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Selections from 1000watt’s Spotlight newsletter, 2011 1000wattconsulting.com/blog
table of contents Forward
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Your contact list, sprinkled with magic
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Published November 29, 2011
Old school grace and Apple’s Cards
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Published November 22, 2011
The need for speed
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Published October 25, 2011
Feeling lame? Here’s a quick move
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Published October 11, 2011
Floorplans get sexy
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Published September 13, 2011
Registration, leads, foreplay and reason
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Published August 23, 2011
Walkscore launches Neighborhood Flyers
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Published June 11, 2011
How to get mobile right
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Published April 6, 2011
Single property websites in an instant with Zapd
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Published March 29, 2011
Just Jing it - and see what I see
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Published March 3, 2011
Paint a picture of your market
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Published March 1, 2011
Tungle.me - Your virtual scheduling assistant
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Published February 22, 2011
Text messaging, the new old thing
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Published February 2, 2011
3 email marketing lessons from 1000watt Spotlight Published January 16, 2011
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forward For many in real estate, 2011 was a head down year. Another season of sluggishness in the housing market, one more year of tight credit and consumer uncertainty. If you are an agent, you wrestled with wary buyers, stressed sellers and lenders intent on lobbing inexplicable hand grenades into almost every deal. If you are a broker, you fought margin-eating forces on almost every front while moving to open new profit centers. In other words, it was probably tough to pause and look at the amazing swirl of technology and media innovation circling around our industry. At 1000watt, we make it our job to have our heads up in this swirl. It informs our client engagements, but we also like to share some of what we see with the larger industry. Our email newsletter, Spotlight, is one way we do that. Each week, we feature an application, technology or trend worth noting. These things almost never have to do with real estate directly they are, rather, a sampling of the opportunities that lie outside its edges. Sometimes, we’re simply sharing a cool little app we think may make your working life just a little easier. This compendium is just a sampling. If you want to get this sort of thing every week, sign up for Spotlight and get lit!
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November
29
2011
Your contact list, sprinkled with magic Most agents have a contact list.
Gist was among the first in this space. But they got bought by Research in Motion early this year.
It sits in repose within Outlook, or remains gridlocked in a .csv file. Every once in a while, it’s loaded into e-newsletter software or merged onto mailing labels. Then back it goes, frozen, Han Solo-like, looking up in a plea for release. It need not be this way.
Rapportive, which we wrote about months ago, is a Gmail plugin that lets you see the recent social activity of contacts you’re emailing. But more are coming. Xobni recently released a product called Smartr that enhances contacts in Outlook, iPhone, Android and Blackberry. And Friends, a much buzzed about app still in private beta, promises an even closer integration of contacts with the social stream.
Magic There are a slew of new applications that enable you to get more from your contact list by mashing it up with social signals. It is now possible to see what your contacts are up to on the ‘net - what they’re talking about, liking, writing about and sharing - at any given time. So, your contact “Randy Martin” is no longer just a name sitting in a file on your computer, he’s Randy the homeowner who’s been talking about the new job he just took across the country on Facebook.
A new way Is this a little creepy? Yep. But it’s here. And the possibilities are pretty interesting for those in a relationship-based business like real estate. It’s a new way of marketing, really. One more finely tuned to the signals of individual prospects, less blunt in practice, and far more alive than the contact lists of yesteryear.
New Randy is much more valuable than old Randy. You’ve sprinkled your contact list with a little bit of social magic.
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November
22
2011
Old school grace and Apple’s Cards A thank you card. You don’t expect them in this day and age, where digital toots, tweets and emails get flung around the ‘Net with casual abandon. But the physical format still has legitimacy, a tangibility that the web cannot (as yet) approximate. Cards, an iOS app from Apple for the iPhone and iPod Touch, enables you to bridge the gap between these worlds. It lets you create and send highly customized greeting cards to any recipient in your device’s address book, right on the spot. So, if you’re looking for a way to impress a potential client or thank a past client for their business, creating a beautiful printed card of their home while you’re in the car outside may just be a way to blow their mind.
