It's 2010 (almost): Where's your mobile strategy?

If you're in real estate, you need be on the "Third Screen"

My first cellphone was a Motorola Classic II. It was a brick. It was clunky and it was heavy. Unholstering a cellphone at the time was a sign of influence; a mark of privilege. A status symbol.

How times have changed.

Today, there are now over 4.1 billion mobile phone users worldwide; there are now phones for tots, even phones for pets. So if you're running a real estate brokerage, formulating a mobile strategy in 2010 - or, at the very least, seriously considering it - is a must.

Here's why:

Phones have gotten smarter

Cellphones have morphed into smartphones. Sitting in our pockets, on our desks or silently plugged into the wall are devices whose computing prowess dwarf the mainframes of only a few years ago. High-speed data networks now blanket the country and as a result, these devices now have the ability to access the always-on, instant connectivity of the Internet.

According to a recent report from the research firm Nielsen, smartphones are on track to be the majority of phones in the U.S. by 2011 - at 50% of the market, this translates into roughly 150 million users. This is a sea change in the way we consume media, interact with our friends and, yes, look for real estate. Marry a rapidly growing user base with a cannibalization of existing consumer products (cameras, GPS units, MP3 players etc.) and you've got a bona fide trend on your hands. The smartphone is rapidly becoming the "third-screen" in most people's lives; behind their televisions and computers -- and even that distinction is starting to blur!

In real estate, where the primary customer interface is the Web, this move towards smartphones is an important paradigm shift to understand.

The small screen means rethinking the way that you interact with your customers, and more importantly, how your customers interact with you. A desktop computer is an active, lean-forward experience. A mobile smartphone is a momentary, dive-in and dive-out experience.

There's an app for that

If nothing else, this move to smartphones has introduced a new word to our vocabulary... 2009 will surely go down in history as the year of the "app".

So what is an app? Simply put, an app is a single-use application, formatted for the small screen and in most cases, for touch screen interaction. Apple can almost single-handedly be credited for the popularization of this term, as the launch of its iPhone development platform in 2008 set off a tsunami of mobile innovation delivered in these tiny, tightly integrated software bundles. As of today, there are over 100,000 apps available in Apple's iTunes store. Everyone else is just playing catch up.

Apps can be a powerful way for consumers and customers to touch, to feel and interact with your brand. But building an app requires more than a "me-too" approach to development. In our experience at HomeFinder.com, developing an app required a fundamental, strip-it-down to basics approach. You must ask yourself, What is the core value to be delivered by this app? and how can it be accessed easily, intuitively and quickly.

For us, that value was in optimizing the on the go open house hunt for buyers and facilitating a sales process for our customers. This was the focus during development of our new 'Open Houses' app, which we just launched last week.

Remember that dive-in and dive-out experience?

Rise of the Droid

The iPhone is a beautiful device. Hold one in your hands and you marvel at the industrial design. It's also been a runaway success. In Q3 of 2009 alone, AT&T said it activated a record-breaking 3.2 million iPhones on top of the more than 6 million iPhones already in service. That's a staggering market share. But the iPhone doesn't stand alone.

This fall Verizon released the Droid - which runs Google's new Android 2.0 operating system - to much critical acclaim. Android is an open-source mobile operating system (unlike Apple's closed, proprietary iPhone OS). The Droid, while not the first, is certainly the most successful of all Android devices to date. And dozens more Android devices are slated to launch in the early half of 2010.

Bottom line: The promise behind Android is that it will take smartphones out of the premium and into the mundane. It'll move the smartphone experience into devices of all shapes, sizes, color and price points. Android may just bring smartphones to the masses. An iPhone app in 2009 is a no-brainer. A Droid app in 2010 may just be the same.

Wonder comes in small packages

Mobile is not the be-all and end-all. It surely won't replace traditional real estate marketing efforts or presence on the Web anytime soon. But that "third screen" is increasingly important and requires a clear vision and the right strategy on which to execute.

And when it is done right, the right mobile experience can inspire wonder out of the simplest utility on a portable device. But more than anything, it makes me thankful I don't have to lug that brick around with me anymore.

It's here!

