Marketing New Construction Real Estate

We are excited to announce our partnershipe with Affluent Magazine and AffluentMagazine.com.

Affluent Magazine is nationally circulated reaching 59,013 affluent households that have an assessed evaluation of their residenceof $3,000,000 or greater. Affluent Magazine is read by over 420,078 high net worth individuals each month. Additionally, Affluent Magazine is nationally distributed onboard private jets at over 100 private jet facilities throughout the United States.

AffluentMagazine.com, on schedule to be optimized by first quarter 2010 attracting approximately 50,000 unique visitors per month, is targeting a worldwide audience of affluent consumers.

Through this partnership with Affluent, we can bring some amazing exposure to everyone in the Agent Shield Network (real estate developers and real estate professionals alike) to a very desirable high end segment.

Exclusive Free Offer to Agent Shield Members (developers & real estate professionals):

www.AffluentMagazine.com will provide a listing for your brokerage/realty company at no charge in its Affluent Collections Luxury Directory through December 31, 2010. The directory will be composed of the finest real estate companies in the United States and abroad.

The redesigned real estate directory listings (launching in October) will allow brokerage companies to include not only background information but also showcase listing* photos and key property features including but not limited to: price, MLS#, number of baths, bedrooms, year built, address, style of home, etc. It will also include an active hyperlink back to your website great for SEO for your company. *Listing may also be updated if sold, taken of the market, etc.

Here’s an example of a present real estate listing. CLICK HERE

In exchange for the complimentary company listing through 12-31-10 in the luxury directory on www.AffluentMagazine.com, Affluent is requesting a text link on your website (i.e. on your News, Media, Partner, or Sponsor page) linking back to your listing on AffluentMagazine.com.

This is a limited time offer so if you are interested, please email publisher@affluentmagazine.com.

Twitter is all the rage right now.  Everywhere you turn, everyone is saying that you need to be Tweeting.  How well does Twitter lend itself to the real estate industry?  If we take a look at Twitter’s user demographics; Twitter can be condusive in growing a real estate business.

Key Twitter User Demographic Stats:

• 32.1 Million Members (worldwide)
• Attracts Educated Young Adults
• Median Age: 31
• 50% of Members with income of $60k+

Here’s an example of how Jay Thompson, a Realtor in Pheonex, effectively utilize Twitter in his real estate business.  Click Here

Here’s an excellent presentation by Benson Wong on how Realtors should use social media.  He makes a great point on what Realtor’s should expect from social networking.  Click here to see the rest of his blog post.

How to Really Use Social Media from Benson Wong on Vimeo.

We are very excited to announce the release of Agent Shield’s social media tools.  Real Estate professionals can utilize these FREE tools to instantly market new construction properties on social media places such as their Facebook profiles, their Wordpress/Blogger blogs along with many other sites/services.

Click here to learn more.

To gain an edge in today’s overly competitive market, we have to think beyond the usual marketing avenues of the past. As Web 2.0 develops and evolve, it has created some new technologies and marketing principles that could be applied to the real estate market.

Crowdsourcing is leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. Applying the principles of crowdsourcing can be a very powerful tool to accelerate the sales of new construction properties.

To illustrate. The best marketing tool of any new development project on the internet is it’s website. Developers spend a large investment time and money to create an amazing website/marketing tool. Currently, the website can only be used by a handful of people (usually the in-house sales team) as a marketing and sales tool.

Realtors will not send their clientele to the new development website. With the in-house sales team’s contact information on the website, there’s a huge potential for the Realtor to get cut out of the transaction. With only a few people using it, the website’s market penetration is very limited and thus the development’s exposure to buyers is limited.

Imagine what would happen if that new development’s website was provided to the 2 million+ Realtors in the US and the millions more around the world to use as a marketing and sales tool? It would exponentially accelerate the development’s exposure, reach and velocity of sales. Real estate agents are the crowd!

With the invention of Agent Shield’s Web 2.0 technology, the crowdsourcing principle can be applied to accelerate the sales of new construction properties.

In a soft market where the volume and velocity of sales have slowed down significantly, a lot of companies/people are cutting back on their marketing. Right now is the time to do more marketing! If we focus on marketing now, we can captures more market share because there’s less competition. Although we have less dollars to spend on marketing, the key is to spend those dollars effectively and understanding (not guessing) how those dollars are producing (ROI).

In developing a marketing budget and strategy, there are a few things that we should do.

1. Try new marketing avenues
2. Focus on attracting internet buyers/online shoppers
3. Track and quantify every effort/dollar (ROI)

Try New Marketing Avenues: If sales are sluggish and we are not receiving results; try something new! Using the same marketing avenues and efforts will produce the same results! We all understand this but for some reason, maybe because it’s comfortable, we continue the same marketing efforts but expect the results to be different. Get out of the usual routine.

Focus on attracting internet buyers/online shoppers: With 90% of real estate buyers already shop online for homes, we need to focus our marketing efforts to attract these online shoppers. We should allocate a larger percentage of our marketing efforts/budgets online.

In the real estate industry, online shoppers are our ideal clients/demographics (especially if we are looking to accelerate the velocity of our sales). Here are some interesting statistics (thanks to Dakno Marketing).

• The average internet buyer spends an only 2.2 weeks working with the Realtor to find their home. The traditional buyer spends almost 6 weeks!

• Internet Buyers only previewed an average of 6.65 homes while the Traditional Buyer previewed 21.7.

Buyers who use the web as an important part of their buying process are usually savvy and have already invested the time to educate themselves. We can spend less time educating and more time selling.

Track and quantify every effort/dollar (ROI): Unlike expensive traditional media (newspapers, magazines, billboards, painted busses, etc), online marketing is track able and quantitative. It’s tracked automatically (avoid the human error associated with asking “how did you hear about us”) so the data is accurate. Every online marketing effort (paid or free) is 100% track able. If set up correctly, we can use Google Analytics (which is a free service) to calculate our actual ROI. Understanding which marketing avenues and campaigns are effective is one of the most important factors of any marketing.

What online/marketing avenues have worked (or not worked) for you?