We all know where residential real estate is now. Huge percentages of buyers begin their home searches online and sign up to receive automatic e-mails when a house matching their criteria comes to market. The big offices spend megabucks on their sites and reap hundreds of customer leads each day. There probably is not a single agent in the country without an email address and those without their own URL are few and far between. Zillow has married the web to satellite technology and Redfin is striving to make agents on the ground a relic as they pioneer what amounts to phoning in home showings and remote control offers.
Still, it is a people-to-people business and many of the top producers have resisted technology and survived quite nicely thank you. Now among the recent innovations is one that marries the personal with the technical, real estate blogs. This should come as no surprise as there are now, according to Technorati some 55 million blogs world wide and the mainstream media is beginning to treat them as a legitimate information source. The National Association of Realtors® devoted part of the program at its 2006 conference and Expo last week to the subject, inviting a panel of leading proponents of real estate blogs to speak to the subject.
Blogs, in the unlikely event you don’t know, are interactive websites where the owner suggests a topic and invites readers to comment. Blogs tend to center around a special interest - politics, pets, knitting, and thousands of other topics. Sociologists are billing them as a way to build communities and that is, in part, the direction that real estate blogs are taking.
As a marketing tactic the first priority of a blog should be to build brand identity. An agent or an office should attempt to project a personality through the blog and building community is one path to that end. An agent who is an avid golfer or one who represents golf centered developments could blend features on new golf products, tournaments or up and coming local talent with information on his real estate listings, using information to draw in the reader who will then become acquainted with the agent and perhaps add to the conversation with information or opinions of his own. That reader will then hopefully talk about the blog and the sponsoring agent in the locker room of the local club, even if only to encourage his friends read his own contribution to the site.
An agent might build a blog completely around his readers’ interest in real estate, i.e., “Talk among yourself, I will give you a topic: ‘Has the bubble burst in Des Moines?’” Everyone loves to give an opinion; to see it in print is a real plus, and blogs can be almost destructively addictive. Once a comment is posted, the author is compelled to return again and again to read any responses. All of this amounts to a lot of traffic to an agent’s web site and probably a lot of buzz from bloggers to their friends.
Tags: Mortgages, Real Estate, Homes, Market Conditions
