Real Estate News

One of the topics people ask me frequently about is social media – and specifically they ask me for how to make the best use of their time. Anyone who has dived into social media knows that it is not “free” – it takes time and a thoughtful effort to make it work your time.

If you are like me, and seem to be “always connected” – whether it’s Twitter, Foursquare, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc  – it’s a great reminder that you need to be smart with your time. If you’re not careful, social media can be a time suck!

So how can you be more smart with your time?

Plan social media into your schedule for 1 hour a day: 30 minutes in the morning and 30 minutes late in the day.

The key here is multi-task, move fast, don’t get distracted.

If I was a real estate agent – this is how I would do it:

AM: 1st thing after or before you check your email

1. Turn on your computer. Open 7 windows: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, your web site, your blog, your favorite news website (i.e. Inman News ), and your favorite ‘drip marketing’ social media site (my fave is Hootsuite). Move fast, don’t get distracted.

2. Facebook: Scroll through the page – make 3 comments on other people’s posts. Post what you are up to that day. Respond to anyone who has commented on your or left you a message. Move fast, don’t get distracted.

3. Twitter. Click your @ button (i.e. – @katielance). Anyone who has mentioned you – thank them publicly. Respond to DM’s. Scroll through your home page and re-tweet 3 things of interest. Move fast, don’t get distracted.

4. LinkedIn: Post your status update – have it feed to Twitter (check the ‘Twitter’ box to do so – so easy!) Respond to any messages in your inbox. Check your groups. Not in a group? Join a group and comment on 1 discussion a day. Move fast, don’t get distracted.

5. Close these 3 windows: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn. Keep Hootsuite.com open and your web site, blog, and your favorite news site. Pick 6-8 links to share that day in Twitter. One can be a listing. The rest must be good content or newsworthy. Pick 3 links to share for Facebook. Twitter moves faster than Facebook which is why you need to post more often. Plug your posts and links into Hootsuite. Space them 1-2 hours apart. If something is a hot topic you can schedule it to go out more than once. Move fast, don’t get distracted.

PM: Repeat!

Next day: Repeat!

Do this everyday 5-6 days a week. If you follow this schedule it will become a habit. Also don’t underestimate the power of commenting and interacting – this is probably MORE important than posting your own content and links. Social media is just that – social!

BONUS TIP: Plan into your schedule an additional 2-3 hours a week if you are a blogger. Also plan one time a week to search for new friends, fans, and followers.

Looking for more info?  Stay tuned… I have something exciting in the works that will be revealed in a few weeks.

I would love to hear how you formulate a schedule for social media – what works and doesn’t work for you. Please leave me your thoughts in the comments below. Thanks!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Since I came to Inman News – one of my big goals was to hit the coveted “10,000 follower mark” on Twitter. As we came closer and closer, we thought it would be fun to have a contest. We decided that the Inman News 10,000th follower would win a free Connect SF ticket.

DRUM ROLL PLEASE…

So yesterday. We hit our goal and we are pleased to announce our 10,000th Twitter follower is: @Rofo_SF

These guys have a great company concept; and having a soft spot in my heart for companies that help small businesses, I was thrilled to be able to present Alan with his free ticket!

Rofo.com, which stands for “Right of First Offer”, is an office space search engine for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Rofo aggregates commercial real estate listings from top national brokerage firms to local building owners and everything in between.  In addition to browsing available real estate listings, businesses can put Rofo to work by posting their specific real estate requirements and receive competitive proposals from local landlords and brokers.

Alan Bernier, CEO for Rofo.com says, “The idea for Rofo and our unique focus on smaller commercial space (less than 5,000 sqft) came from first hand experience as brokers.  Entrepreneurs and smaller businesses who represent the majority of real estate transactions do not have the same access to resources and professionals as larger companies.  The goal at Rofo is to empower smaller tenants in their search for space and create an environment where those looking for space are easily matched with those who have it.  As a growing startup who has moved 3 times in 2 years we’re eating our own dog food.  And we now have an even greater appreciation for the platform we’ve created.”

