Nearly 80 percent of home buyers start their search on the Internet - soon they’ll have more to look at.
On its Web site, the Peninsula on Indian River Bay development in Delaware has begun using high-quality, television news-style presentation to sell homes. On the site, viewers take interactive tours of the property, led by two on-line hosts, through different site “channels.”
According to Roland Varesko, president of Ecendent Interactive, the production company that put together Peninsula’s site, nobody is doing this on as grand a scale as the Peninsula. “It’s like having your own TV show,” he says.
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Being mobile=2007 year, being mobile=the opportunities are endless.
House hunting seems to me to be an inherently mobile activity but as yet all of the house hunting options we have require you to root yourself in front of the computer and therefore being less productive. This strikes me as a pretty large disconnect, especially as the mapping technology already exists and it has matured over the time. Just to mention two of the most popular ones: Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search
Some companies are already trying to enter this unexplored territory. Smarter Agent can already show you apartments for rent and recently sold homes and they promise to have homes for sale available this Spring.
It would also make sense for our local MLS to provide this, of course free of charge, or a small price that could be incorporated in the annual dues. It may even be a way to allow them to reclaim some of the ground they’ve lost to websites like Trulia, Housemap, or Yahoo Real Estate.
So is mobile house hunting even viable? What are your opinions on this?
HouseMath 2.0 lets you calculate all the costs associated with your new purchase and gives you a true monthly cost of owning your new home.
Online property searches are evolving quickly and are morphing away from simply displaying listings on a map. Adding the proper context to the data, like Trulia’s heat maps or Oodle’s Index or Shackprices‘ neighborhood suggestions, is the next frontier of real estate online.
This is a little different from the mortgage calculators - it lets a buyer quickly see if they can afford the property they are looking at. Most mortgage calculators only work as function of the term, down payment and interest rate and are therefore not truly reflective of the full cost of home ownership.
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As many other realtors, all my listings are posted on Craigslist weekly. Even though I think Craigslist is an amazing free way of getting more exposure for my listings, I find it time consuming to get a listings up on the website, and without even having a nice design applied to it.
So, after some research, I cam across a great website, www.postlets.com, that helps you create beautiful designs for your listings. Basically, it’s a few steps process where you have to fill in the blanks for your particular listing, and then at the end, you have the option to choose the theme color for your listing.
From start to the end, it took me less than 3 min to get a nice listing up and running on craigslist. The HTML code provided at the end of the tutorial can be used on other websites as well, or even when you send an email.
Check out my listing: Lakeview Listing
Beautiful right?
Macromedia Flash can be a great way to add some life to your otherwise static page. In the past, you would have to learn to code Flash by yourself, and tackle a fairly steep learning curve. This is no longer the case, thankfully - as there are many sites out there that can crank out a Flash movie or animation for you almost instantly.
Slide is one of the easiest to use applications and it allows you to quickly create an embeddable Flash graphic very quickly. Uploading and reordering images is very straightforward and then you simply pick one of a number of themes, apply it to you picture and instantly have your graphic. The HTML code is provided for you automatically so you can include it into your web site or blog.
Using Slide you could quickly throw together a multimedia presentation of your listed properties or even a tour of a particular home.
One other popular application is One True Media, which creates slick presentations, complete with music and professional quality transitions. In compare to Slide, it has a fairly steep learning curve, but the outcome is absolutely remarkable.
Here is a sample that I’ve put together by using Slide.
Get Your Own! | View Slideshow
The other day I was thinking about how much the technology has changed over the years and how productive a realtor has become these days. So, I decided to write about the 5 most important gadgets in a realtor’s life. It might not apply to everybody nor be the most complete, but in my opinion those tools are a must in our profession.
- The Smartphone- this gadget is at the top of my preferences.It’s a “tool” that is absolutely necessary in the realtor’s daily life. With a smartphone, you can organize your appointments, have a TO-DO list ready to view at anytime, sync your emails, receive emails in real time, search listings on MLS, connect your phone to the laptop for an easier browsing experience, and even be able to use your phone’s infrared option as a Supra key. There are so many other things that can be accomplished with a smartphone, but I will get into that in another article.
My preferences in terms of smartphones selection are:
- the Blackberry models, 7000-series, 8700-series and my favorite, the new Pearl
- the Treo phones(650,700p,700w,700wx and the upcoming Cingular Treos 680 and 750)
The Blackberry smartphones are known for their push-email capability, an email function that seems to be better than the competition’s. But, if you would like to have more software choices and have a phone that is very close in functionality to a computer, then the Treo is definitely the best choice.
- The Laptop/Tablet PC- this gadget needs no introduction, these days we all have a laptop or know somebody that has a laptop. I just want to point out why I added the Tablet PC next to the laptop. I find the new Convertibles Tablet PCs (a laptop that has a rotating screen that turns it into a Tablet) to be very useful in my profession. The Tablets offer the capability of annotating Web and Word documents, Excel sheets. Here is how basically I use my Tablet PC when I’m ready to meet a buyer: I sign into MLS, I choose the listings that I want for printing, but instead of sending them to the printer, I save them as PDF files, and then I write on them all the important informations that I might want to show my customer, or I can actually add a screenshot with the Map directions to the properties. After I’m done editing my PDF files containg the listings, I can just send them for print. Bottom line, I highly really recommend the Tablet PC over a regular notebook, since it has the same capabilities as a laptop, but with added Tablet functions. The learning curve is short, so there should be no major obstacles on learning how to use a Tablet PC. My recommendation here, as far as the brand, goes to the IBM X-series.
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HousingMaps.com is a Web site that collects real estate listings from Craigslist and displays them graphically on a map, basically giving you a visual to look at houses for sale or rooms for rent in your area. I found this tool very useful on finding listings that are not in MLS and have less exposure.
I think it's a great tool that helps realtors finding the right home for their customers when they have exhausted all the MLS listings.
Trulia is another website that scrapes real estate sites to find listings and brings it all together on their site. Using an approach similar to Google maps, the properties are displayed on a map, and the searches can be narrowed down based on cities, address or zip codes.
I've been using Trulia to list my properties on it, and I found the tools on the website being very useful to me. There is one feature that I found being very interesting, Interactive Heat Map, which display the city areas with listings by showing different colors on the map, with the red color representing the area with the most properties for sale.
Trulia's biggest edge is its partnerships with real estate brokerage companies that allows the website to pull data from many sites in order to redisplay it on a map in an easy to digest and attractive user interface.
For all of you that are using Craigslist for your home searches, I found a great tool, called Listpic, that let’s you navigate through craiglist’s postings using the thumbnail images associated with each listing. Listpic can be very useful to realtors or investors as well, since a lot of Sale by Owner properties are listed on Cragslist.
Though the images are small, I think it is easier to scan through them in compare to the text lines. Plus, since I rarely bother exploring any listings that don’t include pictures, this site acts as a sort of filter for me right off the bat.
