Archive for category: Real Estate Related

It used to be that America’s farmland was made up of small farmers with moderate acreage. Today, the small farmer is complaining that they are being put out of business by the mega-farm corporations.

How did that happen? The simple answer is that efficiencies were made to the farming system.  Newer automated tools replaced older “wares” and traditional methods.

The message being made here is that efficiencies matter! New tools matter!  What does all this have to do with real estate you ask? Well, say there’s one subdivision you notice is a great place to “farm” for real estate prospects. So you decide you are going to become the real estate expert of that neighborhood and get all the listings and sales.

Guess what? As you know, if it is an attractive subdivision, there are other agents thinking of exactly the same thing.

How do you win this battle? You get the right tools.

Sure, you already know the basics of farming — brochure boxes, mailers, get on the neighborhood newsletter, open houses, sending out just listed and just sold notices, videos.

Guess what? Your competitors are also thinking the same thing.

But take your strategy one step further with SpatialMatch — the newest innovative neighborhood and lifestyle search tool with IDX listing that you can embed directly into your website.

Other agents can talk about how they are the “experts” in one area, but you can demonstrate and show people that you are the expert right from the first moment of contact on your website.

SpatialMatch has billions of bits of local data about every neighborhood in the US and has a search function that display those results in a colorful, very easy-to-use map format.

Here’s how to become the expert farmer and utilize SpatialMatch’s real estate tools: you can create separate pages on your website containing each one of the screens:

Schools – display a screen showing all the schools within a certain radius of the neighborhood. Private, public, K-12. This database will also display number of students, student/teacher ratios and much much more.

Dining, Shopping and Entertaining – do the same thing with all of these amenities. If there is a mall or some other popular destination right down the street, play it up.

Medical – is the neighborhood you are farming filled with seniors? Then you can be sure to point out all of the medical facilities nearby.

Transportation – commuter neighborhood? Are trains, airports, important? Same thing.

Homes for Sale – with our IDX functionality, you can show MLS home listings next to any of these screens and in many cases use the above settings to filter relevant homes for your prospect.

Home Values – people always want to see the values of properties in an area. When they click this feature, you can either deliver an automated value or a lead form pops up and you get that lead.

Boundaries – school districts, neighborhoods, towns, etc. Got that too.

Custom locations – this is huge, this reinforces your hyper-local expertise. With SpatialMatch you can enter all the popular or important locations near that neighborhood. Is there a local theater? Museum? Jogging park? Dog park? Water park? Enter the information. Think about it, how many agents get to customize a map?

And there’s more you can do with these real estate tools in addition to displaying them on your site.

Use SpatialMatch data to target those popular SEO keywords you need to appear high in Google searches. For email marketing, you can send individualized bookmark links back to custom screen shots that you created specifically for your prospect. Share a page with your Facebook and Twitter followers. In your advertisements, promote the fact that you have the right real estate tools with this special lifestyle search engine on your site.

Residents (potential sellers) of your target neighborhood are going to be impressed when they see this information on your site. Buyers are also going to be impressed with the depth of your knowledge about that particular neighborhood.

Now who’s the real expert farmer of that particular area? With SpatialMatch, you are.
Efficiency and new real estate tools! It matters.

For a live demo where we can include your target neighborhood, go here.

On the Internet, if you want to get something, you’ve got to give something.

It’s old fashioned Internet behavior to expect one to fill out a contact form before he or she can even see what you have to offer.

Real estate marketing is no different.

It’s ironic that more than 80% of home buyers start their search for a home on the web, yet most real estate sites offer users very little or at times nothing in return for their contact information.

SpatialMatch, however, gives agents and brokers a very effective lifestyle search data tool to capture leads. Using our map-based IDX and Lifestyle search technology, they can provide a valuable incentive for home buyers to provide their contact information.

What’s the hook for users? A neighborhood of their dreams that meets all their needs.

Nowadays, it’s very difficult to find the right home. There are soooo many other variables besides the house:

How close will I be to schools? What’s the quality of the schools? What about when my child advances to the next level of school, where will it be located? What about things to do? Will I have to drive four miles to get a decent cup of coffee? My parents are elderly. Where’s the nearest hospital? Retirement homes?

When you, as a broker or agent, have SpatialMatch on your site, you provide a resource where a potential client can find all of these answers and more with our 100-plus layers of billions of bits of neighborhood/lifestyle search data in a very cool, easy-to-use format.

In that case, you have established a “fair exchange” proposition. An agent can give a user all of this information for free. But if they want to save their search, lifestyle settings or dig deeper into the site, the agent can ask at that time for contact information in a simple registration form.

“To generate real estate leads in today’s environment, you must offer something of value that is personally relevant to encourage visitors to share their information with you on the web,” says John Perkins, CEO of Home Junction Inc., creators of SpatialMatch. “What can be more valuable than helping them find the ideal place to live in an area where they will probably spend the next several years of their lives?”

