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.

Real estate websites, like may virtual offices, mimic the demands of the traditional brick and mortar office. Major difference: the real estate website’s potential market is far more vast and therefore potentially more lucrative. It is an added benefit that it is an office that can attend to potential clients’ needs in many ways 24 hours a day. How are the traditional marketing concepts and principles carried over to the virtual office?

1. Driving business to your office.
Just as hanging your shingle out in front of your office is only effective for a portion of the traffic driving by the office - not enough to create a meaningful business. In the same way, just having a real estate website is also not enough. Driving traffic to your website has at least three main areas:

• search engine optimization to leverage the visibility search engines provide,
• including your real estate website address on all your printed and radio/TV advertising, and
• placing your website address in your signature on all your email correspondence.

2. Networking.
Just as social organizations and acquaintances offer opportunities to network with potential clients, the Internet has both social sites like MySpace and FaceBook for networking. More market-specific networking opportunities are the real estate blogging sites, such as Active Rain. Real estate blog websites can be used to post helpful information along with your website’s address in your signature. Build credibility and visibility.

3. Open Branch offices.
Just as more offices provide more exposure, website pages of information provide the contents that search engines seek. Each keyword-rich page becomes another “branch office” in that is another discrete piece of information for search engines to index and rank. Blogs and neighborhood news tools provide excellent opportunities to easily add content to your site and continue to expand the visibility of your virtual office.

4. Attention grabbing graphics.
Just as your printed real estate marketing materials need visual punch to attract someone’s attention, your website needs to be visually attractive and sell an image. Consumers read into a website presentation: If the website does not look professional, how serious is the agent about getting their business? If the website design looks cheap or like corners were cut, how much will corners be cut in their real estate transaction?

Continuous attention to a real estate website as part of an overall marketing program will reward real estate agents with a growing amount of business. Putting up a real estate website and expecting it to work financial miracles is akin to simply putting up your real estate sign and expecting all the business in your area to find you. You have to prime the pump.

Real estate technology continues to make advances that make a real estate agent’s life more efficient and cost of doing business lower. This time with a little help from Congress! Since Congress passed the Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (ESIGN) in 2000 to facilitate interstate and international commerce, electronic signatures on real estate contracts carry the full force and effect as actual signatures. One step closer to the “less paper office” and contracts with parties in different states or even different countries can be signed off in hours, instead of the 48 hour overnight courier turn-around time.

Real estate agents have several e-signature technologies to choose from - each has advantages for the different scenarios. One technology favors the face to face interaction whereas other technologies are more fitting for long distance document shuffling transactions.

VREO Real Estate Dashboard and Topaz Systems software applications are loaded onto tablet PCs. When stored documents demand signatures, such as a listing agreement, the parties simply sign on the line on the tablet PC. The image is stored and the signed documents can be printed, faxed or emailed. Topaz also offers hardware attachments that allow real estate agents to use their laptops. Small electronic signature pads simplu plug into to the laptop’s serial or USB data port. Both software applications interact with your real estate contracts or documents stored in Microsoft® Word (.doc) and Adobe® Acrobat (.pdf) formats. Adobe also has a Self-Sign plug-in to Adobe Acrobat for adding digital signatures.

ZipForm’s Esign software allows real estate documents to be electronically signed by one party and then printed to a digital envelope. The Esign software then encrypts the file and sends to an Internet lock box, where multiple parties can then access the file and add their electronic signature. Recipients can access the file, authenticate their identity and sign the document with just their web browser. Once the document is signed off, copies can be sent to accounting, customer service or anyone who needs to be aware of or follow up on the signed contract. ZipForm also offers real estate forms and contracts packages that utilize the Esign technology.

All the electronic software applications come with the technology to detect any changes in the real estate documents. Any changes, of course, cause the software to mark the signatures as invalid.

With the ability to quickly append and gather electronic signatures, the need to expend funds on (and wait for) overnight delivery services to gather signatures could be a decreasing. With a technology upgrade to your business laptop, you can take a giant stride to cutting the time and paperwork it takes to seal the deal!

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!

With the iPhone, Blackberry and Nokia new cell phone technology, real estate agents now have a great tool for virtually showing properties anywhere they meet a client.

Many cell phones have picture-taking capacity, but the iPhone, Blackberry and Nokia’s new phones allow real estate agents to create libraries of photos to show off properties in their listings. These are not grainy photos, but, in a benefit for real estate technology, very clear photos that easily convey the features of homes for sale in the best light.

