Constructing your perfect online real estate media platform

Stage Two – (for those who missed Stage One)

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A common theme within the real estate industry is when an agent speaks with a vendor who just completed a new home where they always say “we would do many things different with our next home” – the same too applies with agent websites.

Agents struggle to upgrade their own websites yet they boast the latest mobile phone technologies. Telephones are not the solution for generating market activity enquiries. Unless your online media platform is switched on and intelligently activated those telephone enquiries will diminish. In this new century agents/agencies are judged on what their respective online platform delivers where more importantly this involves the businesses driving the communication not vice versa. How many names, telephone numbers, email addresses do you presently have in “your” electronic database?

“You can run – but you can’t hide.” Don’t hide rather start seeking, delivering and then exceeding your online expectations. Move your business to the future given online technologies with aligned marketing strategies are moving at such a frenetic pace that even the most savvy of online real estate businesses are struggling to keep – up. The savvy real estate businesses are the first point of contact for new listings to prospective purchasers which are delivered via an email alert – your personal viewing invitation. Invite the call and invoke – The Law of Reciprocity.

We launched our online media platform back on September 15, 2000. Call it what you want just that at the end of the day we were actually chasing something that was yet to be recognised nor properly discovered for that matter. Five years later, Google entered the online world and the rest is history where today, it’s all about climbing that Google search engine optimisation (SEO) ladder. For all your individual demographic markets one has to explore so that you can then fast track your online SEO position. Just like market positions which are all about growing (not declining) so in which direction is your online strategy headed – better still, do you actually have one?

In life, we are all consumers where not a single day goes by that we don’t buy product(s). When you are buying something you are drawn to product presentation. Change hats – as a real estate agent ask yourself how you are presenting and communicating your properties on your real estate media platform. Are you tracking your online traffic on a daily and weekly basis – your property website as compared to the paid portals? Don’t rely on external forces rather concentrate on your internal deliveries to consumers. When you get the mix right your website must be the (primary) source and the property portals (back – up) secondary for your online communications. Drive your business not others that you invest with. Your online message to consumers has to be your number one priority.
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Online guarantees a market – print suggests a circulation market. Just because you buy a newspaper does not suggest that you want to buy a property – the smartest online real estate agencies work from within not without. I take Unique Browsers (UB’s) well over circulation figures any day – given that UB’s are consumer activated who specifically go to your website in search of information. When consumers are not chasing your website then something is alarmingly amiss?

With Stage 2 – I want to focus on the four key ingredients that I believe assure you of the perfect building process for your online media platform. Much like building a home these four points are what I consider the “bricks and mortar”. You need to build on your foundations first.

• 1. Technology
• 2. Database
• 3. Communication
• 4. Future

All four are actually intertwined although the key processes are the identification, application and integration is to ensure that you are applying best practice for your real estate media platform. When the right technology is applied you can effectively contact your database and communicate your business activity online to your key demographic markets.

TECHNOLOGY

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One word keeps resonating – WordPress which launched to the public on November 2005 a state – of – the – art publishing platform that is free. When I look at the leading websites globally they are all using WordPress. We have been running WordPress for just over twelve months now – and I am one of their greatest fans – the perfect online publisher. WordPress also, provides a fantastic database function that administers our daily database email alerts and also, the flight centre for our subscriber weekly newsletter.

In conjunction with WordPress we run Agentpoint which manages our website individual property presentations for all our listings (the back-end). The dashboard (control centre) required absolutely no training for our staff – a vital ingredient for business owners that struggle to understand online. The transition period to a smart online business must apply the Kiss Theory: Keep it Simple Stupid. If you understand it – you use it. If you don’t understand it you don’t use it!

DATABASE

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The Achilles heel for most real estate businesses – agents own vendors not buyers. If a business is running multiple databases it is terminally ill, where in all probability no one is singing from the one hymn book. Your business is simply a one agency platform that is collectively united or a divorced communication process. United we stand – divided your business will fall. The leading real estate online businesses are running the one (and only) database platform.

COMMUNICATION

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Remember the Telstra advertisement “Why didn’t you call?” Verbal communication is important – email alerts supersede memory loss provided you are managing your database correctly. Database entry = communication. For the cost of a postage stamp (not including an envelope) you can send out thousands of email alerts. Calibrate your business so that you can communicate with your online subscribers. Activate don’t detonate your online communication platform.

FUTURE

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When was the last time you used the White Pages (print edition) to look up a telephone number? Consumers use search engines for over ninety per cent (and growing daily) of their respective enquiries. We still use print with online where the global financial crisis offered an amazing Litmus Test – that being significant declines in vendor paid advertising (VPA). As a consequence we moved our business to online – (refer points 1, 2 and 3) and outperformed all of our competitors ($63,000,000 – June 2009 month sales.)