With any of the themes you can choose to work with an existing photo in your camera roll, but if you shoot the picture from within the app itself, Cards will help you compose the perfect picture by overlaying the printed elements of the card directly on the live image on the screen. It even adds your location using GPS. When you’re ready to send, Apple prints your card on high-quality cotton paper using a technique called letterpress printing, which creates a truly unique look and tactile feel for each card, and then mails it out for you. The app will even send you a push-notification when the card has been delivered to the recipient. Each card costs $2.99. A small amount to leave a lasting - and physical impression.
The interface is a breeze to use. Simply pick a theme, snap a picture, add some text, choose your contact and hit send. That’s all there is to it.
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October
25
2011
The need for speed
You have a beautiful design. Loads of content. And plenty of traffic. You should be sucking up leads like a Hoover. But you’re not. You have a need for speed. If your website is slow, it’s killing you. In fact, website conversion expert Bryan Eisenberg claims that a mere one second delay in page load time will result in 7% fewer conversions.
They do this via a proprietary “Cloud routing technology” that can be applied to your site quickly, with no additional hardware, no software to install and no changes to your existing code. Customers basically piggyback on their enterprise-scale infrastructure. Pricing starts at just $29 per month. They also have a free diagnostic tool that tells you how you’re doing right now. Based on our “average” ranking for 1000wattconsulting.com, we may be giving Yottaa a test drive.
And don’t forget that Google factors speed into its rankings. Yottaa is a new company that promises to make improving your site’s speed - something that normally takes significant investment in hardware and code optimization - much, much easier.
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October
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Feeling lame? Here’s a quick move A kick-ass website would be nice.
A quick move
But, really, if you’re like a lot of agents (and even some brokers) not lame would be an excellent start.
Check out Onepager. It’s a “build your own website fast” app. There are lots of these out there, but we like Onepager because it is extremely usable. You can get a nice looking site up in a matter of minutes.
Kick-ass can come in time, or when the budget materializes. We bring this up because we continue to see real estate websites that are shockingly bad. Usually, they’re template products purchased years ago and never improved upon - either by the customer or the vendor.
Not a kick-ass site. A nice looking site. No, there is no integrated IDX solution. No, there is no back-end contact manager. Link out to those things if you must. But if you’re struggling with your Clinton-era website. It’s a first step.
They are brand death. And hopefully not the last. Every page view is destructive. Every Flash intro or blurry headshot exudes the repellent power of Deet. Every minute they live, your brand dies a little.
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September
13
2011
Floorplans get sexy
Floorplans!
MagicPlan is a new iPhone app that makes the process much simpler.
No matter how hard you try, you just can’t make them sound sexy. But done well, they can help get a home sold which is pretty sexy, right? We’ve seen High Definition Range photos, video walkthroughs, virtual tours, 360 panographs all come into fashion, and while this certainly adds sizzle to the steak, sometimes it’s the simplest cuts that are the most tantalizing.
MagicPlan uses the phone’s camera to measure the dimensions of a property. Simply take photos of every corner in the room and the software uses a sophisticated algorithm to create precise dimensions of it. You can then use the app to drag, drop and place the rooms in their natural context using just your finger. Yeah, it’s that simple.
A floorplan can help a buyer visualize the spatial relationships within a home. How the master bedroom is close to the bonus room. How the kitchen connects to the dining room. You get the picture.
MagicPlan publishes your floorplan to the web. The app is free but it costs $4.99 to remove the watermark on the drawing. MagicPlan is available in the iTunes app store.
Up until now, however, getting a floorplan drawn meant hiring a draftsperson or architect to come and measure the home and create the illustration.
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August
23
2011
Registration, leads, foreplay and reason It happens all the time. We’re in a meeting talking about website conversion and someone will say “This isn’t rocket science - we just need to make users register to see the listings.” Or, if the site in question already requires registration, someone will say “If we ditch forced registration, near-term lead volume will drop, agents will freak and a portal to hell will open in my conference room floor.” Our position on this question is clear: Forcing registration is a bad idea, long term. Lead quality will drop over time, as will users’ feeling toward your brand. Lead conversion is an art, not an ultimatum. We’ve seen this play out on many sites. But...if you must force registration, there are ways to mitigate its negative effects.
