Ubertor Real Estate Blog

The May Real Estate Technology Meetup just finished and it was a great success and full of firsts.

- We ran an Ubertor Training session before the meetup and it was a great success. Thanks to Dara from realtysupport.ca for teaching the session. I think we will do it again next month as well.

- The Meetup was held for the first time on the 3rd floor of Ceilis Irish Pub which is a beautiful deck with a retractable roof.

- We had a sign-language translator on hand for a couple of new Meetup members. It was interesting to watch Nigel translate what was being said.

- It is the first time that I have loaded the Meetup photos to Facebook.com

* Would you like to come to the next Meetup? RSVP here - agents from all over make it
* Want to see the pictures from the May 2007 Meetup? Click here
* Interested in Jordan Behan’s notes from his presentation? You can see there here

May 7th 2007 is shaping up to be a great day. If your looking for the opportunity to learn more about the Ubertor software, ask some specific questions about your website and attend the Real Estate Technology Meetup then May 7th is your day.

All events take place at Ceili’s Irish Pub in downtown Vancouver

4:00 - 6:00PM - Ubertor Training Session (details here) Instructor: Dara Sklar
6:00 - 6:45PM - Social Interaction with Agents, Ubertor Client Service Team, Approved Vendors (cash bar and food available)
6:45 - 7:45PM - Presentation by Jordan Behan on “Kicking Ass and Taking Names in Cyberspace”

In the past, agents from Victoria, Whistler, Calgary, Edmonton, Seattle, San Francisco and all over the Lower Mainland have come out to attend these events.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

Last night’s Vancouver Real Estate Technology Meetup was outstanding. We had the pleasure of listening to professional speaker and author Shane Gibson. Shane came to the meetup to discuss “Using Technology to create and cement long-term profitable client relationships”. The response from the group was overwhelmingly positive. Everyone was very pleased with his presentation and said they took some great tips away. Shane was kind enough to bring some of his books and he sold out pretty quickly. For those interested in getting a copy of his book, you can get it here from Amazon.

Again, this meetup brought out real estate agents from all over. Brenda Russell took the ferry over from Victoria, Craig Mackenzie drove down from Whistler plus we had agents from all over the Lower Mainland.

Missed the meetup? Next one is 1 month from now… details here

Here are a few pictures from the meetup last night:

More pictures from the Vancouver Real Estate Technology Meetups

Monday, April 2nd - Ceili’s Irish Pub
6:00 PM - 8:30 PM - UberGenius Q/A
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A few of Ubertor’s client service team will be on hand from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM ready to answer any questions you have about your website, search engines, Meebo, SEO, blogging, content, Google Analytics or whatever you can think of.

If you have a question and want it answered this is a great opportunity to learn more.

Complete Event Details Here - http://realestateagent.meetup.com/109/calendar/5540794/

Click here to see photos from past Meetups

Real Estate Technology Meetup - Shane Gibson co-author of Closing Bigger the Field Guide to Closing Bigger Deals will share with us how to integrate time tested and proven sales strategies with technology to create and secure high return on investment business relationships in our communities.

Shane Gibson, President (North America)
Knowledge Brokers International Systems Ltd.

Have you RSVP’d for the next Meetup? Details Here want to see some photos from past meetups?

Tonight was the Vancouver Real Estate Technology March Meetup and it was our biggest yet. At last count there were over 75 attendees in the room including a few from San Diego! We had the pleasure of welcoming Cameron McNeill to the stage who is the co-founder of MAC Marketing Solutions. MAC Marketing, with their developer client Cressey created a 5 series web based show that was an outside the box, “purple cow”, marketing masterpiece that caught the attention of the world wide blogging community, international press and the attention of the real estate community. Cameron spoke about the idea, how it came about, the costs involved, the risks and the exposure that they received from this marketing move.

