During our journey to building a digital real estate office, my intention is to share not only the steps that we take, but also to produce regular progress reports outlining any progress (or lack thereof) towards our goal of 3000 monthly visitors, and the end of prospecting :-).
My hope is that this blog will not only be a journal of our experiences, but become a place where new and experienced real estate agents can come together to share their marketing/sales successes, failures, questions, and concerns.
Establishing a Baseline
Now 5 months into our switch to Keller Williams and the start of our Real Estate adventures, this first report will summarize our efforts to this point, establishing a baseline from which to measure future progress.
Digital Marketing
*I will address the specifics around each asset in future blog posts
1. Website: Our first priority was a new website – our “hub” for our online marketing efforts. I built a WordPress Website on the WP Engine hosting platform. Although we are still working on organizing and optimizing it for search and lead generation, the basic webpages are complete and have been optimized.
2. IDX: We are paying a monthly fee for IDX through iHomefinder. It allows us to offer our visitors custom MLS search capability from our website, and provides the opportunity to build pages around custom searches (i.e. pre-built search pages around specific schools, communities, etc).
3. New Home Search: Although we have not done a lot with this yet, we have paid an annual fee to offer visitors to search for New Construction Homes in the Las Vegas area from our website.
4. Facebook: We’ve set up and started posting on our business Facebook page. Additionally, we’ve paid for a few small Facebook ads – branding within our farm, and advertising a couple of our open houses.
5. Additional Social Media:
Katie and I each have a LinkedIn page
Twitter account
Google+ page
Pinterest business page
still working on adding YouTube
still working on adding Instagram
5. Triberr: Triberr is a networking site for bloggers. Through Triberr you can join a tribe of bloggers that share your interests. It makes it easier to share each other’s content on social media.
6. Realtor, Zillow, Trulia: We’ve both set up free profile accounts on the major real estate sites, and have started collecting reviews from past clients on Zillow.
7. Offrs.com: Offrs is a seller lead generation platform. It uses predictive analytics to “predict” which home owners, within a specific community, are most likely to sell their home in the next few months-to-a-year. It requires a 6 month subscription.
8. Blogging: Blogging will be an important part of our on-going digital strategy. Although we have started blogging, our publishing schedule has so far been erratic and too infrequent.
9. Placester Website: Keller Williams provides all agents with a free Placester Website. We are not using it at this time, but plan to in the future.
10. eEdge: eEdge is Keller William’s Contact Management System. Through eEdge, we can track our contacts and leads and stay in touch with them through drip email campaigns. KW actually has a library of pre-written emails that can be customized/personalized and sent out in an 8×8, or 33 touches campaign (8 emails in 8 weeks, 33 touches throughout the year).
11. Mojo Dialer: the dialer automatically dials the phone numbers from my lists, allows me to make notes about each call, and to re-organize contacts based on the results of my calls.
12. Coles Realty Resource: Coles is a phone list provider. You can create lists by neighborhood, then load them into the dialer to call.
13: Landvoice: I have access to free Landvoice FSBO and Expireds lists through Landvoice during BOLD.
Off-Line Marketing
1. Open Houses: We try to hold an open house every Saturday. As we don’t have our own listings, we ask other agents if we can “borrow” their listings for an open house.
2. Open House Signs: We’ve invested in 15 branded Open House signs and would like to get more in the future.
3. Farm: We have picked out an area to farm, but other than hold open houses, and purchase the area from Offrs, we haven’t spent much time working it yet.
4. Classes: Our Keller Williams office offers regular classes for us on most aspects of real estate – how to get listings, understanding contracts, what is escrow, etc.
5. Productivity Coach: Keller Williams offers an in-house Productivity Coach that we meet with/report to once a week. We pay our coach through a portion of our future commissions so that it doesn’t create any upfront expenses for us.
6. Power Hour: Our Productivity Coach offers daily “Power Hour” sessions. These sessions are free to all agents and focus specifically on scripts.
7. Bold: Bold is a sales and motivation training session offered by Keller Williams. It takes place one day a week for 7 weeks. It focuses on shifting your mind set, prospecting, and living your life by design. I paid $800 for this class, but can earn that money back from my market center over my next 4 transactions (reimbursement plans differ from office to office).
8. List: we have a small list of renters that we helped from our time as property managers. We are continuing to contact this group so that we can hopefully help them with their next real estate transaction.
9. Sphere: We did not know anyone in Las Vegas when we moved here. Our Sphere is back in Idaho, Oregon, and Canada. We have not done a lot with our sphere yet, but do plan on contacting them for possible referrals in the future.
10. Other Agents: we’ve established relationships with a couple of agents in our office. We’ve ended up covering for them when they left on vacation. We’ve also arranged to follow up with old internet leads for some of them – splitting any commissions that are earned.
11. Networking: I am a volunteer board member on the Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America’s board of directors, and have recently started to coach the girl’s JV basketball team at a local high school.
12. Phone Calls: I’ve started calling former rental leads, old Zillow leads, our Offr’s database, and around our “just solds” , open houses, and expired listings on a regular basis. I use the Mojo, single line, dialer to make calls.
Results to Date
Obviously the most important data is the number of transactions we have closed:
Listings Sold: 0 (haven’t had a listing yet)
Buyers Closed: 6
2 from referrals from another agent
2 from Zillow referrals
2 from Open Houses
We have a handful of leads that we are currently working with.. They are from Zillow, Open Houses, and recent Prospecting (calling) efforts. None have signed contracts with us yet.
Other Numbers:
Website Traffic: from Google Analytics – 221 Visitors in the last 30 days.
Organic Search is the number that we’re looking to improve through SEO – we still have a long ways to go to reach 3000 per month.
Facebook Page: 129 Likes
Email List: 165
In looking at this information, and preparing a plan for 2017, it appears that we need to become more focused (we are a little “all over the place”), need to devote more efforts to our digital marketing, and need to increase our lead production and conversion if we are going to meet our goals for the next year.
The post Developing a Digital Real Estate Agency: Update #1 appeared first on Brent Carnduff.