Real Estate Agent Tools For The Caller Registry

For successful real estate broker, there is nothing more annoying or potentially damaging than violating the countrywide Do Not Call Registry. This index of people who have explicitly opted out of phone contact from marketers was developed exclusively to help people avoid telemarketing phone calls, and much like the CanSpam act, it has done its job quite well. Nevertheless, for small business people such as REALTORS, and real estate brokers, constantly read-through this registry before making a telephone call costs time, cash and resources that are in scarce supply.

In spite of the cost, real estate professionals must adhere to this law. Any documented violation of the DNC regulation can result in a swift and sizeable fine for the real estate agent. More notably, action in recent years for violators has been dire. Thus, the benefits of compliance far outweigh the risks.

Fortunately, if a REALTOR relies on cold calling prospects, or even expired MLS listing leads, there is an easy way to ensure compliance. Real estate lead generation services such as the (Real Estate Data Exchange) include DNC verification as a fundamental part of their service offering. As a basic part of their service, companies like the RedX provide a comprehensive way to scrub listing leads against the DNC registry. This feature provides REALTORS with the added assurance that they can prospect customers and call their list of leads and be assured that they will not accidentally violate the DNC act.

In addition to the Redex do not call registry, there are numerous other marketing and lead creation services for real estate professionals. The types of tools and software vary and there is a variety of technology available. Thus, when looking for any type of lead generation service, especially if you are a REALTOR, choosing one that is DNC and CanSpam compliant is a fundamental and non-negotiable feature.

As a sales person, the responsibility of maintaining compliance with this and other laws is a fundamental requirement of doing business in America.

Real estate agents, if you are already in the market for a respectable source of expired MLS Listing Leads, then Real Estate Data Exchange. Realize the benefits on automated lead generation and the bliss of a continual flow of business to you and your office. Join Brian Learson at the RedX.net to see more on the subject of this great technology and how it can help you today.

REALTORS Save $185.00

If you have kids, or are under the age of 20, you know what that acronym stands for. For those of us who remember learning how to type on Electrolux typewriters, it may be foreign. For me, I had to look it up.

Regardless, that was the sentiment that I felt when my friends over at the RedX (Real Estate Data Exchange) gave me permission to offer huge discount on their listing lead, FSBO and Agent Website listing lead service.

As many of us can attest, they have a great product that includes a complete lead management system that interfaces with your MLS as well as multiple databases to give the correct listing contact for every expired and FSBO in your area. Their system then scrubs the data against the DNC registry to provide. Here is a link to a video demonstrating their product. http://theredx.com/demo.html

So here is what they have agreed too. In addition to waiving the $149.00 start up fee, they are also offering a 15% discount for the first three months of membership if you choose either the quarterly or monthly package. You save about $184 with this package which is fantastic.

So anyway, to take advantage of the program, us promotion code 14610 or register through this rather long URL: http://www.theredx.com/signup/4mysalespromo.html

Planet Realtor

Lockbox

I am pleased to announce that lockbox and supra ekey and strangely enough Planet Realtor which is the florida MLS system are all in my baiawick of tools from which to do a little realtor website optimization.

These new tools have been collected to help Realtors maximize their return on investment by focusing on using lockboxes as market intelligence tools to help better sale a property. The new lockbox technology includes smart phone interfaces as well as infra red technology that allows the showing agent to provide the listing agent with direct feedback about what was liked about the property.

Twitter Prospecting

I must say that I love the Twitter technology. Thanks to Iranian elections, it has reached critical mass which means that most of your target clients are not on the network. I routinely use the technology to offer discounts to the RedX service and to provide updates on dedicated the dedicated listing URL service, and know that for a REALTOR, it can be a very large source of leads.

So as a real estate agent that is new to Twitter, how do you use it to get sales leads? Well, the service provides a window into your client’s mind, and ancillary services give you instant notification when your client is thinking about real estate. You can then connect with that prospect online to direct them toward your services. It’s sort of like someone making the announcement in a crowded room that they are looking for a home, and you responding to them by saying, that’s great because I have one to sell. So how do you get set up to use Twitter as a lead generation tool? My recommendations would be as follows:

1) Register for a Twitter account, upload your picture, add your website, change the background, and make yourself at home.

2) Register for notify.me which is a notification service that will let you know if someone adds a post that includes your search terms.