You can quickly scroll through your entire collection or homes for sale images. With your phone images, you have the choices of e-mailing pictures to clients (yes the phones can go on the Internet) or adding them to your contacts. With iPhone, if you rotate the phone sideways, the image automatically changes to landscape mode, which comes in handy for outside pictures of homes. By using your fingers on the screen to pinch in, an image zooms in or zooms out. Nice for checking details when you are dealing with an approximately 3″ viewing screen.

Recently, one iPhone owner showed off a property, inside room photos and outside photos of house, garden and pool area. All the pictures were clear and left no doubt as to the quality of the property. All the photos were also taken by the iPhone!

All the cell phones have 2 mega pixel cameras as standard. That allows real estate agents to take very crisp pictures both for the cell phones’ screens and later when placed on the computer. This means that in the field of real estate technology, these “business ready” cell phones roll a real estate agent’s camera and computer (for emails, Internet connection and slide show presentations) into a very small package.

The Blackberry still dominates the corporate market, but with higher user satisfaction ratings, iPhone is making inroads into the commercial market. The mobile office keeps getting more mobile, smaller and able to handle several tasks. Now if our cell phones would just connect to a printer.

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.

In today’s competitive real estate market, virtual tours of homes for sale are fast becoming a real estate agent’s technology tool for capturing website visitors’ attention. Virtual tours can range from a slide show of a home’s interior and exterior photos to a movie of 180 degree or 360 degree panoramic view of different rooms in a house. Virtual tours can also be effective sales tools by capturing a 360 degree panorama of a house’s exterior and the nearby neighborhood, especially if all the neighbors’ flowering bushes are in bloom.

What does it take to set up a virtual tour? There are several ways to start using virtual tours in your Internet marketing program. The first decision to make is if the tour is a slide show or movie.

For creating slide shows, you (or your real estate website designer) can use Adobe’s Flash software. Less expensive software, such as GIF Construction Set Professional allows you to turn your photos into a slide show using animated GIF technology. This technology can also be used for spicing up the images on your website’s homepage.

Creating panoramic videos needs software to “stitch together” a series of still photos. One option is to use application service providers that hire the photographer, process the photos with their software, and post the panoramic pictures to sites like Realtor.com. Another option is to buy monthly subscriptions that allow the option of the real estate agent providing the pictures to a company that processes the photos and posts the virtual tours to various real estate websites. A third option is to buy the software, take your own pictures and create and post your own virtual tours.

Software such as PTGui Pro allows real estate agents to stitch together their photographs and make color and angle corrections. This ability to make corrections in the software comes in handy when you find that you forgot your tripod when you are at the house ready to shoot.

Just as with most technology, there are ways to get extra mileage out of your virtual home tours:

• Give CD-ROMs with the tour to the home owner to hand out to interested people;
• Send a collection of different home virtual tours to other real estate agents so they know what to expect when showing the house; and
• Have them available at your open house;

Virtual tours of the downtown shopping area and any of the area‚s picturesque city parks can also add extra pizzazz to a real estate websites.

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.

As more of the real estate market migrates to the Internet to view property, the bar is being raised on the visual information real estate website’s provide. Being an early adopter of the video technology has a great upside for your real estate website and internet marketing strategy - less competition, more visibility. Besides virtual tours on your own real estate website, using video to sell property on the Internet has ventured into the free for all world of YouTube.

Even though YouTube is known for postings of amateur videos on an astounding array of subjects, it has become an avenue for showcasing real estate. The reason is simple, less competition on keyword searches. For example, to use the keyword search “colorado springs real estate” on 21-Feb-2007 on Google shows 526,000 results. The same search on YouTube.com brings only 337 returns. On Google Video, the keyword search brings 523 returns, which also includes the YouTube videos.

YouTube.com, the free video streaming service that lets people view and share videos online, also has a feature that lets real estate agents embed their YouTube real estate video on their websites. By copying code provided by YouTube, Real estate website designers can easily place YouTube videos into the layout of your real estate website. This allows real estate agents to maximize their video advertising investment.

Recently, YouTube announced an upcoming feature that benefits real estate agents - a new analytic tool that gives agents the ability to see where their viewers are located geographically. Hopefully the analytics will go so far as to present a differentiation of embedded views vs YouTube views, bounce rates, average time spent on the video, as well a list of embeds driving views to your video. These analytics should be similar to website page tracking software.

A 40 second video can feature the attractive selling points of a property with a voice-over as well as prominently positioning the agent’s contact information. By simply changing the voice-over track, real estate agents can use the same video for both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking website visitors.

As more Internet users change to high speed connections, videos will be faster and easier to download, thus paving the way to the growing use of video presentations becoming the new standard for property descriptions.