For your review, here are the links discused tonight:

- DonovanLife - A made for web TV series about a woman’s life in Donovan, a downtown Vancouver condo development. A kind of “Sex and the City” meets “Will & Grace.” - All 5 episodes here

- We also showed Ian Watt’s use of video and Meebo as a way to gain “stickiness” for his website. Check out Ian’s website here and his real estate channel on YouTube here

- Tom Davis was the lucky winner of our door prize tonight. He took home a copy of The Purple Cow written by Seth Godin

- MAC’s website is www.condosbymac.com

Here are a few pictures from the evening:

Stephen Jagger co-founder of Ubertor.com and Cameron McNeill, co-founder of MAC Marketing

Jason, Nicole, Sarah, Steve and Cameron

Vancouver Real Estate Technology Meetup Group Picture

Check out the rest of the March photos here

Would you like to come to the next Meetup? Be sure to RSVP here

ubertor

Vancouver Real Estate Tech March Meetup brings you 2 new speakers to the group. We are pleased to have Cameron McNeill and Cameron Good of MAC Marketing Solutions.

Cameron McNeill the founder of MAC Marketing Solutions and Cameron Good the Director of Sales for MAC Marketing Solutions will be presenting on their recent use of YouTube and Web Episodes to promote the upcoming Yaletown building called “Donovan”.

MAC created a made for web TV series about a woman’s life in Donovan, a downtown Vancouver condo development. A kind of “Sex and the City” meets “Will & Grace.” - (see all 5 episodes here)

MAC is one of Canada’s leading project marketing and sales organizations which assists developers to design, market and sell new residential developments. MAC boasts over 6000 sales valued at over $1.7 Billion of new homes in the last five years.

MAC has marketed over 160 residential developments and has worked along side some of Canada?s largest developers. Currently MAC is actively involved in real estate projects valued over $3 Billion throughout Greater Vancouver plus the BC Interior and Alberta. www.condosbymac.com

And, a new format, we will have a few of Ubertor’s client service team on hand from 6:10 PM to 8:30 PM ready to answer any questions you have about your website, search engines, Meebo, SEO, blogging, content, Google Analytics or whatever you can think of. If you have a question and want it answered this is a great opportunity to learn more.

***** To attend, please RSVP here*****

Here are some photos from past meetups?

From outside of Vancouver? don’t worry, you are welcome to attend… past Meetups have had agents from Whistler, Victoria, Seattle, Bellingham, Calgary, San Francisco and Gibsons. Would be great to see you, let us know if your coming from out of town as we would be pleased to answer any questions about hotels, driving directions, etc.

February 5th 2007 is shaping up to be a great day.

Ubertor Training - 10:00am - 12:00pm
- For those that want to learn more about their Ubertor websites, meet other agents using the Ubertor system and take their existing web presence to the next level then attending the Ubertor training session on Monday, February 5th 2007 is a must. Complete details here (be sure to RSVP)

Real Estate Tech February Meetup - 6:00pm - 8:00pm
- The 4th Real Estate Tech Meetup is shaping up to be a great one. Leon Ng President of RealEstateChannel.ca and Dara Sklar the founder of RealtySupport.ca will both be in attendance. Complete details here (be sure to RSVP)

I just arrived home from Mexico last night after a long overdue vacation. Myself and my girlfriend, my parents, my 2 younger brothers and their girlfriends all went down to Mexico for an 8 day vacation. (right: here is most of us at breakfast) It was a great break and the weather could not have been better.
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I had an opportunity to meet with Vancouver native Joel Burslem when he was up from Portland for the Christmas break. Joel works as a marketing consultant with a large real estate company in Portland and also runs the widely read blog called www.futureofrealestatemarketing.com. He and I met at the Cactus Club on Vancouver’s Robson street and it was a great opportunity to finally meet face to face as well as discuss what is upcoming for 2007 in Canada and the US. If your in the New York area right now, you can meet Joel at the Inman News Real Estate Connect.
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Tonight was the Vancouver Real Estate Tech Meetup Group’s night to meet at Milans in Yaletown. As expected we had a smaller crowd as most people still seem to be just getting back from their vacations. But, the smaller group did not hamper the groups real estate technology talks. Jordan Behan from telltenfriends.com who is new to the Vancouver RET Meetup came out tonight with his Realtor brother Wesley to check out the group and talk technology. Mike Blaney made an appearance and gave a few of us a demonstration of his new HTML Email software. Vancouver RET Meetup faithful attendees Ian Watt and Joel Carcone were also in attendance. It was great to see everyone again. Be sure to RSVP for February’s Meetup.
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Google snuggles up to the real estate industry even more by launching a page on their website specifically for real estate agents. Google Tools for Real Estate Professionals is a list of Google tools that they think agents could use within their real estate business.
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The first important point to understand is that having a website requires work! Many real estate agents think that you can just launch a website and it will work its “magic” and bring in the business. This is not how the internet works. Having a website is just like having a storefront. It takes work to make it work. (there are ways to get the work done without you doing it… see below)

Think of your favourite website… look at it today and then think, would this still be your favourite website in 6 months if it was exactly the same?