3) Choose the methods by which notify.me will let you know when a search term comes up. I use google chat for my desktop and the mobile text function for when I am out.

4) Set the system to notify you when someone looks for a specific phrase that would be unique to your target clients. You can also add filters to better limit the notifications that are not pertinent. For example, use the search terms “moving to” “salt lake” and filter our terms that include words such as “planning rent.” With that phrase, you will likely get tweets from people moving to salt lake, that are not planning to rent. You can add multiple search phrases to keep track of and the notices simply popup on your desktop.

5) When a notice is received, follow that person, reply to their tweet, and offer your services. It is really that simple.

Real Estate Leads from Twitter

I have been spending time on twitter learning about its ins and outs and using the site to promote the RedX lising lead, fsbo and web marketing service, with some success. In my learning about the tool and how it is used to promote your business, it occurred to me that Twitter may be the best lead generation tool in existence for REALTORS. Where else can you get a real time notice from a total stranger that they are looking for a home?

Imaging being at an open house and getting a tweet from a someone that you don’t know or follow that is driving around six or seven miles away. The post in your phone reads “shopping for houses today, doing drive by’s” Simply by texting them back you can respond and ask them if they need any help, if they would like to stop by and check out your open house, or any number of other appropriate responses.

So what tools are available to get real time notification that a person in your area is looking for a house? In my original search, I couldn’t find an application that would perform these activities. In fact, I was legitimately planning to create the application myself. However, I did find one application that may do exactly what I was suggesting.

The Twitter Application is called EasyTweets. What it does is continually monitor Twitter for a specific keyword and immediately sends you an SMS message with a copy of the text. From there, you can respond to the person that posted the tweet by SMS or through your standard Twitter activities.

Here is the link to EasyTweets. My recommendation would be to set up your account and be very targeted using phrases you know your target clients will use. Every a fresh lead comes in, respond immediately and get the dialog going

SEO for Bing, The Jury is Still Out

I haven’t quite formed my opinion about Microsoft’s new release of their Bing search engine. In reading the reviews, I am not alone. I have spent a little time this afternoon trying to get a feel for what where my real estate listing lead site and associated links lay in the ranking. What I found is that this “because it’s not google” search alternative has a completely different algorithm which will likely require a completely different SEO strategy for your real estate website.

I am not sure if this new search engine will give google a run for its money in search engine terms. As Seth Godin put it, “Bing is trying to be the new Google. Unfortunately Google is the new Google.” However, it does have some interesting features.

Now for those of us who are trying to get our real estate website to the top of the ranking, optimizing for bing may require a different strategy. In fact, in looking up the search terms that index my site well on google, I there is little success on bing. The Expired Listing Lead term did return back my link to the RedX as the top link, but the multitude of other sites that typically show up in reference to me did not. For my Agent Online experiment, the site was not even indexed, and similar to google, real estate country did not return a link to my page, even when I typed in the exact URL. Even my wife’s’ “prenatal vitamins” page did not get indexed.

From what I can determine with the very limited experience that I have had with the site, it uses an algorithm similar to google’s but puts a high weight on sites that have been around a while along with those that are well linked. Unfortunately from an SEO standpoint there is not much that you can do to age your real estate URL.

Getting Your Site to the Top of Google –Real Time Update

To report on the progress of the experiment to demonstrate how to get your website for a given search term, in this instance “agents online” to show up within the first ten listings of Google, we have now achieved position number seventeen for the organic search. This has been about ten hours worth of work. If you are using these techniques to get a high ranking for your own real estate agent website just think of the number of prospective listings / buyers will end up landing on your website. In addition, you end up with a premium ranking and don’t need to make such a heavy investment in pay per click.

So just to recap the process, again,

1) Use google keywords tool to find a target keyword. High number of searches returning low page rank results. If you are targeting a specific service, REO’s, Short Sales, etc, you can get very targeted.

2) Register a URL using that search term. Our example for this experiment is AgentsOnline.org

3) Optimize your website or landing page to support that keyword and format the site for collection of your prospect’s contact information. For our example I created a thee page site feeding into the Listing and FSBO lead service from RedX.

4) Start getting backlinks to the URL that you have created. I add links from my blogs and created a couple of Squidoo lenses. I also comment often on the real estate blogs that I read and include the URL.

Just to summarize, that is the process. Pretty simple and if you do it three or four times, you can maximize your visibility on google which essentially automates the search engine optimization for your real estate website.