Marketing New Construction Real Estate

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.

Map Widget

While you may be in D.C. or Los Angeles, South Florida, etc, your prospects may be interested in a second home in Costa Rica or Dominican Republic, Florida, the mountians, etc. The idea is by having a diverse resort section on your webpage, you not only position yourself as an international agent, you can capture prospects and earn referral fees for sales in other areas — and provide information to consumers. Everyone wins!

Adding a resort section is very easy to do.  Go to www.AgentShield.com and sign up for a free account.  The site will walk you through the 3 steps simple steps.  If you don’t edit your own website, the last step gives you the option to send the instructions to your webmaster to complete.  It’s that EASY!

Note:  The information above includes an excerpt from a comment found on the Institute for Luxury Home Marketing’s blog.

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.

Held once every 18 months, the NAR Resort Symposium is a networking and educational event for Realtors specializing in selling resort and second homes. Realtors in attendance either already have their Resort and Second-Home Property Specialist (RSPS) certification or are attending to earn their RSPS certification. The symposium will consist of educational events, seminars, tours and social events.

When & Where: March 29-31 in Naples, FL
Hosted By: NAR and NABOR (Naples Association Board of Realtors).
Attendance: 200 – 400 Realtors with RSPS certification or in the process of acquiring

Agent Shield will be exibiting this year at the 2009 NAR Resort Symposium.  If you are attending the event, please visit us at Booth #6.

We are excited to announce Agent Shield’s partnership with The Institute for Luxury Home Marketing (ILHM).   ILHM is the premier independent authority in the training and certification of real estate agents working in the luxury market and has trained over 8,000 agents worldwide.

The Institute offers the Certified Luxury Home Marketing Specialist (CLHMS) designation for member agents who complete our specialized CLHMS training and have documented performance in the top 10% of their markets.

Agent Shield will provide all ILHM members with our web tools to  increase their market reach to include new construction, second and vacation homes.  We are excited to work with ILHM and their Realtors.

For more information about ILHM, please visit: http://www.luxuryhomemarketing.com

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?