These potential buyers, also known as the “millennial generation” consists of people    born between the 1980’s to the early 2000’s. This ever changing market, which has grown up with the influence of the Internet, knows only one way to gather information: quickly and online. Technology is the main platform for their source of information- generally gathered through social media, websites, or landing pages. The internet above all resources has become the key platform for finding their daily news and potential homes. Today, in order to effectively accommodate this generation, it’s imperative to be accessible through various platforms.

 SOCIAL MEDIA:

Facebook:
You’ve heard it now a million times: Facebook is a must for creating user awareness, especially toward the Millennial Generation.

91% of Facebook users make their places, and interests public
76% spend over an hour on Facebook a day
40% sign into Facebook over 10 times a day

More than anything, Facebook serves a relationship platform- one where agents should communicate with current and potential clients.

Twitter:
The instant messaging media that we’ve all heard and seen in every recent news source. (Stats speak louder than words) and brief statements are all generation X needs to know about your listing.

58%  of users post to Twitter all the time

Independent sales agents (40% of the real estate industry) can and should use Twitter to connect with other larger firms and get their information exposed to a broad span of users and potential home buyers.

Pinterest:
Pinterest was recently announced as the fastest growing social media platform. Pinterest’s platform allows users to create categories of interests through photographs and images. An often suggested approach with social media is to have a presence in certain select spaces that make most sense to you and ensure that content is posted on those networks routinely, rather than being on every single platform and having a difficult time keeping up. Pinterest is rapidly proving itself capable of drawing extremely large crowds and is recommended to real estate professionals for posting listing pictures to get noticed by potential clients. Images can be shared or “repined” to various sites, giving further reach to users past your immediate  users accessibility to your listings as well.

20-80% increase in referral traffic
64% of users are women
20% of home buyers are single women

YouTube:
YouTube has become an embedded source of information and cultural norm for younger generations. Thousands of top producing real estate agents benefit from Youtube by posting their listings online and presenting themselves as a source of knowledge for potential buyers. Most importantly, Youtube ranks highly on Google so it makes searching for your listings a lot easier.

20% of Generation Y visit YouTube multiple times a day

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GET YOURSELF NOTICED! Exposure is crucial and as a real estate professional, you should be taking advatange  of these FREE opportunities (if you aren’t already). Leads can (somewhat) easily be generated and maintained through the internet on a broad spectrum that many have not formed otherwise. It’s now more important than ever to embrace these changes and use it to your advantage.

Pinterest is an online “pinboard” that lets users create, manage, and share collections of interests mostly in the form of pictures.

Could it be the next big real estate tool? Apparently, Pinterest helps agents and brokers get their websites noticed. Here’s how: Create a board for yourself, your business page or your team. Search engines give higher rankings to websites with lots of social interests. So the more people pin your pictures or websites onto their own boards, the higher the website will ultimately rank.

Watch the video below by ActiveRain and Internet Marketing Specialist Designation for an introduction and explanation of Pinterest. Learn how it works and how it can benefit your real estate business.

A contact manager lets you create lists that include virtually anyone you have ever done business with, are doing business with right now, or are planning to do business with in the future.

But a contact manager isn’t just a list of your connections. It goes far beyond that. The best contact manager will simplify all of your contact management activities. So instead of checking email, reviewing past calls, and trying to remember which properties you have shown to your clients all in different places, get a contact manager that will consolidate all of those activities for you. Here are some things you’ll want your contact management software to have:

• Smartphone synchronization that allows you to work from anywhere, anytime
• Email Integration for easy communication with contacts
• To-do lists that let you stay on top of things
• Calendar integration for scheduling meetings and viewing appointments
• Contact history logs that allow you to view all past conversations and transactions
• Organization into groups that lets you sort contacts according to customized options
• Automated email campaigns that allow you to reach targeted groups

A good contact management software will help you ensure that you never forget to follow up or keep in touch with anyone in your environment. With it, marketing to and managing your clients couldn’t be simpler.

- Interior and Exterior features: (Paint, wall fixtures, yard landscapes, and repair maintenance). It’s important to make the home stand out from the exterior as well as the interior. Real estate agents could enhance this through an intriguing entry.

- Agents should have extensive internet advertising: Broad exposure to the market is an essential component to the awareness of your listing.

- Know your market: Agents need to have extensive knowledge on the local market buyers as well as the sellers. It is the responsibility of the agent to gain factual information of the local demographics as well as the process to better market the property in order to facilitate the needs of their buyers and sellers.