Which takes me to point 4 – you can’t expect to remain relevant unless you embrace, adapt and activate your real estate media platform.

Online is a magnificent tool – just you have to work on it. We all know what happens when the tools (of trade) go down – your competitors build something bigger and better. Otherwise known (as work in progress) where online today, is very progressive, aggressive and obsessive. Just look at what Google did to Microsoft (whom had many years start on them).

Sit back – take three breathes, and design your perfect online strategy for 2010 and beyond.

All I ask is that where is your online business today – not tomorrow? Today, it happens and tomorrow it follows. (Hmm, I should claim that quote.)

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Australian Real Estate SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Part 1

Search engines are the  key to generating significant traffic on the internet. It can certainly be supplemented and enhanced by social networking like Facebook, Blogs and the Twitter but search engines are King. In other places around the world a number of search engines are very popular but in Australia, there is only one serious contender for the crown and thats Google.

Even well known brands in our industry like realestate.com.au have over 30% of their traffic delivered every single day by Google. Many of the returning vistors would be returning visitors have already arrived from the search engines in the past.

What this Article Series is.. and what it isnt

This article is going to be one in a series covering the topic of Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for short as it applies to the Australian Real Estate Industry. Search Engine Optimisation is the process of getting your site ranked higher in the search engines and thus generating more traffic.

This article is going to cover the basics of Search Engine Optimisation and how to get more visitors to your website. We are not going to be covering any advanced topics and everything discussed should be able to be completed by the average Australian Real Estate Agent with minimal technical skill. Each step is fairly easy but if you need help just ask for help in the comments section.

The restrictions of some content management systems will mean a few of you may not be able to do specific things but if thats the case, just skip that section and move on. You will probably have have to pay for some things to be done on your website but it should be very minimal as most things you will be able to do yourself.

Please understand that I am not going to provide a step be step guide of every single mouse click or form you have to fill in.  That would require something about 10 times the size. Each step is very easy to do and millions of people from a range of skill levels have already been there before you. If you dont understand anything or want some help, just ask.

What is Search Engine Optimisation?

Now before we get too heavily into the subject I must point out a few things. SEO is considered a black art because there is no rule book or documented procedures to follow. Search engines use proprietary algorithms to rank all the websites in the world and they don’t share how that algorithm works for obvious reasons. This means that SEO experts around the world analyse in every fine detail the websites that do rank at the top and they attempt to reverse engineer just what makes a site rank well.

The very basics that form the core are universally agreed by most SEO experts but other than those you will always find someone somewhere who will disagree on any specific tactic or point. Also many experts who agree on a specific SEO strategy might still disagree on the importance that specific issue means in the calculating of web ranking. The important thing to remember is that it is the overall effect of everything that will deliver you results.

What Sort of Results Can You Expect?
SEO cannot work miracles! If your agency is in some small little town about 800km west of civilisation then the worlds best SEO is not going to create more people looking to buy real estate in your area. Better SEO than your competitors will get you more share of the existing searches but it cannot create more searches out of thin air.  It also takes time for everything to work, a lot less than it use to, but it does not not happen overnight. You may first notice changes to how you rank in a few weeks after we finish but the full effect of what you do wont be felt for a few months at least.

In each article I am going to try and give you additional resources for further reading and if anybody at all has anything to add or share to the articles feel free to comment away.

I am aiming to have each article in the series require about 2 hours work and the target is for 6 articles. There is a specific logic to the order of these articles because some things either have to be done before others or they take longer to start acting.

Lets Get Started!

To measure the success of what you are going to undertake we need to record exactly where you are now. This will set a baseline that you have to work from. During this article there is going to be things you have to send your web provider. Obviously sending them each item in one email to be all done together will be the cheapest way to get this added to your site.

Website Grader Report

Website Grader produces a report on your website and gives you an overall grade out of 100. This is not perfect by any means but it is the best overall ranking of a website currently available and is perfect to compare how you score today and how you score after a few months. It takes a lot of factors into consideration when ranking a website. Request a report on your website. A good number would be between 80-100.Any score under that and you really need to do some work on your site to start getting results. Read the report it gives you as it will explain what you are doing right, and what still needs work.

Web Analytics

To understand just what is happening on your site including how many visitors you get and what pages they visit you need some sort of web analytics reporting. A visitor count or hit counters just don’t cut it anymore. If you don’t have detailed statistics on your web visitors you need to install one.

