Social Media Profile

5 Ways Agents Can Build A Social Media Profile

There’s no doubt that social media is a fantastic platform for reaching out to your audience. Given the quality of the people using social media every day – all 300 billion of them, the cost to promote across the platforms is fairly minimal.

It can be quite hard to maintain a decent social media on presence, whilst providing real value to customers and prospective clients. Despite this, many agents strive to keep their social media presence alive – because the audience is huge and therefore the potential business is fantastic.

Here are our top 5 tips for building a social media profile.

1)   Post Less Often

Sometimes it’s important that you can bite off what you can chew – and no more than that. By posting too much social media content, you’re risking the longevity of your social media profile’s presence.

Think about quality over quantity – if you’re pushing more posts out, you’ve potentially sacrificed quality for quantity. The solution to this is simply to post less. It will mean you don’t annoy your audience with continuous posts.

Two to three posts per week should suffice – and you’ll find that this drives engagement for much longer than if you’re posting daily. You’ll find that you also don’t run out of things to say, meaning your content will be more engaging.

2)   Don’t Automate

Social media was created by people, for people. With this in mind, you shouldn’t ever automate your social media profiles, as people can smell them from a mile away. Make sure that you keep your profiles authentic, and real – run by you or other agents in the company.

You can however, automate some posting. This is usually known as scheduling. Scheduling or automating posts is a good way to make sure that your content is reaching your target audience, in a timely manner.

Think about your target audience, as different people will use social media platforms at different times.

3)   Advertising Properties

The likes of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn all have their own advertising platforms that you can take advantage of. You can use these platforms to separate properties to sell & lease, with the organic content that you’re posting.

Instead of posting properties on your social media outlets, you could simply advertise and promote them – reducing clutter in the news feed and promoting to ideal purchasers & tenants only. This will help to show the quality of your agency, not just bombarding people with endless property options.

Use LinkedIn Sponsored Content, Facebook Ads Manager and Twitter Ads to target potential leads for sale & rental.

4)   Targeting Ads

For those of you who are a bit more savvy with advertising platforms on social media, you might want to think about using appraisal methods for people who’ve visited your site through an ad.

This will allow you to target people who actively use your site as a result of advertising. Make sure that you follow up on these potential leads, as they’re actively seeking out your website to view content and possible rental/purchasing opportunities.

5)   Post Engaging Content

Last but not least, you should think about posting engaging content. This might seem obvious because let’s be honest, who would post boring content? Well believe it or not, many agents out there are full of boring rubbish.

The posts which garner the most views are multi-image posts on Facebook and Instagram, as well as videos – which reach a considerably wider audience than pure text and image posts.

Remember that the bottom line is you want to communicate quality and deliver value to potential future clients – something that must be engaging, permeated with authenticity and aimed at the right audience.

Agreement with couple

Six Tips to Turn Your Market Appraisals Into Listings

Turning an appraisal meeting into a listing is critical, but not always easy. After talking with a few agents who were willing to share their secrets, here are some tips for helping you win more business.

Understand the client’s motive

For an appraisal to be successful, it is important you determine the owner’s plans right from the beginning.

They may be looking for nothing more than a general market appraisal, but they may also have plans to sell down the road.

It is a mistake to treat these two scenarios the same way. They are different mindsets, so it doesn’t make sense to go with the same presentation.

Two important questions to ask the owner are: “why?” and “how?”

More specifically, “why do you need me?” and “how can I get you to where you want to be?”

Once you figure this out, you will be able to move forward with a much better idea as to what the client is looking for, making you both happier down the road.

Information, Information, Information

Before going to the appraisal meeting, send the client information about yourself and your previously successful listings.

People don’t want to trust their most valuable assets or properties to a rookie; they want someone with a proven track record who has a history of getting the job done.

It might also be a good idea to send a sample agency agreement and some information on potential marketing campaigns so that they can have an idea as to what they are getting into.

If you don’t give this information upfront, you risk the client trying to answer questions themselves, which could lead to frustration and ultimately choosing another agent.

