In the evolving world of real estate Internet marketing, a new and successful real estate website strategy has evolved called “hyper local” marketing. This strategy has been driven by three elements: Google (the usual given), home buyers search techniques and real estate agents’ ability to build great website content base with neighborhood news tools and blogs.

Google decided to steer search terms “yourcity real estate” to larger real estate firms and directory style websites. Theoretically these websites are authoritative lists that give home buyers and sellers more options from which to choose. The algorithm will most likely get tweaked some more as time goes on. When Weather Underground shows up on the first page for real estate keywords, one has to wonder… What this means is that the Google front page competition shifts to the neighborhood, suburb and smaller real estate market areas’ keywords.

Home buyers’ search techniques are migrating to niche markets since A) the Internet can zoom in to any level of search granularity and B) using the broad search term “yourcity real estate” tends to turn up out of state, national websites. To find local Realtors and Realtors with specific areas of expertise, real estate searchers are using keywords that are becoming more market specific, such as “residential single family detached yoursuburb”.

With real estate agents able to research and add niche market specific blog entries to their websites, website visitors are able to find agents by their niche markets. Neighborhood news tools allow agents to post large articles that can encompass an areas history, scenic and cultural attractions, school data and general neighborhood descriptions.

The traffic that hyper marketing attracts is smaller in volume, but higher in quality. The real estate Internet marketplace is ripe for real estate agents to add their neighborhood or niche market content to their websites.

The nature of real estate marketing today is akin to the ocean before the storm clouds appear. To the tourist the water looks great, to the old salt, the wave patterns portend a big storm over the horizon. Much of real estate marketing has not changed, the post cards, the continual meeting people live and developing and expanding the referral network, and the newspaper and magazine advertising.

But as real estate agent Burke Smith said back in 2007, “Technology won’t replace agents; agents with technology will replace agents.” What is masking this real estate marketing sea change is real estate agents’ natural propensity to not fix something that does not appear to be broken. The most successful real estate agents of today are the ones with the least impetus to embrace real estate Internet marketing or to treat is as an auxiliary marketing tool.

The nature of a market’s change is that the new idea starts small and, even at 100% growth, does not significantly change the market’s dynamics. Then when the 10% market share doubles to 20% the major players in the market take notice, but they are too late to adapt. Detroit ignored the Japanese imports and the customers’ desire for small, trouble-free cars driving that market. Similarly real estate websites were once thought of as the small world of technology freaks selling to computer geeks. But consumer’s buying habits have changed tremendously from 1998 to 2008. The luxury of shopping from home at all hours of the day caused many computer-averse shoppers to master their computer’s Internet browser.

The National Association of Realtors figure on the percentage of buyers who search for houses online is almost 80%. Clouding the picture perhaps is the inability to draw a line from the Internet listings searches to the final sales. The agents with the technology, with their one, two, three or more real estate websites, are not waiting for the dust to clear. They have detected the number of real estate website leads that turn into sales increase dramatically year over year and know which way the home selling market is heading. Real estate brokerages that are hiring agents to handle their overflow of leads from their real estate websites are also aware of the marketing shift.

The Internet has turned shopping for homes for sale into a virtual journey. MLS listings are evolving online from static images to walk through slide shows or videos. Google Earth has made checking the neighborhood something anyone can do from satellite photos. While the shoppers are on virtual house shopping trips, it pays to have a virtual real estate storefront.

As part of your grand real estate marketing campaign, you write an informative entry on your real estate blog detailing the changes in your local market of homes for sale…but no readers contact you. One small step can make your time blogging time well spent. In fact, there may be several areas in your marketing where one small step will increase your leads and your Internet exposure.

After you have written your blog entry (and checked the grammar and spelling) you upload it to your site. In your blog editor, look for an icon that looks like chain links. This is for adding hyperlinks - a coded link to another page on the Internet. By highlighting words in your article, such as your city’s name, your real estate agency’s name or the words “please contact me”, and clicking on the hyperlink icon you can link these words to your real estate website’s Contact Us page. In marketing, this is anticipating needs and shortening the steps. If your article triggers a website visitor’s interest, make the path to turning them into a lead easy - provide a link to your contact information. Use this technique when you add articles to your neighborhood news tool also.

Similarly, never send out an email without including your real estate website’s address in the signature. There are several reasons:

1. Reinforce your brand (as reflected in your domain name), and
2. Use every avenue to drive traffic to your website (how many of your emails get forwarded? OK, so sending really good jokes is now marketing!).

One of the ways Google measures your real estate website is by the traffic it generates. So while search engines lead traffic to your site, conversely, when the search engines detect your website getting a lot of traffic (directed from business cards, print ads, etc.) it benefits your real estate website’s search engine ranking.

Another underused area is answering machine messages. Include an invitation on your business answering machine to visit your website to search your listings, blog entries, and buyer and seller guides.

These are just a few ideas to examine the real estate marketing steps you are already taking and tweaking them to make the most of the opportunities.

