Tag archive for "Real Estate Marketing Tools"

Tips on Using Drone Photography for Real Estate

Drone photography is no longer a tool for cutting-edge, tech-savvy real estate selling agents. Drone photography is now a must-have feature that today’s sellers and buyers have come to expect. It delivers a wealth of information, showcasing expansive property views, the layout of luxury properties, home condition, neighborhood amenities, and more. However, if you’re ready to join the bulk of agents putting drone photography to work, you may be in for a few surprises. Make your initial flight into drone photography easier with these tips.

Get Ready for Flight

Using drone photography for real estate selling involves more than a buy and fly drone purchase. The FAA governs the use of commercial drones, including strict rules and the need for professional remote pilot certification. Thus, your first step in employing the use of this powerful marketing tool will involve either drone pilot certification, or enlisting the help of a licensed and insured local drone photographer.

I’ve Got My Drone Footage, Now What?

Once you’ve got your drone footage, put it to work for you with the Virtuets easy video building tool. Free for use with the Properties Online family of products, the Virtuets video builder will help you easily upload and integrate your drone and real estate footage into a comprehensive and compelling video property tour.

Put Drone Photography & Video Listings to Work for You

Share every listing, distributing footage via your website, social media, YouTube, Craigslist, and more. With the help of real estate listing videos, you can now quickly and easily showcase your listings, enjoying 1200% more shares than using text and photo imagery alone, according to recent research.

Fly to new heights. Put drone photography and video listings to work for your real estate selling business with the help of Properties Online today.

Connect with clients immediately with chat apps

Should You Use Live Chat Apps on Your Website?

Live chat apps are literally popping up everywhere. In this week’s real estate agent marketing tips, we’ll take a look at this talked about tech, and whether or not it might be right for your business.

Put a Bug in Your Ear
You spend countless hours driving traffic to your real estate agent website. But in your business, and with today’s instant-access lifestyle, it’s easy for first-time visitors to feel ignored. Let’s face it, as much as it would be great for initial client contact to be one-on-one with you, the nature of the realty business makes a prompt, live response tough to tackle.

Live chat apps can be a boon, stepping in to offer real-time answers to potential clients. Doubly-effective, this virtual back-and-forth can also lead to follow-up conversations, providing valuable client insight.

Listen Up!
Live chat apps are highly effective in real estate agent marketing. Despite the industry’s typical lag-time in response to tech, agents and brokerages are jumping aboard due to the bountiful benefits:

– Increased Opportunity
Brokerages leveraging live chat apps see a 36% increase in leads, on average – more than lead sources from prominent listing portals and website contact forms.

– Quality Leads
For each lead garnered through chat services, about 49% are sufficient to qualify for agent follow-up.

– Higher Conversions
REAL Trends points to a conversion rate of 7.5% with live chat – 3 times the average for general online leads, at 2.7%. Triggered properly, these rates could increase as much as 11%.

Are You Leaving Potential Clients Wandering in a Virtual Desert?
By taking advantage of live chat services, you can quickly snag clients before they go elsewhere in search of answers to their questions, keeping them right where you want them – with you.

Stop struggling with conversion. Up your real estate agent marketing ante with the latest tools and technology on the market from Properties Online today.

Will Your Next Appraisal be by Fly By? – By Drone Of Course.

New roof? Large tract? Strange or interesting geography? You can now simplify your real estate selling needs, documenting and communicating attributes such as these with ease – with the help of drone technology, or unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).

It’s not sci-fi
No longer hampered by Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations, there’s now an easy to understand system and set of rules for flying a commercial drone, and the real estate industry is taking notice. Should you take advantage of this technology when appraising real estate and gathering listing photos? You betcha.

Hold on to your hats
Real estate selling won’t be this interesting again until the implementation of driverless cars. This booming and exciting technology has been around for awhile, but only recently has the FAA finalized its plan to “fully integrate the UAS into the National Airspace System (NAS) harmoniously, side-by-side with manned aircraft, occupying the same airspace and using many of the same air traffic management systems and procedures…” without training that requires a brain and physique that rivals a NASA astronaut.

This picture might be worth more than a thousand words
It’ll also take you more than a thousand words of reading to figure out how to do it yourself. It’s not a flying camera, folks, it’s an aircraft – and you have to be certified to fly one. But you no longer need a pilot’s license and a fortune in time and monetary investment to put on your flying hat. Interested? Take a look at the FAA’s Airmen Certification Standards. Rest assured, commercial flying rules are common sense:

1. Get your license.

2. Choose a unit that weighs less than 55 pounds to avoid registration.

3. Stay in uncontrolled/Class-G airspace.

4. Keep drones in your line-of-sight during operation, under 400-feet.

5. Sorry, no fly-bys of people or planes – or driving drones from your car.

Ready to start flying high with the latest real estate selling technology? Find it at Properties Online today.

Should You Be Advertising Your Listings on Zillow? Part One

In the months following its merger with Trulia, Zillow Group is looking to cash in on the benefits of its former rival. Currently, 63 percent of new real estate listings are from existing Zillow advertisers, but the megalithic realty site wants more. Over the next several years, it will be making its play for your real estate listing advertising dollars job number one – to the tune of spending about $100 million this year to grow its audience. Are you game?

The benefits:
Unlike most broker sites which feature only local MLS listings, Zillow has close to complete coverage in most markets, including every property – not just those for sale or rent. This is a huge boon to buyers searching by neighborhood, giving them access to nearly 100 percent of property data versus the roughly 3 percent of homes listed on the MLS. With the addition of Trulia, the benefits are even greater, including consumer – not agent driven – information such as neighborhood crime maps and crime density as well as a far more robust offering of data on schools, market trends, past sales, and more.

The drawbacks:
Aside from the most obvious, including inaccurate ‘Zestimates,’ incorrect data, and paying for the leads garnered from your own Zillow listings, Zillow is far from a real estate listing advertising utopia. Barclays sites slowing web traffic growth resulting from market saturation as a long-term concern, and Zillow’s termination of agreement with ListHub in April hasn’t helped matters, resulting in declined listings following the dissolution, putting Zillow behind Realtor.com as it attempts to duplicate ListHub’s comprehensive and accurate real estate listing advertising database. The merger itself has also sent customers on the hunt for alternatives.

Make sure to check back Thursday as we continue “Should You Be Advertising Your Listings on Zillow?”