Rob's Blog

This week we will turning our attention to on line directories. One of the better ( and FREE) ways to increase your results in search queries is to be listed on some of the top web directories. 

Google and Yahoo have the most well known. Bing.com's local listing center and BOTW Local (Best Of The Web) have created very good local directories.

Have you come across a really good local directory recently? We are especially interested in directories that are based around towns and cities.

We will be putting our results together in a 6 part post starting next week. If you have any feedback on your experiences using web directories let me know and I will include your information.  

Over the last two weeks we at URBaCS have been researching and writing about on line photo galleries. We wanted to look at how they can be used by new home builders to increase traffic to their website. We posted our results on the URBaCS Blog. Over the next five days I will be elaborating on what we have found and some of our feedback. 

Home Builder Photo Galleries -Intro to the blog series ( Post #1 of 5)

Homebuilder's aren't using photo galleries to their full capabilites so we'll be spending the next week discussing what builder's should be doing to use photos as a tool to drive search traffic and engage prospective home buyers. With today's down housing market we are all doing business differently than we did just a few short years ago.  Most of the old marketing stand-bys don't work like they used to, and we are all looking for new ways to make our marketing dollars stretch further. 

It's all about the numbers

Ask any new home sales professional or Realtor and they'll tell you it's always been about the numbers. X number of traffic units leads to Y number of sales. Click here to read the full post.

Stop back tomorrow for post 2.

Why don't builders make better use of photo galleries?

Each year Builder magazine does its top 100 list. Last week while going through the list, I visited the website of the top 15 builders. What I found, is that it is very hard to find a picture gallery of their homes. 

Over 78% of home buyers will visit a builders website before they visit the model home. We also know that the model home is one of the best selling tools in a builders arsenal. Make a quick visit to the Flickr or Picasa websites and you will see how popular posting photos on line has become. 

Some of the builders websites have nicly produced videos of a few of their homes. This is helpful, but still lacks the full benefit of a large photo gallery. There is something compelling about a "next" button that pushes us to click to see what the next picture is going to be. 

Here is an example of two photo galleries;

Centex photo gallery

Estridge photo gallery

Which of the two of these is more compelling as a sales tool? Centex has a nice slide show. No titles, descriptions or tags. Estridge has titles so buyers know which home they are looking at, tags so the pictures are easy to find by category, and descriptions so they increase page rankings by search engine's.  

The technology is available. Realtors have found the benefit of adding pictures to their listings. So I ask again... Why don't more builders make better use of photo galleries?

The winds of change are continuing to accelerate. The way we do business needs to change as well... if we are to keep up. 

This year is the year of the social networks. Twitter and Facebook seem to be the flavor of the day for now. How many of your co-workers have Facebook accounts? I guess the better question is to ask, how many of them don't? It was not too long ago that Facebook was only something that college kids were on. Now it has gone main stream. 

How about cell phones? I know many of you can recall the days before cell phones. Can you even imagine doing business without cell phones today? It would be imposable. Our clientele expect that we will be available for them at a moments notice. 

Text messaging is coming into it's own this year. This is partially do to the popularity of Twitter and similar applications. But it can also be attributed to  the maturing of the medium itself. This is the first year that the number of text messages will exceed the number of phone calls. More and more Realtors are finding ways to incorporate text based marketing into their marketing plan. 

So what is the next technology change? Photo Messaging

Many see the next change coming as digital images become more Mobil. Platforms like Fliker, Facebook and MySpace have trained us how to post pictures on-line for years. Cell phones are now equipped to take, view and send pictures far better than they could even as recently as 12 months ago. According to a recent survey by PMA Foresight;

• About one-fourth of all US mobile subscribers sent or received images or video through their cellphone.
• Photo/video sharing is the top multimedia activity on the cellphone in the USA, ahead of games, downloading of ringtones, applications, and more.
• Photo messaging activity is highest in the months of December and August. 
  
• Most notably, the 2008 M:Metrics survey recorded a 60 percent increase in the number of cellphone subscribers involved in photo messaging from the same survey period in 2007.
• Participation in photo messaging increased across all age groups, as well.

No wonder we are all tired. 

Jayson posted this great bit of information from Sprint on the URBaCS blog.

Check it out it's good. SPRINT

URBaCS is volunteering services to Estridge during the construction of the Extreme Makeover home in Indianapolis. We are helping organize a food drive and getting information out about the build through Twitter and Facebook. Follow the build and receive status updates on Facebook, or Twitter.

While walking through the build site today, I was struck by how many people have come together to help make this dream a reality. Just walking through the parking lot and looking at all the different trucks and trailers, was amazing. Everyone has been hit hard by the economy, especially contractors, but they are donating their time and resources anyway.   As Paul Estridge says, "Giving when things are going well is easy, giving when things are tough is hard." 

So here's a little credit for the companies who are giving right now. 

Kelich Crane Service

Certa Pro Painters

Dealers Wholesale

Mainscape

Lunar Construction

Thanks to all. Your giving is appreciated. 

I will post some more as the project progresses

On Sunday I participated in the "Braveheart Charge" with the cast of Extreme Makeover Home Edition, Employees from the Estridge Company, and around 500 other volunteers. So, when the show airs May 17th you should not have any trouble picking me out of the crowd.