Congrats again @Rofo_SF!

If you aren’t following Inman News yet on Twitter, I invite you to join us to get the latest in real estate news, marketing and technology!

Now onto 100,000

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Congrats to our 10,000th Twitter Follower!

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This Tuesday I am talking about one of my favorite subjects: Facebook. With an audience of over 350M people – Facebook is the top social media source that Realtors must be engaged in.

5 Things Every Realtor Must do to Be Successful on Facebook:

1.    Post good content daily. This is the #1 one thing that I see agents NOT doing. They spend time calling or emailing clients, but they drop the ball on their Facebook page. You should be posting 2-3 times a day. A good formula for Realtors on Facebook is: 2 parts personal and 1 part business. Corcoran does a great job of this – they post interesting real estate and market data but also sprinkle in really cool and unique links to New York city, little known facts, places to eat, etc.

2.    Have a plan and stick to it. Make a list of the top 10 sites you like to visit – include news sites (i.e. Inman News, NY Times, etc), recreational sites (gardening, travel, etc), and of course your website or blog. Visit this list daily. This makes it very easy for you to link to interesting stories and post good and relevant content daily.

3.    Do it yourself. As a Realtor you can’t hire out someone to manage your Facebook account for you. You have to make time – every morning and every evening to manage your account. You can however hire someone to enhance your page and make custom tabs with HTML. Mike Mueller is a great resource for this.

4.    Comment on what others post. This is KEY! It is not all about YOU!   Take 5 minutes out of your Facebook time each day to comment on what some of your friends or fans have said.

5.    Be engaging. Ask questions, post photos, be a part of the conversation. Remember Facebook is like the ultimate dinner party. At a dinner party you wouldn’t sit in the corner and not talk to anyone right? Nor would you JUST talk about real estate.

Here are some great examples of Realtors doing many of the right things on Facebook:
Sue Adler
The GoodLife Team
Julie Ziemelis

Do you have a great Facebook page you’d like to share? Leave me a comment here!

Check out the Inman Facebook Page here!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Original post:
Tip Tuesday: 5 Things Every Realtor Must do to Be Successful on Facebook

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I realize I’m a little biased in the world of smartphones. In the interest of full disclosure, I am a proud iPhone user. I love the apps, the ease of use, the large screen and the ‘bells and whistles.’

In real estate, having a smartphone is not just an option but a necessity. Everyone wants a response right now, not later today.

So the question remains, can the leader, the iPhone still hold their lead in 2010 as the top smartphone in the United States?

According to Nielsen…
According to Nielsen, The iPhone is still the most popular smartphone, followed by the BlackBerry 8300 series, but despite all the new smartphones flooding the market, Motorola’s trusty Razr (yep, the RAZR!) flip-phone was the third most-popular phone of the year.

What about Andriod?
Comascore.com, a leader in measuring the digital world, announced a few days ago the release of its latest report on the mobile market, ‘Android: Crashing the Smartphone Party.‘ The report provided an overview of the current U.S. mobile environment and offered an in-depth look at the Android OS. Among the report’s key findings is that consumer awareness of Google’s Android is growing rapidly, due in large part to the Verizon Droid ad campaign.

Here comes Google!
Coming to the smartphone party (possibly) next month is Google’s Nexus One. Nexus One puts Google in business against other providers of Android-based phones. Google is the major force behind Android. Will this create a backlash against the company, or did other providers get into the Android game aware that Google eventually would make this move?

A major shift happened…
A new survey of smartphone users by PC World and Macworld found that 85% of smartphone owners were extremely or very satisfied with their handsets, and the same percentage said they rely heavily on them. On a typical day, people use their phones two-thirds of the time for personal use and the balance for business. This highlights the HUGE shift that happened with smartphones from being primarily a corporate use to gaining a wider consumer customer base, courtesy of the iPhone.

