Web-based Marketing Made Easy

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Homes.com helps agents connect with customers
Web-based Marketing Made Easy

Homes.com helps agents connect with customers

By Maria Patterson

Standing out among the sea of information and images that cross our paths on a daily basis is a tall order, especially in the Internet era where information overload is always a risk. As a real estate professional, standing out among the home buying and selling masses is equally as daunting. Up against two major obstacles?time and money?many real estate agents are weighed down by the prospects of marketing. Not enough time to devote to it, not enough funds to make it happen. If a company could step in with a simple way to dissolve these roadblocks, it would surely set a new course for real estate marketing. That?s exactly what Homes.com is doing.

?The marketing available in the real estate market today most definitely falls short,? says Patty McNease, director of customer service for technology solutions provider, Homes.com. ?The majority of marketing choices that agents and brokers can choose from does not combine the areas of technology and graphical details into one product. Agents usually have to spend hundreds of dollars and it becomes a very complicated product.?

With the introduction of the Marketing Design Center just last month, San Bruno, California-based Homes.com has added instant value to its AgentAdvantage? members? Web sites. Designed and powered by Bellevue, Washington-based Imprev, Inc., the Marketing Design Center offers agents an extremely easy-to-use, fast turnaround, all-inclusive, Web-based marketing vehicle. That said, perhaps what makes this product stand out most is the quality, high-end designs that can be applied to everything from virtual tours to listing post- cards. Clearly, with the Marketing Design Center, a new standard in real estate marketing is being set.

From concept to launch

?Homes.com recognized that personal promotion is profoundly important to today?s real estate agent,? says Curt Schooling, senior vice president of business development for Imprev, Inc. ?Homes.com licensed our platform and hired us as a design firm, as well. The material on the Homes.com Marketing Design Center is 100 percent unique to Homes.com.?

?We wanted to provide a quality product that helped agents elevate their professionalism,? Schooling explains. ?We helped them create an image that they?d either pay large dollars for or have to have a sophisticated level of art skills to develop. Many agents forget about branding themselves. They need to say, ?I?m a real estate agent first and foremost?if there?s an easier way to build professional looking materials, I?ll do it.??

?Dollar for dollar, Imprev is the best tool used in my real estate business,? says Bill Foss, III with RE/MAX Property Promotions in Leominster, Massachusetts. ?Imprev allows me to create high quality, professional grade flyers, postcards, virtual tours, and even Web commercials in minutes. In a short period of time I can have flyers ready to display at a new listing and virtual tours/Web commercials to broadcast and e-mail to prospective buyers and fellow associates. The ease of use and overall value that Imprev offers is unmatched. This tool will set you apart from your competitors.?

McNease explains that the implementation of the Marketing Design Center is all about adding value for Homes.com members. ?We wanted to create online marketing avenues to provide our agents with more value and more opportunity within their Web sites,? she says.

According to McNease, Homes.com began working with Imprev six months ago to develop the Marketing Design Center. Powered by Imprev?s Aria platform, Homes.com began rolling out the Marketing Design Center to roughly 2,000 of its agents currently using a Homes.com AgentAdvantage? Web site just last month. The introduction will continue in such increments in order to assure a smooth transition and effectively deal with any bumps that may occur in the process.

?We?ll be migrating 20 percent of our clients on a first-come, first-serve basis and if it goes smoothly, we?ll speed up the migration,? McNease reports. ?Our first concern is being able to service our clients. We want to make sure that we can handle service requests.?

Free of charge for Homes.com AgentAdvantage? members, the Marketing Design Center can be accessed by logging into the back-end of their Homes.com Web site. There, agents will find a link that sends them directly to the design center where they will be able to produce any number of marketing materials, including: Web commercials, virtual tours, brochures, postcards, flyers, sell sheets and more.

Within each of these product categories, agents are offered a variety of designs. After selecting the designs, the agent can customize the piece with digital photos, text and branding. The application takes the agent step-by-step through the production process, leaving little to no room for confusion or complexity. As McNease says, if the agent already has digital photos on his or her desktop, creating a marketing piece from the design center would take anywhere from five to 10 minutes, start to finish.

Once the marketing piece is designed, an agent will be able to download it to his or her desktop for printing, or have it outsourced for printing. ?We?ll have a virtual option so that agents can send their materials to one of our printer partners,? explains McNease, ?or you can print them yourself at your office. You can print them on a $200 printer and they come out looking great.?

?We wanted to create something that would be simple to use and intuitive, and allow agents to produce something professional within a couple of minutes that they used to have to outsource,? she adds. ?They may be subscribing to services that we?re hoping they can now cut costs on.?

McNease also reports that the Storage Locker feature will allow Homes.com agents to keep all of their marketing pieces, PDFs, contracts and other documents in one place on their desktops. Once again, it?s all about simplifying the process.

Although it?s popular jargon in the real estate business these days, the Marketing Design Center is quite literally a one-stop shop for marketing and promotions.

