Working to gether to gain economies of scale

Well, it's conference season. I've spoken with hundreds of realtors who might want to invest in a new website or they might want to invest in some online marketing.

The fact is that most individual realtors don't have the budget to do this well. Lots of the real estate agents that we speak with are spending less than $100/month online. On their own, they're highly UNLIKELY to see any result from that C-note, but let's think about what could be done by working together.

I've also observed that these agents would be happy to spend even twice this much if they thought they would see results. Most would not be willing to jump in and spend $500/month.

Instead of every agent spending $75 or $100 per month on a website that sees almost no visitors, what would happen if everyone in the office invested together. Let's assume that your average office invested $200/agent/month. So, 10 agents pool their $2000 and make an investment. Let's see what they would get, assuming that you sign up to do all of this with Boston Logic vs. every agent signing up with a cheap template provider:

Working Together as a Real Estate Office

Each Real Estate Agent Alone

Aggregate budget: $2000/month/office The office gets a main website Each agent also gets their own site using Boston Logic's ONE System Website features: Integrated Property search Content management Save favorite searches Save favorite listings Email updates Contact an agent Mortgage calculator Take notes on listings Lead management/CRM Blogging Live Chat Real Estate Development profiles Email marketing integration RSS feeds Integrated lead management from office site and agent sites Search engine marketing campaign including Search engine optimization Pay per click management. Email blasts to all leads broadcasted monthly. Professional SEO services provided Stable search engine placement achieved Social media presence management and implementation. More traffic generated from: Facebook Twitter Linked In many more sources Consistent flow of leads Efficient PPC ad buy Each agent receives several leads per week on a consistent basis.

Budget: $200/month/agent - Each agent spends less money Office has no website or must pay for a stand-alone site that is not linked to the agents' sites Each agent gets their own site Website features: Property search Content management Save favorite listings Save searches Email updates Contact an agent Mortgage calculator Take notes on listings Unmanaged, inefficient ad words, and ad buy. Few leads generated. Agent feels helpless and lost Agent stops sped after a few months thinking that the campaign isn't effective. No search engine ranking achieved. No budget for professional SEO. Agents left on their own to implement social media strategy No lasting, consistent traffic, few leads generated

It's obvious that the economies of scare are huge!

I've been bringing this up in meetings lately. I'll report back soon and let you all now whether or not anyone actually gets behind this logic.

by David

Posted on October 20, 2009 Filed Under Personal Branding, Real Esate Marketing, Real Estate SEO, Real Estate Software, Real Estate Web Design, Real Estate Website, Real Estate Website Design, Real Estate lead generation, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Sequoia Real Estate Solutions, Strategy, Uncategorized, lead generation, leads, real estate, real estate internet marketing, social media, twitter | Leave a Comment

Announcing Logic Classroom!

Starting next month, Boston Logic will be offering the Logic Classroom, a series of instructional sessions for real estate brokers and agents about online marketing, technology, and best practices in real estate business growth.

Classes begin 11/19/09  and are free to Boston Logic's clients ($50/class for non-Boston Logic clientele)

To sign up, email Katrina at ksierant@bostonlogic.com

CLASS SCHEDULE

Web Based Lead Generation - 11/9/09
Register Now!
In this session, we will discuss the most effective online lead generation tools and techniques for finding buyers, sellers, and renters. Learn how to leverage your website, your blog, search engines, and social media. We will also delve into the science of generating leads using online marketing and effective website design.

Effective Blogging - 12/8/09
How to turn a blog into a traffic and lead generating machine.

Leveraging Social Media - 1/12/10
Teaching agents how they can leverage free social media to generate leads and a loyal client following.

Search Engine Marketing 101 - 2/9/10
The basics of Search Engine Optimization and Pay-Per-Click advertising. Realtors will learn how traffic is efficiently driven to their website from search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

by Aurora

Posted on October 14, 2009 Filed Under LogicClassroom, Personal Branding, Real Esate Marketing, Real Estate SEO, Real Estate Software, Real Estate Web Design, Real Estate Website, Real Estate Website Design, Real Estate lead generation, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Sequoia Real Estate Solutions, Strategy, lead generation, leads, real estate, real estate internet marketing, social media | 2 Comments

One System, Now with Page-Level Permissions

We've pushed a big change to the way CMS permissions work in the One System. Access permissions now reside on the page level, rather then the menu item level, which is were they really belong. When software grows and changes over time, there are always areas you know you'll need to rework, but for the moment it works, and it's a lower priority item, so you save it for another day. CMS page level permissions where one of those areas for us. In addition to more tightly locking restricted pages down, we were able to make some improvements to how the menu is rendered, which speeds up page loading.