So what is it about the iPhone?
I think one of the biggest reasons consumers, especially real estate professionals, love the iPhone is because of how easily they work – not the mention the incredible branding campaign that Apple has done to make you “feel” extra cool when you own an Apple product!

Did you know?
Did you know, Apple didn’t even launch the iTunes App Store until a year after the first iPhone became available? Over 2-billion-apps-sold have been sold as of late September 2009.When the iPhone was first launched in June 2007, Steve Jobs tried to sell developers on just making Web apps. When Web-based apps couldn’t match the performance or capabilities of native apps, developers asked for more. Apple announced that they were changing course in October, but didn’t launch the App Store until July 2008—just as Apple released the second generation iPhone hardware

So, in the spirit of the holidays, and because I do love the iPhone, I wanted to share with FOREM readers 7 FREE new iPhone apps just released within the last few days:

1. Ribbit Mobile
This app has already gotten quite a bit of buzz. You have to sign up and request to be invited to their beta trial. Ribbit Mobile will read your voicemail and then text or email it to you, it will save your messages forever, you can dictate memos on your phone, and answer calls on any phone.

2. CallRec.me
Pretty cool app especially for real estate agents –record your phone calls and voice notes with the push of a button. I could see this being especially helpful for agents to keep track of conversation records.

3.  HWA, Inc. – Home Warranty of America
Videos, sales tools, what’s news, and much more. Great app for title/escrow officers, mortgage lenders, real estate attorneys and agents. I’d love a Realtor’s first-hand experience using this app.

4. iParked
Ok this app was made for me – it helps you remember where you parked your car! If you dare to go shopping in the next couple days, I recommend using this app!

5. San Francisco Tweets
Search by categories or by SF districts. I like that it is a live Tweet stream so you could theoretically be walking down the street toward a restaurant and see if there is anyone inside the restaurant tweeting about the food, service, etc.

6.  New York App
Look up shows/events, places to eat, bars/clubs, tourist attractions, Yelp reviews and much more. Cool factor: there are links to some of the best lifestyle blogs in NYC built right in and a NYC Twitter stream. Not bad! Can’t wait to check this one out in person next month.

7.   ConnectNYC
Saved the best for last! This app is specifically designed for Real Estate Connect NYC  Jan.13-15th (#ICNY) includes live Twitter feeds, conference schedule, what sessions are starting within the next hour, exhibitor and sponsor booth info, as well as NYC hot spot info.

So how do you feel about this smartphone debate? Are you loyal to your iPhone, Blackberry, Andriod, or Razr? Are you holding out for something else?

Leave me a comment or send me a tweet here or here!

Written by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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This past week has been a pretty exciting week around here. Last week, I began managing the Inman News’ social media streams. I’m pretty excited to say that within the 1st 7 days we have over 700 new Twitter followers.

I am fired up about the results we have had by simply ‘turning up the dials.’ So how can YOU grow your Twitter traffic?

Here are my top 4 tips plus a cool update from Twitter’s blog:

1. Work smart. Have a plan. Don’t get distracted.

I could just end my blog right now because that’s really the core of what I’m doing to grow our follower list at Inman. I have a simple plan that I follow every day. Where do you want to drive traffic to? What message do you want to convey? One of my favorite Twitter products is HootSuite.com which allows you to plan your tweets – much like drip marketing. Spend 1 hour a day on Twitter and plan out 95% of your tweets.  Also, Hootsuite just launched their iPhone app this week. This is quickly becoming my favorite Twitter app.

2. Don’t be passive. Twitter moves fast – you better keep up.

Twitter is not Facebook. Twitter is not email. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you can just tweet once or twice a day and that’s going to cut it. Log onto Twitter and look at your Twitter stream. Scroll to the bottom of the page – when’s the last tweet? An hour ago? Half an hour? For me it’s 2 minutes ago.  If you aren’t on your follower’s radar– they will NEVER see your tweets – so be aggressive. Word of caution: don’t just tweet to tweet. Put out good content and good links.

