Brightfox – What's hot in I.T. for the Property Industry
The latest news and information from Brightfox about what's hot and what's not when it comes to I.T. in the property industry!
Posts and information of interest to Property Developers.
Brisbane Business News has just published an article showing a worrying trend for apartment developers with commencement of new product down almost 13 per cent in the last 12 months.
“. . . While the January floods have increased new housing construction in Queensland in the March quarter, demand for unit and townhouse sales decreased 15 per cent.”
Visit Brisbane Business News to read more . . .
http://www.brisbanebusinessnews.com.au/article1961/APARTMENT%20STARTS%20AND%20SALES%20TUMBLE.html
After the successes of its various websites including carsales.com.au and bikesales.com.au, the team at the CarSales Network have turned their attention to the property industry with the introduction of homesales.com.au into the mix.
With over a decade of experience and a network of more than 24 classified websites attracting over 14.2 million visits every month, the CarSales Network is sure to make an impact on the property industry with the introduction of this new site. According to the site, their goal is to lower the cost of real estate advertising in Australia and offer you “an opportunity to extend your buyer and seller reach by listing your properties on homesales.com.au for FREE”.
With the cost of advertising on some real estate portals on the rise, we may soon see many people making the switch to this new rival.
For all foxAdvantage users, uploading to homesales.com.au is 100% free. There are no extra charges for uploading to additional portals.
After great demand from users and agents, realestate1.net.au upgraded to a national search function capability in late 2010.
Along with this improved search function, new site features include improved property short-listing and bigger maps and images in property listings.
As one of Australia’s fastest growing real estate advertising websites, realestate1.net.au provide a user-friendly website with tools and information for buyers, sellers and renters. With the new features, realestate1 aims to provide an alternative real estate website for browsers designed to be simple, quick and easy to use.
As part of a recent update, users are now able to upload listings automatically to realestate1 from foxAdvantage. This improved functionality will support our many clients’ diverse marketing requirements and help them to remain market leaders.
With the launch of their new look website the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ) is proud to announce the exciting addition of the REIQ Property Search. A Queensland-based listing portal featuring properties from REIQ accredited agencies.
Available at no extra charge, REIQ members need only subscribe to Property Search to begin taking advantage of this wide reaching internet presence.
After being up and running for only two months, already over 19,000 properties are advertised for sale and over 2,000 for rent. At this rate of uptake, it looks as though the property industry has already given this particular portal a big thumbs up.
Understanding that our clients need to be able to send both wide reaching and diverse marketing, Brightfox is proud to announce that as of June 17th, 2011 our clients will have the ability to simultaneously upload their listing details to sixteen different real estate portals including REIQ Property Search at the click of a button.
Best of all for foxAdvantage users, uploading to the REIQ Portal is 100% free. There are no extra charges for uploading to additional portals.
If you don’t already know what Google Places is all about, it is basically Google’s attempt to provide relevant local search results to searchers based on their geographic location.
So when you search for something like “Real Estate Agent Capalaba”, Google assumes (and rightly so) that you are looking for Real Estate Agents in Capalaba.
If you do not already have your office set-up with a Google “Places” page, now is the time to do so.
Why? Well, here are three simple reasons :
• It is free.
• It will help people find you more easily.
• It makes Google happy.
Why get a Google Places listing now?
Recently, Google has rolled out changes which emphasise how serious they are about the Places search and helping users quickly finding local business results.
Places is now a search type of its own, found in the left-hand column on Google, along with other common search categories.
The current order is:
• Everything
• Images
• Videos
• Places.
What’s different about Google Pages listings?
Places Listings have far more prominence than they used to, dominating the results page. They also provide more information than before, including an image if images were provided with the listing.
To understand the impact of this change, consider your search engine optimization efforts. If you used to be on page one of Google for a search term that is local in nature, your business might be relegated to page two with this change.
As well, the map works differently now too.
It has been moved over to the right-hand column above the AdWords ads and it will now scroll down the page as you do. Places is so important to Google, that the map will actually cover up those AdWords ads which are also so valuable to Google.