Make use of your resources

Going into an appraisal, you want the client to know you are comfortable and familiar with the market in which you will be selling. As such, knowing as much about what and where you are selling is critical.

There are several resources out there, such as the Pricefinder app, that give you loads of information about properties. You can use it on your phone, meaning you can be studying up even when on the road.

The app also features a new price estimator feature, allowing you to calculate approximate home values, something that will prove rather useful when performing appraisals.

The app also includes school catchment data and developer applications, making it all the more useful.

Under-promise and over-deliver, not the other way around.

While it might seem like a good idea to wow your client with an exciting valuation, you’re only hurting yourself when you do this.

With so much information available these days, it’s a lot easier for buyers to know when a property has been overvalued, which will turn them away and hurt your chances at delivering for a client.

Later on, when this truth reveals itself, the real damage will be your reputation, as people will associate you with less-than-honest practices.

This doesn’t mean you should shy away from properties you think will do well, but rather to just not overdo it.

Try to find a middle ground. Be honest with the client, letting them know you think their property can do well, but also set a more realistic number. Managing expectations is half the game.

Pragmatism can’t hurt you, especially when your reputation is on the line.

Step into the client’s shoes

Selling a property may be business for you, but for someone else, it is a momentous occasion in their lives.

Walking into a property and looking past the subtler aspects of the house can sometimes offend clients. It’s their home after all.

Do what you can to connect with them so that they can see that you care about the home enough to get them the best deal for it.

This is something you can be doing during the appraisal, which will help you build a relationship with the person.

By stepping into their shoes, you are more likely to find some common ground with the client, which will help the business relationship as you move forward.

Sell yourself

It’s important not to be arrogant, but don’t be afraid to sell yourself.

You can showcase your past sales, or if you’re not there yet, discuss some of the past successes of the agency you work for. Be specific, showing clients some actual examples where you did exceedingly well.

Do your best to make them believe in you so that they’ll believe you’re the best agent for the job.

New Website - Blog

New Development Site for Aberlyn Estate

River Realty in Maitland, NSW is marketing the new Aberlyn Estate in Aberglasslyn. To best market this new estate to locals and those more further afield, they knew that a great looking website was required to advertise the benefits of the estate including location, site plans, lot images and more.

This is where the team at iDevelopments stepped in, to create them a beautiful, modern & easy to navigate development site aberlyn.com.au.

To keep navigation simple, our team produced a single landing page style site, to advertise the development to a range of prospective clients, that included the following features:

  • Mobile & Tablet Friendly
  • Image Galleries
  • House & Land Package Details with Artist Impression & Floorplan Slides
  • Development Features
  • Location Map & Information
  • Developer Information
  • Interactive Contact Form

As with many development projects, there is a strict marketing budget to conform to, after discussing their requirements with us, team at iDevelopments were able to produce and stick to the set budget, all within a quick time frame. So there was no delays in getting the site live, as well as no cost overruns.

Wether you are marketing a new estate or subdivision, apartments or townhouses or even a commercial project, the team at iDevelopments will be able to work with you to produce a fantastic looking website and other marketing collateral that you and your developers may require.

iProperty are enhancing their products and services for developers, as well as real estate offices. Take a look at our website, iDevelopments, for more information on how iProperty can deliver the same results for property developers as for the real estate agents. We’ve now produced hundreds of websites for agents and offices Australia-wide!

Opening email on mobile

5 Email Metrics You Should Be Aware Of

How’s your email marketing going these days? Believe it or not, but email marketing is really important in the modern, online world. As an estate agent, you should be able to use email metrics in order to understand how effective your email marketing tactics are.

In a traditional sense, evaluating email effectivity was a marketer’s job. Real estate agents provide content and then forget about the email being sent at the end. But this is all about to change.

Understanding how you communicate with your contacts and audience is key to developing longer lasting and stronger relationships, as well as developing a more impactful strategy.

Here are 5 email metrics that you need to get your head around in order to fully make use of your email marketing strategy.