3.    To be followed you must be a follower.

Twitter is not a “wait and see” marketing tool.  You can’t expect for people to just find you and follow you. One of the fastest ways to generate new followers is to follow like-minded people. Use the search function and search for people who are your target audience. In TweetDeck you can save searches so if you plug in a specific search like “Manhattan Real Estate,” anytime someone tweets about that subject, you will be notified

4.    Recognize and connect.

Aren’t you surprised at the number of people who just spew information out there and never interact!? Don’t be one of those! Your daily plan has to include checking to see who mentioned you, retweeting others, and responding to DM’s. This may be the last point to this blog but this is SO important. A great video for breaking this all down in 10 minutes a day is a fantastic video by Laura Roeder.

One last thing – breaking news from Twitter on their blog yesterday.
Twitter is beta testing a new function for companies called “Contributors” – it enables users to engage in more authentic conversations with businesses by allowing those organizations to manage multiple contributors to their account. This could be huge for brokerages – you could have the CEO, Broker/Owner and Marketing Director tweet on the same handle – but you would know who “the voice” would be.

These Twitter tips are so easy to do – but they are also so easy NOT to do. For every 5 real estate agents and brokerages on Twitter, there are 25 that are not. The odds are your favor – take advantage of it! And if you’re not yet following me on Twitter yet, click here or here!

posted by: Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Originally posted here:
700 New Twitter Followers in 7 Days

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Greetings FOREM readers!

I am really excited to be a featured writer on FOREM’s blog. I have been a reader and admirer of this blog for some time and am thrilled with the opportunity to contribute!  It is an honor to write along side Joel Burslem. I am equally as excited about my new position as marketing manager with Inman News. I look forward to bringing a fresh and new perspective to our readers and fans!

To read more about me click here!

So for my 1st blog post, I am going to talk about one of my favorite subjects – Google.

Let’s face it, we are living in a Google world. But, as you all know Google has become so much more than just a search engine.

There are tons of experiments going on with Google – but I thought I’d take this opportunity to give you the 3 latest (and in my opinion most exciting) things happening with Google that will impact you and your business.

1. Google Living Stories – This looks like it could be the next “big thing” for Google and potentially down the line for real estate. Google Living Stories takes newspaper reading to the next level.

Newspapers?  Yes. Stick with me here. This is where it gets good.

It’s not surprising to anyone that the newspaper industry is dying but breaking news and the hunger for news continues to grow at an exponential rate.

Google Living Stories is in beta form right now, and is very “Wikipedia” looking.  So far, Google Living Stories has partnered with The New York Times and The Washington Post. When you go to Google Living Stories and click on a story, you are brought to a page with 1-2 paragraphs of text, photos, graphs, timelines, related links, and related stories.

I love this.

If Living Stories takes off this could be HUGE for the real estate world. Imagine a client searching for “New York Real Estate” – when they click ‘search’ they then may come to a page with listings, photos, neighborhood info, school info, timelines, video, and so much more.

Living Stories still has a ways to come but it has a lot of potential!

News organizations produce a wealth of information that we all value; access to this information should be as great as the online medium allows.

2. Google Chrome – This free web browser is literally taking the web world by storm. Just 2 days ago, at the Googelplex in Mountain View, over 500 new Google Chrome Extensions were unveiled.

Why Chrome? Speed, simplicity and style – but the best part is the speed. It is lightening fast! Already  have Chrome? Check out these experiments from Google to play around with! Also announced today on Google’s blog is the launch of Mac and Linux extensions for Chrome.

3 . Google Goggles – Take a picture of a book, a store, a landmark and that picture translates into a search for that object. It is still in its infancy and only available on the Android (but the rumor is that it will available soon on Google Chrome) but think about the possibilities for real estate search. What if this worked with homes on the market? You could snap a photo and instantly see how long it had been on the market, details about the home, listing agent, virtual tours, and more.  I think there are lots of possibilities for this – plus I love the “cool” factor.

What’s next for Google? Stay tuned – the possibilities are wide open!