This says a lot about how important local business listings are to Google.
Google Places: Tips to Optimize Your Local Business Listing
Have you taken the plunge & joined Twitter? Perhaps you have and you are not getting the results promised to you? Well, don’t worry – what you are experiencing is completely normal. Getting social media (including Twitter) to work for you is not an easy thing to do, so we have put together a few tips to help you.
1. Twitter is not a competition
Do not try to get the most followers possibly in the hope that they will all be hanging off your every tweet, chomping at the bit to list or sell with you. You need to be conversational & let your follower count grow organically.
2. Twitter is not a marketing medium.
At least not in the way you may expect it to be. It is a social medium, which means it works best when approached as a conversation.
Marketing is generally a one way conversation, where you share information about your services. Twitter needs both sharing AND listening.
Give updates and talk up your services. But also take time to respond to questions, or to join in a friendly conversation.
3. It is not just all about your business.
When you tweet, you may be representing a brand, but you are a PERSON who is placing the tweets online. So act like a PERSON. Take the time to discuss things that are not just about your office or even industry. Share interesting stories, links or pics. They do not always need to be realestate related.
4. Keep your re-tweets interesting & useful.
If you have found the Retweet button, then keepthe things you are repeating interesting. You could retweet local news, realestate stories or even cricket scores! Make your RT’s useful information-packed tweets for your followers. If you do, your followers will retweet them too, which helps attract new followers.
5. Stay consistent.
If you are going to start, keep your twitter activity consistent. Don’t go crazy for a day or two, then share nothing for weeks on end.
Try to space tweets out throughout the day or week, to reach the widest possible audience and so that your followers recall who you are.
So, give it another go, but just remember that Social media is not just a short term thing. If you want this medium to help enhance your business and create profits for you, treat it like any other business tool. Stick with it and pay attention to how you use it.
When is the last time you looked at your website?
I mean, really looked at it.
Not just opened a page with one of your listings, so you can get the link to send through to a potential buyer.
I speak with companies who have not touched their website since it was set up in 2004 or 2005!
It’s pretty much a given that most real estate companies, have had a website for the past few years or longer.
As you focus on the day to day activity of selling and listing, it can be easy to just take the attitude of “Oh, we have a website up and it is working, so I will leave it be.” The problem is, after a while a website, like many things in life, starts to look a bit outdated.
More importantly, your website can be hurting your business without you knowing!
You could be losing potential vendors to other local agents, simply because your website is not as nice as theirs, or because theirs has more information on it. Buyers may also not contact you, as they cannot find the listings that strike their fancy.
This is how your website can be hurting your business RIGHT NOW!
It is recommended that clients revise their websites about every three years (if not sooner).
I bet you are thinking that this sounds like a ridiculous and costly exercise.
But I can promise you that you will reap the benefits of a site revision.
To make things really clear & easy to follow, here is a list of straight forward reasons why you should look at revising or redesigning your company website.
Many offices tell me that they feel their website is not as important anymore, because most views of their listings occur via Property Portals sites, such as realestate.com.au, domain.com.au, etc.
Whilst it is true that the portals get exposure for your listings, your website is now more import than ever.
Your website is what potential vendors use to judge who to list with.
Your website is where buyers end up when they have done enough general looking on the portals and are at the purchasing stage.
Your website is what potential sales people judge your business on, when deciding if your organisation is the one they want to work with.
Don’t take your website lightly. Take a good long look at it today.
Scroll through all the pages.
In a tight market like the one that a lot of real estate agents are experiencing today, your website is the key to your company – as much as your sales and customer service staff are.
Treat it well and it will deliver the world to you.
Speak to a Brightfox website consultant today, and stop your site from hurting your business.
Very recently, Google made significant changes to its search engine algorithm.
This algorithm is basically the formula that Google uses, when determining which sites should appear at the top of search results, and which ones should not.
Very few people, except for hardcore search and tech literati understand precisely how these changes were set up or exactly how they work, but the changes are pretty evident already.
The long and the short of it, is that you will need to take a good look at your website to determine if it is still “search engine friendly”.