1)   Open Rates

Opening rates depict how many of your emails are opened, compared to the number that you send out. In real estate, the average percentage of opened emails is 13-15%. This could be due to impersonal, generalised content sent out in a lazy manner. This comes across to consumers, who just simply delete the email without opening.

You can double that figure with personalised customer journeys, and interesting content that captures the attention of your audience. If you send emails on an agent’s behalf, you can even increase opening rates by over 100%.

2)   Click-Through Rate

Having a click-through rate measures the percentage of people who have clicked links in your email, as opposed to those who just open it.

This is a revealing statistic that many marketers use – especially in relation to real estate. Agents love it because it unveils how many people have been directed to your website. This can be equivalent to the number of people who have viewed property stock. This may increase enquiry on your listings and potentially lead to sales of homes.

3)   Conversion Rates

Conversion rates are when a person complete a form from within an email that asks them to do so. This is the most common call to action in the real estate industry – sometimes known as an appraisal request.

This is a great way to measure your objectives and results against one another. There are however, a number of poor indicators that you’re not measuring the right factors.

4)   Number Of Emails Sent

Emails are being sent to everyone in your database. This will lead to a massive number in your sentbox, but gives no indication of engagement with said emails. Make sure that you do not use this figure as your benchmark.

5)   Unsubscribe Rate

People unsubscribe from email lists for a number of reasons. A whole multitude in fact. Most of these reasons don’t have anything to do with the content of your emails, so don’t take it to heart too much.

The bottom line here is that there’s no point in spending time, money and manpower on something that you can’t measure. Make sure that you routinely check up on campaign reports, and make sure that your email marketing strategy is helping you meet your goals.

Vlogger

4 Tips For Maximising Video On Social Media

There was a time when utilising video in real estate, was only for the tech-savvy agents. Nowadays it’s completely normal to see video footage all over social media, because everyone and their dog owns a phone with a camera on it.

Eight in ten Australians are on social media platforms. 81% of those on social media, prefer to use it via a mobile device. Lastly, video accounts for more than 50% of all social media mobile traffic.

With this in mind, you’ll want to check out our top four tips for maximising video hits on social media – getting your agency the attention it deserves.

1)   Formatting

With social media and the rise of the smartphone levelling the playing field, online real estate has never looked so different. Video was originally made for desktop computer screens – taking a number of inspirations from TV production.

This is no longer the case however, as most people opt to view videos on their phones. It’s time to drop the widescreen 16:9 ratio and hit the original 1:1 square. This gives you around about 78% more screen space to hit someone’s news feed with.

2)   Selling Vs Narrative

Some agents might find it distressing, but using video is not all about sell, sell, sell. You want to get to grips with storytelling, so that you can draw clients into a property. You will want your clients to feel as though the house they’re viewing, could be their home.

Begin by telling the story of the home – including history, potential future, and what you love about it as an agent. Think about description of what it’s like to be there – so that potential buyers can share in your vision.

3)   Timing Your Content

Timing is super important. Different people tend to browse social media at different times of day, so it’s imperative that you know your audience – as well as the times they tend to be active online.

According to Sensis data, 18-29 year olds tend to access social media in the morning and last thing at night. 46% even admitted that they browse on the loo – but that perhaps doesn’t matter too much.

The point here is, that you should schedule posts to go out when they are most likely to get attention. Consider posting in the evening so that people are home from work and relaxing on the sofa (or toilet) with their phone in hand.

4)   Speed And Quality

We’re here to tell you that slow and steady, doesn’t always win the race – especially when you’ve got 200 properties that need videoing. Just bear in mind that whilst you don’t to take drone footage of every single property, there will be different video styles for each lot you own.

Some properties will have a much bigger marketing budget, and so you’ll be able to bring in the helicopter and shimmy down on a rope with a camera (hold the explosions though), but others will simply require you to use slideshows.

The bottom line here, is that they should all reflect quality, even though you need to get things done quickly. Appropriacy of media content is key.

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Have you heard about agentPages?

37 (2)At agentPages, we want you to have the best chance of being a successful online real estate agent. That is why we’ll be looking at, and breaking down the best marketing strategies for 2018.