Unbelievable

The amazing thing about the project is that Estridge and the EMHE Team is going to demo the old home, build a new home, and furnish it all in 106 hours. 

The Weather

I live in Indiana. In Indiana, we experience all four seasons each year. In late march, in Indiana, it is possible to experience all four seasons in a single day. We had one of those days for the Braveheart Charge. The day started warmish, turned cool, started to drizzle, turned cold, turned to rain, sleet,  snow flurries, and then the sun came back out after it was ok to go back inside.

The Charge and Demolition

There was a good turn out for the charge. A large mass of people charging down the street and congregating in front of the doomed home. A helicopter was flown in and the demolition was started by dropping a large weight on the home with the word "Knowledge" written on the side. The big equipment finished the job. In a few hours, nothing of the home was left. 

Estridge Companies is building the next Extreme Makeover Home Edition home right here in Indianapolis and we need help from Realtors.

The "door knock", announcing the family, is less than a day away. From there, Estridge will demolish the family's old home and build them a brand new dream home in 106 hours. ABC will be shooting the 2-hour season finale here in Indianapolis, which will air on May 17th.

Paul Estridge Jr. truly believes this opportunity is about more than just one family or one neighborhood. He has said time and again that we as a community can and should use this event as a catalyst to help one another.

So, in addition to volunteering to help build the dream home, Estridge has created other opportunities for everyone to get involved. They are leading a food drive to help feed hungry Hoosiers (learn more at ExtremeFoodDrive.com). They will also be launching a Facebook video campaign where they're asking people to work together to build something great. Also, M&I Bank has established a mortgage fund for the family.

We need your help to spread the word, drive participation and donations. We encourage you write about the event. To help you, we have a handful of behind-the-scenes passes to help you blog about the event. If you are interested in visiting the build site and writing about some of the many great stories surrounding the home contact me at rob@urbacs.com.

Estridge will also be Tweeting about the build with 106 + hourly Twitter updates. We would love to include any of your posts about the event in our Tweets. So even if you choose not to visit the build site, but write a post about the event, make sure to send me a link.

I can't believe it is March already. Daylight savings time has kicked in. Spring is almost here. March Madness is just around the corner. My last post was December 2nd of 2008. Oh my! Where has the time gone?

It has been a busy first quarter for us at URBaCS. At the end of last year we started working on a project with a company called Connective Mobile.  We started talking with Connective Mobile's Adam Small about integrating Connective Mobile's text messaging and voice messaging technology with our Referral Builder application. What we came up with is a completely new application using the best of both companies knowledge and technology. 

We are almost finished with the project and are putting the final touches on a new product for Realtors and New Home Builders that we are very excited about. Both URBaCS and Connective Mobile will be marketing the new application under our own unique names. We will be marketing our application as Lead Builder. 

Lead Builder will allow you to quickly create an individual website for each of your listings, where you can display an unlimited number of high quality photos. The website is designed to be viewed on cell phones and computers. Each listing will have a toll free number where prospects can call to hear a recorded message about the listing. Each listing will also have a short code where prospective buyers can receive a text message on their cell phone with your contact information, listing information and a link to the website.

The best part of integrating all these technologies is that every time a prospect uses Lead Builder to get information about your listing, you are instantly notified. The system captures the prospects contact information so you can follow up with everyone looking at your listings. 

We are very excited to introduce Lead Builder to the public. We will be going live within the next 14 days. I will update you on our progress. We are hoping to find some active Realtors to test Lead Builder for us. If you know anyone who is an early adopter of new technology, forward this post or have them contact me directly.

Are you mobile? I mean really mobile. It's a question you should be asking yourself. A cell phone has become part of our required business tools. They keep us connected. Today that may not be enough though. Is your cell phone generating leads for you?

Ahh... Now I have your attention.

My business partner, Jayson Manship and I met with the owners of Connective Mobile today to discuss their company and share information about developing market trends. We were pleasantly surprised at what we learned.

Connective Mobile has created a S.A.A.S. application for real estate professionals. They call it Pro-lead Suite. According to their website Pro-lead Suite is " An innovative lead generation tool that utilizes both text messaging and hosted toll free numbers to ensure that home information is always available to prospective buyers." I think it is more than that. It's just plain cool.

You put a yard sign in front of your listing. When prospective buyers want information about the home, they send a short code text to the service. Within seconds the prospect receives a text message giving them instant information about the listing. They then have the option to place a call to you, receive an automated email with more information, get directed to your website for more information, or request that you call them at a later time. The end result is that you capture more prospects than you would with a traditional information box.

Today and in the future, we have to work smarter and more efficiently. This one service cuts out, buying an information box,  printing flyer's, delivering flyer's, and re-stocking flyer's to the information box. Your time is spent where you makes the most money, in front of clients.

There are some more good applications to this technology. I'll be discussing those ideas in upcoming posts. Until then I'll be looking for other great ideas to bring you about the changing technology of today's new media. At URBaCS we are committed bringing you the best people with the newest ideas to help you make money in this challenging environment.