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.

The luxury residential real estate prices continue to rise, contrary to the general market contraction. According to the recent report on luxury and high-end homes from Christie’s Great Estates, luxury homes selling around the country at record setting prices.

In the Colorado real estate market, luxury real estate in mountain communities such as Bachelor Gulch, Beaver Creek, and Vail have seen homes for sale keep pace with national luxury home price trend and sell for record amounts. In Telluride Mountain Village, 2007 prices were over 10% higher than the 2006 prices. Boulder County has also seen real estate values increase on the high-end properties.

The Florida real estate market’s Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast have seen increases in both demand and prices for high-end homes. Hawaii, which overall saw a 10% decline in home sales in 2007, enjoyed a 14% increase in sales of high-end properties in the same period. On the East Coast, Europeans, Mid-easterners and a growing number of South Americans form the majority of the foreign buyers. In the West Coast and Hawaii markets, Australia and the Asian Pacific countries dominate. With expected changes easing the ability to obtain visas, China and South Korea are poised to become a larger part of the market. Both markets enjoy a resurgence of Canadian buyers now that the Canadian dollar is on par with the American dollar.

In the competitive world of Internet real estate marketing, blogs, neighborhood news tools and email “new property” notifications are standard. In order to stand out, websites are putting more emphasis on editorial content. To take advantage of the international interest in American luxury properties, real estate websites have adapted by adding more information on their niche market through very informative area luxury lifestyle guides and currency converters.

The market appeal to the luxury home buyer is not based so much on school locations, value and price, as on the lifestyle the home affords. Price is part of the picture, of course, but with 28% of foreign buyers purchasing their luxury property for cash (20% more than US buyers), price is not a hurdle. Real estate websites that add content on an area’s high-end life style amenities help create the market through their attractive and educational presentation.

Successful real estate agents in the luxury market know the power of Internet marketing as a foundation to their traditional marketing methods of colorful flyers and networking with associates. Starting with their own real estate website, designed to appeal to high-end buyers, they also utilize high visibility websites such as the Wall Street Journal’s website and the NAR’s website to steer traffic to their website. With many luxury home buyers leading “movable feast” lifestyles, the Internet is one stable real estate information source for the luxury market, where ever it may be.