The agent has the responsibility to not only be fair to the public, but to their competing agents and broker as well.

Websites are currently becoming one of the most successful means of marketing, communication and sharing of resources. Unfortunately most agents only think about themselves and not about the concerns of the buyers and/or seller. Most agent websites are a shrine unto themselves. The old saying is so true with websites: “Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care”. Remembering this one statement will give agents and their clients the biggest win-win.

If you provide your clients with what they want first, they’ll willingly take what you want them to see. So take a look at your Home page and look at it from the perspective of the buyer. Ask yourself if this is information that YOU would be interested in reading.

In this section, we’ll be talking about all the major incentives and features that your buyer will want to see on your website. I’ll be drawing from websites that I oversee all over the country whose owners earn between $50,000 to $100,000 per year just from their website as passive income.

One of the most important features that make up compelling websites is the “Subscribe to New Listings” or “New Listings Alert” widget. This feature is an invitation for the buyer to fill in a form of the parameters they’d like to use as their preferred home. Then as homes that meet these parameters come available, the buyer gets an email. Another similar feature used however mainly for sellers is the Featured Listing.

We’ll also discuss the kind of pages that you create in your website. Are you creating “static” or “dynamic” pages, and what’s the difference? And of course a discussion of websites wouldn’t be complete without video tours.

When deciding to either upgrade or begin a new website, you need to answer one very important question. Are you going to build a website, or are you going to build a blog site that looks like a website? The first has the backbone of HTML code and can be built from either a template site or as a custom format.

The blog site format typically has a WordPress backbone and can look like a plain old blog site or can be misconstrued to be a website. The question then comes, if you’re using a framework to make it look like a website, why not just create it as a website. Good question. And there is a very good answer for this. In fact there are some very good answers. Let’s take a look at some of the differences between websites and blog sites first.

Ease of navigation – A website would normally contain an index or menu, repeated on every page, listing all the available pages. Most blog sites, however, are usually navigated from one page to another or from links within posts to other related posts. Generally a blog will have a sidebar in which recent posts are listed as well as an archive where you can see the posts for any given month. A blog will also have categories, which differentiate between the types or topics of posts. This being said, the blog site can navigate exactly the same as the website.

Ease of updating. Appending a page to a website would commonly necessitate some knowledge of HTML (hypertext markup language) and the need for some sort of webcoding software. Blogs ordinarily have a content management system which pretty much does everything for you, apart from actually typing the posts. The software will organize everything for you and will automatically update your archive, etc.

User-friendliness. Making a blog attention-getting and easy to use is fairly simple because there are a lot of templates readily available, plus plugins and widgets. In general they have an easy to use comment facility. A website can generally only be revised by its owner, so the browsing experience isn’t interrupted by rubbish.

The choice is your choice and yours alone but there are times when blogs are better for your business and times when a website is the only way to go. Are you trying to create one landing page that will rank well and from which you can funnel all of the traffic you generate to other pages for the products you’re promoting? Or, do you want people to come back often and check frequently for updates to your site while it’s quickly climbing to the top of the search engine heap in your chosen keywords?

Once you have the answer to that question you’ll know, without a doubt, if a website that is static or a blog that is always being updated and added to is a more appropriate choice for your business.

The most useful mashup is the use of combining the  functionality of the IDX listing addresses with the Google mapping tool. This is probably the best of all real estate mashup tools. When doing a Map Search, after the search parameters are input, the map pops up with small balloons/pins indicating where each of the resulting matches can be found.

Now click on any of the balloons and a brief description will show as well as along the right-hand side of the map, the highlighted listing will show. If you didn’t click on the MLS# link from the pop-up, you can click on it in the highlighted listing on the right to see full listing details. It wasn’t that long ago that this technology wasn’t even thought of.

While interactive mashups with MLS data can get a little expensive, you can certainly add your own Google Map mashup for your own listings, office or other purposes. Here is a little about what you’d be doing and the steps to take:

The great thing about the Google Maps program is that you can use it in just about any way you want. If you can envision a certain tool in your mind, you can find a way to create it through a real estate mashup using Google Maps. I’ve seen web developers do some pretty amazing things with this tool, but I won’t go too far into web development weeds. Instead, I’ll show you how to use this program to create a simple real estate mashup for your website, one that shows the location of your listed properties.

Before I get to the steps involved in this process, let me give you a basic overview of what you’re going to do. To create a mashup for your real estate website using the Google Maps program, you’ll sign in to your Google account, go to their maps application, enter data for your mapping points (your property listings, in this scenario), and then embed the resulting map onto your website for your site visitors to use.

Now let’s walk through the steps involved in creating a real estate mashup with Google Maps and publishing it onto your website.

