Ubertor Real Estate Blog

The Globe and Mail ran a story on the changing real estate market and it’s effect on newspaper advertising.

“It’s bad enough that a cratering housing market is leading to a slump in real estate advertising at newspapers, as a dreary series of earnings reports showed last week.

What’s worse is that a lot of that advertising may never come back to newspapers even if the real estate sector recovers. That’s because a significant chunk of those advertising dollars are moving — you guessed, online.”

(complete article)

Are you still advertising in print? do you do any web marketing?

Whatever it is that you do… you should be tracking it. You should be able to know how much your online and print marketing is effecting your business. Do you know? This and this might help.

(hat tip - Rob Lewis)

I saw a post in the 37signals blog the other day about the 2008 Presidential Campaigns. Apparently all presidential candidate logos must use red, white, and blue. Sounds good right? Well, not if everyone is doing the same thing. Check out the logos for 2008… any of them stick out? (image care of 37signals via 4president.org)

Now think about your real estate business - Does your advertising look like your colleagues? How about your business card, does it look like your colleagues? If the answer is yes - time for a change.

I get flyers from real estate agents in the mail every day. Almost all of them are the same old look and feel.
Why not do something different?

The other day a Realtor put a flyer under my door to my condo. I heard it come through so I walked over and picked it up. Now, the flyer looked the same as any other but the delivery method got my attention and made me look at it. Initially I thought it was a good idea to gain access to a building and push flyers under every door, but then I wondered, what happened if the pizza guy did that? Chinese food delivery guy? etc.

Stand out from the crowd… it is worth it. Here are a few thoughts:
- why not hand out coffee/business card to drivers leaving their condo’s garage in the morning?
- when it snows, hire a few guys to run around and shovel your clients walk ways - be sure to leave a note saying it was done by you

I just received an email from another CSS Programmer that has been working with some of our clients. Take a moment to check out what he has been able to do with his CSS skills and the powerful Ubertor real estate agent website software. Here is his email:

Hi Stephen,
We have been busy. http://www.JenniferChuRealty.com is completed. I’m putting some finishing touches on Jennifer’s sister site http://www.CoalHarbourWatch.com. These sites use featured listings to create a top 3 weekly watch; as well the watch pages make very good use of virtual tours and maps (see http://www.jenniferchurealty.com/AzuraWatch.php)

I have also recently completed http://www.downtowncalgarycondos.myubertor.com/ for Curtis Bebek in Calgary. This is not a highly customized site and I was able to complete the design and CSS coding in a few short hours. Such is the power of Ubertor!

I am happy to report that working with Ubertor is making websites much easier for both my clients and myself. Your live chat support provides one of the best help desks I’ve ever had the pleasure to work with. And the logical, intuitive and robust nature of Ubertor’s content management framework is a joyful thing for a developers.

Thanks!

John Lowe
GetCConsulting.com

When I was at Zillow the other day I ask David Gibbons the Director of Community Relations for Zillow about their expansion to Canada, Europe or Australia. He said that while they can’t discuss their expansion plans at this time he did say that they are going to be doing work outside of the US. I saw this video on InmanTV interviewing DavidG and he does discuss what is coming up next for Zillow. Check it out:

Confused? (here are some links if you need some help - Ubertor.com, Sellsius, Zillow.com and Redfin.com)

Well, yesterday I had the pleasure of meeting up with the legendary real estate blogger Ardell in Seattle. Myself and Ian Watt of Century 21 drove down to Seattle to meet up with Ardell and Rudy and Joe from Sellsius. The Sellsius guys are on the last leg of a cross country RV tour meeting with real estate bloggers and agents that started in New York. The plan is to finish in San Francisco in time for the Inman Connect Conference.

A few Seattle real estate bloggers joined up with Ardell and crew and we went into downtown Seattle to meetup with Zillow.com and Redfin.com.

Zillow.com was outstanding. I have had the opportunity to check out the office before but this time we were treated to a tour of their offices so that we could get a feel for what goes on at Zillow.com. It was really great to finally meet Drew and DavidG who are the social networking face to Zillow. For those that don’t know Zillow.com is an online real estate service dedicated to helping you get an edge in real estate by providing you with valuable tools and information.

