Real Estate: Creating a Strategy from a Sea of Numbers

RISMEDIA, November 24, 2009—When I entered the real estate industry in 1984 I was told real estate was a numbers game. I never forgot that. The more people I reached and made a connection with, the better chance I had they would turn into buyers and sellers.

I was young and eager to succeed so I called a minimum of 50 people every day from the Yellow Pages, ran as many newspaper ads as my pocketbook would allow, sent out flyers, sent out postcards, etc. I tried to reach as many people as I could.

In 1998, I switched careers and became a mortgage broker. The Internet was gaining speed so I made a decision to seek alternative avenues for marketing. People started coming to me by the hundreds, then by the thousands.

It hit me…numbers still work, but instead of me reaching out to people, they were reaching out to me.

Between Google and Yahoo! there are over 275 million monthly visitors in the U.S. alone.

In the last two months, more video was uploaded to YouTube than the combined content of network TV stations since they started airing in 1948. Twitter gets approximately 4,419,413,000 tweets per hour.

NAR states that over 84% of home buyers and sellers begin their search online. Unfortunately, as an industry, we are forgetting what I learned in 1984. According to NAR, only 33% of real estate agents are participating in social networking. What am I missing?

The Internet, whether it is your website, a blog or social media campaign is about numbers and conversations. Real estate is about numbers, but as an industry, we need to do more to create an integrated Internet marketing strategy.

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