I strongly suggest Google Analytics which is totally free although you may be charged by your web provider to install it. Hubonline recently announced a special for June for nearly $600 which also includes short property urls. For my mind this is highway robbery.  In contrast I believe Portplus will install Google Analytics on your website for under $100 and I think they do short urls as standard.

If you have a Google account such as a gmail account you can use it to log into Google Analytics and create a profile for your website otherwise just create an account now. Google Analytics will provide you with some code that you need to send your web provider to get them to inject it into every page on your site. If you don’t want to use Google Analytics then see if your web provider has another detailed statistics package they can offer but dont just rely on property views.

Google Webmaster

Google Webmaster is a suite of tools for managing how your site integrates with Google Search. We will cover some of those tools in future articles but for now just setup the account and get the verification process underway.

Create an account at Google Webmaster using your Google Account login details you just used for Google Analytics. Add a profile for your website and it will ask you to verify in one of two different ways. Select the meta tag option and send that to your web provider to add to the code of your homepage.

Microsoft Bing Webmaster and Yahoo Site Explorer

The other major search providers, Microsoft and Yahoo also have their own versions of Google Webmaster. Create accounts with Microsoft Bing Webmasters and Yahoo Site Explorer and you should setup accounts with both of them and add your website profile. Select the meta tag verification option for both and send these meta tags through to your web provider.

Sitemaps

A modern website should have a sitemap which provides instructions to search engines on exactly what pages you have, when they were last updated and how important are they. To find out if you have a sitemap on your site already you need to add the word sitemap.xml to your web address in a web browser. For our agency site the web address is http://www.nfn.com.au so we enter http://www.nfn.com.au/sitemap.xml and we find that we have a sitemap on our website.

If you don’t have a sitemap don’t panic you need to contact your web provider and ask them to create a sitemap for your site and ask them to place a reference to that sitemap in your robots.txt file. Dont worry what all that means just tell them and only get concerned if their techs don’t understand it.

You will not be able to add your website’s sitemap to Google Webmaster, Microsoft Bing Webmaster and Yahoo Sitexplorer until you have verified all of your accounts. I will remind you again in the next article but don’t forget to send your web provider the verification instructions and get them to setup a Sitemap for you if you don’t already have one.

Save Your Searches

Identify the three or four suburbs that make up your core trade area and use them to search google printing out the first two pages of results each time. Add the words “real estate”, “property”, “real estate agent”, “rentals” and “property for sale” and do a search on each.

So just for the suburb of Nerang I would conduct the following searches on Google and print out the first two pages of results for each.

1. Nerang
2. Nerang real estate
3. Nerang Property
4. Nerang real estate agent
5. Nerang rentals
6. Nerang property for sale

Repeat for each of your core suburbs and identify just where your site returns for each of those results. In the future you are going to run the same searches and if everything has worked out well you will be ranking higher. Ideally you want to be coming in the top three for every search on every one of your core suburbs. Ideally you want to be number 1 for each search but top 3 will still be pretty good.

Next Article

We have now set a baseline to work from so you can see just what your work results in and started some prep work we will follow up in in future articles. The next article in the series will cover link building and getting your site listed in a range of online real estate and general business directories.

Further Reading

Read up on the Real Estate SEO Study as it shows you how important your pages look on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP’s)

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Dumb and Dumber Real Estate Awards 2008

Well what a year it has been, with just about every major company in the real estate and classifieds market vying for entry into this years awards.

So how do you make our dumb and dumber awards? Well quite simply, you make a schoolboy mistake, try to cover something up or worse still knowingly do something that is so obviously dumb to everyone else aside from your inner sanctum.

So here is our list for this year, enjoy!

1. WINNER – REA Group – Realestate.com.au

What do you do when one of your email servers have hundred’s of thousands’s of property email enquiries stuck and not delivered for months and months on end to real estate agents battling through tough times? Well for starters some bright spark decided we will just deliver them to agents who had no clue of the age of the emails! Once the story broke here on business2.com.au REA then went into damage control and placed a note in agent admin and then later sent out an email explaining the situation to unsuspecting agents. This left agents embarrassed – their reputations tarnished and having to apologise to ten’s of thousand’s of enquirers.

REA offered a heartfelt apology, discussed compensation, but decided to just weather the storm and continue business as usual. REA’s reputation for care has never been worse and will take a hell of a lot of work to win back agents trust. More price rises to come will not help their cause. Fluffy promotional emails will not do anything either, hard work, improved customer service and some humility will help.

