In today’s Sunday Real Estate pull-out in the San Francisco Chronicle, Carol Lloyd discusses the various things that agents are, or can do, to market themselves in an article entitled “Surreal estate: Real estate seminars aim to give agents the edge in a competitive field”.
An interesting article that certainly offers a number of valuable points but perhaps the core perspective is that Agents must create personal brands - brands based upon specialized niche expertise. Don Hobbs opines “…Once Century 21 had 80,000 agents, how was an agent supposed to distinguish themselves from the crowd?” Hobbs’s company offer’s a host of marketing and coaching programs.

The most obvious thing missing in this whole article is discussion of the internet. Interesting! Let’s see, 80% of people start their housing search on the internet yet 2/3’s of internet leads have a conversion rate of ZERO percent (NAR data 2005). Consumers expect the immediacy and transparency of the internet to be delivered to real estate services. Yet as an agent, you are just a name and a face. The internet changes everything and makes the playing field much more fair. Gone are the days where networks of people are limited. The network of all humanity is up for grabs but dare you engage with it? The internet is an opportunity to expand your reach by showing people what you know - that YOU ARE THE EXPERT.

It helps you engage with your current and future clients in a meaningful way that elicits trust. It enables you to incubate ALL your clients at the same time and creates a history of your expertise for future clients to reference. In other words, it makes it cheaper, easier, and more effective to keep your pipeline fertile and growing. Welcome to the SHOW ME economy.

But if requires you to do new things. The simplest is to start writing things that demonstrate your knowledge base (blogging). Free systems include Wordpress and My-Currency that offer a blog free just by registering (30 seconds). My-Currency gives you the opportunity really differentiate yourself by taking things much further. We give you the opportunity to answer questions through our “answer” section, to participate in “wiki’s”, and to make valuation predictions on housing indexes (median values of a square foot by zip code) and homes. This all helps to answer consumers SHOW ME sensibilities.

My-Currency also enables you to create a very robust profile with all your contact information. And it is free!

Engagement with clients using social tools is a foregone conclusion in other industries. The real estate industry has begun to embrace it but there is a lot of adoption ahead. As the “rookie agent” at Coldwell Banker noted in Lloyd’s article, “You never know if that deal could be your last”, adding “… do people really choose their agents based on a postcard they get in the mail?”