For example, during a presentation regarding online leads, panel members mentioned things like:

1. We only give online leads to agents who’ve blogged on our site at least once in the past 30 days. Active online agents.

2. We follow up on all eLeads within 5 minutes.

In both cases, the technology is not what’s making them succeed. Clearly, they have quality websites or they wouldn’t have put lead routing expectations and procedures in place, but their real success is going to come from responding to those leads in a timely manner by people who are qualified to do so.

This is just one of many examples I saw of companies building systems suitable to their culture that leverage emerging technologies. The above examples may not fit your own company’s culture (although I think most people would agree that a timely response to online leads is the perfect first impression on the path to doing business together).

At WhereToLive.com, we create real estate web technologies that help our clients market and communicate more efficiently with prospects, customers, and internally. We also coach our clients on how to make the best use of web technologies to grow their businesses. However, in the end, success comes down to the systems businesses create themselves and take ownership in.

Find the right tools with the right team of people behind them; smart people who will continue to innovate to keep you ahead of the curve on technology. Then create usable systems and execute like crazy. That’s the winning formula.

Trade Up/Downs

Buyers who decide to make a move within the city or neighborhood they already reside within tend not to use neighborhood or school information during their search process. Why? Because they live there.

Relocations

People relocating to new cities often search based on a landmark they’re familiar with. This may be the location of their new job, a school, or an area they previously had a chance to visit. Being new to a community, they may not be familiar with the names of counties, suburbs, neighborhoods, and other ways that locals describe the market. If your site requires that type of local knowledge, it will be very difficult for non-locals to navigate.

Motivated Buyers

The most motivated of buyers tend to pour over listings online, but also get out of the house to drive around neighborhoods and properties that interest them. When they turn to the web, they run searches based on cities, zip codes, property addresses and MLS numbers. They know what they’re looking for. Getting them to that content quickly provides a good experience to them.

The quality of listing presentations may be what convinces this type of buyer to rely upon your site for their online research. It also increases the chance that they’ll share your site’s versions of listings with their friends, thus introducing your site to future prospects in your market for free.

Faster Indexing

As Google explained on their blog, the first major benefit should be faster indexing of new content on the web. Google’s robots are continuously scanning the web for new content. This change should allow them to get more fresh content into their search results faster. For real estate, this may mean faster indexing of new listings or blog posts.

Annotating Content

Former Google employee, Vanessa Fox, writing at Search Engine World, explains that Google will be able to associate more information with the content they index:

The Caffeine infrastructure provides more flexibility in the type of details that can be stored with a document. As the web changes and new valuable data about web content emerges, Google won’t have to build new code to take advantage of it. This means that while Caffeine itself is not a ranking algorithm change, it could impact ranking in the future (as new signals are associated with pages).

So, what does that mean? Here are a few possibilities. This doesn’t mean that Google is or will do any of these, but they seem possible.

1. Better tracking of country of origin (mentioned in Fox’s piece) in order to help people find content from their own country.

2. Geocoding of content. If an address or lat/long are included with a page, Google could use that to improve “what’s nearby” type searches.

3. Industry specific content. If Google could detect and classify content as real estate related, they could use that to improve results for terms that have proven to be real estate related.

In practice, Google may be able to do provide better results than they do today for terms like “3 bedroom 2 bath home for sale”. Today, that term appears to be too broad to deliver quality results. However, if Google detects where you are (they can do to varying degrees based on what you allow them to do), determines that this is a real estate related search, checks their index for relevant real estate related content, then serves it up in a relevant manner, they’ll provide a better experience to searchers.

What do real estate sites need to do to take advantage of this? The same sort of things they should be doing today:

A. Make sure Google can see your website’s content. If they can’t, you simply will not show up in search results.

B. Make sure you’re creating original content for your site. If you have the exact same content as every other site competing in your market, you’re not giving Google a particularly good reason to bother indexing your site. Blog posts are one of the easiest ways to publish original content.

C. Make sure your site has high authority. Google’s measure for this is called PageRank. If two page have identical or nearly identical content, which one will Google rank higher in their results, or bother indexing at all? The one that they’ve determined has higher authority. This comes down to link popularity. The quantity and quality of websites that link to your website help Google determine whether your site is an authority site. Fly by night sites have a hard time gaining links. If you’re a credible business, people will link to you. And people will link to you more often and faster if you’re creating the type of content that they want to talk about, such as definitive blog posts on why certain neighborhoods are family friendly.

In conclusion, Google’s goals haven’t changed. They want to provide high quality results to searchers in order to keep them coming back and occasionally clicking on an ad. If you’re creating quality content on your website, you should be rewarded for this if you’ve done your A-B-C’s.

