In Real Estate, Deliver Knowledge not Data

Full service real estate pros know how to compete with information overload and are comfortable stepping in to supply information where the Internet leaves off. Buyers and sellers need a trusted guide to transform overwhelming information into valuable knowledge. Real estate pros who know the difference between data, information and knowledge will be a step ahead.
Real estate information overload on the Internet also presents issues for agents. It doesn’t:

Data is unstructured, individual bits of information, such as MLS data some agents give their customers.

Information can be defined as data displayed graphically in maps, graphs or charts that can help buyers quickly understand the details of homes, schools and neighborhoods.

Knowledge is information that can be applied to a specific client’s circumstances to make better buy­ing and selling decisions. Real estate knowledge that answers practical questions – Is this neighborhood more or less expensive than my current neighborhood? – will help you win business.

Make information overload work for you. Too much information will raise concerns about choosing the wrong house, the wrong neighborhood, wrong school or wrong financing. The key is listening to your buyers and to anticipate the information they really need. If you can cull out the misinformation and non-relevant information, buyers will appreciate your service.

In addition to helping you win business, real estate information can help real estate pros avoid steering issues. Agents can’t say whether a school is good or bad. But they can deliver a report comparing SAT scores, graduation rates, student-to-faculty ratios and other information that can help their clients decide.

It’s your role to package, personalize and interpret information for your prospects, buyers and sellers. And the best way to make complex information quick and easy-to-understand is to make it graphic. Want to learn more ways in which you can deliver knowledge to prospects? Download our free ebook Stand Out and Sell More: Using Real Estate Knowledge to Build your Business. http://www.eneighborhoods.com/report.html

Take back the information advantage

Real estate professionals historically have held a clear information advantage. Listing and neighborhood information was locked up in 3-ring binders or dumb terminals tucked away in brick-and-mortar real estate offices. Buyers and sellers needed to work with real estate pros to get the information, or fly blind.

In the 1990s, the tide began to turn – eventually into a tidal wave of real estate information across the Internet. Neighborhood demographics, sales trends and robust listing information appeared on thousands of websites. As the information advantage shifted toward consumers, some traditional realtors were caught by surprise, and many thought that advantage would never be regained.

Today, agents are less frequently recognized as a valuable source of information. A 2008 study by the California Association of REALTORS® showed 10 percent of respondents found the Internet a more useful source of real estate information than agents. The percentage of respondents who found Internet information less useful than agent-provided information has declined sharply since 2004.

How can you differentiate the information and expertise you’ve built throughout your career from some­thing your clients can pull up on Google? Follow the guidelines in this special report to give your clients information they need and can’t get on their own, marking you as the true Neighborhood Expert.

Download this free ebook: Stand Out and Sell More: Using Real Estate Knowledge to Build Your Business http://www.eneighborhoods.com/report.html

The Secret Formula for Increasing your Income is Really no Secret.

In real estate appraisal terms, the “highest and best use” of a property is how that property would be used most efficiently or profitably. In the same way, the highest and best use of your time as a real estate professional means making the most of those events that lead most directly to income-generating activities– sales, referrals and repeat business.
In other words; Spend more time with better prospects, using better presentations and proposals.

Real estate’s top performers and coaches will tell you the highest and best use of your time is in personal meetings, proposals and presentations. That’s why it’s vital to have a system to make the most of every marketing proposal, open house, and buyer showing. A system that enables you to convert more pros­pects to clients may be the best marketing investment you can make.

If you think you don’t have time to provide detailed neighborhood knowledge, consider the benefits. If you’re trying to sell a fixer-upper in a desirable area, it’s important to let buyers know about potential appreciation. When working with buyers, it’s a good idea to “sell the neighborhood” along with individual homes. This provides an opportunity to maintain buyer interest and loyalty even if a particular property is not available or doesn’t work out.

Want more tips on how you can increase your income? Download our free ebook Stand Out and Sell More: Using Real Estate Knowledge to Build your Business. http://www.eneighborhoods.com/report.html

Welcome to our new format – the 2-minute real estate coach! In today’s challenging market, eNeighborhoods subscribers are telling us their concerns:

1. Looking for ways to work smarter and faster

2. Interested in business-building tips for recessionary times

3. Making the most of their marketing dollars. Staying motivated, organized and productive

We hear you! With our new format, we’ve teamed up with our sister company Homes.com to offer today’s best ideas and success strategies from the industry’s leading real estate professionals and coaches. Send comments this way: Success@eneighborhoods.com
_______________________________________________________________________
Are you making the most of every meeting, proposal and presentation with your eNeighborhoods products? Real estate information is all over the Internet today, but does it really deliver what buyers and sellers need – and you need – to be successful?

Here are a few thoughts on how real estate pros can take back the information advantage while building their brands and delivering the first-rate service buyers and sellers expect from a full-service real estate professional: Knowledge is (earning) power

Today’s top real estate pros know how to compete with information overload on the Internet and turn it to their advantage. Buyers and sellers need a trusted guide to transform information overload into valuable knowledge. To solve the “too much information, not enough understanding” problem for prospects and clients, it’s important to know the difference between data, information and knowledge:

Data is unstructured bits of information, such as the MLS printouts some agents give their customers.

