If you work in the real estate or construction industry, then I have some good news for you. Our 2008 real estate products and services will be more robust than ever before, and we are pulling out all the stops to offer more value to Realtors and brokers. Delaware.Net customers will get many new marketing benefits for free, including our hands-on consulting about the changes in Internet marketing, technology, and the options that we bring to 2008. In this article, I’m going to expose some of the details of what we have cooking. If you want to know all of our secret projects for the real estate market, then you can call us to make an appointment to find out more. More about our plans after the jump.
History of our real estate applications
Waaaay back in 1999 and 2000, it was the first time that we got serious about offering interactive web tools for our real estate customers. Around that time, the local MLS companies were just getting online in a big way, and they were starting to offer tools to real estate agencies to help them with their web sites for the first time. Our real estate customers wanted to manage their own web sites without paying for us to update their listings, so we developed a content management system that we called “RealMLS“. RealMLS was also a way for us to centralize all of our customer’s listing data into one large database and then display them on a portal web site (more on that later). I literally built that whole RealMLS system myself, and it worked great for what it was supposed to do. But there was one problem. Office workers inside the real estate agencies didn’t like having to add their homes to my application, and then also add them to the required MLS system through the MLS web site. It was double work for them.
Broker reciprocity changes the game
After 2001, a new method for sharing real estate listing data was starting to sweep the country, and it was called “broker reciprocity”. Broker reciprocity was a new way for real estate brokers to share their listing data with each other. The MLS systems that service the Delaware area were FORCED to offer this as a service for their brokers. For a cost of about $600 per year, a broker can get a data feed from the local MLS that contains ALL of the listings from all of the other brokers in the area that are also participating in the program. This changed the nature of real estate web sites in the area because it was no longer acceptable to only show the listings that your broker had in his inventory. Think of it this way - when the market was really hot, brokers couldn’t keep enough homes in their inventory. A large broker could have as few as ten homes in their web site if they were busy, even though there were many more homes in the MLS system. After broker reciprocity, a broker could show all of the homes in the MLS in their web site. This lead to an explosion of new companies that came into the local Delaware market from all over the country to sell turn-key template web sites to Realtors and brokers. We had to rethink our real estate applications, and we built an all-new real estate database system. At the time we started to build broker reciprocity into our database applications, I hired additional programmers to help write the new system. This was a challenging process, and I had to go through a few programmers until we got enough programing talent to build the systems that we have now. One of the former programmers once told me that I would need to buy a server computer to correspond with each county, just to have enough server horsepower to update the listings each day. He was wrong, and he doesn’t work for me today.
Currently, we process up to 80,000 real estate listings per day, synchronizing them between multiple MLS systems in about 30 minutes. Yes, we have newer servers as well, but the code that we developed is miles ahead of what other firms in the area are doing. This system allows us to have a centralized database of ALL real estate listings in Delaware, Northern Maryland, Philadelphia, and Central New Jersey. We are adding Southern New Jersey to our databases as well. This is just the tip of the iceberg of what we have in development now.
What’s New for 2008? Lots!
Blogs for Realtors
Blogs are extremely important to a solid web effort, but most web design companies do a bad job of integrating them and educating their clients about blogs. There is a TON of misinformation about how to build, use, and exploit blogs for marketing. Especially for home builders and Realtors. Recently I’ve presented educational sessions to local business organizations on what REAL blogs are, how to build them, how to manage them, and how they can best be used for online marketing. If you are a customer of mine, I will even come to your office and educate your staff about how to build and use blogs - for free. Blog integration has become an important part of building web sites and developing online marketing programs, but again there is a lot of disinformation out there. For example, I have seen developers throw a blog into or alongside a web site for their customers and tell them how important they are, but the content in the blogs and the way that they are configured will do more harm to the customer than good. The biggest reason for building a blog properly is to come up higher in search engines, and to get your readers to subscribe to your content. Correct blogging requires that you speak with an expert to get a return on your time. Any GOOD Realtor or Broker should have a blog, but not a bad blog. Most of the blogs that Realtors are writing in the area are lacking. I can’t give away all of our secrets here in our blog, so I encourage our customers to call us to schedule a meting to discuss a blog strategy that works.