Here are three:
Appeal to reason. If you’re going to ask a user to give you their name and email address just to see a listing they could see on a thousands other sites, you better give them a reason for doing so - a good one. Often, this obvious step is overlooked. Or a weak explanation (“track all the properties you like”) is offered. Be clear about benefits, if you have them. Better yet, run a VOW on your site and explain how that unlocks useful and unique data for registered users. Make it easy. This is where a lot of sites blow it. The user decides they want to register, but is then presented with a form asking for first name, last name, phone, address, email address and whatever else “our agents” or “our back-end system” requires. Ask for the absolute minimum. Name, email and account password is all you need in most cases. Or, to grease the skids even more, deploy Facebook registration on your site. Doing these things right takes time and effort, of course. But it’s worth it. At a minimum, it will tame the debate over registration just a little.
Get good at what we call “conversion foreplay.” By that we mean you should think about more than the final action you want the user to take and make sure the pre-conversion experience is optimized. That means having a site that looks good, feels good, and speaks to the user in a voice that addresses their needs, not yours. Users who feel cared for will be more willing to register.
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June
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2011
Walkscore launches Neighborhood Flyers There’s more to buying a home than just falling in love with the property. Where it is (neighborhood) and the lifestyle it offers is typically what seals the deal. That’s why we’re such big fans of WalkScore. The four year-old company launched with the goal of using the Web to promote liveable communities. One of our very first Spotlight emails featured its founder, Matt Lerner. Walkscore ratings can now be found on a number of top-shelf real estate websites. However, this week, WalkScore launched something really interesting: a new service designed to help Realtors - the WalkScore Neighborhood Flyer. These flyers take the best of Walkscore’s data detailing local amenities, parks and schools and combines them on a high resolution printable PDF. Agents can pick up to six features to focus on.
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These flyers cost $5 per listing, and they are easily customized to add your photo, logo and contact information. Once complete, the final document can be left as a supplement inside a flyer box, handed out at an open house, shared via email or linked to on the web. Brokers wanting to co-brand the service for all their agents can do so as well. Northwest brokerage John L. Scott is one of the initial partnerships announced by the company. This is a dead simple and efficient way to give potential buyers a realistic, trusted, informed perspective of the surrounding neighborhood. It’s also a nice bow to place on the marketing efforts package you’re providing your seller. More informed buyers, better positioning for your listing, a very affordable price - it’s a win, win, win.
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April
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How to get mobile right
A client of ours, Michael Saunders & Company, released a mobile web app today. Just go to the site on your phone to check it out. It works on pretty much any phone you can think of - even some pre-Bieber feature phones. Yes, there are some downsides to going web versus native. But that’s not what this post is about.
Unfortunately, if you look at real estate brokerage mobile apps - particularly web apps - it is clear this demand is often ignored. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve seen a “Find an office” button on the home screen of a brokerage WAP. Or a logo that dwarfs the content in which the user might actually have an interest. These apps are more like Las Vegas than Europe.
This post is about designing a good mobile experience, which Michael Saunders & Company and its technology partner, Aumnia, managed to pull off. If you want to pull it off, you must prepare for a process of ruthless triage. Given the dramatically reduced screen size, you will forced to serve only those users who truly must be served. Everything extraneous must be hacked away. User-focused design is imperative.
Fifteen years of research tells us pretty clearly that consumers want properties - all of them, quickly and easily - when they go online. When you’re designing for mobile, it’s important to keep in mind just how easy it is to screw up giving them what we know they want.
You might think of mobile as being like Europe. Everything there - from cars to hotel rooms - is constrained by tighter space limitations than we, as Americans, as used to. Everything is thus smaller, but the attention to design demanded by the constraints often produces a more pleasing experience than something less tightly bounded.