I am happy to report that HomeFinder.com has launched our first iPhone App called 'Open Houses'. This free application gives homebuyers an incredibly simple, easy way to find open homes using their iPhone or iPod Touch. You can download the app today from the iPhone App Store, here is a link to get it off of our Mobile page.

Why focus on Open Houses? Two reasons – one, the iPhone rocks, and two, we have really great open house data.

Finding open houses is something that's still too hard to do with today's information. Either you have to pull out the newspaper and dig through listings, or comb through a bunch of Web sites and print everything out before you hop in your car or set out on foot. This app changes that.

The app takes one of our unique advantages – our strong open house data, and puts it into a tool that makes it dead simple to find and get to local open houses. Since HomeFinder.com powers the real estate search for over 130 leading newspapers, we get great open house data, including the open houses that normally only appear in those newspapers. That data, combined with the iPhone's GPS, and mapping capabilities, gives you a powerful, easy to use mobile tool to find open houses.

Searching for open houses isn't something that you only do on your computer, it is inherently mobile. That is why our app is a perfect match for finding open houses, It's pretty hard to take your laptop house hunting, and taking the time to print out a bunch of stuff beforehand, and create maps of where you need to go is a pain.

The Open Houses app allows you to find – and get to – open homes from wherever you happen to be, without printing directions, property flyers or taking time to view homes that do not match your criteria.

Here's the full list of features:

• One click open house search, which locates you and all of the open homes around you
• View all open houses on a fully scrollable and zoomable map
• Scroll through property photos and detailed floor plans
• One click access to email and phone info to contact the selling agent, or to email a friend about a property

Making real estate searching simpler, easier and more efficient is something that you will see as a common theme from HomeFinder.com in the months and years to come. That is what we tried to accomplish with this app. Mobile applications are best when they try do one thing very well. Home buyers will always want to tour homes, and sellers and their agents will always want to be found.

Hope you enjoy the app. As always, let us know what you think so that we can make it better.

Remember when your parents lectured you saying your driver's license was a privilege and not a right? Well, the same holds true when it comes to interacting with blogs. Social media is a great way to get the message out, but there are rules for blog etiquette.

If only there was a way to take away a user's keys when they misuse blogs, we could probably clean up a lot of unnecessary clutter. The following are the 5 biggest ways I see agents misusing blogs:

5. Don't use video, podcasting, etc if you don't have quality content.

Only use video or audio in the following situations:

a) words won't do the story justice (video about proper home staging)

b) it saves you time (an interview where transcribing it would take too long)

Always remember to stay on topic; editing is your best friend. If you think of multiple topics, instead of cramming them in all together, break them out into separate stories. If the video or audio is going too long, leave them wanting more and split it into multiple parts.

4. Reposting stories that are from CNN, Inman, TechCrunch, etc.

Remember that a blog is there to represent you and your opinions. If you are reposting stories and not giving your take on the situation, you are doing your readers an injustice. Summarize the story, link to the full story and give your opinion or thoughts about how it affects you or others.

3. Stories that are just glorified personal advertisements.

It's great that you think that you are wonderful, but rather than telling us how great you are, show us you are great by teaching us to better ourselves.

2. Forcing a post about a property that you have just listed where it doesn't belong.

Sharing a property on social media is cool. Posting a property to someone's Facebook or tweeting about a new listing is perfectly acceptable. There are tons of sites where you can push your listings out to on the Internet, but before you do, take a moment and ask yourself: Given the culture of this site, would people find this post interesting? If you give the answer that everyone is excited about new homes for sale, you will get your keys taken away.

1. Dropping links back to your site as a comment to an article.

Getting links back to your site is one dimension of getting your site to the top of the search engines, and comments are the easiest way to put links back to you from someone else's site. But with great power comes great responsibility. Does the link that you are about to put in this comment add to the discussion, or are you forcing it? Forcing links into comments makes you look unprofessional. If you really want quality links back from that site, ask the blog owner if you can write a guest post.

Your online presence is just as valuable to you as any marketing or branding that you would do. With the majority of home searches starting online, think about how you can put your best foot forward, and not leave behind a trail of bad habits. And remember: think before you link.