Information might be defined as organized data. Examples include maps, graphs or charts that help buyers and sellers see relationships and make comparisons. Knowledge is information that can be acted on to make better buying and selling decisions (and results in higher satisfaction, with you, their agent).

It’s your role to package, personalize and interpret information for your prospects and clients. Is this neighborhood more or less expensive than my current one? Are the schools better here? Can I afford the taxes? Real estate knowledge that answers practical questions helps you win business.

The best way to make complex information quick and easy to understand is to make it visual.

Visual impact = financial impact

Many people are visual learners, and the best way to present real estate knowledge to them is visually. Buyers expect photos, video, virtual tours, and interactive maps to help them select or reject properties quickly and easily. Younger buyers who play 3D computer games and watch special-effects movies in high definition are unimpressed with columns and rows of data from an MLS printout.

Important: In addition to helping you win business, neighborhood knowledge can also help you avoid mistakes like steering issues. You can’t say whether a specific school is good or bad. But you can deliver a report comparing SAT scores, graduation rates, student-to-faculty ratios and other information that can help their clients decide.Eager to show off their knowledge, many less-experienced real estate pros spend lots of time feeding their opinions to their clients. More seasoned agents know that buyers and sellers trust their own judgment above all, and help them arrive at their own conclusions. The result is often a smoother transaction and clients who are more comfortable with the buying and selling decisions they have made.

This article is from the upcoming eNeighborhoods Special Report:

Build Your Career and Your Profits with Neighborhood Knowledge

It’s coming soon and we’ll notify you when it’s here. Get ready to build your business - and your profits – with Neighborhood Knowledge!

Six tricks: Keep marketing content on track

For veteran copywriters and content providers, it's always gratifying to see research highlighting the effectiveness of text copy to attract online visitors, persuade them to take action, and ultimately drive sales. Text copy will always be a key driver in marketing and sales, but in the evolving online, multi-platform world, it's no longer sufficient to seek comfort in the "content is king" credo and write on.

Why? For all types of marketers, the true north of actionable content has always been to make it relevant and deliver it to the right audience at the right time. These same principles apply across platforms, whether content is distributed through Weblogs, streaming media or podcasts.

But as people become more sophisticated and diverse in the types of content they consume, the application of simple rules becomes more difficult. Is your content breaking news or old news? If you're not sure, here are six tricks to ensure your content retains its regal status:

Mind your medium: Today people have the opportunity to interact with more types of media than ever before. Your message could be delivered through an animated billboard, podcast or a branded desktop application. You probably wouldn't send the same content to a senior corporate executive and a 19-year-old gamer. But many organizations will try to reach both target audiences with the same marketing channel. While television may reach both parties, it may not be the most effective way to reach either one. It's said that more than $50 billion is spent annually on television advertising, but young males may spend more time playing video games.

In your eyepath: Eye-tracking is an increasingly popular way evaluate web pages because eye movements provide insights into the human thought processes that cannot be derived from surveys and self-reporting. On a very practical level, eye-tracking has confirmed things like scanning behavior and "banner blindness" in web users. Although studies have underscored the relative importance of text versus graphic content, they have also shown that people habitually scan rather than read, skipping large portions of text on every page they visit. Use color, bolding, bullets and subheads to break up copy so it can be easily scanned.

Target your list: Direct response diva Lois Geller champions a quick formula to identify the components of success in direct marketing campaigns: The offer and list are each responsible for 40 percent of campaign success, with creatives accounting for the remaining 20 percent. You may have extremely relevant and valuable content, but if it's sent to the wrong list, you won't make a connection. The best practices of direct response marketing have been developed for more than a century, and they still provide valuable direction in the 2.0 world.

Remember the offer: All the persuasive and elegantly written copy in the world can't make up for the wrong offer at the wrong time. If your campaign is underperforming, and you’re fairly certain you are sending the right creative to the right audience, then you probably have the wrong offer. There aren't that many moving parts... time to test some different offers to see what's most attractive. If this offer-list-creative trio is beginning to sound like the old CLUE board game (Mr. Mustard in the conservatory with the candlestick), it should. Put the three together in the right combination and you've found the killer (marketing campaign).

Keep it in order: It sounds basic, but a quick survey of print ads, emails or web pages will yield plenty of examples of putting the cart before the horse. The problem of ordering your message becomes more difficult as technology provides people with more and more control over how they consume media. In many cases, a solution is pitched before a compelling business problem is outlined. In others, the proposed solution may follow the problem too closely. Especially in more expensive or complex sales, let your content and campaign establish relationship with successive degrees of involvement. Print, broadcast or interactive, the right content in the wrong order is a recipe for mediocre results.