Real estate is a crowded market, so it’s essential to build up a brand and to show potential clients that you’re unique and appealing. The strategies we will look at will help you to grow your brand, and to foster goodwill in your local real estate market.

Set up a personal blog

agentpages-all-medium

This is a great way to ensure that all of your marketing efforts are centralised. Using a personal website or blog acts as a hub for this kind of activity, allowing for quick and easy access for your clients.

If you’re producing flyers, social media posts, billboards, business cards or something totally different, your own personal website is the best place to send potential clients. This will give them a place to go where they can learn about you, your business and how you operate your company.

Having your own personal website is also a great way of setting yourself up as an expert; as you choose the content. Blogs will allow you to share picture, video and other relevant content for clients to check out – helping you to build a positive relationship with them.

Any website or blog with a call to action, will generate more interest as it provides a point of interaction for service users. It is a metaphorical hand reaching out of the screen and pulling the potential client in.

Don’t forget that your website should look professional; first impressions are everything in real estate, so don’t skimp on the design of your website.

Review the local area on your blog

It seems that many real estate agents think they can only talk about the market and their listings. They plaster it all over their Facebook pages, and especially when they post a new listing. The truth is this is pretty boring.

Your blog gives you a platform to share informative content with potential clients. Think about it like a cake – if the cake was bland on the outside, you wouldn’t find it appealing to try, am I right? But if the cake looked amazing then you’re more likely to bite into it.

So the big secret here is that you’ll want to post content that people want to read and engage with. A great way to do this is to ‘review’ your area. You can even include interviews with important local figures.

Such figures might include: the owners of local restaurants, school teachers, interior designers, shop owners etc. Such a simple tactic can make your blog stand out because you’ve gone the extra mile to generate some interesting content for people to read. Here’s how you go about getting it on lock-down.

The strategy

First off, you need to get the interview. Do this by going into the local store, office or wherever they operate out of. Tell them you want a quick interview for your website about the local area.

These days you can record the entire thing on your phone, which will be really useful for typing up later. You can even use the camera to make a little video blog. Ask them about why they got into business and why they love working in the local area. It’ll help people to see that there are passionate people living in the area.

These stories will create a narrative for your blog, and can motivate people to move to an area if they can see the area as a worthwhile community to invest in.

Post-production is important. You’ll need to transcribe the video and upload to YouTube. At which point you’ll be able to embed it into your blog or website. Adding a few pictures from around the business is also a good way to please the kind owners for their interview – they get some publicity too.

Finally, you’ll want to promote the content by posting it to social media. Make sure you use Facebook and Twitter, as well as professional networks such as LinkedIn; along with your own email database.

Alternatively…

You can post reviews of things in the local area. Reviewing local businesses, schools, restaurants and other amenities, can be a great way of generating content for your website.

Think of writing pieces such as “where to eat on a Friday night”, or “things to do with the kids at the weekend”. This type of content will get you hits in the search engines too.

Make a database and share it

When you’re pushing out good content, you’ll undoubtedly get people who want to sign up for more. This is where you’ll want to make sure you have an email database in place – and don’t forget to keep it up to date.

Keeping potential clients up to date on future content is key, as it provides further call to action. A good way to build up an email database is to offer something free to people who sign up.

Conclusion

The key to any good marketing strategy, is to be consistent.

If you’re able to get in front of your target clients, this will prove to be an invaluable strategy.

Make sure the content you put out is engaging and informative at the same time. Ensure your blog contains relevant pictures, video and content about local points of interest. Finally, provide a call to action for potential future clients through mailing lists and sign-ups.

Click here to get going with your own professionally looking AgentPages site and increase your digital market presence.

Facebook for listings

4 Ways Of Using Facebook To Advertise

Within the last five years, there have been two new revolutions – the social and mobile revolutions. These two revolutions are interconnected, as we can now access the internet on out phones. Being constantly connected to social media has provided real estate agencies with a new means for marketing their listings & services.

Facebook has around 2 billion members, with 1.3 billion using it every day. This is huge potential for agents & agencies, one not to be missed.