Posted by Katie Lance, Marketing Manager, Inman News

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Top 3 Latest & Greatest Products from Google

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The eyes of the real estate industry will be on California again as Inman News’ annual Real Estate Connect conference kicks off this week in San Francisco.

Having been involved planning Connect conferences for the last couple of years, I can honestly say the Inman News team has really pulled off an amazing schedule of events this time around. There’s a ton of great speakers and sessions this time around that will really make a trip to San Francisco worthwhile.

Here’s a few highlights:

Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and Zappos COO Alfred Lin are going to keynote at Connect!

Also who could forget ReBarCamp – at Trulia’s HQ tomorrow!

Parties! Vendor Alley has all the deets.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend this summer’s Connect – but I will definitely be following the goings-on online. Should be a great conference and there’s still time to register.

And hey, if you’re attending Connect – let me know how it’s going in the comments below!

Full disclosure: The Future of Real Estate Marketing is part of Inman News. Inman News also organizes the Real Estate Connect conference.

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Real Estate Connect Kicks Off this Week!

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Have you got your ticket for Real Estate Connect San Francisco 2009 yet? Only one more day till the price goes up!

This will be the fifth Connect conference that I’ve been been part of and I’m proud of having been able to contribute to the program over the years.

But more importantly, Connect is something that I personally look forward to attending every summer. It’s a great place to meet up with all my friends in the industry and catch up; but I also get a ton out the conversations that spin out of the conference.

Here are 3 things that I’m personally really stoked about seeing this summer’s Connect:

• The Keynote address by Zappos’ COO Alfred Lin;
• The revival of the ConnectTech Workshop;
• Connect Create – The first-ever online real estate developers challenge. 72 hours to build a killer real estate app.

I’m also speaking this year again on a panel called How the Amazon Kindle Will Change Your Business
on Thursday, August 6 at 2:00 pm. So I hope to see you there!

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See the rest here:
Real Estate Connect registration deadline tomorrow

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In what should surely spur another burst of creativity from the real estate developer set, the New York Times announced this week a brand new Real Estate API.

The Times API contains real estate data from the NYC Department of Finance dating back to 2003 and all the classifieds data from the Grey Lady dating back to 2007.

What exactly does it offer?

The API offers aggregate data divided into two sets: listings and actual sale prices. You can get the number (”counts”) of listings and sales per ZIP code, neighborhood and borough, for various building types and date ranges. You can also get percentile prices for listings and sales per ZIP code, neighborhood and borough, again for various building types and time periods.

You could mash that up with a simple Google Map to get an elegant heat map of how prices in Manhattan have changed over time or go a step further and layer in the data from the Trulia API or the Zillow API too.

This may even be a cool project to tackle at Connect Create this summer in San Francisco. What is Connect Create?

From the Inman News web site:

72 hours. A room of developers. One killer app. Watch innovation come to life during Connect as technologists compete to create something amazing for you to take home.

Winner gets to strut their stuff on stage the final day of the conference. Pretty cool opportunity!

Any other APIs out there folks can talk advantage of? Leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll update this post.

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Read more:
Dabbling in Real Estate APIs

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I’m slowly catching up from beneath a mountain of interesting news that was announced over the last week.

One such item is that HomeScape has rebranded itself as HomeFinder.com – presumably to respark some enthusiasm for a brand that, for all intents and purposes, has been off most people’s radar for the last few years.

HomeFinder.com is a product of Classified Ventures, the online conglomerate owned by media titans Belo, Gannett, McClatchy, Tribune and The Washington Post. Classified Ventures also owns resurgent HomeGain which, with the help of an orange ape, has successfully clawed back some mindshare from the big Web 2.0 ventures over the last several months.

HomeScape flew under the radar for a while since it was largely in the business of powering real estate website for newspapers, which included the Chicago Tribune, the LA Times, Newsday and The Arizona Republic.

But with the rebrand to HomeFinder.com I suspect it means the company intends to double-down and focus on building out the portal as a legitimate destination for consumer traffic. Indeed, with the help of their media parents’ reach, they could make a serious run at the top 10.

