Kicking and screaming?: The revision cycle that will lead to Realtor 2.0…
By: Greg Swann,
Phoenix Real Estate,
Post Archive,
RSS FeedPosted: Monday, July 17th, 2006, 6:59 pm MST
Category: Marketing, Real Estate
The Council of Residential Specialists is running a Promotional Materials Contest for CRS designees:
Great promotional materials and a solid marketing plan lead to better name recognition, more clients and a better bottom line for your business. They can also lead to great cash prizes and peer recognition when you sign up for the CRS 2006 Promotional Contest.
We are a marketing practice. We believe in marketing like fish believe in water. It would be an error to say that marketing is a part of everything we do. Instead, everything we do is a facet of our marketing vision.
Anyway, I entered two of our efforts in the contest. Unfortunately, if you’re not a member of the Council, you can’t get to the web page where the contest entries are on exhibit. From our own site, here are our two entries:
- A fairytale cottage in FQ Story — This is a web site we built for one of our listings. We do a site like this for every home we list, but this was the best one we did this year.
- How our signs work to sell your home… — This is a marketing flyer that we use to explicate our very elaborate yard sign strategy.
If, perchance, you are a Council member, please feel free to go here and here to vote for our entries. I would never, ever think to spam the voting for an on-line contest. That would reflect too great an understanding of the inter– oh, wait…
The true fact is that, until now, I have been careful not to share ideas with other Realtors. We sit back and look at absolutely everything. If we see something we think shows promise, we deconstruct it down to the original idea, then rebuild it our way, keeping what we think it good, jettisoning the rest and adding everything that is uniquely our own. But for the most part, other Realtors just act bored when we even presume to talk about marketing, so we just sit down, shut up and take it all in. Better for us, anyway: If our competitors don’t understand what we’re doing, they have no idea why it works so well — on their former clients.
I’m actually interested to see where this goes from here. The Council sent me email asking me to talk about technology and marketing issues. Cathy and I both have a lot to say on the subject. Our take is that Realtor 2.0 is either going to be adept at internet marketing — or unemployed. We’ll see how that flies in Chicago…
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Related posts:3 Comments so far
[...] Last week, I said, “Realtor 2.0 is either going to be adept at internet marketing — or unemployed.” Our own answer is that there is always room at the top, but that room at the top will be won by effective internet marketing. What disintermediation means to traditional Realtors is a reduction in the marginal cost of pursuing alternatives to traditional real estate business models. For-sale-by-owner might be a losing strategy, but how about a FSBO with an RSS feed? Even at the level of competition among individual full-service Realtors, the internet will prove to be a progressively more decisive factor. Die-hard dinosaurs counting on repeats and referrals from their sphere of influence will find their prospects drifting away one by one, some for lower prices, some for better service. [...]
[...] I’ve written about our signs before. Counting the custom rider and the rental for the post, a configuration like that shown to the right costs about $275. The post rental is per house, of course, as is the cost of the rider. The top and middle signs are re-usable, but the weather is not kind to them. We don’t want our signs to look beat-up, so we rotate them out as soon as they start to look worn. [...]
[...] I am taking of course about Bloodhound Realty’s Sign Philosophy. Mr. Swann has blogged about the evolution of his signing philosophy and related marketing efforts, more than once during the past year. I was driving around my neighborhood this week, looking at the homes on the market, and it really hit home. I almost felt like howling at the houses on my block “Where is Greg when you need him?” The vast majority of the “for sale” signs in my neighborhood, are the usual boring rectangular shape and size. It’s sad because the most interesting yard signs in my neighborhood are from Redfin (memorable because of its non-rectangular shape and the BUY ME “button” on the sign) and from Plateau Real Estate, a small & local company down the street from me, (memorable because it’s logo has gradient greens and a unique font). It’s not like Redfin’s logo and Plateau’s signs are that great, but at least they stand out amidst an ocean of boring, rectangular, monochromatic signs from most of the big and independent brokers in the area. [...]