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March
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2011
Single property websites in an instant with Zapd It’s getting harder and harder to call that brick in your pocket a phone. Complex hardware. Fully-realized operating systems. An software ecosystem that adds value to the device. We are witnessing a new era in computing. Yet while we’ve highlighted plenty of apps in Spotlight that help you take better pictures, create notes and manage documents using a smartphone, creating something has usually meant going back to a PC. Zapd, a new app available exclusively for iOS devices, eliminates that platform dance and gets you to a place where your smartphone is the only computer you’ll ever need.
A simple drag and drop interface lets you combine discrete elements on the page and then quickly apply a pre-designed template. Real estate is clearly in Zapd’s cross-hairs too - as several of the templates that come with the app are geared specifically towards property. Single property websites are nothing new to this industry, but the speed with which you can create one using Zapd certainly is. Imagine being able to wow a prospective client by creating a website for their home... while you’re standing in front of it. Forget time consuming coding, HTML, even the hassle of getting online from your home or office. Building websites doesn’t need to be hard. As Zapd shows us, sometimes all you need is your phone.
Zapd lets you quickly combine photos, text and links into beautiful websites that take all of a few minutes to create directly on your iPhone. Like this one, that I made of my home office.
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March
3
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Just Jing it - and see what I see The web gives us dozens of new ways to communicate. Google Voice if we want to connect via voice. Skype to video conference. Instant messaging (IM) to chat. Twitter to message each other publicly.
You could use Jing to teach a quick online lesson on how to use your web site. Or you could highlight and explain the most important parts of contract or escrow document. Even better, you could collaborate around a real estate search by recording a quick narration over the search results.
You can throw Jing into that mix too. Jing is a small - and free - desktop app, which when installed on your computer (OSX and Windows versions are available), allows you to select a region of your desktop and then record a quick video of anything in that area. Sometimes it’s just easier to show someone what you’re trying to explain. Jing is a simple way to make that happen. There is clearly an application to real estate here.
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Jing forces you to be concise, as its videos are limited to 5 minutes. And once complete, Jing will instantly upload those videos to Screencast.com and give you a short URL that you can email or IM to your clients. If you want to archive or place your videos on your website Jing also gives you the necessary HTML embed code. If you’ve ever found yourself struggling to explain something to someone online - remember there is a easier way. Just Jing it.
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March
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Paint a picture of your market Real estate is about places - properties and communities.
Consider just a few possibilities here:
Pictures of those places have been proven, time and again, to generate engagement on real estate websites. Instagram is a mobile photo sharing app - one of many in what is a very buzzy category these days. Well, last week they released a “Real time” API. That means that developers can now build applications that display photos taken by Instagram users as they are taken. The photos displayed can be limited to certain Instagram users, photos tagged only with certain keywords (e.g., “parks”) or by geo-coordinates or geographic area (e.g., photos taken of places in a certain neighborhood).
UÊÊ*>}iÃÊ ÊÞ ÕÀÊÀi> ÊiÃÌ>ÌiÊÜiLà ÌiÊÌ >ÌÊ` ë >ÞÊÊ photos of your market, of certain neighborhoods, or of individual properties, automatically, as they are taken. UÊÊ Ài>Ì }Ê>ÊÛ ÃÕ> Ê LÀ>ÀÞÊ vÊ«À «iÀÌ iÃÊ ÊÞ ÕÀÊÊ community organized by tags you designate to help divine buyer preferences - e.g., “rancher”, “colonial”, “Mediterranean”, etc. UÊÊ Ài>Ì }Ê i } L À `ʺÃÌ ÀÞL >À`Ã»Ê ÊÊ Ê albums that take your website visitors beyond the inventory to answer the “Can I live here?” question. Your agents - those folks out there in the field with smart phones - create this media. Instagram is iPhone-only right now, but an Android app is coming soon. Remember: People love pictures of real estate and communities. So get snapping!
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February
22
2011
Tungle.me - Your virtual scheduling assistant “I’m thinking about making a move. Can we get together and chat?” Words that every working Realtor loves to hear. Finding a good time to have that conversation, however, can sometimes be a bit of headache. Multiple email threads to try and find a convenient time. Calendar invites that get fired off into the darkness and disappear into the ether. Tungle.me aims to solve all that messiness.
