An insanely great hyper-local real estate weblogging strategy: Be the community

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

In January, I told y’all that I have an insanely great idea for making a local real estate weblog successful. I actually had the idea last Summer, and I worked out all the details and software then. But we have been busy with other things, so I’ve just been sitting on this tactic for nine months.

Just lately I promised to reveal three ideas, one good, one great, one insanely great. If I were more of a showman — or an extractor of torment — I would disclose my stratagems in that order. But: I’m not going to do that. I want to talk about the big idea today, not alone because it’s time for us to implement this on Teri’s weblog.

But I do want for you to take a moment to reflect upon what a natural Teri Lussier is as a real estate weblogger. I think the post I linked to betrays a pitch-perfect understanding of the kind of writing I was talking about the other night: Here is something we share, and here is how I am involved with this shared value. Here are some of our neighbors, and here is why I feel honored to know them. The post isn’t about real estate or radio, it’s about “us.” Us? What us? Teri’s writing creates an us, creates a tiny community of two who each see themselves in the context of the larger community.

People do business with people they like. Experience? Great. Expertise? Bring it on. Integrity? I believe it. Obnoxious? Abrasive? Condescending? Overbearing? Get the hell out of my house! By design or by accident, I think Teri has landed on the intersection between cat blogs and viral blogs, and I think this is the perfect place for a hyper-local real estate weblogger to be: Personable but professional, eliciting affection while earning trust.

She delivers one hell of an introduction to everyone she meets through her weblog. The big job is to attract more people for her to meet. We’ll be talking about simpler, more mechanical means of achieving that goal as we go along. For now we’re going to talk about the naked essence of viral real estate weblogging.

What is our objective? To “connect in an emotional, visceral way with a steady population of long-term readers — neighbors, friends, family.” We want to engender a conversation, and, by doing that, to create a community of people potentially interested in hiring Teri — or you! — to represent them in real estate transactions. Long-tail search hits are good, too, but only insofar as they can be converted to clients.

What’s the benefit of creating this standing community? Only a small number of people have immediate real estate needs. The rest will have needs in the future, but the Realtor who gets that business then will be the one who is engaged with them then. If, by means of a real estate weblog, we can create a community of people who remain connected by common interests over the course of years, we stand an excellent chance of representing them when their real estate needs arise.

Lightning does strike, and, when it does, we need to move at lightning speed. But for a real estate weblog to be effective in the long-run, I think it needs to engender a long-term community of users who would not even think of using another Realtor. Do this right and you’re making your own rain — “and the rain it raineth every day.”

So how can you create a community like this?

The answer is simple and obvious, and I have been waiting for nine months for someone to come up with it:

To create the community that will fuel your real estate practice, be that community.

How’s that? Turn your most interested readers into contributors. Turn your most interested contributors into editors. Turn your community-focused real estate weblog into a community of contributors focused on your community and its real estate. By getting the readers themselves to contribute to your content, you enlist them in your cause. You ensure that they will stick around for the long haul, and you ensure that other readers will stick around to see what your contributors have to say.

Recall that authoritative, definitive writing is usually the enemy of the conversation you’re trying to spark. And yet, by it’s very nature, weblogging can bring out exactly the behavior we need to avoid: “I’m the teacher, you’re the class. I’m the reporter, you’re the audience. I’m in charge. You’re not.” For one thing, the power imbalance between posters and readers/commenters invites a stratified kind of writing. For another, people uncomfortable with the art of discursive prose will seek relief by freezing into a stiff formality. Engaging directly, as equals, with the people you hope to appeal to will ameliorate this, and the additional voices will strike different notes with other readers.

Note that I am not talking about recruiting local lenders or escrow officers or attorneys to write with you. What I’m suggesting is that you invite self-selected volunteers to participate directly in posting to your weblog.

This is actually the default state of a WordPress weblog: Unless it has been edited out, the “Meta” section of the sidebar will invite you to register. What we want to do is to draw attention to this feature, and to encourage readers to use it.

Take a look: DistinctivePhoenix.com is BloodhoundRealty.com’s hyper-local real estate weblog focused on historic and architecturally-distinctive homes in Central and North Central Phoenix. We’ve basically been sitting on this site for nine months, too busy with other work to deploy it. But — even though we’re not using them yet — the ideas we’re talking about have been built into that weblog since I set it up last July.

At the top of the sidebar, we’re encouraging people to register. If they do, their initial status is as a Contributor — able to create and save posts but not publish them. For a Contributor’s posts to be published, they have to be approved by an Editor or Administrator. Why? Flames. Libel. Pornography. Star Trek trivia. Someone has to make sure you’re not doing more harm than good. A cool benefit of doing this is that, in due course, the cream of your contributors will rise to the top. You can promote one or more to Editor status to help you keep an eye on things.

Note that there may be people who want to write for you who just don’t make the grade, for whatever reason. Because they can’t publish their own posts, you will have the opportunity to gently suggest that they find another way to contribute — or to move it on down the road if they cause more trouble than they’re worth.

Further down the sidebar at DistinctivePhoenix.com, you’ll see a menu entry called Contributor Profiles. This leads to a PHP form that contributors can use to set up their own capsule-biographies for the site. This content will be of interest to everyone who comes to the weblog, but it will also serve to bind the contributors themselves more tightly to the community we are building. Each contributor will have his or her own unique archives URL, to be emailed off with abandon to each contributor’s warm network.

What are we doing? We are taking the I-me-mine of the normal weblog hierarchy and turning it into a we-us-ours. We are giving every voluntary entrant into our community an on-going stake in the community. We’re enlisting the contributors, the readers through the contributors, the contributors’ warm networks, and, in due course, more contributors, repeating the process.

The conversation is not what you want to talk about, but but what they want to talk about. And, in talking about what they want to, they will stick around to see what is said in response, offering up responses of their own. It’s your house, it’s your kitchen table, it’s your coffee and cream, but it’s their conversation, their community. And because it is, they just might hang out at your kitchen table forever.

You must police for flames, fights, bad will. Most people want to be nice, but people have trouble modulating their behavior on-line. If you encounter an antisocial personality, you have to cut that person off right away. Nice people show consideration for each other. Mean people suck. If you open your community to mean people, you will drive the nice people away.

If you’re thinking of sending me a note saying, “I already thought of this” — don’t bother. As I said, the idea is simple and obvious, and what is amazing to me is how many real estate webloggers hadn’t thought of it before now. If you’re in that company, amend your ways now. Of all of the ideas I will discuss in the Weblogging 101 series of posts, this is by far the most important one. Get busy now repurposing your weblog to work well with contributions from your community of readers.

Potentially, real estate weblogging is a path to mega-producer status. The way it’s done now, it seems more likely to me to attract nebulously-motivated prospects, mainly buyers. If you can build the kind of long-term community I am talking about here, you can cultivate listing clients in your farm, spinning the buyers off to your buyer’s agents. In essence, we’re turning your real estate weblog into a farm, a more consistent, more intimate, more productive farm than you could build by any other means.
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