- Prepare an unbiased, professional Comparative Market Analysis (CMA): It’s important to create value in the data that is being presented. Detailed reports and price recommendations are details that would help your listing stand apart and it’s vital that it’s interpreted effectively.

Overall the key determinant of confidence is the relationship created between the prospects and agent. Contact management can be better organized and facilitated through software systems that can better consolidate all of these activities for you.

About Privatization in Team Edition

So… what does it mean to practice good contact management? It means storing contact information in one consolidated place. It’s about being able to recall the exact details of your last conversation with a prospect or client. It means feeling comfortable calling your SOI because you have something relevant to talk about. Not only that, a sales rep who practices good contact management has clients taking the initiative to call them between transactions because they are viewed as an expert on home-related services. This same sales rep frowns at batch and blast emails, and instead sends mass emails that are personalized and targeted to specific groups or segments.

The answer and key to good contact management is adopting an easy-to-use, real estate specific contact management solution into your business. A good real estate customer relationship management (CRM) system will help you ensure that you never forget to follow up or keep in touch with someone in your SOI.  You’ll be able to easily pull up important profile information and know the last time you spoke with a client or prospect, and the details of the conversation. You will feel in control of your business and become empowered.

You’re going to want a CRM that will allow you to set up automatic prompts to remind you to send an email, letter, or make a phone call. By doing this, you’re making certain that you never miss an opportunity to build loyal relationships. It’s also vital to have an integrated to-do list so you can track your progress on a listing or a new marketing plan, for example, and constantly be aware of what still has to be done and what has already been completed.

Now… all this might sound great, but as a Realtor, you’re always on the road. You need to have the ability to update pertinent client information from your smartphone and have the changes wirelessly synced to your real estate contact management system. You use your calendar too so you’ll want to ensure both your calendar and your smartphone are wirelessly synced. This ensures nothing is forgotten or falls through the cracks.

Above all, a CRM system must be easy to learn and use, because if it’s not, nothing else matters. You should use a real estate CRM every day, because if used efficiently, your business will flourish. It’s all about relationship building: focus on your SOI, grow the existing relationships that you have, and you’ll be pleasantly surprised at what you’ll see happening.

What’s Going on?

AgentOffice: Personal Edition and AgentOffice: Team Editions are not upgrades to older versions of AgentOffice (including the AgentOffice desktop program).  Both editions are completely NEW programs with virtually no relation to the old program. Personal Edition for single-users and Team Edition for larger teams. Think of it as: the new generation of AgentOffice!

The new versions are installed directly onto your computer as an add-on to your Outlook. Neither Editions are web-based, however they give you the option to automatically synch (backup) your data to Emphasys Software’s cloud servers in the event of a computer malfunction. The major benefit is that integrating your AgentOffice data with your smartphone is now a breeze.

Personal vs. Team Editions Explained

AgentOffice: Personal Edition is a single-user program best suited to individual real estate agents. If you have personal assistant, they can share the subscription as well. Subscription cost is $30/month with no contracts to sign. Unlimited support is included as is free upgrades. Available for up to 3 computers.

AgentOffice: Team Edition has been designed for real estate teams in mind. It features a newly integrated dashboard to keep track of reporting and also has customizable privatization capabilities.

Both Editions integrates directly into Settlement Room, real estate’s leading closing management software. SettlementRoom is a web-based platform also powered and supported by Emphasys Software.

So…. what should you do?

Emphasys Software continues to support previous versions of AgentOffice. If you’re looking to upgrade your system, you now have options. We believe that AgentOffice is laying the foundation for a multi-user platform poised to again become the next best thing in real estate. We invite you to sign up for a Free 15 Day Trial and see some of the great features of real estate’s most popular crm software.

We’re here to help so please feel free to contact AgentOffice Support at (888) 661-6600 or join an upcoming webinar to see how this software can help your real estate business grow.

Privatization

First off, privatization is now a feature for AgentOffice: Team Edition (TE) and is no longer a feature for AgentOffice: Personal Edition (PE). We have removed the feature from Personal Edition because it is generally used for one Agent (and possibly an assistant) and all the data in those 3 or 4 registration keys should be shared across all the computers identically.

Privatization was a big highlight for the release of AOTE because now when an item (contact/note/listing etc) is marked with the “Private” category, AgentOffice will verify the owner of that item and leave it on the computer it was originally created on, and removing it from any and all other computers that item may have been sent to via the sync. You may think…. “data is disappearing from my Outlook”. Rest easy that it is not and your data is safe.  This is simply because the item in question was marked as private.

