During our visit to the Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2010, we could see first hand how much technology has advanced in the mobile sector and how these will be the new window for information consumption by our clients.

The truth is that everyone of us has a mobile phone, while the majority does not have it connected to the Internet this will change rapidly in a short time. Now that many companies have seen the potential to advertise information and reach out to the masses with this platform with efficiency.

Mobility in the real estate sector.

What role will mobility play in the real estate market? This is a question that we have asked ourselves. It will be an important one so real estate transactions to buy or sell properties can be focused on our “ideal clients”.

I am referring to an “ideal client”, by sending information regarding a property at the appropriate time to an interested party, when they are searching for a house, appartment or land on a specific zone. Many will say – They already do this on the Internet – yes, but not when they are physically near the property.

There are companies that are offering geolocated services to build maps of streets and higways via mobile applications on your phone, because the new generation of Smartphones have GPS on them, opening up the possibilities so services like Waze, Poynt and CloudMade can be offered.

Mobile phones, the start of hyper-local real estate.

The information that you can send through mobile platforms and applications has the advantage of sending the right kind of information, lets say that a person is visiting the state of Baja California to buy a house in Playas de Rosarito, he or she makes a search on a mobile application by typing some characteristics of the desired property like: “beach house in Rosarito Mexico”. The service is able to pinpoint her location, searches for all the local information that is near her position and shows the results on a map or links to the desired results.

Now we can show our real estate listings to persons that are physically near the house, apartment or land; but what is most important is that they have the intention to be our clients.

How close are you to them?

I am going to take some words from Chris Brogan blog, which will help us set the tone for the next following posts that we will be providing to you in regards of the tools on the Web for real estate agents and agencies.

a) I would create a blog about the community where I am selling and renting properties.

We all know by now that publishing on the Web is easy, but what is challenging about it is how to write and where to publish, answering the ¿How? requires practice and persistence because this will be just another task in our daily marketing effort for our real estate listing. The ¿where? is not that easy to define, you will soon find that there is a lot of sites to publish on.

So you need to consider two things:

1. who do you want to reach? You have to mentally create the type of audience that will be interested in reading your blog and foremost the information you will be providing them, so make it relevant.
2. where do our potential customers gather? There are forums, social networks, network of blogs or portals on the Internet where they get together to solve their problems, exchange ideas and socialize on the web. They are not difficult to find and remember always give more than you receive.

Most social networks today give you an opportunity to publish content, but this is not the same than having your own blog on WordPress, Typepad or Blogger. Being part of these platforms makes you a member of the community and you will have the chance to interact with very specific niches.

b) Publish many photographs on the blog.

A very important aspect of publishing is keeping the intellectual property of your creations, I know that by now you would have publish many photos on different social networks, but you need to know that you are giving up the rights to exploit the photos to those platforms, which means that you are sharing the rights to use them. You no longer have control over that content.

The following services can easily be integrated into many Blog platforms, like Flickr, Picasa, iPhoto, Photobucket o Photo.net they are easy to use and have different type of accounts, many have a free service and a paying service. The main difference is the storage capacity they can provide.

c) Create walk through videos of the communities where my real estate agency is selling homes and appartments.

This will provide information that is relevant to the interested party in renting or buying a property from a realtor, because your are providing a virtual visit to the neighborhood.

It is not very complicated to create, now the majority of photo cameras have the capacity to film video and many of us have digital recording cameras as well, maybe laying around the house inside the closet. This is a great opportunity to get some return on that investment, besides filming your kids or parties.

On the Internet we will find the very well know service from Youtube where you can upload the video tour of the neighborhood and also the real estate property you are promoting. There are alternatives like Vimeo, MetaCafe and Ustream. they provide great service, but Youtube is still the most popular and it is crawled on most search engines, so it has some search engine optimization advantages.

We also have a post about  video services on the Internet to sell and rent properties in Mexico.

We are not finished.

The list that Chris provides us is quite big to finish it in one post, so I will leave you with the link to the Blog called  “If I were a realtor”.

This week the Inman Connect technology conference was held in New York, where every year the real estate industry gets together to discuss trends and the market. This has become more international as the years go by, when in the beginning it was focused for US realtors and now many global companies and real estate enterprises are seen in this event.

Inman Connect

The speakers are from the technology industry, but give their opinions on the real estate market and how they see it evolving for the coming years. So the industry listens to them from service providers, banks, real estate brokers, mortgage brokers, real estate franchises and government institutions, everyone in the same place looking to work together and find partners. We have seen this past years that working with a common goal as an industry we might stand a chance to stabilize the real estate market.

Next tuesday you can find the presentations from Real Estate Connect in the Inman site, during those days REBarcamp NY was held one day before ICNY. Where you could hear most of the speakers from the Inman conference so you could get an appetizer of their talk, but the most important aspect of it was that speakers and attendees could share their experiences in a lay back environment with out paying an entrance fee.

Realtor Social Network

There where parallel events to ICNY, like RainCamp and a workshop held by PropertyPortalWatch. Where the discussions revolved around important events and statistics of the real estate market, but also discussions on new tools to measure your reputation on the Internet or the effectiveness of your web initiatives.

