Me and Claudia and PHP: Using internet real estate marketing to — you know — sell real estate…

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So, the Arizona Republic ran an article yesterday on on-line real estate marketing and you will never in a million years guess who they did not call. I never get called for any of those kinds of things — the RaiseTheBarTab kinds of events — even though we’re doing cooler stuff than anyone I know of. I’m not weeping. I’m always very forthcoming with everything I know, but if there is going to be a cadre of Realtors dead set against learning how to do the work I do, I’m more than happy to have them working in my own market.

And I’m not bragging, either. We’re going to have a banner year, for us, in terms of volume of transactions, and we’re kicking the asses of all the canned-software Twitter-fidgets named in the article. But we are digging our way out of a deep hole, and we’re a long way from where I want us to be. I like to brag that we spend almost nothing on marketing, but the fact is that we almost never have any money to spend on marketing. I will put every Realtor in Phoenix on notice: When we have money and staff, we are going to be a force to contend with.

So, even though I don’t issue any Twitter spasms, at least not non-robotically, of late I am putting paid to a lot of new and interesting real estate marketing ideas.

What’s changed? Cathleen is giving me some Claudia time. Claudia Couts is the housekeeper I made Cathleen hire last year. She’s with us for two hours a day, six days a week. She keeps the house down to a manageable level of chaos and takes care of all the pet-maintenance duties. The idea was to open up the time that Cathleen was spending on those chores, and this has been a win-win all around.

Lately I’ve been buried in paperwork, at which I’m horrible, and I had marketing ideas that required small amounts of rote labor — at which I’m also horrible. I thought we might hire a virtual assistant, but Cathleen suggested giving Claudia a try. Very big bonus. She is meticulous, conscientious and very thorough-going — and the animals all think she hung the moon.

So I built four new weblogs to target-market niche products. I generate the basis of the content with software, then Claudia goes in and enhances that content by hand. All of this is stored on our server, to be posted automatically by email submission from a CRON job. Each new post auto-Tweets itself into the @PhoenixBargains Twitter account (which also auto-Tweets every search run from FreePhoenixMLSSearch.com). The RSS feed from each of those weblogs is auto-inherited into a corresponding Scenius scene, and those scenes are in turn echoed back on a number of our real estate web sites. They’re also echoed on a huge number of engenu pages, with the result that I can give each one of those weblog posts a temporary window on around 12,000 backlinks.

Here’s the funny part. None of this is about SEO. Search-engine marketing for real estate, so far, has been about as sophisticated as a box of puppies: You hope to be the puppy who jumps the highest when the customer chances to look your way. Our style of marketing is always about building the relationship, so everything I’m talking about — and a lot I’m not talking about — is devoted to getting prospects into our web-based marketing universe. If I can do that, it doesn’t matter how cute your puppy is. I’m selling value, not gimmicks.

Every new thing we come up with builds on all the work we’ve done so far. I don’t depend on vendorslut hacks, and I don’t have the exact same crap that every other Twitspastic doofus in town is using.

Frankly, it’s a pretty lousy time to use the internet to sell real estate. Price is everything, and speed and strategy matter a lot more than style and high-concept. But I know this market will get better, and I know that I will have more money and more staff to throw at the problem of internet real estate marketing, going forward. I have way more ideas than I have time to implement, and my competitors are too busy trading bowling scores with each other on Twitter to notice what we’re up to — so much the worse for them.

I don’t need to hear from newspaper reporters. I need to hear from buyers and sellers. I know I don’t have this down yet, but I’m pretty sure that I’m the only Realtor in this market who is even working on the problem.