I need your help.

My real-estate buddy came to me the other day asking my advice as to whether he should get in ‘the game’ of social media/networking/blogging or even for that matter a new website. His take was that after 25 years selling homes and trying out every new web ‘trick’ he has sold exactly zero [0] homes from it. Not a single substantial lead. He’s a very successful agent and his company does well with what he is already doing.

My initial take was, “Imagine how much more you could do with a bangin’ website!” Almost verbatim.

As we chatted more I got stumped on whether he should actually invest any money for the following reasons:

  1. He doesn’t want to distract from the time he’s currently using selling to spend more time in front of a computer (or hand-held device or whatever). He spends 30 minutes checking email in the morning, 30 at the end of the day.
  2. Real estate (to him) is all about people and it seems people are not googling “real estate agent” as much as “homes in…” His longevity as a company is word-of-mouth at it’s finest and all of that W-O-M has been minus tools like Twitter, Facebook, etc.
  3. How would someone in real estate really go about it? Is it just an issue of promoting addresses more than themselves? When people are looking for info on the area rather than the actual real estate agent they would then find this guy because he could crank out some great content/data? Does he have the time to find all the data and put it all together?
  4. It seems the ROI issue is huge for this one and when he only gets paid by selling homes, there’s not a lot of lead time for his efforts to ‘get there’. He needs something that can help elevate quickly and for a very little amount of time investment. The money investment wasn’t as much of an issue as much as the time.

I could probably go on, but wondering if there any of you out there with some thoughts/perspective on how a guy (or gal) in Real Estate can actually use social media to explode their selling margins and become a dominant player in their area.

My take is that it would require investing in promoting great content about surround schools, neighborhoods, news items relevant, safety concerns, etc. on a daily/frequent basis. Along with that would be blogging/tweeting/posting each property listed – not in the typcial MLS listing format but using fliqr /images of the property, youtube virtual tours, etc. But then I’m back to the issue of this guy doesn’t want to get away from the core schedule/plan that has helped his business succeed.

At the same time, from a business perspective, there are a TON of real estate agents out there…

For you social media gurus out there, PLEASE HELP! What are some of the real estate online marketing options you think he should explore?

Author

With over a decade of experience, I have managed online marketing for a wide range of industries including biotech, high-tech, financial, higher education, non-profit, manufacturing, hardware providers, and startups. My specialty is helping business make the right turn with their online efforts focusing on lead generation and analytics.

Leave a Reply