RainCamp NY 2010:

• Twitts from #RainCamp
• A good post from RainCamp.

REBarcamp Ny 2010:

• Twitts from REBacamp NY o #rebcny.
• In the  Facebook Tweal_Estate there is a good ammount of information, nice work guys.

We hope that next time we will be at the event to provide more insights into what was happening during the those days in New York, for now Twitter will have to do…..just for now.

This last months have been very active with good new from the real estate sector and for the venture capital scene in Seattle. At the start of the year we talked with the people behind Redfin & Zillow when we visited for REbarcamp Seattle 09. there you will find our perspective of the event.

Nos let us go the matter at hand:

Redfin has reported their first earnings for 2009, there are several posts from techcrunch, washington post and others.

I have to share with you the following link to the latest book from Chris Anderson “FREE”. The only problem is that you have to be located in the USA to downloaded, but nothing that a few emails cannot solve.

The information portrayed in the book regarding the Freemium Business Model, is very relevant to the story behind Redin´s earnings, there is an interesting discussion between Fred Wilson, Malcom Gladwell & John Gapper, their perspectives can be quite enlightening, so have a read.

I am signaling these three stories because they are proposing several ways newly created services can provide profitability, not only for StartUps on the Internet but for anyone willing to try a different approach to doing business, because there are many companies that are not living directly from advertising which is Redfin´s case, on the other side of the fence we have Zillow which have had some trouble staying a float.

The result is that these opposite business models from both companies have had different outcomes, Zillow decided to sell ads and Redfin chose to go against the tide and became a digital real estate broker, which in the begging stirred many arguments from inside the broker industry and real estate alike. But at the end of the road everyone came out profiting from their services, the reason for it was that the agencies and brokers received a very efficient channel to provide a better services to their customers which translates in sells. They now have a way a partner so they can do the outsourcing of their management for their real estate leads.

So the benefit is for real estate agents that use these types of services that integrate information technology to real estate transactions can provide added value to their customers, they will see the benefits in:

• Reducting in advertising costs for their real estate listings.
• Enable better customer for specific needs, such as renting an appartment on the beach or buying a house in the mountains (sorry the lack of niche examples).
• Increase the interaction with their local and international market under one comunication channel.
• They can measure the effectiveness of their offline and online campaigns.

I hope this points out a couple of areas where you can exel at and that will help you develop more business for your real estate agency or brokerage company. So you can use all the different social media outlets that you can incorporate such as Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and instant messaging services like MSN, Yahoo, GTalk and a long list of etcs.

I was browsing through ways on getting to know much better our clients and by a chance had to browse through a couple of videos that are not too far related to the real estate market and Internet web services.

This is a video by And Freire from Axialent where he talks about Culture Archetypes: Customer-focused Culture.

On the video he explains 5 types of business culture that enable a better customer service inside the vision of the whole workforce.

For real estate brokers and agents, a person that comes to me them seeking a home, falls into 2 categories:

a) Wants to buy a property, this person has a clear understanding of what is the needs and the budget for commiting to buy a house or apartment. This person calls the broker for and appointment and arrives early to the date so the realtor can “show him what he wants to buy”.

b) Looking for real estate, not everybody has a clear idea on what their needs are and most people fall into this category, this person will tend to browse the web through a period of time ranging from 2 to 3 weeks before calling the realtor, they can be motivated to contact or engage by the real estate agency or agents information on the web, the recommendation of  friends, referrals and peers.

What Andy thinks is essential for a successful alignment between our customers needs and our company vision, thus enabling a much better interaction that results in a sale. He established 5 cultures:

1. Customer-focused.
2. One-team.
3. Innovation.
4. Achievement.
5. People-first.

How is this related to the real estate business?

• Any real estate transaction is involved to better care for the needs of housing that our client is looking for, always inside the budget that he has explained to the realtor. If our offer is aligned with this 2 factors, the probability of selling the house or apartment increases. The fine line is drawn into catering for every need of every lead, so we know that we might not have what they are looking for, but this is when referrals to other realtors play a big part and this is in most real estate markets is a usual business practice.
• It is normal that on most real estate agencies, just one agent is taking care of making sure that the leads are being transform into buyers or at least being referred to a proper realtor. all the administration tasks are handled by a one man operation service, so less coordination with different areas or individuals  minimizes the points of failure.  Which is always a plus.
• The most important aspect is handling sales is meeting the metrics that the realtor sets for each month trying to sale a home. In this aspect most real estate agencies and realtors have experience, I can go as far to say that most professional agents have a few years to probe it. The only thing I can add is that we are working hard to provide a service from FronteraEstates that can help contact more potential buyers for a home or appartment.
• Having a personal touch is a way of engaging and taking the sting out of changing your home or selling it, so please be aware that not everybody is suited for every realtor or broker, you need to know their needs and be in tuned, to establish a clear channel of communication and hopefully a sale.

A real estate agent can clearly filter most of his “leads” and get to know his clients by applying all five cultures into his day to day activities and we hope that the video had also contirbuted to it.