Step 1 – Sign in to your Google account. What’s a Google account? Well if you use AdWords, Analytics, Gmail, or any other Google application, you would log in with the same information you use to access those programs. If necessary, sign up for an account. It’s free.

Step 2 – Once you have successfully logged in to your Google account, visit their maps program. It can be found at maps.google.com.

Step 3 – Click on the “My Maps” link at the top of the page.

Step 4 – If you’re creating a new real estate mashup from scratch, click on the button that says “Create new map.”

Step 5 – Give your map a title and description in the fields provided.

Step 6 – Now you’re ready to add the items you want to show up in your map. Within the context of a real estate mashup, this usually means putting the addresses for your property listings, open houses, maybe your office location, etc. You can do this in several ways. One way is to use the “placemark” tool.

Step 7 – I recommend zooming the map in as much as possible when adding a placemark. This allows you to put the icon exactly where you want it. It will then stay in place as you click and drag, or zoom in and out. That way, when your website visitors zoom the map in, they will see an accurate location for each item.

Step 8 – When you add a placemark, you can also include notes. You can enter the property address, a description and more. In fact, the placemark notes work like miniature web pages. You can put HTML code into the notes, which means you can add pictures of the property, hyperlinks and more. This is the information people will see when they click on a certain placemark.

Step 9 – When you’re done, be sure to save the map with a descriptive name. Your saved maps will always be there for you, so you can edit / update them as you wish.

Step 10 – To publish the map / mashup onto your real estate website, you would simply click on the link that says “link” and copy the HTML code provided. Paste the HTML code onto the web page where you want the map to appear.

Before the you can even build your website, you need to know who your target audience is. This goes hand in hand with your real estate SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. Is it buyers, sellers, or both? While the answer is both, the better answer is primarily buyers with some features for sellers. Why? Because it’s the buyer that originates the transaction, and it’s the buyer that is doing most of the searching on the Internet.

This being said, the next question is what is the most effective and responsible tool to implement on the website. NAR again gives us the answer here. In study after study, they show that the number one thing that buyers are looking for are properties. Following this is information about communities. The bottom line that most buyers are looking for is “Search the MLS” or “Search All Properties”.

This being said, it’s no longer enough to just deliver a long list of properties that meet the requirements of the public’s request. Nowadays the broker must provide much more to be competitive and to garner trust and confidence from the public. As has been shown with the UAR website, map searches with pinpoint listings, school districts, zip codes, shopping and more are a part of what the public can now demand.

The easiest way to provide this feature for the buyer is to be able to use your local MLS data in the form of IDX (Internet Data Exchange). Most Boards have different 3rd party IDX companies that can access their database of listings to be shown in full detail. In fact, the data can be set up such that all the company’s listings are shown with full detail and all other company listings with full detail except no listing contact information.

IDX is a tool that must be available to all brokers as it includes much more than just a search of the MLS. Various IDX tools can also show just the broker’s listings, do a Quick Search and even do a “Subscribe to New Listings” as mention in the Agent section.

With IDX, the broker never has to go in to manually add, delete or modify listings in any way. The IDX tool does this for the broker automatically as these changes occur. Thus it’s the ultimate in interactive tools for the broker to have at their fingertips.

It should also be stressed that because all listings taken whether by the broker’s agents or themselves are their ultimate responsibility. Because of this, IDX may also be used by the broker’s agents, but only with the broker’s authority. All information that goes out to the public with regard to all listings taken by the broker is their responsibility to be correct. So when listings are taken by the agent, brokers must make sure that all information can be verified and correct as they are responsible to the Board and the Division should there be mistakes down the road.

Please help save our real estate industry. On July 21, 2010, our President signed into law the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. It’s another federal statute responding to the financial meltdown of 2008 that occurred in part because the Federal government unwisely forced banks to take on risky loans.

In reality, this statute was nothing more than government taking over our industry with the most sweeping regulatory changes since the Great Depression. It’s just another regulation that says, “Government knows better than you how to run your business.”

But does it? Ask yourself this question: How many of your buyers can afford to pay 20% down?

Answer: According to NAR statistics, only about 60% of them, in most markets. And of those, most would have to wait 14 years to do it in many markets.

This means that an average family paying $1,200 a month rent would be spending over a $200,000 that could otherwise be going toward mortgage payments without this regulation. That’s a lose-lose for everyone!

I fail to see where the Federal government is helping by forcing another regulation on our industry.

A Healthy Market is the Key

Now we need your help. Opposition to this destructive regulation has broad, bi-partisan grassroots support, but we need to contact our legislators and get the votes in Congress to defeat this proposal before August 1, 2011.