Meetings made easy Tungle is dead simple. You create an account, or sign in with your Gmail or Facebook account, and pick a personal URL where your new schedule will reside. Next, connect your Outlook calendar. Download and install a small background app which allows Tungle to stay synchronized. If you use a web calendar, like Google’s, you can connect this as well and the two will always stay in sync without the need for a desktop app.
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Finally, schedule your availability, or your work hours. Tungle will automatically compare the two and block out your busy times. It’s important to note that your Tungle profile will never display the contents of the meetings you have in your calendar. It only shares the hours that you are available to take meetings.
No more double bookings Clients can now instantly see your availability on your profile in real time and request a meeting with you, even propose multiple times that might work for them. Tungle even handles time zones dynamically. As you fill up your calendar, Tungle automatically updates your availability on your public page. “See you at noon on Thursday.” Those words never sounded so sweet.
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February
2
2011
Text messaging, the new old thing We like technologies that have wide adoption |but little buzz. Especially when they are quietly improved.
Tiger Text does many of the same things, but allows you to control when texts you send are deleted from your phone and the phone of the recipient.
That’s why we’ve written here about apps like MailChimp and TinyLetter. They make marketing via email - a technology everyone still uses despite persistent proclamations of imminent death easier for lots of people immediately.
GroupMe is a “group texting” app that let you set up a single number for several contacts. That same number can be used to jump on a conference call when texting won’t cut it. GroupMe also allows photo sharing.
We’re feeling that about SMS now too. A mobile phone is a piece of technology practically every agent uses, and most of them have been texting for years. It’s quick and simple. People get it.
Any Realtor working with text-loving clients would benefit from these apps. No crazy learning curve, no social awkwardness. Just utility, right now.
A new crop of startups are now improving this tried and true means of communication. Take Kik, an app that enables unlimited free texting to other users in “real-time,” meaning it behaves more like IM than traditional texting. It also shows you if your message has been delivered or read, so you’re not left wondering if someone actually viewed that text you sent three hours ago.
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January
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2011
3 email marketing lessons from 1000watt Spotlight Hold on tight. We’re about to get meta on you.
Lesson #2: Send times don’t matter too much
Yes, this Spotlight... is about Spotlight.
The consensus on send times has always been located in the “send mid-week, mid-day” range. People are frenzied Monday, checking-out Friday, and more likely to delete their way through an inbox early or late in the day.
We launched 1000watt Spotlight because wanted to engage our audience in a new way. We also wanted to express - and test - our intense disagreement with those who were contending (and still contend) that “email is dead.” We’ve learned a lot. And want to share just a few lessons we’ve absorbed about email marketing from the first nine months of 1000watt Spotlight. We hope they’re helpful to you in your own email marketing efforts.
Lesson #1: Always perform the “Who gives a s____?” test before sending Our best open and click rates were on those emails that passed this test instantly. We’ve written about a lot of cool applications, but it has been those emails that were forceful and clear about why a new application mattered - what benefit it delivered, what trend it illuminated - that got people engaged. This test is relevant for your email marketing too. Let’s say you send out market stats to your email list on a regular basis. Good idea. But make sure to include a sentence or two (e.g., “Inventory soared in August - sellers must rethink pricing”) that bottom lines it for the reader.
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We’ve kept our send day at Tuesday (predictability is important) but have tried just about every time of day. And there’s been no significant difference in open rates. If you take time with your content, people will open your email, day or night.
Lesson #3: Never stop promoting Very few email lists grow based on viral activity alone. Spotlight sure hasn’t. Thousands of people get our email now, but only because we promote it at almost every touch point. On our home page, on Twitter, on our Facebook page. And, most effectively, in person. Whenever we speak, we promote Spotlight - and get a big bump. The content’s got to be relevant, and the entire effort needs to be woven into your larger brand and marketing effort. Far from dead Email is far from dead. And we continue to believe real estate under uses the medium. But we know by virtue of our own effort, and campaigns we have created for clients - that it can be hugely effective.
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