The fact that real estate brands’ ad dollars are now seriously starting to chasing online destinations (see Century 21 Ditches TV for Online) no doubt helped seal that decision.

According to company sources, HomeFinder.com has over 3 million listings, pulled from a mix of MLS sources and broker feeds.  They have over 2 million unique visitors a month — and, of that traffic, much of it is truely unique: 71% of consumers visiting HomeFinder do not visit Realtor.com and 84% of visitors do not visit Trulia.

Nevertheless, the new site is pretty generic; the design is inoffensive, but frankly pretty bland. Compared to Frontdoor (another Big Media play in this space) it lacks a certain splash of personality. However, that said, technically it’s quite competent.

What I’d love to see though is for these big media guys to take a long hard look of some of the innovators that are really pushing the envelope when it comes to search design (Estately for example) and see if there wasn’t a way to marry that technology with their marketing muscle. That would make for a truely interesting relaunch.

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Originally posted here:
HomeScape Becomes HomeFinder

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In a move I suspect may be followed by many of the other big real estate brands in 2009, last week at Real Estate Connect in New York, Century 21 announced it was shifting its television advertising dollars to support its online marketing efforts.

You can see the announcement made by Tom Kunz, president and CEO of C21 in an interview done with Susie Hale of Frogpond TV. (The announcement comes at about 3:00 minutes in).

This shift should not come as much of a surprise to many readers of this blog. But what is surprising (and refreshing) is that C21 has come out so publicly in their endorsement of new media. C21 plans to spend the bulk of their advertising investment in 2009 on display advertising, search engine marketing and enhanced listing partnerships with real estate web sites, which no doubt bodes well for companies like Zillow, Trulia and Frontdoor. Their goal, ultimately, is to generate more leads to their franchisees, affiliates and brokers and agents.

Over the last couple years we’ve seen the technology providers and pundits (myself included, natch) talk about the need for real estate industry to fully embrace the Internet as the channel of choice to connect with consumers.

The web provides a platform for brokers and agents to connect more meaningfully and, more importantly, more measurably, with the buyers and sellers who are now predominantly searching for real estate information online.

This wave has been cresting for a long time and while the smarter agents and brokers have ridden the curl of this trend for many years, and have prospered because of it, this announcement sends a clear signal that the big brands are fully committing to this new world as well.

2009 may just be the year that the wave finally comes crashing down and we see the end of big real estate’s old media habits.

Photo by prgibbs.

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Century 21 Ditches TV for Online

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Late last week I added Google Friend Connect to this blog (if you followed @jburslem on Twitter you would have seen my tweet asking for people to help me test it out). I did so after Google  made the service widely available to all web site owners.

Friend Connect is part of the Open Social movement that lets you, the web site owner, add community and social features to your site with single upload (ok, it’s two uploads but there’s still no programming required).

By doing so, you’ll instantly bring a new social networking aspect to your site. But the best thing is, rather than having people build new identities from scratch, Friend Connect lets people join your site using their pre-existing identities. Effectively countering the growing sense of social networking fatigue.

In short, by enabling Friend Connect on your site, your sites visitors can easily join your community by logging in with their Google account as well as a few others — which, as of today, also includes their Twitter profile.

For example, to join the FOREM community, click on the ‘Join’ button in the right side bar (RSS subscribers, get out of your readers and come to the site to see what I’m talking about). You can use any one of your chosen identities to log in and then begin to connect with the other members of this blog’s community.

For readers, the upside is it means you can see who’s reading a particular site and start to find other people who have similar interests to yours; clicking on their thumbnail reveals their profile and what other sites they are members of.

For publishers and site owners it is a way to build your traffic through word-of mouth recommendations, reader reviews and by adding other functionality to an otherwise static experience.

To add Friend Connect to your Blog

1. Log into your Google Account at http://www.google.com/friendconnect/home/

2. Click on the “Set Up A New Site” button.

3. Upload files - canvas.html and rpc_relay.html to the root directory of your blog. That’s it!

To add any the Gadgets (the community, Wall or Review gadgets) to your blog; just cut and paste the HTML code in your sidebar or use Wordpress’ widgets (if you use Wordpress).