I believe that a healthy real estate market is the key to our economic recovery in this great nation. And real estate agents know best how to make this happen, not government. Help us get those regulators out of our pockets today!

The three most important steps you can take today are:

1. We urge you to stand with us and to donate to the American Leadership Fund today with a secure contribution of $1,000, $500, $250, $50 or whatever you are able to give to help us raise another $5,000 in the next 24 hours. You can choose a monthly amount or a one-time donation. (My wife and I have spent well over this amount personally and we are asking for your support to continue on).

2. Call your Congressional representatives today and let them know you oppose the QRM amendment to the Dodd-Frank Act and;

3. Sign up http://americanleadershipfund.com/ for updates and forward this message to your friends. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Randy Eagar

NAR has entire teams of programmers and copywriters that do nothing but input volumes of material for the benefit of its members. During our time here we could not even scratch the surface. However it’s well worth your time to go to the site and use their search tool to look around for areas of interest.

One of the areas that I always search for is the “NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers”. This is an extremely rich statistical report of how and why buyers and sellers buy and sell real estate. What use to cost over $150 in a bound book, now costs only $19.95 as a download with no expiration. Included in this report are:

1. 1.       Characteristics of Buyers              5.  Financing the Home Bought
2. 2.       Characteristics of Homes              6.  Home Sellers Experience
3. 3.       The Home Search Process             7.  Home Selling w R.E. Prof.
4. 4.       Home Buying and R.E. Profess.     8.  For Sale By Owners 

One of the more interesting and interactive parts of the NAR website are the RSS Feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and they are dotted throughout the Home Page. RSS Feeds give the agent the ability to subscribe to and stay up to date with almost any subject interesting and needed by them. In addition, there is an entire section of topics that you can subscribe to in order to get constant updates to information of interest. Just click on the “STAY CONNECTED”/RSS link. This will take you to a list of 36 different topics that can be delivered to you. There is everything from Appraisals to Government Affairs to Research and Technology. And best yet, there is no charge for this up to date information. 

NAR has not only a huge amount of information for its members as mentioned previously, but also for the public at large. These white papers, reviews and research papers can be downloaded and used in the agent’s presentations for both listings as well as buyer usage.

Finally, NAR is huge into education. Not only does it offer the Code of Ethics training, but also links to every designation, webinar and video under its wide spreading umbrella. Pretty much anything that you’d like to know about can be found in the REALTOR.org education area. 

Nobody says “if we can build a computer, then . . .”, or “if we can build a super computer that can think like a human, then . . .”. So many technological advances have been made in the last century. The factory, the automobile, electric light, telephone, cameras, copy/fax/printers and many other devices.

But of all man’s technological achievements, the one that continues to stand out and for one brief moment brought the world together took place in July of 1969 with the words “That’s one small step for man . . .”. To commemorate this achievement I decided to create a video capturing the original video of that first flight with the launch of that great Apollo rocket. See if it doesn’t give you chills as you think back:

The online version of this is the online press release, which is the very same as the printed news release except it is electronic and much more viral.

But the biggest and fastest growing of these online press releases are the personal RSS feeds. In this instance, the individual becomes the Editor-in-Chief and spews out whatever news they come across or decide to create. Many blog sites such as the Huffington Post have become so popular with bloggers and readers that they have been able to sell their blog sites for big money. In the case of Huffington Post which sold for 315 million to AOL.

Now maybe you’re not a huge news organization, but you can attract visitors by:

1. Continually posting news
2. Posting interesting or controversial news
3. Send out online press releases across the major online news wires
4. Draw your posts into your social media such as Facebook, Twitter and such

There is a whole world of news, views and information just waiting for you to post it. For more information on our two part series of the Power of RSS Feeds, click on the video below:

Nowadays because of the ability to get news instantaneously on the Internet and through RSS Feeds, newspapers are being seen as “old news”. Many people have already read all about a late-breaking story by the time it reaches the morning paper.

A great example is the huge story of the killing of Osama Bin Laden over the weekend. As the story broke, everyone ran to their computers, ipads and smartphones to look up the story. Savvy newspapers and news organizations now have their own online version. But the RSS Feed delivers the story to those who subscribe to it immediately.

The benefit of the RSS Feed is that the story is not linear. What does this mean? If you watch a TV story, you have to keep watching the story as it unfolds as the TV producers want you to watch it . . . from beginning to end. On the other hand, if the story is posted on the Internet, links can be placed within the story so that the reader can jump off to read about the background of Bin Laden, the town he was found in, press coverage and so forth. In other words, you can read the story in your way of interest.

For more information about how to set RSS Feeds up and the power of marketing with them see part 1 of our 2 part video below:

This video is gives some quick tips on how to create/modify your domain name.