Getting to know more people in your community has no downside in real estate. And, since you’re meeting people who spend time on the web, the chances of them visiting your website and telling their friends about it are much higher than average.

So, where to look for online connections? Here are a few sites and tactics that may be worth checking out.

Yelp & Urbanspoon

Both Yelp and Urbanspoon are popular business review sites. Yelp tends to allow reviews of any business while Urbanspoon is solely focused on the restaurant scene. If you look at the Top Contributors page on Urbanspoon for your community, you can see who is going out on the town the most, reviewing the most restaurants, etc.

These are web savvy people who manage to get out of the house from time to time. And, if they can afford to dine out often, they may have some financial means.

Twitter Search

Twitter’s search engine allows for geo-targeted searching, so you can combine a topic that interests you together with your location to find people that may be of interest to you. For example, a link to a search result for mentions of “High School” within 25 miles of Minneapolis . . .

. . . brings back a wide variety of mentions of that topic. Not all will be relevant, of course, but you may find some interesting people in your community that are worth following on Twitter in order to start to get to know them.

Attend Tweetups

Assuming you’re using Twitter, keep an eye out for mentions of tweetups in your community or in cities you’re visiting. Happy hours or other events that bring together Twitter users help close the gap between online and offline relationships. If no such event exists in your town today, consider being the person who starts it. Mashable has some excellent tips on how to start a Tweetup in your town.

Real Estate BarCamps

Real Estate BarCamps bring together people involved in the real estate industry for learning and networking. Topics vary, but anything related to social media and web technology is usually on the agenda, but there is no limit on where topics may range. Plus, you can always break off with peers to discuss what’s on your mind. If the idea of networking with your competitors doesn’t interest you, keep in mind that other real estate industry professionals also attend BarCamps. Another option is to attend a BarCamp is a different city. This could turn you into the one agent people know from your town. That has referral potential written all over it.

Each of the above tactics involves getting in touch with people who both live in your community and are active online. They’re the type of people who’ll use your website, tell others about it, and link to it from their blogs, Twitter, or Facebook. Tech savvy social butterflies. Get to know them.

Now it’s your turn. What else would you add to this list?

Unfortunately, mimicking the gadgets and gizmos on Zillow.com is no guarantee of additional traffic. The site is far from a case study in “if you build it, they will come”. In fact, they do some of the best online marketing I see today.

One particular tactic Zillow uses extraordinarily effectively deserves more attention. But before getting to that, keep in mind that the online marketing ecosystem is largely link driven. Every link to your website brings in additional traffic both directly through that link and also through the impact it has on your website’s search engine rankings. So tactics that get more people to link to you are sure-fire ways to increase your traffic both short and long term.

So, what is this tactic that Zillow uses so well: Blogging about celebrity homes.

People love talking about real estate. And they really love talking about celebrities. Zillow has successfully combined the two to create a tremendous volume of conversation around a small portion of the content on their website.

By simply letting people know through a blog post that a particular listing is a celebrity’s home (and which celebrity), they set of a firestorm of conversations on online forums, Twitter, Facebook, and other blogs. This drives traffic short-term, and generates links that lead to higher search engine rankings long-term.

Zillow is smart about putting this type of content out as blog posts, which are easy to link to and – unlike listings – can stick around long after the home goes off the market. So if people, years from now, want to find out what Britney’s home or the Ferris Bueller home were listed for, they can Google for appropriate terms and go directly, again, to Zillow.

Zillow plays this game at a national level, but it can work just as well locally by featuring homes of prominent members of your community. Sure, you may need to be a bit more careful than Zillow in how you present this type of data (you wouldn’t want to lose a client over it) but I think it can be done with some creative thinking. Give it a try.

For a fairly in-depth look at LEMON Leadershp, consider finding an hour to watch this presentation at Google by The Institute’s founder, Brett Johnson:

Whether you have an hour or not, here is what this has to do with real estate broker websites.

Successful real estate brokers tend to have a mix of LEMON types within their organization. Many people who own brokerages are Networkers, who used to sell real estate. They are very good at what they do, but, like each LEMON type, they have strengths and weaknesses. Entrepreneurs are quite common type among brokers as well.

Looking at the day to day operation of a real estate website, Networkers or Entrepreneurs are not going to be involved. It simply does not fit their personalities. Networkers can’t sit still long enough, and entrepreneurs are out working on their next deal.

Purchasing a real estate broker website is not a case of set it and forget it; something a Luminary, Entrepreneur, or Networker could find time to do (then move on to other things). This type of website succeeds when they have lots and lots of photos of agents and properties, lots of local content created by agents (bios, property descriptions, and blog posts). Systems makes it win. Consistency makes it win. Enabling Networker and Entreprenuer agents with systems and tools that help them present themselves professionally online (then get back to selling) wins.