Here are some items that now need to be understood in regards to this new Google algorithm:
There are other changes still to come from Google. They like to rearrange things periodically just to keep the SEO experts, tech guys and online marketers on their toes.
Trying to play the game and work out how Algorithms work, can be a real waste of time. These Google Algorithm Changes, don’t really change the core message and approach of a good website though – it still is all about CONTENT.
The best thing to do is ensure the basics are covered and that you have good, solid content on your website.
This means:
Brightfox is aware of these changes, and we regularly advise our clients on the best way to manage their online presence, to be the most search-engine friendly that it can be.
If you are seeking to improve your website rankings, traffic and sales, then feel free to contact us here at Brightfox.
In most markets around the world foreign investors represent a significant % of all purchasers. This is particularly the case for apartments in many markets (some countries even preclude foreigners from purchasing land alone or sometimes any form of property other than residential apartments and houses).
A recent article in Queensland (which you can find here) discusses how Asian investors are now buying more property than the British, which have traditionally been the largest foreign investors in Queensland.
So if you are a Developer or a Project marketer, how do you get your share of this market?
Here are a few ways we have successfully generated sales for our clients in the past that we would recommend you consider:
– build a multilingual website. If you are reading this Blog you probably have English as your first language but English is in fact only the 3rd most spoken language in the world (see reference here). Chinese and Spanish represent the first language of more people than English. So if you are seeking to target specific markets, you do need to consider making your site and all direct marketing material (such as emails) multi-lingual.
Also those of you considering using Babelfish (an automatic language converter) please be warned. Babelfish is not very successful at converting english into most asian languages.
– create an Agent Portal. An Agent Portal is a secure website that a network of external sales agents can login and view live availability on your Project. this can also include fully interactive building or estate animations, sales and marketing documents, floor plans and pretty much anything they need to be able to successfully sell your project. An Agent Portal should also allow online reservations, enabling you to sell property 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week. This is essential if you want to do business internationally.
– email marketing. Email is a great tool for promoting your project and communicating with foreign prospects. It is low cost and if used correctly, it can be highly targeted. Consider running completely different campaigns to different countries, taking account of language and cultural differences. With the low cost of creating and executing email campaigns this should be seriously considered.
– Search Engine Optimisation. Unfortunately most websites created for a Project are still poorly optimised for search engines. This is a huge disadvantage for selling over the internet. So you need to ensure your website is SEO friendly. It is a must if you want to reach anyone other than local prospects via the Internet.
– Search Engine Marketing. Through the use of local real estate portals and major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing and country specific portals such as baidu.com in China, you can reach a very large audience. The key is ensuring your website is accessible in the website locations of choice of your target audience.
– consider developing a mobile friendly or iPad friendly website. In many merging markets the use of a mobile phone to access the Internet is far in excess of PC access. Even in markets where this isn’t the case, access to your Project via a Smart Phone or iPad ensure you essential Project data is available 24 hrs a day from any location (very helpful if you are selling property over dinner and drinks!).
These are just a few of the various solutions we have put in place for our clients marketing property around the World. Brightfox is quite unique in that we have been doing business internationally for many years, and have customers that sell property into most parts of the World. Just a few of the countries we have helped our clients target are the UAE, England, Ireland, France, Spain, Switzerland, Russia and the various countries of the former USSR, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Oman, India, Pakistan, Thailand, China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore, USA and of course Australia and New Zealand.
A great article on The Economist on how BRICI countries are using mobile phones. Anyone who reads this blog will know how we have being saying for years that the ‘new’ internet is smart phones, and this article demonstrates very aptly why this is the case.
The graph in this article shows the number of PC’s compared to smart phones and the speed of adoption. It is amazing to think that these BRICI counties will bypass the PC age. They are essentially leapfrogging straight to the smart phone age – jumping PC’s completely. It is the sole medium that hundreds of millions are increasingly using for accessing the Internet.
It is time for every company to have a ‘smart phone’ internet strategy. Give us a call if you would like to discuss how this trend is going to impact your business.
Brightfox - What's hot in I.T. for the Property Industry 
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