It’s get even better. There’s the quality of the lead as well. You can offer someone a lollipop or a chance to win an iPad and many will give up their contact information. But what is the value of that lead?

In the case of SpatialMatch, this lead is coming from a person who is actively researching where to move. They are digging deep the find all the information they need. They are ready to buy a home, sooner rather than later!

The parameters are customizable. What’s important in your area? Is school quality important? You might want to set a limit on the number of searches for schools in the school application before you require their contact information.

Is your market filled with young, single professionals? Maybe you want to set the limit on clicks for restaurants. Or heck, maybe you want to include limits on school and restaurant searches and a bunch of other lifestyle amenities. We leave that up to you.

With SpatialMatch, you can customize the number of “clicks” or “views” your users can see prior to a forced registration being required.  Or, you can let them “continue as a guest.”

Internet marketing experts will tell you, always offer some type of free gift on your lead capture page as an incentive to get people to fill out the form.

But when you offer home buyers something of real quality such as lifestyle search data, then you are going to receive quality leads in return. And you can take that to the bank.

(See an example of the SpatialMatch registration form below. For a demo, go here).

What do short distance, safety, and time savings, all have in common?  Answer:  they are rewards of selecting the right location that meets the lifestyle amenities for my next home search, and my last one.  Let me explain:

This is going to sound strange. But the best thing I liked about my old house was not the architecture, or the swimming pool, or the atrium in the kitchen.

It was the fact that the house was located 1/2 mile from a movie theater.

Hey, I love the movies and going every week is an important part of my lifestyle, and I loved the short drive to the theater.

Now while I love car crashes and chase scenes inside the movie theater. I certainly don’t like them outside the theater, for example, on the same road that I’m driving on.

And you know, it’s not any safer out there. You’ve got to contend with texting teens, drunk drivers, people who think they’re in second place at the Daytona International Speedway, AND drivers who think that because they are driving a SUV, they can plow at normal speeds through snow, rain and wind.

Progressive Insurance once polled 11,000 policyholders in 2001 who had experienced accidents. Sixty-nine percent of those accidents took place within 10 miles from home. Ten miles from home!

Here’s the next point to ponder. Since then I have moved away from a movie theater, and now, it’s a 20 minute drive. Sometimes I don’t go! My wife sees my anguish and suggests, “Why not just rent a movie from the cable company?”

Rent a movie??  Sit at home?? How is that a movie-going experience?  I want to be wearing my 3-D glasses, sitting next to my fellow film buffs in a huge, dark space, laughing, crying and slurping down $5 sodas surrounded by head-pounding Dolby speakers with my feet stuck to the floor. That’s how you watch a movie.

You probably already know this, but it is worth repeating: It’s a key reality of human behavior. The further away you are, the less likely you are to engage in that activity. For consumers considering their lifestyle amenities, this will be a major factor to them.

Thirdly, there’s the time issue. In today’s hyper-drive mode of living, we ALL need to spend more time with our family and friends and less time sitting at traffic lights, driving around detours, and getting our cars repaired.

As a real estate agent, proximity to the places home buyers love is an emotional hot button. If your prospect likes to run in the park every day, or visit church functions at night, or needs to go to a chiropractor three times a week, or maybe prefers a certain type of latte, it’s a smart idea to point out those lifestyle amenities.

This is why the developers of SpatialMatch decided it was not only important to list millions of bits of hyper local lifestyle activities in its lifestyle search tool, but to also provide a distance feature that clearly illustrates how far each amenity was located in relation to residential properties. As a real estate agent, you can feature this technology right on your website.

A home buyer can pick each business or facility they know they will be visiting regularly. Then, using SpatialMatch’s handy distance slider, they can quickly gain a visual understanding of where all these lifestyle amenities will be relative to where they are looking to live.

Bottom line, an ordinary house can all of a sudden become the extraordinary place to live not only because of its square footage, or awesome closet space, or the garden in the back yard, but also because its location will optimize the time your clients spend outside of the house.

Recognizing that the home sale is beginning to include conversations about exact distances to places the buyers will frequent is an important step in services for today’s more comprehensive buyers.  SpatialMatch will easily and expertly deliver detailed information to you in real-time and with great ease. This will give both you and your buyers more time to take in a movie, and that can sometimes be what life is all about. Nice.

 

Our group came away from the San Francisco Inman “Real Estate Connect” tech conference with the feeling that Realtors are truly grasping the importance of lifestyle search technology.

SpatialMatch had an exhibit located in an area called Start-Up Alley where we were able to display in person our extensive, geo-spatial lifestyle search platform available for Realtors to add to their websites. We had hundreds of visitors.

