any exercise in draining VPA from ‘The Establishment’ is not going to make for a very happy camping ground.

It has taken Shane about three years to pull it off; and he’s done so by looking at all the content suppliers on the Gold Coast, and then, very gracefully and creatively ‘pimping’ all of our services; mashing them up in a very GC show – that’s being posted by the super slick operations of BlackLab and Cutting Edge.

And these outfits are VERY SUPER BROADCAST SLICK. No doubt about that.

Plus. I use the word ‘pimping’ in, actually, a very complimentary fashion.

And no doubt Shane will take great exception to the term. But I was ‘pimped’ before I knew it, as a lot of content was downloaded from the Internet and cut into a ‘pilot’.

Without our knowledge. But there’s no great gain without a great risk.

And I like Shane and what he’s trying to do.

I’ve even signed my Non Disclosures and my Copyright waivers; and supplied copies of the $21 million in public liability insurance we need to operate in public as property ‘video’ shooters.

In fact, I have never been ‘pimped’ any better, in what is the ultimate exercise in aggregating existing content and re-purposing it for what I reckon is a dead duck medium.

And that’s TV. Closely followed by newspapers. Its a rolling bet which line of dominoes falls first.

Short of the next series of UNDERBELLY on Nine, I see nothing compelling about what’s on offer on TV anymore.

TV needs all the help it can get. I mean it IS there. We turn it ON. But it is still an idiot box.

Concepts like Shane’s that can bridge the gap and drive viewers to portals are interesting.

In fact. I wish I’d thought of GOLD COAST FOR SALE myself but I’m still very much in the bridge-mending or bridge-building stages, between myself and various competitors, so I can attempt to deliver some impartial postings – post the controversial ‘Banning Adjectives in Property’.

Shane approached most of the content suppliers on the Coast; from those offering the dreaded ‘Ken Burns Slide Show’ – which is not video, despite the fact it happens to be ‘moving’ (while anything and everything in the frame itself remains ‘still’) – and most of the digital cinematographers specializing in property.

From the GC to Brisbane.

The good. The bad. And the ugly.

I’m supporting GOLD COAST FOR SALE and we’ve licensed about three years of Gold Coast HD lifestyle for this new series.

The Burning Questions:

Will two-hours of Gold Coast real estate ‘rate’ on a Sunday morning? I’ve personally lost half a million investing in a series called JUST FOR THE RECORD on Ten. Which didn’t. The Comedy Company got my slot and the rest was history.
And will it sell property?

These are two real hard hurdles to jump.

If GOLD COAST FOR SALE can clear them, the ground rules will change.

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