2008 is the year real estate marketing dollars pour more into Internet marketing and less into newspapers. It almost happened in 2007 with newspapers retaining about 36% of the marketing budget (yet declining) and real estate Internet marketing increasing to 33%.

This trend reflects the increase in real estate clients reached through the Internet. Real estate Internet marketing has already eclipsed the walk-in market. As the National Association of Realtors reported, almost 80% of homebuyers start their search on the Internet. Part of the equation is that newspapers get updated once a day, real estate websites can be updated quickly as new property becomes available. Home buyers and sellers are always interested in the most up-to-date market information.

As Stefan Swanepoel points out in his research on the 2008 real estate trends, this marketing shift means that “as a very general rule, agents need to ensure that their websites are ’sticky.’ In short that means that real estate websites need to be:

• Unique, local, relevant - content that makes buyers and sellers want to stay on your site.
• Constantly changing content - at least daily.
• Visual content - images, podcasts and multimedia.
• Viral content - content that people can share with others.”

From a look at Swanepoel’s short list, two strategic steps stand out:

1. Dive into learning the latest technology. It is part of staying at the forefront of effective real estate marketing. Indeed, virtual tours - video or slide picture tours - of homes and properties are a marketing tool that only an real estate Internet website can cost-effectively provide. Virtual tours on television are costly and usually a one-shot exposure. On a real estate website, the tour runs whenever the website visitor clicks on it. Very customer-centric.
2. Make sure you are working on your real estate website - either adding articles, blog entries, property listing updates. Ranking high on Google is worth the investment of time and money to attract leads. Just remember, even if you don’t think so, all your successful competitors believe it is so.

When entering or seeking to be competitive in the Internet marketing arena with your real estate website, rely on a website design professional such as Internet Marketing Consultants. Just like it is wise for home buyers and sellers to rely on a real estate professional such as you.

When honing your real estate website on a target real estate market, take into account Generation Y. Generation Y is the 18 to 30 year olds who pose a doubly potent market for real estate agents utilizing real estate websites to garner greater market share. National Association of Realtor’s Senior Research Analyst Jessica Lautz recently checked the home buying statistics on this age group and found why they are such a potent target market.

More than any other age group, 82% of Gen Y home buyers used a real estate agent in their purchase. Most of them were first-time home buyers. Interestingly, most of them viewed their home as a better store of wealth than the stock market and paid attention to both the quality of the house and the quality of the neighborhood.

What is best for real estate agents with websites is that 36% found their home on the Internet and another 35% found their home through their local Realtor. Jessica Lautz points out “These unique home buyers are the youngest of the home buying segment, and are the most likely to purchase a home in the next two years in comparison to any other age group.”

Oh yes, the average income for these first-time home buyers is $61,000. They get most of their information through the Internet, want to use a real estate agent and are ready to invest in their own home. Is your real estate website targeting this potential market?

The cold engineering world of real estate technology has crossed the line to enhance your real estate offices’ decor. The days of the photo covered tack boards may be numbered, if they aren’t already over in your office.

A repeated pattern with technology is someone creates a new tool or technology, which other creative people then think of new ways of using that technology or tool. The same is true for the elegant picture frames that have the technology to display slide shows. Originally marketed for showing family images, the digital picture frames have been discovered by real estate agents.

Real estate agents are transferring their listings’ photos from their computers to the digital picture frames. Like many computer accessories, the connection is a simple USB connection. Slide shows created on the computer are copied to the frames. The picture frames, now adapted to the real estate office, show homes for sale on a regular showing.

Several attributes of the slide show are that the movement of pictures is more eye-catching than static photos and the photo’s colors or light/darkness ratios can be enhanced with software such as Photoshop or Gimp so the real estate property can be shown in its best light.

Digital picture frames can show pictures in sizes from 6″ to 10.4″ (measured diagonally across the screen like laptop measurements). They range in price from $80 to $200. Some of the more expensive models added MP3 players so you can even have music in the background!

Bring your real estate office into the technically proficient age and spruce up the place a bit!

The good news is that real estate agents can edit their real estate video material with inexpensive, readily available software. Free programs such as MS Movie Maker and Apple’s iMovie can make entry level video editing very inexpensive. Some newer PCs come with Muvee editing software (Start > All Programs > Movie Technology > muveeproducer) or you can purchase it for under $100 online. Once you have worked with editing software, you are better able to pick a professional application, such as Apple’s Final Cut or Adobe’s Premiere Pro CS3, depending on what features you want or what platform (Apple or PC) that you want to use.

If you are editing your real estate video for YouTube, they recommend you encode your video in MPEG4 format, size it to 320 x 240 resolution, set your framerate to 30 frames per second (30fps), and use MP3 audio. Since YouTube’s player really uses a 425 x 318 resolution, you may only want to shrink your video to that size. The benefit of the smaller resolution is that the file size is smaller and uploads faster to YouTube. Unfortunately, if you send the video at the recommended size, YouTube “upscales” your video to the 425 x 318 resolution, which degrades the quality of your images.

