Business Online

When it comes to promoting products that have limited buyers, real estate is a great example, spending too much time or money to reach the buyer eats into profits or commissions quickly and long term makes you feel like you're banging your head against a brick wall. I've already touched on five things a real estate agent should be doing, and in this article I want to draw attention to some new things you might not know about.

Aside from the disastrous economy and slow sales, the reality is that successful realtors from 2 or 3 years ago are mostly still successful today, so they must be doing something different and it isn't hard to figure out what.

Networks.

That really is it, the successful realtor from 10 years ago, 2 years ago, or today, will be the same successful realtor next year or in five years because they have a network of people around them who have property for sale, and people who want to buy or lease property. Do they build their network and then kick back? Nope, they understand that networks of people change constantly, and they make sure their network is always uptodate.

With more and more people selling or buying by using the Internet to research pricing for comparisons, or background information, it's important that they find you as part of their search. And this sadly is where too many agents lose out. They think it's enough to have their business number listed in the online yellow pages, or to join industry forums which the average buyer/seller will never visit.

The truly successful agent understands that the real estate market is 100% based on peoples interests. People talk, people socialise, people complain etc. And online the best place to do those things is on a personal blog, a social networking website, or some interest based forum. But there is something new on the horizon now that is growing in popularity and allows us to blog and socialise, whilst at the same time search for people who have similar interests that might indicate an interest in property.

And as a real estate agent you need to be using this new service now to build credibility. The service is Google+. I've been using it since the service started and it's helping me a lot to find buyers for my property listings - make sure you use the saved search tool, it's similar to Google Alerts but let's you connect directly with the person you want to speak to instead of just a contact form on their blog or the messaging service in Facebook. Good luck.

I found an article in the UK's Overseas Property Professional that talks about the numbers of units of apartments and land being sold in Dubai, using figures that come from the Dubai Land Department, and showing a very interesting trend with buyers being proximate to the region.

Probably we shouldn't be surprised, very few westerners want to live in the Middle East with the religious extremism and different culture, most preferring to stick to Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and Latin America, but it gave me a chance to think.

Before I go on too much more, let me quickly share the figures for buyers in Dubai. Aside from local buyers from the UAE, who you'd expect would be the biggest group, the top buyers in Dubai were Indians, British, Pakistanis, and followed by Iranians. The British are the anomaly, but interesting to see Indians and Pakistanis so high up in the figures, way more buyers from these two countries than from other Gulf states.

What do I read from this? Quite simply people in both India and Pakistan are securing second homes away from problems at home, not all of it political or religious, and choosing to buy in a thoroughly modern yet comfortably similar city in terms of culture and tradition.

Americans were outside the top 5 buying nationalities after Russia which surprised me given the high number of US forces based in the region and dominance of American engineering personnel. There may be a reason, generally speaking, Americans like to go where there is already a solid expat community and latin America features highly.

British people on the other hand have traditionally been more open to buying property in countries all around the world.

Investing in property isn't something you do just for fun, unless you can afford to lose your capital, so looking to long term saleability is important, as well as who your market is going to be. With this in mind I'd say American investors probably want to look more carefully at Dubai or Middle East real estate than they would US or Latin American property.

If Americans like to stick to places where Americans have traditionally bought, then Dubai might be the wrong place for investing, and by that same logic, anywhere in the Middle East would be a bad choice. I'd be interested in comments about this.

In a previous post I wrote about the top 5 Internet tools for real estate, and in this post I'm going to quickly describe 5 other tools that should be considered mandatory for a realtor who wants to be successful, especially in this depressed market where quickly getting information to your client makes the difference between gaining their trust and selling, or losing them altogether.

First things first, are you connected to the web? Do you already have a website for your property listings? Are you already using mobile Internet for uploading photos to Flickr, videos to YouTube, and updating Twitter to let prospects know what's happening in your market? If not, #fail and back to class for you!