Dashboard

The dashboard is a tool that is activated for every Team Leader upon signup. Team Leaders will be able to view their team’s productivity in detail as a whole or view each individual’s performance.  The team leader also has the ability to view the data in 2 different formats: bar graph or a pie chart. One very important thing to know is that only the team leader will be able to view this dashboard unless it is specially requested to be viewed by another member of the team.

If you aren’t already running AgentOffice: Team Edition, contact your Account Manager or email
realestate@emphasys-softare.com to get setup today.

There are a lot of things that can go wrong with email marketing — broken links, typos, unoptimized images — the list goes on and on. So read carefully, and make sure you avoid these email marketing mistakes next time you’re promoting your real estate or brokerage business to clients or prospects.

1. Database #Fail

Nothing is more painful than opening an email and being greeted by… “Dear <First Name> ”. Oftentimes this puts an emphasis on the lack of authenticity on the sender’s side so make sure you are correctly mapping labels (First Name, Last Name, Company Name) to values. Otherwise, you risk disappointing your community and losing email recipients.

2. Boring Emails

Boring emails trigger readers to quickly hit the delete button. You can still promote data without being boring. Use exciting language and try to pique people’s curiosity with humor or controversy. Be somebody who tells a story and grab the reader’s attention with the very first sentence by referring to something funny or newsworthy.

3. The Hard Sell

So many emails are all about selling. Often, organizations only send email correspondance to promote their products or services. These types of messages get pretty old pretty fast and can turn people off. Instead, make sure your messages deliver value to recipients. It could serve to spread announcements about a new property; help people with a common, real estate specific challenge; or extend new opportunities to an existing community of followers.

4. The Same Ol’ Timing

Test different times and days for sending out emails and, most importantly, do some counter-competitive timing. Sending emails on weekends for example can actually increase readership as people take their time reading emails while enjoying their morning espresso and croissants.

5. No Connection with Readers

When running marketing campaigns, adapt your messaging to fit the needs of different buyer personas (your target audience) in your network. If you’re a Broker/Owner of a real estate brokerage company, for instance, you might have five buyer personas: an independent buyer, a corporate buyer, a buyer with a large family, a buyer looking for a vacation home, and a couple planning to purchase their retirement home.

Interestingly enough, this is true for other aspects of marketing—presentations, blogging, social media updates, etc. For all of them, you have to develop a voice that represents your brand and resonates with readers. Try telling stories about successes or failures in your industry.

What are some of the email marketing mistakes you have learned from? Has the AgentOffice mass mailing feature helped you stay in touch with your networks?

The most overlooked factor of networking is that to really make the most of it, you first have to give. Networking isn’t only about what you get out of the connection, it’s also about what you give. This is one of the biggest reasons why many fail at networking events. If you look at it solely as a quick way to pick up new clients, you are missing out on the bigger picture.

Successful Networking

Successful networking is about meeting new people and offering just as much as you receive. If you constantly try to sell, you’ll be known as as a salesperson and chances are they won’t buy what you’re selling (even if they are in the market somewhere down the line). But if you are known as someone who is constantly giving (information, advice, referrals), you will start to gain a reputation as a trusted source and expert in your industry.

Be aware that we are all networking “at all times”. Look at every social interaction as a way to build your network of contacts and friends. Let this happen naturally: you never know when the person behind you in line at the grocery store is looking to purchase a new condo and looking for a trusty real estate broker to help them navigate the market.

Also, don’t be afraid to add everybody to your list of contacts. It may seem odd to try to add the local gym trainer to your professional network but some day they’ll probably be in the market for a new property. If you’re looking to shed some of that holiday weight or just want to get in shape for the New Year, you’ll be glad you have that person in your network as they may offer you a discount or preferred service. Make sure to have an efficient CRM software that allows you to keep detailed information of your new contacts.  Having the foresight to integrate everybody into your social network is forward thinking for success.

As mentioned before, don’t come on too aggressive when building your circle of influence. Networking should be viewed a social activity and your communication should reflect that. Making a connection should be like talking to an old friend. Trying to manufacture a relationship where one doesn’t exist is a recipe for failure. Creating a new contact is about listening to the other person and hearing what they have to say. They’ll appreciate the fact that you are willing to listen to them.

If you take this approach, building relationships and expanding your sphere of influence through successful networking will become natural. Practice the methods above and act in a professional manner. Keep an eye out for any new connections and relationships you can build and soon you will have a network that any real estate professional would envy.

Tell us your successful networking tips or stories in the comments below.