SEO Continues to Evolve
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), is a critical part of any web site project. This holds true for not just new web sites, but old ones as well. Just as with blogs, we see a lot of poor service and disinformation from other web design firms. In 2007, I hired a management employee that makes SEO his passion. He studies SEO strategies and he finds new techniques to show our team every week. With SEO techniques changing so rapidly, our customers need to see us at least every three months if they want to stay on top of new search engine techniques. We share a lot of information with our customers, and some of our customers update their own SEO work after we get it started for them. A key aspect to good SEO that many sites lack is good written content. Gone are the days where we wait for months for our clients to write their own web site content. Many times we have to rewrite it for them anyway to make sure that search engines read the content correctly. We’ve recently hired a full-time marketing person who writes great copy for web sites, and she has become invaluable in helping our team help our clients in this area. If your web site is mostly pretty graphics and an empty blog, then you REALLY need our help in this area. Smaller web design shops always cut corners here, leaving your nice looking site with no traffic.
Lead Tracking and CRM Now Available!
There are many software products on the market that help Realtors to track sales, and we have seen many of them. We aren’t impressed. At Delaware.Net, we’ve developed a next-generation lead-tracking system using the latest AJAX technology. Realtors can now follow up with clients using a laptop or cell phone from anywhere. More traditional real estate offices that assign new leads to agents can also use this technology to better manage the referrals as they come in. This makes the Realtor, the broker, and the office manager MUCH more responsive to their clients. Even small teams of agents can better work together using our system. We call this new system “Agent-Logic”, and it is now available. We are rolling this system out for some of our current customers at no cost for a limited time. This system can be used in any industry, but we have added features for Realtors to track homes with every lead that enters the system. Call us for more information.
New Email Newsletter Service
As I mentioned in a previous blog post, we recently launched Mail-Logic, our new email newsletter service. You’ve got to see this new system to believe it. Email newsletters are something that all of our most successful customers use to grow their businesses, and now you can have the power of the national newsletter services for a fraction of the cost. Email newsletters start at only $12 per month. Add one to your site and watch as your customers provide more referrals to your business.
New Delaware.Com Real Estate Directory in 2008
It’s a fact that Realtors are leaving newspaper advertising and putting more of their marketing dollars on the web. Most traditional real estate portals on the web have the same problems that I mentioned earlier in this article - the agents have to upload their listings. No more. After years of planning, we are about to launch a new Delaware real estate portal. And we have the best domain possible for this new portal - Delaware.com. Central to this new portal is a real estate site that will show ALL of the homes in the local MLS systems. We have found a way to make this happen, and our real estate portal will put local newspaper web sites to shame. Customers of Delaware.Net will have their web sites listed for free in a business directory that coincides with the real estate listings themselves. Agencies that wish to stand out from the crowd will be able to pay for advanced listings that show more data than other homes in the search. Their listings will also come up higher in the search results when people are shopping for homes. Prices for this service will be less than all other Delaware area newspaper web sites, and our performance will be higher. Our system will contain the latest SEO techniques, and built-in integration with our CRM system for sales lead tracking. Even though the real estate market has taken a hit recently, this is the time to plan for the rebound. There are other aspects to this new marketing channel that we can’t discuss yet, so stay tuned for more information. Delaware.Net customers will be the first to hear about these new opportunities.
Here’s to an exciting 2008!
With our combination of new MLS applications, search engine marketing, email newsletters, lead tracking, and local portal traffic from Delaware.com, we’ve become a Delaware Realtor’s best friend. It isn’t enough any longer to simply show real estate listings from the MLS in your web site. You need a real professional web firm if you want to stay competitive. If you are Delaware.Net customer, you should contact us soon for a free consultation so that we can help lay out your 2008 plans. Initial consultations are always free for new prospective customers as well.