2. RUNNER UP – PBL & Microsoft

Get a photo op with a bunch of Steve Jobs wannabes on launch, spend ten’s of millions of dollars marketing a website with out-of-date and sold listings, less than 30% of your rivals listings (and the same data), do buddy deals with a handful of the major franchise groups along with the worst real estate interface to come out of the 21st century and what do you get? Well you get them running scared and selling it off in 12 months for less than 3% of what they put into it. Still it has to be one of his better deals since he took over from daddy. If you want to know how NOT to build and launch a real estate portal, note the myhome.com.au debacle. The new owners are trying their best and have really got back to basics. May be worth the try now!

3. Major Telcos

Put together pathetic customers service, disgraceful data plans, slow networks and you have yourself a major Telco. Telstra may have the best wireless Internet in Australia, but it has the most expensive – restrictive plans around and Optus is not much better. It pays big time to look around. Maybe Telstra should spend some time and money on the people that make them money rather than trying to protect their monopoly. Optus does not fare much better and you only have to look into the Whirpool forums to see how many people loath their Telcos.

4. The Financial Meltdown

Oh, how we were once impressed by our finance market friends driving their Maserati’s and Porsches, how we listened to their amazing insights into how the money markets worked, how impressed we were about how they speculate and how their models make everyone rich and successful. Turns out they were all pretty much clueless, having fancy degrees on a wall means nothing if you don’t have real world smarts. If making money is your only goal then you will eventually fail, problem is – this time around everyone suffered.

It is ok to strive for an open market economy, but should mum and dads around the world have to bail them out when it all goes pear-shaped?

5. Get it ‘FREE’ Mobile Domain

SMS property alerts on your mobile, great idea and absolutely free – well free as in 0.55 cents an SMS. Ooops sorry forgot to mention that! ACCC noted this and slapped Fairfax over the knuckles.

6. REA’s Peak Industry Body

Way way back in March 2007 (nearly 2 years ago, REA setup ‘The Peak Industry Body’, this was no doubt an effort to ‘connect’ with you, ‘Joe the Plumber’, meeting ‘at least’ 6 times a year would equate to around 24 meetings so far. I think each meeting ended with a Hollowmen ‘steady as she goes approach’ because unless I am mistaken nothing has ever come out of this – except continual price rises :)

7. Internet Explorer

To every single software/website or so called IT expert that only works in Internet Explorer or in the latter case only only allows you to use IE6, hang your heads in shame. Every time I use Internet Explorer I am frustrated, whether it is testing sites in IE6 or 7 and now IE8.

The latest debacle for Internet Explorer came just a few days ago.

The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted Web page using Internet Explorer. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. This security update is rated Critical for Internet Explorer 5.01, Internet Explorer 6, Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1, and Internet Explorer 7.

Basically anyone could access your PC and take anything they liked. Microsoft stated that it is always looking at ways to improve their product, no, they are always looking at ways to get it to at least work. One friend of mine lost $4,800 just yesterday and is scrambling to get it back because someone hacked their PC.

So free yourself from the train wreck of a browser which is Internet Explorer and jump with Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome and leave, buggy, slow, insecure software behind. If your software provider can’t cut it, then leave them behind as well.

Note: Also read some reviews on anti virus software and get it installed on all pc’s.

8. Why are we waiting?

Google needs to get its act together and release a solution that the whole market is waiting for. Every day I am asked the question and each day I have no answer. I know they are working on it – but come on guys and girls. Worldwide the advertisers market for a stand-alone real estate website from Google would be worth billions and billions of dollars of new advertising revenue.

9. Yellow Pages

Time to get a new advertising campaign, no one really cares about you any more and the campaigns warning us of impending financial gloom if we do not advertise with you just don’t cut it any more. Rising costs, hundreds of thousands of books dumped in rubbish bins or left rotting in the rain – and a business model that just plain sucks. And don’t get me started on Yellow Pages Online.

10. Newspapers

I love newspapers, I really do, they serve a great part of discussion in our community, but if you think articles about Nicole Kidman’s lips or Brad and Angelina are going to lift your readership think again. Newspapers need to rebuild their classifieds to suit a new market. Once upon a time agents pushed newspaper advertising for them, only a few do now and the market is getting smaller by the day. Keep this up and classified newspapers are finished. Simple test, get two people, one in a newspaper and one online to find a 3 bedroom 2 bathroom property in Wagga Wagga.

Solution?
1. Rebuild your classifieds for ease of use.
2. Offer annual subscriptions at a loss to build base readership – $10.
3. Get into real property journalism that gets people talking. (not paid for fluff promos)

11. New Real Estate Portals

So you want to help agents get away from REA and Domain? No you don’t, you want to make money and sell out to one or the other once you have some success. Oh and $10,000 you have committed does not build you a national portal – not even built off shore. So, stop telling me you care and how exciting your product is and do the hard yards, start local and build out, and your systems had better be good!