Who does systems and consistency the best? Quality Managers.

Making sure you have the right types of people on your team can have a significant impact on your website’s success. If you’re an Entrepreneur or Networker, be sure to find someone who does not think like you to fill the role and a daily point person for the website.

Creating professional looking websites with intuitive search functionality and plenty of related information is a great start, but it’s hard to have a competitive advantage when you’re doing something your competitors could buy tomorrow. Because of this, I think it’s worth stepping back for a second to consider where a site’s competitive advantage comes from.

Here’s the challenge: Lots of companies can create professional looking websites. A few companies can create create usable real estate search functionality. Most companies can syndicate 3rd party content onto your website. If that’s as far as you go with your website, you’ve done little to stand out from the crowd.

What is Original Content?

In this context, original content to me is the type of content that goes above and beyond what your competition can syndicate (listings, school info, neighborhood info, trend data) just as easily as you can. Examples include:

1. Enhanced listings – photos of higher quality and volume than can be found on your competitor’s sites.

2. Full agent sites – think “beyond the profile”

3. Neighborhood information – Not just specs, but original stories and news pieces about places.

4. City information – again, not just specs that your competition can syndicate as well. If you’re really experts in your market, demonstrate it.

These are just four examples of types of content that can differentiate you from your competition. Creating a website people will visit, link to, and share with their friends, is done by creating content people want to visit, link to, and share with their friends. Content that’s better, more interesting, and unique gets that done, which means real estate sites are becoming media sites.

Platforms that enable the broker and every agent to contribute original information builds a competitive advantage over the competition one web page at a time. If your website doesn’t offer the functionality you need to behave like a real estate media site, you’ll have a hard time differentiating your from your competition online.

Every once in a while, it’s fun to step back and try to quantify the value of changes that are made. Here are two examples that I think help illustrate how much impact design changes can have on the front-end of our client’s websites. Both of the graphs below illustrate a month by month perspective of a representative client’s website’s performance. First, let’s look at page views per visit:

Notice the significant lift last fall. At that time, we made a significant number of changes to the search interface on our client’s websites that made their site’s more usable for consumers. By learning from website visitors experiences, looking at website traffic statistics, and listening to feedback from clients, we came up with a series of revisions that let to a 40% increase in page views per visit on average. That’s a huge difference. The beauty of this is that the increase in page views came from an increase in visits to property detail pages. Exactly the type of pages we want prospects to get to during their home search process.

Slicing this data another way, here’s a look at a representative view of the lift in Time on Site statistics:

If people are looking at more content per visit, they’re also spending more time on the site per visit. The more time they spend on our client’s sites, the less time they have in their day to spend on our client’s competitor’s websites. Over the past few months, our clients have benefited from a 35% increase in time on site among their website’s visitors.

Continuous improvement. Measurable results. That’s real estate web development experience in action.

Once great content exists, why not make an effort to spread it far and wide using services like Twitter? Luckily, there is a way to automate this process so you can tweet your latest blog posts – with links back to the posts – after spending less than 10 minutes setting up a Twitterfeed.com account.

Once in place, Twitterfeed.com will automatically monitor your blog for new posts. When it finds one, it will turn that into a tweet that will go out to your Twitter followers. One-time setup – long term benefits.

I’ve created a video to walk you through the setup process below. The sites you’ll need to visit during this process are Twitter, Twitterfeed, and Bit.ly.

I hope you find this valuable. As always, be sure to create valuable content so people find your blog or Twitter account worth following and sharing with their friends. That’s the key to building a loyal audience of prospective clients.

Century21.ca – Century 21 Canada – in Chinese

The Globe & Mail recently took a look at what impact the Chinese economy may have on the Canadian real estate market in an article titled, Chinese investors eye Canadian housing boom.

Century 21 Canada’s efforts to serve Chinese speaking real estate buyers residing in China or Canada has not gone unnoticed:

The prospect of any sort of slowdown makes a pool of potential overseas buyers that much more attractive to the country’s real estate industry.

To tap into the demand, Century 21 will unveil a new Chinese version of its website this week, the first major real estate company to do so in Canada. The site is the cornerstone of a strategy that will see the company increasingly marketing properties directly to consumers in mainland China.

We are WhereToLive.com are proud to have played a role in the development of the now trilingual Century21.ca. This has already had a significant positive impact on the use of the website by Chinese speaking real estate consumers. In practice, here is what it looks like at a property level:

Chinese

French

English

While the Globe & Mail mentioned the forward facing benefits of a Chinese website, it’s worth noting that the OnlineOffice used by agents and brokers is also trilingual, so Century 21 Canada agents and brokers can manage listings, create websites for themselves, and blog in the language(s) of their choice.