Facebook also organises your advertising for your agency. It does this through its complex algorithms that predict what people will want to see, based on their likes, location, key events and shopping behaviours. Every interaction a potential buyer make builds up a portfolio of information that is used by Facebook to position the content of your agency.

With this powerful tool in mind, here are 4 tips that can help you to use Facebook for advertising your listings & services.

1)   Get On It Now!

Social media is no longer something that teenagers do in their spare time. It is now the job of thousands of people the world over, to monitor and develop social media platforms. You should make it someone’s role in your business to understand and get to grips with your audience on social media.

With the sheer number of people on Facebook alone, it’s definitely in the interest of your agency to get involved.

2)   Geo-Targeting and Feature Targeting

Get out there and learn about the advanced functions of geo-targeting and property feature targeting. A common example of this is use may be “find X people matching Y description within Z km of my office”. You can also look to see which property features are in demand.

A key asset of these features, is that as an agent you need to ask yourself “what would I do in the buyer’s position?”.

3)   Improving Your Content

Social media is all about building human relationships and community. Facebook advises that your content should be striking and attention-grabbing. In fact, your content needs to grab people’s attention within the first 3 seconds, otherwise it gets scrolled past.

A constant stream of properties for sale will only be appreciated by people who are actually looking to buy – but occasional viewers will need to be targeted by a broader scope of content. Think about how you can use pictures and video as well as articles to capture an audience.

4)   Different Content Styles

We talked about how you might change up the content to engage the audience, but it’s not enough to just stick up a post with a few photos. Facebook rewards businesses who are innovative in their approach to marketing their products.

One way that Facebook does this, is through an algorithm which means that videos and Facebook Live posts are prioritised over others. Make sure that you caption videos however, as not everyone will be able to put on headphones for 90 seconds of vide

Complaints

How to Deal with Real Estate Complaints

You could be the best agent in the game, but sometimes, you’re going to receive complaints. Whether these are justified or not is irrelevant – one way or another, you’re still going to have to deal with them.

Real estate is an emotionally-charged environment, and when stress levels are running high for both parties, tensions are bound to rise. So, what can you do to deal with them? Read on to find out more.

Dealing with Real Estate Complaints – What You Need to Know

Managing complaints effectively can be the difference between you winning repeat business and referrals or losing a client completely.

Turn a negative into a positive

It might sound difficult, but it’s what’s got to be done. At some point, you’re going to get a complaint. It’s just going to happen. However, the trick isn’t to minimise it and make it out to be nothing – you should maximise it and find out exactly where your client is coming from, so you can make the most of the opportunity to learn and develop.

For example, if you work in property management, you might receive complaints from tenants who are unhappy about what they’re being asked to do. Looking deeper into it, you might find out this is because they don’t understand their legislative requirements. Instead of minimising the complaint, maximising it would have produced this information, meaning you can develop your service to better serve future clients.

Property management can be a sensitive area, as for tenants, that house is their home. For investors and landlords, it’s often less personal, but it’s still a substantial asset that they have a vested interest in.

Develop a culture where it’s okay to admit mistakes

One of the key methods for avoiding future mistakes is creating a place where people feel they can admit them. By offering yourself and your colleagues an environment where you can own up to errors, fear is seriously reduced, instead becoming learning opportunities that you can all grow from.

What would have been an overly negative experience for everyone involved instead gets turned into a positive learning experience.

Offer an honest and open dialogue

In addition to a robust, inclusive culture, you need to involve open and honest dialogue with both customers and staff within your complaints process. Actively listen to what all parties have to say, and clearly communicate your procedure for handling complaints.

First and foremost, let the customer know you’re taking their complaint seriously, then let them know the next steps, as well as how long they should expect to wait before they get a response.

Don’t focus on apportioning blame

Pointing the finger isn’t an overly successful strategy for handling complaints, as clients often care less about the root of the problem than its resolution. Complaints can do serious damage to your business if they aren’t taken seriously, so be sure to address them in a timely manner and don’t waste time blaming others. If not addressed quickly, they can undo years of hard reputation building.