Ubertor Real Estate Blog

Leon Ng, the President of the Real Estate Channel emailed me a few days ago to let me know that one of my feature requests for their system had been completed. Hundreds of agents use the Real Estate Channel to promote their listings and their services and now you can embed their videos into your website.

It is an excellent way to take your video and get more exposure for it. All you need to do is grab the embed code and pop it into your website or blog.

Here is Ubertor client Shelly Smee’s latest Real Estate Channel interview:

What a great way to gain more exposure to your videos!!

This is a really great feature and should be utilized by every Real Estate Channel customer. Nice work Leon!

Attention Real Estate Agents: Do you have a unique home that you are going to be listing in the coming months?

Here is a unique marketing idea, Kids Help Phone, a national toll free help line for kids runs an event every year called “Homes for the Holidays“. The idea is they get 4 or 5 beautiful homes to agree to have their houses toured at Christmas time. Designers and Decorators then customize those homes so that they are perfect for the event. Then they sell tickets for $20 - $50/person to tour the home.

Why not use this to your advantage? If you have a house that you will be listing before next Christmas, why not apply to Kids Help Phone to have it included in the homes for the holidays? (assuming your clients agree) What a great way to have a few hundred visitors to a paid open house, all while supporting a great charity.

Here are the cities in Canada that run this type of event (Vancouver, Calgary, Lethbridge, Edmonton and St. John’s) plus I’m sure other charities across North America have something similar.

Vanessa Fox of Ignition Partners (formerly of Google.com and Zillow.com) discusses what she would do if she was a real estate agent?

I did an interview today at the Opus Hotel in Yaletown with Marni Wedin from CityTV’s Realty TV. We sat in the bar and discussed real estate, where agents are going in 2008, what technology should be focused on, plus lots more. It was a 20 minute or so chat that will be cut up to about 4 minutes and aired on January 3rd @11pm, January 5th & 7th @ 9am.

“The Nasdaq Stock Market, Inc. (Nasdaq:NDAQ) today announced it has launched the NASDAQ Internet Index(sm) (Nasdaq:QNET). The Index is a new benchmark designed to track the performance of companies engaged in a broad range of internet-related services including internet access providers, internet search engines, web hosting, website design, and internet retail commerce.” …more….

I wonder which real estate technology companies will be included?

Ever wonder where the day went? Do you have days where you realize that it is 5:00 and you feel like you have not accomplished anything?

Check out SlimTimer.com. We have been using it for quite some time with our whole team and find that it has significantly helped us track our time and make best use of each and every day.

Signup for an account. It is free and start using it to track your day. After a week or so, check out the reports section to see where your time is going. You might find that your loosing a lot of time to meetings, client phone calls, personal calls, web surfing, etc.

Plus, get your assistant to use it. It will really help you track his/her time and ensure that you are getting your moneys worth.

We use it to track manual tasks. This way we know what task is taking too much time and what tasks to automate. For example, updating a customer credit card used to be a manual task, it seemed to be taking lots of time for our client service team so we automated the process so that clients can update their credit card instantly within their Ubertor control panel. We only realized the actual time it was taking due to Slim Timer. Before we tracked it, it just seemed like a quick little task that took 2 minutes. It seems that 2 minutes ads up.

What part of your real estate can you automate? systematize? reduce? delegate?

Warren over at TechVibes.com brings our attention to a video clip of The Lab with Leo where they discuss MyRealPlace.com and its potential effect within the real estate industry.

Plus you can see the Ubertor TV interview with MyRealPlace here.

Marketing guru Seth Godin responded to some questions that I emailed him about the real estate business. I was curious to know what he would do if he were a Realtor. I asked him 3 questions and you will see his responses below. Seth is the marketing mind behind The Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, The Dip plus much more.

Ubertor: If you were a Realtor what one way would you market yourself differently?

Seth Godin: It wouldn’t be marketing, it would be what I DO. I would specialize obsessively. On a neighborhood or a market segment. I’d only sell restaurants, or condos, or to the gay community. I wouldn’t start doing ANYTHING where I didn’t have a good chance to be the best in the world at it.

Ubertor: What mistake do most Realtors make when marketing a home?

Seth Godin: They act like invisible middlemen. Here’s the question: if you had to charge a 7% commission instead, how would you justify it?

do that.

Ubertor: How would you pick a Realtor to sell your home?

Seth Godin:
Someone I trusted
Someone respected
Someone who was the clear and obvious best choice!

If you looking for an always entertaining, good read, then check out Seth’s blog. He always has something to say that is interesting and entertaining. Be sure to subscribe to his blog email feed.

Jordan discusses MyRealPlace.com, Zillow, Facebook, ActiveRain on RealtyTV on CityTV… interesting interview. Worth a watch.

hopoffthefence.com is a website created by the Memphis Area Association of REALTORS® and is an online/offline advertising campaign to get consumers to buy real estate in the slowing US real estate market or in their words it is a “consumer awareness campaign about the health of the Memphis real estate market”. Either way, it is unique and reminds me of the “How Realtors Help” campaign put out my mls.ca.

(image from our pals at Sellsius)