Friend Connect is interesting project but is not totally complete yet. There’s still a few pieces of the puzzle that are missing.

I’d love for it to integrate into Wordpress’ comments system more deeply (but I suspect it is only a matter of time before someone develops the proper plugin). Moreover, as the site owner, I’d love to be able to message all members of my community (respectfully, of course) — if they did this it could turn Friend Connect into a highly effective permission-based marketing platform like Facebook Pages (see Marketing Real Estate on Facebook (and Other Social Networks)).

Let me know if you add it to your blog! Drop your URL in the comments section.

social networking, friend connect, google friend connect, web 2.0

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Use Google Friend Connect to Quickly Add Community to your Site

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Agents can now change the linked web site of their listings on Trulia to their own web site.

A common request from agents on Trulia.com is to change the linked web site for their listings, so the listing points to their own web sites. When we receive multiple listing submissions for a property, we aggregate the listings together, and display the highest priority source. Usually, this is a franchise or broker submission.

With a Trulia Pro subscription, you can change the web site linked to your Trulia.com listings. When some one clicks for more information about the property, you can redirect them to your own web site, and get more traffic to your site, as well as your other listings.

[Emphasis added]

I think this is a sign that The Notorious R.O.B. might be on to something.

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Yahoo Real Estate, the nation’s #2 real estate search portal, launched a redesign today.

The site, which has adopted a much more muted color palette (lots of earth tones), offers up a new dynamic search results page and much larger photos in its listing pages (see Inman News story). It’s a decent catchup effort but still needs to go a bit further to keep pace with some of the technology leaders.

While the new Y!RE experience is intuitive, I found as I dug deeper into the results, it began to feel like there was often one too many clicks to get to where I wanted to go. This was a little frustrating frankly.

More importantly however, the individual listing pages still felt somewhat spartan and vaguely underwhelming, especially compared to some of the newer search offerings like those on MRIS’ HomesDatabase (see MRIS Takes on the Search Sites).

All that said however, Steve Schultz, Senior Director for Yahoo! Real Estate writes on the Yahoo! blog that this is just the beginning; more is coming, including “a greater emphasis on property photos and meaty new personalization and sharing services.”

In conjunction with the new public face to Yahoo! Real Estate, the company has also introduced a range of new features for Real Estate professionals. Brokers, if you’re already syndicating your listings to the portal, you can now log into Yahoo! and manage them all online.

Agents interested in tapping Yahoo!’s reach can purchase a classifieds listing on the site for $49.95 and are also encouraged by the company to give Yahoo! Sponsored Search a whirl to build traffic to their websites.

Despite a tough market and months of turmoil at the company, Yahoo! has made some impressive strides over the last couple of years in this space, and it looks like they are still committed to seeing their presence dial up. I’m looking forward to seeing more from them in the future.

Yahoo! Real Estate, Yahoo!, real estate search, real estate 2.0, real estate

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Originally posted here:
Yahoo Real Estate Gives New Options to Realtors

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Word today from the Official Google Mobile Blog, Adwords advertisers can now target their ads to searchers using iPhones, G1 or other mobile devices.

Now, advertisers will be able to display ads exclusively on these mobile devices, create campaigns for them, and get separate performance reporting. If you prefer not to show your desktop ads on these phones, you can opt out and show ads only on desktop and laptop computers.

The upside here is that real estate advertisers who are aggressive targeting city-level or neighborhood level searches can create unique campaigns with mobile-ready landing pages as well as mobile-specific calls to action (e.g. “Call 1-800-XXX-XXXX for help with your home search).

This video posted by the Adwords team goes into more detail about how you can set up one of these campaigns.

Click here to view the embedded video.

google adwords, mobile adwords, real estate marketing

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Read more:
Google Lets You Go Mobile with Your Adwords

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