Consider the source: While telling your own story is an essential skill for marketers, sometimes it's better to let someone else take the podium. A great rule of thumb from Marketing Experiments is to back up your own claims with data, while leaving qualitative praise for your product to customer testimonials. The same can be said for online credibility indicators such as seals and certificates. Placing the Verisign logo or Better Business Bureau seal next to your checkout form is probably simpler and more effective than creating a long explanation of why prospects should trust you with their credit cards. And if you can get Steve Jobs, Seth Godin or Guy Kawasaki to say anything at all about your product, that would help too.

Get eNeighborhoods’ Now's the Time to Buy Free Special Report today.

http://www.eneighborhoods.com/time

When is a Good Time to Buy a Home?

No one wants to purchase a home only to see its value decline. But should you wait to buy a home until prices bottom out? A quick web search will yield a number of articles and opinions for and against timing the real estate market, but beware of those in favor of market timing who also want to sell you a how-to book or system.

Many people who have tried to time the market miss out on the chance to build equity by waiting to buy until prices rise again. The chart below shows the gradual increase – along with typical ups-and-downs – of home values over nearly 40 years. The arrows indicate market low points when home values dipped before continuing their historical rise.

The problem? Market cycles only become clear in retrospect. In the midst of a market slowdown, it’s very difficult to predict when housing prices hit their low points. In addition, this trend line represents home prices at the national level, which may be very different than housing prices in your neighborhood. Broad national indicators may lag the market by months – meaning the actual price floor would not show up in reports until weeks or months later.

The best way to protect against buying at the wrong time? Sell at the right time. In many cases you can’t control when to sell, but you should plan on keeping your home at least six or seven years. The longer you own your home, the better chance you have of building wealth and protecting yourself from the market’s ups and downs.

Getting nervous buyers off the fence is one of the toughest challenges facing real estate pros right now. People are rightfully concerned about buying a home that will drop in value in the coming months. But buying a home is a long-term investment, and there’s more to consider than the just the purchase price.

Depending on the rate and the amount financed, the price of financing can easily exceed the price of the home. In the example below, it’s easy to see how mortgage costs can exceed a home’s purchase price. What’s more, the total cost of buying a home rises more than $70,000 when interest rates rise a single percentage point.

Rates have risen in the first half of 2008, but in historical terms, mortgage financing is still a great bargain. From 1980 to today the 30-year fixed rate mortgage has ranged from more than 18 percent to less than 6 percent, says Jim Elfelt, a mortgage banker in Virginia Beach, Virginia. If you’re waiting for home prices to come down another $10,000, you may pay more in the long run if mortgage rates rise in the meantime.

When you’re looking for a bargain, don’t lose sight of the big picture. If you try to time the market to save a few thousand on the price of a home, you could end up with a higher monthly payment and total overall cost of home ownership.

Get eNeighborhoods’ Now's the Time to Buy Free Special Report today.

http://offer.eneighborhoods.com/time/

Mastering the Market in Turbulent Times

In turbulent times, real estate professionals have a unique opportunity to step up and successfully guide buyers. You will be ahead of the game if you help clients separate the facts from the hype and clarify how national real conditions affect local markets. Buying a home can be stressful under the best of conditions. When you add in general anxiety and confusion about the housing market, you’re bound to have buyers waiting on the sidelines for a better day.

Go local. The Internet puts today’s consumers a click away from a world of real estate information. You can’t know all the news that’s available to your clients, but you can maintain the information advantage by becoming the expert on local markets. Focus on information your clients don’t have. Local market information gathered from your experience, your MLS, and your network of local contacts is unique and provides value to your clients that other sources can’t match.

Do the math. You don’t need to be an expert in statistics, but you should know what the key numbers mean and how to explain them clearly. Numbers like days on market, units closed, list-to-sales price and pending sales can provide great insight on where your local market is headed. It’s also impressive to clients when real estate pros know how local trends stack up against national numbers.

Show and tell. Using your MLS and marketing tools such as eNeighborhoods, you can provide personalized reports that show current neighborhood information and local demographic information such as schools, crime, employment and education. Provide branded leave-behind reports and materials homebuyers can reference later. When you become the local source who can explain market conditions with current statistics and visual summaries, you gain an advantage over less-prepared agents.

Bring the bad news. Yes, prices are falling through the floor in many areas, particularly where activities like sub-prime lending, overbuilding and investor speculation occurred. The media tends to focus on areas where these abuses occur, bringing the bad news into sharp focus. You can help clients understand that falling prices in these areas are part of a natural – and necessary – market correction. As prices continue to fall, the real estate market will begin to recover as part of its normal cyclical process.

Be sure to keep your prospects and clients engaged throughout the recovery process. Changes in local sales, home prices and inventory are good indicators of your local market’s health. The national real estate market will inevitably recover, and those buyers who are on the fence now may be ready to purchase in the near future as some sunlight begins to emerge from the market’s dark clouds.

Get eNeighborhoods’ Now's the Time to Buy Free Special Report today.

http://www.offer.eneighborhoods.com/time