Next we went over to Redfin.com the industry’s first online brokerage for residential real estate. Redfin was interesting. A very different office environment compared to Zillow. It was more of a startup feel with agents and marketing people running all over. We were given a quick tour from Glenn Kelman the President & CEO of Redfin around the office. It was great to be there.

All in all we had a great day.

Here are some pictures from the day:

(L - R) - Drew Meyers, Rhonda Porter, myself, (forgot her name, sorry) and David Gibbons

Some Redfin.com for sales signs

(L - R) - Ian Watt, Glenn Kelman, President & CEO of Redfin, and myself

Ian Watt in front of the Sellsius Real Estate RV

(L - R) - Rudy of Sellsius, myself and Joe of Sellsius

Parker Web Marketing, a web design firm in Matthews, North Carolina has created quite a masterpiece with one of our clients websites. They took Kelly Stratton’s website, which is on the Premium Ubertor Plan and adjusted the CSS to change the entire look and feel of the website. Plus they hid the Ubertor forms on the site and added input forms from her Top Producer account so that the leads from her site go directly into Top Producer.

Andrew Schulz from Parker Web Marketing emailed me about thoughts on our real estate agent website software:

“Ubertor is the first Realtor content system we have encountered that allows for the freedom to build the site exactly the way we designed it! On top of being an excellent product, Ubertor’s staff is rivaled by none with willingness to go the extra mile just to see that their customers are happy! I found the Live Chat to be convenient and helpful every time.”
– Andrew Schulz, Parker Web Marketing

Here is what Kelly had to say about her experience with us:

“Ubertor has been outstanding to work with. I had another similar website that I was trying to customize with no luck. Their system was difficult to work with and you could never get a hold of them. My web designer came across Ubertor and recommended that we give them a shot. As you can see the results are exceptional. Ubertor has been extremely flexible, open, and available in helping me develop the site that had the look and feel that I wanted ,while maintaining the functionality that I desired for capturing and tracking my business.”
– Kelly Stratton, Broker/Owner, Waxhaw, NC

TechCrunch is reporting that the San Francisco area has had a major outage to some key websites on the internet. Netflix, Technorati, Craigslist, Typepad, Vox, Yelp, Alexa and LiveJournal were all down this morning, some are still down. I guess that is why there is no such thing as 100% uptime.

On the lighter side, here is a great video that Joel over at futureofrealestatemarketing.com posted. It is quite funny.

We have relaunched our order form now with a great new bonus - order now and you will get your first 30 days free! Plus with our current promotion of waiving the setup fee you and quickly and easily test us out with no obligation. Plus there are 4 plans to choose from. Which one is perfect for you? - www.ubertor.com

As I have mentioned in the past the Ubertor real estate agent website system is completely integrated with Google Analytics. Actually, we were integrated with Google Analytics when it was Urchin and not part of the Google Empire. If you have not opened your free Google account to watch the stats on your website, check out this quick video about Google Analytics as it will show you why you should be using this stats program. (VIDEO)

I have the honor of speaking at the upcoming Inman News Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco this coming August. The theme is Open Source. Open Data. Open Dialogue. It looks to be a great event.

Some of the keynote speakers are Rich Barton founder & CEO Zillow.com, Sherry Chris COO Coldwell Banker Real Estate Corporation, Pete Flint founder & CEO Trulia, Craig Newmark founder Craigslist, Glenn Kelman CEO & president of Redfin plus many more.

The (somewhat intimidating) group I’m speaking with consists of some great minds. Our moderator is Ilyce Glink, President, ThinkGlink, Inc., who is a syndicated columnist. On the panel includes:

Brendon Kraham, National Sales Manager, Classifieds & Local, Google
Justin Merickel, Managing Director, Finance & Real Estate, Yahoo!
Laurie Scholl, Senior Director of Marketing, YellowPage.com
and me (Stephen Jagger, Co-Founder, Ubertor)

Our topic is Using Search Marketing & SEO. Should be really interesting.

Are you coming?

Here are the details for the event - http://www.realestateconnect.com/sf07/