So now that you're ready to embark on the next stage, let me tell you there are several different sites you can use to find prospects or market yourself better without having to cold call. What do you need to do? You need to setup Google Alerts for keywords relating to your town and as well as selected phrases like house for sale, buying a new house etc. Google then tracks all mentions of these in forums, blogs, Twitter, even public Facebook posts and serves them to you in an email so you can go add the writer to your follow list.

If you have a smartphone or tablet computer all of the alerts you just setup in the step before can be pushed directly to your device wherever you are, possibly giving you the opportunity to contact the writer while they're hot, that is shortly after they've published their post or comment. To be specific though, go for an iPad or iPhone, or both because... Read More

A couple of days ago I was chatting to a friend in LA about property in general, and she mentioned the prices of homes in LA compared to Denver, which led to me mentioning prices of European property, specifically in Spain and Germany, the two markets I know the best.

The conversation rolled around to short sales, because any investor worth their salt will be looking for short sales if the price is right. Flipping in this market isn't the goal, instead its to build a portfolio of rentable property on the cheap.

In Spain there are some bargains to be had, at least in Spain we think they are bargains, for example pisos (apartments) of 100sqm selling for 60-70k euros that can be rented for a minimum 450 euros per month in the small towns, or as much as 700 in the bigger towns. In the big cities you won't find property at these prices where the rent can be higher.

Contrast this with a recent short sale in Denver, 100sqm condo for US$20,000, and possible rentable income of US$1,000 per month. Wow, for an investor I'd love to be the buyer on that property. Sure taxes and other costs aren't the same between the US and Europe, but it doesn't take a genius investor to know that property in Denver with the right numbers could pay itself inside two years, whereas in Spain you'd be looking at ten+ years.

Cashed up investors complain about the property market going nowhere, but I'm looking for these kinds of opportunities. To get something of an equivalent price in Spain I'd need to look at rural property, what we call fincas here, which will probably be an acre or two with a stone barn that could be converted if the legals work out, and if I hunt around I could pick that up for less than 20,000 euros, but it would be far from useful as a rental, in fact probably too far from town to even bother.

The US economy may look like its tanked, but don't write it off yet, with 300 million people there is always going to be demand for real estate, the secret to working through the current crisis is to invest for the long term, flipping isn't going to work so look at the rent income vs buy price to see which property is going to be an asset to your portfolio.

As a real estate professional you probably recognize the value of your reputation, and maybe on your website you have an about page that tells readers who you are. But do each of your articles mention your name? Could potential clients find articles you've written to assess your expertise?

I guess as a realtor you get most of that trust factor offline, but recent changes to Google mean it is now possible to build an online trust factor by declaring yourself as the author, and best of all, Google will now rank your articles higher because of the trust you've built.

Here's how it works. You write an article on your website, or any website if we want to be truthful, you declare somewhere on the page, perhaps in the author resource box at the bottom, that you're the author, then include a link to your full online profile, add a bit of extra HTML code to the link, and a link from your profile back to the website with your articles.

Now when Google index your article they will automatically recognize you as the author. In their search results they will then list your article along with your profile picture and a link to your profile, AND a link to more articles you've written!

If that doesn't make you sit up and take notice, then let me make this clearer. Google are now putting more emphasis on personal reputations than to SEO from backlinks. This means you can continue to do what real estate agents do best, build relationships, and Google now ranks you on the size and quality of your online network.

I gotta tell you this is the most exciting SEO development since the invention of the internet. The idea of investing time getting other websites to pass a link and part of their 'pagerank' to your website is so alien to the way real relationships work, is it any wonder the only people who succeed are those who somehow have more money to spend.

So looking forward to the future the success of your online ventures will be determined by your expertise, the success you have in getting your network to read your articles, and in managing your reputation. This is fantastic news because we already do this offline, and now we can transfer this skills to our online world.

To read more about declaring your authorship of articles, check out Yoast's rel="author" guide and don't forget to read Graham Hunt's Web Marketing for Real Estate Agents