For those who've already added restricted pages to your website, don't fear, we've migrated those permissions for you. Menu items are now displayed based on the permission of their corresponding page. So, if you've restricted a page, say for only your agents to view, the menu item for this page will only show up if the user is logged in as an agent. When you create a new page, you'll see a new sub-section in the CMS, called 'Who can see this Page?'. Clicking 'Show' will display check-boxes for the five different user types (admin, broker, agent, lead, anonymous user). By default, all users will be able to view a page, so all these check-boxes will be checked.

For system pages (like log-in, search, etc.) you won't see any editable permissions. We've pre-configured these to insure proper functioning of the system. We wanted to be sure that someone didn't accidentally prevent a user from accessing an important part of the system.

If you have any concerns, please don't hesitate to contact us. We value your opinions and insight. It helps us to improve the One System, and all our offerings.

by Jason

Posted on October 12, 2009 Filed Under LogicClassroom, Personal Branding, Real Esate Marketing, Real Estate SEO, Real Estate Software, Real Estate Website, Real Estate Website Design, Real Estate lead generation, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Sequoia Real Estate Solutions, Strategy, lead generation, leads, real estate, real estate internet marketing, social media | 1 Comment

Twittering For Fame and Fortune

Here at Boston Logic, we've been talking a lot lately about how to find new customers.  We've redesigned the website, stepped up our Blogging, continue to do SEO, and have continued to leverage AdWords as sources for building traffic numbers.  We've also been suing Twitter for 2 years now, and to build our base of followers every month.  One of the challenges has been combing through the Twittersphere for people we're interesting in connecting with.  After seeing Dominiek ter Heide's post on building a one line Twitter bot, I was inspired to build something to keep an eye on Tweets relevant to our Boston Logic, specifically Real Estate brokers and agents. For those so inclined, I've included the code at the end of this post.

What we're doing is looking for through tweets with the words 'real estate' in either the tweet or the user's description.  If we find that term, we add them as a friend (or follow them).  I've been running this for just over 24 hours on a test account (so as not to taint our existing Twitter account), and already have some interesting observations:

1) There is a lot of spam type tweets out there.  It makes sense.  It's easy to automate the process of both tweeting and following.  Just like email, there is virtually no additional cost of an additional recipient, and even if you're response rate is quite small, as your pool of followers is large enough, you're likely to get a few responses.  I think to really effectively leverage a bot, we'll need use it simply as a tool for finding people to follow, keeping a human in charge of determining whether someone is worth following or not.

2) People want to network.  Yes, I know that sounds quite obvious, that's why we use Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin; to grow our pool of people we are connected with.  Our bot has found and followed about 100 people at this point, and about a third of them have started to follow us.  This is a bit surprising to me because we've given nothing in terms of relevant or useful information.  Remember, we're just doing this on a test account. My one and only tweet is 'First Post!'.  I would assume that if we provided value through our tweets, we'd see a much higher rate of people following us after we follow them.  We'd also keep followers, instead of seeing them drop off after time.

I'm personally a bit nervous that Twitter will turn into a place dominated by bots and spam.  I'm sure the folks at Twitter share similar concerns.  I also am not sold on the value it brings.  Call me old fashioned, but I like my blogs.  I like that a good blog is a means through which to transfer knowledge. Twitter is much more of a notification tool. For me, the number of notifications quickly surpass my desire to monitor those notifications for for personal value.

Given its 'Right now' nature, I'm interested to see if we can convert some of our Twitter audience into customers.  I suspect like most forms of online-marketing, it's going to be dependent on our ability to provide value to our base.  If we can effectively do that, we'll be successful in converting some of our followers into paying customers.

For those interested, here's the code.  I leveraged John Nunemaker's fantastic Twitter gem:

require 'rubygems'

gem 'twitter'

require 'twitter'



terms = ['real estate', 'Real Estate']



httpauth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new('username', 'password')

client = Twitter::Base.new(httpauth)

friends = client.friends.map{|i| i.screen_name}



while true

  stream = Twitter.firehose

  stream.each do |tweet|

    str_tweet = tweet.text

    str_tweet += ' - ' + tweet.user.description unless tweet.user.description.nil?

    terms.each do |term|

      if str_tweet.include?(term)

        puts "tweet: #{str_tweet}"

        begin

          unless friends.include?(tweet.user.screen_name)

            client.friendship_create(tweet.user.screen_name)

            friends << tweet.user.screen_name

            puts "added: #{tweet.user.screen_name}"

          end

          rescue Twitter::NotFound

            puts "error: #{$!}"

            puts tweet.to_yaml

          rescue Twitter::General

            puts "already a contact: #{tweet.user.screen_name}"

          rescue

            puts "error: Malformed JSON"

        end

      end

    end

  end

  sleep(30)

end

by Jason

Posted on October 5, 2009 Filed Under LogicClassroom, Personal Branding, Real Estate Web Design, Real Estate Website Design, Real Estate lead generation, Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Sequoia Real Estate Solutions, Strategy, Uncategorized, lead generation, leads, real estate, real estate internet marketing, social media, twitter | 3 Comments