YouTube officially accepts uploaded videos in AVI, WMV, MOV, MPEG and MP4 formats. Newer uploads are encoded by YouTube to support the AppleTV and iPhone.

When editing your shots, always place your best shots at the beginning of your movie. Given the “jump to hyperspace” nature of website visitors, they may never get to the end of the virtual tour movie.

When doing the voiceover, speak conversationally and clearly. Leave quiet time at the end of a view so your website viewer can view the shot while thinking over what you have said. If you do use background music to add a sense of continuity to the video, make sure it is in the background and not competing for your viewer’s attention. Your voice-over is your opportunity to replicate your walk-through skills of creating a picture in the viewers’ minds.

Visually, to keep the continuity, do not use jarring transitions. Simple transitions are more natural. Also you can do some sharpening and color correction before exporting. FLV compression (used by YouTube) tends to soften an image’s edges. Experiment with your setting to find the amount of sharpening that looks good. If you do add too much sharpening, don’t worry, YouTube’s encoder blurring images will save you.

With practice, editing and adding virtual tours to your real estate website will go faster and better. There is no better time to enter the video space of internet marketing of your real estate properties than the present.

Zolve.com is an internet business exchange platform for real estate agents that was created to simplify the hit or miss process of referrals and referral tracking. As a work in process (launched in October 2007), any new feature Zolve adds to its website platform has to answer the question “How can Zolve directly help real estate agents on the street grow their business?” Zolve has taken the marketplace of real estate agents online - to send, track and receive referrals and evaluate real estate professionals around the world.

Zolve is the creation of Colorado Springs real estate broker Brian Wilson while he was deployed in Iraq. In a recent interview, Brian, Zolve’s CEO, told Reggie Nicolay of MyTechOpinion.com, “First and foremost, Zolve‚s platform completely systematizes the entire referral process so it can be executed and tracked online. Secondly, the Zolve network will be comprised of members with online profiles and consumer ratings that simplify the process of choosing referral partners. Of high importance, it helps real estate professional to ‘be found online’ which is no small challenge. There needs to be some reasonable alternatives to every web-based real estate professional in a market all competing for the first 10 search results on the search engine.”

Similar to ActiveRain, once you join you can add your real estate agent or mortgage officer profile and blog or respond to blog entries.  Unlike ActiveRain, the social networking side of the website is not the main focus. It is a useful adjunct allowing agents another avenue to send people to their website and build a reputable inbound link from another real estate industry website.

Zolve.com intends to streamline and simplify the internet-based referral business by:

• Expanding your real estate “sphere of influence” in your local market, but especially to markets outside your local area. Since it is the internet - that means international also.
• Being a reception point for referrals from other agents.
• Sending referrals using a digital referral agreement that provides for automated progress reports and that creates a digital “paper trail” of the referral transaction.
• Allowing the posting of ratings and feedback from customers and referring member agents each time a transaction is closed using the Zolve.com network.

Starting out in the Colorado Springs real estate market, it has already over 2200 real estate agent members all over the United States. That is part of the beauty of having a real estate website: live local, sell global.

Creating a sales situation in the mortgage and real estate business rests on credibility and the strength of the relationship. Understanding how your clients view your profession, both good and bad, is key to knowing what relationship barriers you need to overcome. Do you know what negative images you must dispel in order to rocket your customer relationships forward?

The first step in the counter intuitive self promotion campaign is to list all the things about mortgage loan officers that people find frustrating. Then introduce step two, which is your personal work habits or expertise that overcomes these barriers - get on the same side of the table!

Your real estate website’s agent bio page is actually a good page to sell yourself in this way. By listing the negative things that happen in loan transactions, you show yourself to be an experienced loan officer who looks ahead so as not to be caught unawares by potential closing disasters.

Address early the frustrations of not knowing where in the loan process the client is and how long the process should take. Give your clients information upfront on the possible delays and what steps need to be taken to overcome basic obstacles. This can be a helpful mortgage guide that you offer for free on your home loan website.

Touch-base phone calls and email reminders can seem like nagging unless your clients are informed in advance the steps and timing you have found necessary to land a loan on time. Always couch the steps in terms of advancing their dream, not just to get the job done. People will absorb the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” as long as they can keep their eye on the great benefit at the end of the process.

List all the other frustrations you hear from people who go through the loan process. Bring them up in your bio and then show, preferably with testimonials, how you help your clients avoid these financing pitfalls. Testimonials from real estate agents as well as satisfied clients add tremendous weight to your loan officer biography.

Often, the problem we face reading our biographies is that we know them from our perspective too well. When going over your website biography, try to read it from the perspective of your potential client. See if you have made your strongest points, not about your best mortgage officer features, but about your clients’ benefits. Counter intuitive as it sounds, your website biography should be mostly about your customers, not you.