Mark Tepper, HomeFinder.com VP of Business Development and Sales, was recently added to Frogpond's list of Industry Visionaries, joining notable profiles including Harley E. Rouda, Jr. (CEO/Managing Partner of Real Living), Victor Lund (Co-Founding Partner of the WAV Group) and Steve H. Murray, Editor of REAL Trends & Lore Magazine, among others.

FrogPond, provider of unique 'Communications Solutions' enabling corporations, associations and small businesses nationwide to effectively reach customers, employees and members with ahead of the curve industry information, is headed by Susie Hale.

Below is an excerpt of Mark's Industry Visionary profile. Check out the full interview on Frogpond. Many thanks to Susie and the Frogpond team!

As an "industry visionary", what do you see as the major changes occurring in the real estate industry?

You don't have to be a 'visionary' to recognize the two areas that are challenging the status quo, social media and agent ratings.

Social media phenomena like Facebook and Twitter are changing the way agents and brokers market themselves and their properties. For a very long time, there was nothing new in Real Estate Marketing/Advertising. Social media has taken the local cocktail party and put it online. The great news is this can be leveraged to help grow your business very quickly, especially for new agents. The bad news is, if you're an established agent that doesn't use social media, you may lose the next generation of buyers and sellers.

Lastly, agent ratings could change the way we choose a Realtor. There are a few sites out there that are experimenting with agent ratings, HAR, RedFin and HomeThinking are the few that come to mind. Relatively speaking, it's not that difficult to become a licensed agent, however, it is difficult to stay in the business and be successful. The easier it is for consumers to differentiate agents, the harder it will be for many at the lower end of the skill/experience spectrum to stay in the game.

Who are the "individual trendsetters" that are shaping the future real estate industry?

In 2006, Time Magazine's person of the year was 'You.' It was the year of the individual with the advent of YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. I think this still holds true in 2009. It could be the agent that has a large following on Twitter or Facebook, the blogger on ActiveRain that gets referrals from other agents or the Broker that embraces online advertising that drives email and phone leads to their brokerage for a positive ROI.

What are the expectations of the emerging real estate consumer?

Consumers want to work with trustworthy Realtors and Brokerages that can sell their home quickly with the least amount of aggravation at the right price. That hasn't changed. But what has is that they are increasingly demanding proof of the capacity to deliver on this promise rather than the unsubstantiated claims that characterized a lot of old-style marketing.

What changes should a Brokerage implement to ensure profitability in the future?

Reduce your overhead, office space, unnecessary expenses and Advertising that doesn't have a positive ROI. Don't be afraid of hoteling in your office space to give the agents maximum flexibility and decreased overhead. Plus, you need to invest in your agents. There may be more expenses in the short term but if you invest in the success of your agents, they will pay you back tenfold.

Ok, I will promise one thing: once you understand the basics of how a search engine orders results, mastering the parts that a search engine cares about is pretty easy. I am going to start with a basic story of how a search engine works, and then in future articles do a deeper dive for each element that a search engine uses to determine your ranking position.

The Spider Bot

Any search engine (Yahoo!, Google, Bing, etc) uses something called a search engine bot that spiders the web looking at different sites.

Translation:

Search engine bot = Automated program that never stops running.

Spiders the web = Clicks on links.

The bot starts on a specific page of a single Web site, clicks all the links on that page, visits all those pages, clicks all the links on those pages, and visits all of those pages. The little guy repeats this process, endlessly churning through all the interconnected pages of the Internet.

Historically, the usual starting point for the search engine bots is a place called dmoz. This place is nothing but a Yellow Pages directory-style site with different categories and lists of sites under those categories. From there, the little guy just goes and goes through as many sites as it can.

The first step in getting a site recognized is getting a link to it from a site that the search engine already knows about. So, if you have a new site, I would recommend doing all of the following to ensure that you get picked up by the bots as soon as possible:

1) Submit your site to either DMoz or Google.

2) Get a link back from a friend's site that has already been visited by the search engine bot. An easy way to tell is if you do a search for your friend's site and they come up (this indicated they have been visited by the search engine bot).

3) Do a search for yourself, and if any of your Facebook, Linkedin, or Myspace profiles come up, put a link to your new site on your profile.

OK, now that we have the basics of how a search engine gets to your site. Next week we will cover the parts of your site that the engine cares most about when crawling your site.