Lets say your favourite website is the clothing company Banana Republic. If you look at their website today (screen shot here) you will see their Christmas specials and some widgets that are pushing certain products and promotions. How would you feel if you went there in July and the site was still pushing their Christmas sale.

Or how about WhistlerBlackcomb.com? What if you went to their website and you saw the snow report from 2005… or if you came across their big new announcement is a new lift that was launched 8 months ago. Would you keep going to their website? or would you find your Whistler news somewhere else?

Make your website relevant! Make your website matter!

Here are 5 tasks you can do in 2007 to help your website gain the exposure and return visitors that it deserves:

1. Seriously.. Get Blogging
INMAN News named blogging as one of the top real estate stories of 2006. They reported that the “Real estate blogoshere comes to life. Real estate blogs really took off this year, with more solo agents getting into the mix and more blogging on collaborative sites.” Zillow’s CFO & VP of Marketing Spencer Rascoff says that one of the top online real estate stories for 2006 was that blogs went mainstream.

2. Expose your Listing in a new way
Get the massive exposure that your listings deserve. Flyers, Open Houses, local Newspapers are all good ways to attract attention to your listings but services like craigslist.org, zillow.com, oodle.com, edgeio.com, base.google.com, hotpads.com and trulia.com are all excellent ways to gain massive exposure to your listings. Adding your listing to these sites should be standard practice when advertising your new listing.

3. Expose yourself to new ideas
2006 will be remembered in online real estate as the year that more information than ever became accessible to consumers, for free. The creation of Zillow.com, Redfin.com, and Trulia.com are a few among a rapidly growing group of companies that are pushing the envelope. Are you up to speed with what is going on? Do you know what a blog is? how about RSS? craigslist? Make 2007 the year of learning new things. Plan to attend a conference that you have never attended before. There are lots out there. Here are a few places to start looking www.realestateconnect.com or www.realtor.org.

4. Track Everything
Take the time to track what you do so that you can replicate what works and stop doing what is not working. Here are a few ideas to help you get tracking your results:
a. Ensure that you are using Google Analytics to track the stats of your website
b. Use multiple email addresses to track what is working.
- On your open house flyers use steve@yourdomain.com
- On your busines cards use sjagger@yourdomain.com
- On your just listed flyers use justlisted@yourdomain.com
You get the idea. Doing this will allow you to track which inbound emails are coming from which marketing effort.
c. Multiple domain names is a great way to track (yourdomain.com, yourdomain.ca, yourdomain.info)
d. Your Open Houses can even be tracked… ask everyone how they heard of the open house. Even tell them that your testing to see which of your marketing is pulling its weight. Run a survey to track the results. Do this for all of your open houses. I bet the results will surprise you.

5. Learn the complete capabilities of your website.
Even if your website is not an Ubertor website (it should be) you should take the time to learn the complete capabilities of what your website can do for you and what technologies are available to help take you to the next level. Take some time to learn about Feedburner, RSS, Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, WordTracker, Blogs, PageRank, Link Baiting, etc.

With all of these new tasks you will need to Systematize your business. A good book to read about systematizing your business is Michael Gerbers E-Myth. His book talks about small business owners and the need to operate like a franchise. Definitely worth a read.

Need help with any or all of these tasks… Ubertor Support can help with some, Ubertor Training is another option, RET Meetups will bring you together with like minded agents, services like realtysupport.ca can do the work for you, or even a real estate coach might be the answer.

Keep in mind the California Association of REALTORS® survey found that “The typical buyer is now an Internet buyer“

Any questions… feel free to contact me directly.