Andrew “Woody” Woodward said his favorite quote from one attendee was “I have been waiting for something like this for years and your price ($24.95 month) is incredible.”

Realtors at the show knew that they needed to be able to provide lifestyle search technology to homebuyers that showcases the lifestyle amenities that they seek in their lives. Homebuyers don’t just want a house, they want a neighborhood that provides them with great schools, a close by gym, or a park where they can get out and play.

To stay on the cutting edge, a real estate agent has to know how to find the properties that fulfill these needs, quickly and in a visual way that homebuyers can comprehend. That’s where SpatialMatch’s lifestyle search technology comes in.

“Initially, many people thought we were just some sort of mapping platform,” said Melissa Pedersen, our director of business development. “But then they were blown away when they saw how SpatialMatch increases their leads and deal flow.”

One of the best responses our group continued to hear from agents was how impressed they were with the incredible amount of data behind the scenes driving the SpatialMatch searches.  We’ve literally loaded over a billion data elements into our platform including 60 million properties, 12 million business listings, details about 130,000 schools, shape files of all sorts, Home Value Reports, and more.

Our VP Grant Gould also spoke during the “New Kids on the Block” panel of the conference. Only six companies were invited on stage to give a brief description of their companies. (You can see the video at http://www.inman.com/video/connect/2010/07/14/new-kids-block).

When all was said and done, even with all the hassles of scheduling, traveling and presenting jammed into just three days, the enthusiastic feedback from potential customers made it all worthwhile!

The popular real estate technology web site, Inman News, recently posted an article by columnist Bernice Ross touting SpatialMatch and the importance of hyperlocalism.

Bernice is no neophyte to the real estate profession. She has more than 30 years experience, is a Certified Master Coach, and is the author of two books. Including her latest one  — Real Estate Dough: Your Recipe for Real Estate Success.

When it comes to marketing an entire lifestyle, rather than just a home, Bernice sees the pixels on the digital wall.

“To achieve market dominance, you must be more than just an expert on the local real estate market,” she says. “You must also become an expert on the local lifestyle.”

Bernice points out that the needs of homebuyers extend beyond the property. Families want the best-rated schools, singles want the coolest places to hang out, and retirees want the greenest golf courses. This is where hyperlocalism comes into play.

She points out that by using the new SpatialMatch visual search technology, this tool will help relocation clients who must decide on a home from afar and even better, it will reduce the number of houses an agent must show.

“To take advantage of this new breed of search, you must start thinking about including more than just the details of the property you are listing. You must also include as many lifestyle factors as possible in your descriptions,” she writes.

John Perkins, CEO of Home Junction Inc., which developed SpatialMatch, adds, “We believe Ms. Ross truly understands our approach to real estate and she obviously sees the importance of not only selling a home, but selling the entire neighborhood and beyond. Consumers use search technology every day. They will be impressed by a real estate agent who can use our advanced platform to not only show them a house, but also show them how the property meets their lifestyle needs.”

Bernice was nice enough to sum things up in a bottom line: “The more hyperlocal lifestyle information you give, the more leads you will generate and the more transactions you will close.”

Nailed it. You can find the Inman article about SpatialMatch and hyperlocalism here and you can read Bernice’s blog about luxury real estate at www.luxuryclues.com

Would you pay $1.5 million for five cents? Someone did. In 1996, a coin collector paid that amount for a 1913 Liberty Head Nickel.

Real estate agents continually use the same principle that created the high purchase for this coin. It’s called the principle of scarcity. Expert Dr. Robert Cialdini calls it “the rule of the few.” To define this phenomena in simple terms, he says “the idea of potential loss plays a large role in human decision making.”

Sure, if you’re selling a unique house or a home at an incredibly low price, it’s easy to persuade the buyer this property will not be on the market for long.

But why not apply the principle of scarcity to lifestyle amenities? This is where SpatialMatch tools play a critical role.

Open your SpatialMatch screen and ask the homebuyers what attributes and lifestyle amenities they want in a neighborhood. Do they want to be close to their job? Then, create a mileage radius which narrows down the homes within a certain proximity to their place of work. Are they golfers and want to be a near a great golf course? Click on the Lifestyle App and, instantly, sonar circles will point out the courses nearby. Need more information? Use our Area and Deck Apps to learn details about each course. Do they like parks? Show them the parks in the area. Best schools? Same process.

Now, instead of numerous homes to choose from, when the buyer looks at the SpatialMatch screen, they may only see 2-3 homes close to the lifestyle amenities they want.

At this point, you don’t need to point out to your prospect that they might want to make an offer. They already know that. They can see it. As a real estate agent, what you need to do is get the paperwork ready and get out of the way. SpatialMatch has shown the home buyer there may be dozens of houses to choose from, but the one that fits all their needs is very rare indeed.