?One of the advantages of this platform,? says Schooling, ?is the ?all-encompassingness? of its power. It can output to multiple formats without having to change the user interface. With just a few keystrokes of entering data I can output to a print document; I can deliver a Flash document; I can output to HTML. We deliver a complete marketing solution within one application.?

?The most important goal for us was to produce a professional-quality product that our customers could use on a daily basis,? says McNease. ?We wanted another value-add to add to our clients? Web sites. It helps them bring their marketing efforts together via a one-stop shop. We?re trying to provide the most comprehensive package that allows agents to run their businesses more effectively, smarter and for lower costs.?

The design is the difference

While online marketing vehicles themselves are not revolutionary, what puts the Marketing Design Center into a class of its own is the level and quality of the various designs it offers. The custom designs available through the Marketing Design Center were created by Imprev solely for Homes.com AgentAdvantage members.

McNease believes that the designs offered via the Marketing Design Center set a new standard for marketing in the real estate business. The goal in ensuring this level of design was an important one for Homes.com. ?We needed something that further differentiates us from our competitors,? she explains.

Differentiation is what the Design Center offers its end-users, as well. A Homes.com agent for about five years, Carol Royse with Arizona-based Keller Williams Realty East Valley has always put a heavy emphasis on marketing. To that end, she hired Ruth Hayden to head up marketing efforts.

?The nice part about the Marketing Design Center is that we?re able to pick out the layout we want for our virtual tours, etc.,? says Hayden, marketing director for Carol Royse, Lifestyle Team. ?If somebody was doing the design for us, we would have one look to work with. With the Marketing Design Center, we are able to do a different look depending on the home we are featuring. It comes out a little bit different each time.?

Having such control over the design of their marketing materials makes good business sense on many levels for Hayden. Due to the varying requirements regarding what can and can?t be included on a company?s virtual tour that runs on the local MLS, marketing materials need to be

adapted to meet these rules. ?The Marketing Design Center is very easy to use and offers a lot of different options compared to other programs like it,? says Hayden. ?The presentations are very easy to add to our Web site and also to e-mails. The background music in the presentations gives the listing a ?richness.? There?s a real softness to it, yet a lot of class.?

The Marketing Design Center is flexible on many levels, Hayden adds. ?We have used this product for $100,000 homes straight up to our million dollar listings.?

Hayden also remarks on the cost-effectiveness of the Marketing Design Center. ?Each time you do a virtual tour, it would cost you about $70,? she explains. ?This is a system where you can make as many virtual tours as you want with different designs that fit each home?bright, calm, modern, conventional, classy, Victorian?you can pick what you feel is best for your client.?

According to Schooling, the flexibility of the Marketing Design Center application is just barely being tapped. ?We can render almost any document,? he says. ?If you want billboards, our system supports it. If you asked for door hangers, the system supports it. Our goal is to improve what the application can do, so that companies like Homes.com can grow their business.?

?What we allow agents to do is tailor the marketing to best represent themselves and help sell the seller,? Schooling explains. ?If you can sell yourself, you can sell the home.?

At the root of it all, service

?The Homes.com Marketing Design Center marketing definitely differentiates us from our competitors,? Hayden reports. ?It?s an outstanding product.?

One of the things that pleases Hayden most, however, is the service Homes.com provides to ensure that the Marketing Design Center is running smoothly and optimally. ?If there?s an issue, they stand behind it,? says Hayden. ?When you get a company that stands behind their product it makes all the difference. They are very customer driven.?

Hayden adds that Homes.com offers a variety of training for using the Design Center, both virtually and over the phone. She emphasizes, however, that she only needed such training once for about half an hour and then, ?boom, I was up and running.?

The bottom line on marketing

According to the National Association of Realtor?s 2003 Member Profile, sales agents spent a median of $900 on promotion/marketing expenses in 2002. The largest percentage of respondents (26%), however, spent less than $500 that same year.

In a highly competitive marketplace like real estate, it seems that marketing would be given more attention and a bigger slice of the Realtor?s budget. Many feel, however, that marketing efforts and products need to be stepped up to a much greater degree.

Whether the investment in marketing is big or small, certain standards should be applied to any marketing effort, says Hayden. She believes, for example, that whatever marketing path you choose to follow, you must be sure to follow that same path for both your lower-end and higher-end listings.

With the Homes.com Marketing Design Center, Hayden is able to do just that. ?With this program, a client would think that you spent a lot of time and money on the product,? she explains. ?No matter what the price range, the client wants their house sold.?

?There are plenty of agents who do an outstanding job of marketing,? says Schooling, ?and they set the bar of what marketing is all about. There are a lot of agents who don?t take advantage of marketing, because, honestly, it?s a lot of work?it?s complex and they don?t have the time. Agents are moving from marketing a property to recognizing that they?re marketing themselves. A flyer has never sold a home, but the quality of a flyer sells the agent.?


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