12. Kevin Rudd

Oh Kevin you had us all, you promised so much, you work long hours and impress us with grandiose words like ‘education revolution’. Here’s the thing, deep down inside you know you are boring, we do too, but we knew that already, we just want you to make a difference, we want some bold initiatives – not only for this industry but for Australia. In 2009 there is to be no more buck passing, no more ‘we are not immune’.

We didn’t know what cards you had, we thought it must have been good, 3 deuces in the hand? A straight? A full house? A flush? A straight flush? If we find out all you had was a piddly small pair – you will be out with the bathwater. So get down and dirty, make some bold reforms and get this country back on track.

13. Printed Local Property Guides

Every week about 24 local newspapers are dumped on our doorstep (we only have 12 apartments) and every week about 23 of them end up in the trash. You all thought it was a great idea to launch a property guide. How wrong it has all turned out to be. I will give you all less than 12 months. When vendors clearly say no to agents about advertising in local newspapers you know you are in trouble, my bet is that you will keep thinking you can turn it around.

14. Agent Websites

I spent a day trawling through agent websites randomly a few days ago. I looked at over 500 sites. Ouch, apart from seeing about 100 websites that are exactly the same (template sites), so many do not work in all major browsers. Here is a hint, if newspapers are no longer viable in this climate for marketing, where is your differentiator? Yes its your website! If you have a good one, then let every vendor know about it and ask them to compare. If you don’t – then you only have yourself to blame.

15. Vanity Blogging

Everyone is getting into blogging and you should be too. However steer clear of chest thumping and telling everyone how wonderful you and your company are – because no one is listening. Write about what you know and your opinions on the market, promote local businesses and get everyone involved. Welcome dissent, as long as it is not abusive or profane – promote it.

16. Vanity Boards

If agents need a pointer as to why some people think sign boards at the front of homes for sale and rent are more about the promoting real estate agents than the properties they are promoting then look no further than those ‘look at me boards’ promoting massive pictures of agents and in most cases nothing about the property. Ok, we get it, you absolutely love yourselves and it is cheaper than billboards but just let it go, the will to want to do it, should be enough of a sign that you have lost the plot.

17. Channels 7, 9,10

So you have your own little ratings system which bears no semblance to actual figures (good to keep that ad revenue coming in) however you are all finished unless you adapt. Showing old series just doesn’t cut it (a lot of people download the new series anyway), blatant chest thumping is so 1980′s and no innovation means a slow grinding death. Think about digital, get together, innovate with set top boxes supported by all and create a new market for direct localisation of ad serving.

18. Advertising Agencies

If you want to know who NOT to listen to when it comes to marketing your products or services just look at advertising agencies. I had a taste of them in the late 90′s and thought I would go through the process again, hoping they had learnt something about the Internet since then. I am not going to name the agencies, but if the group I met are any indication, stay well away, save your money and do it yourself!

19. James Packer

James oh James, what a business you inherited, tv networks, magazines, prime Internet locations, casinos and the list goes on. Here’s an idea, lets build a business our family empire will be proud of, lets dump just about everything we have built over the years and just get into gambling. What a noble business to be in and what a time to do it? We never cared to much about how rich you were, we liked Kerry, he was like one of us, we loved his stories (even if they were myths) and we liked you. If all you want to do is make money – then good luck to you – but you only have a few billion left buddy!

20. Mobile Agents Angst

So you have a local competitor that does not have an office (road warrior) – get over it. This is the 21st century and mobile agents working from home or on the road are going to be a lot more common over the coming years. If you use your office as a springboard to connect with vendors and buyers then you have nothing to worry about.

21. Real Estate Institutes

Can someone tell me what these organisations actually do?

A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of our readers, see you all again in 2009!

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Greg Ellis announced as new CEO for REA

The Chairman of the REA Group, Richard Freudenstein, today announced the appointment of Greg Ellis as the company’s new Chief Executive Officer. Ellis is currently Marketing Director Asia Online Services for Microsoft. He will take on the new role on Monday, 8 September. Read the rest of this article »

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Microsoft in bid to buy Yahoo

Microsoft got out the the moneybox this week with a bold AUD 50 billion bid for advertising giant Yahoo. What this means for the Australian market is anyone’s guess but as Wired Magazines report “Do Two Losers Make a Winner?” is probably bang on in relation to search and advertising. Yahoo are aligned with Channel 7 and Domain whilst Microsoft are aligned with Nine and MyHome.

This will basically leave two companies slugging it out for search advertising, but for me the race has ended for now and it will take someone new and something innovative to topple Google.

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