The Montrose Gold Team Blog

Moan and Toast to Technology and Real Estate

Technology actually probably brings out these emotions in most people not just Realtors.

We are:

• Excited about what it can do for us,
• Scared of how hard it will be to implement and use,
• and even More Scared about how hard it will be to integrate with our other technology tools and what it will cost us in time and money.

It seems that every week a new technology and platform or application comes out.  And most of them are very cool and innovative ideas, and their marketing is getting more creative as well.... Try a dumbed up version for FREE. 

It is a great sales pitch, (wish we could use it on homes), kind of the traditional "puppy dog close" where the pet store owner sends the small child home with a puppy and tells them if their parents say its not OK, they can bring it back....  But it doesn't work as eloquently as it always should... or we don't have time to play with it and it sits on our disk...  These marketers know this and are starting to let you use it free for 1-2 properties rather than unlimited for 30 days, but both options are out there.

Another "moan-able trait" of technology is the Internet itself.  It, "The Internet" or more specifically"The Web" and its "crawling" or "Surfing Tools" like IE, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, etc. are our windows into this virtual sea of information, "It" is a truly amazing and I believe life changing technology...   It has definitely changed and will continue to change the Real Estate Business.

(BTW - Its perplexing to me that we evolved from "crawling" to "surfing"...  I mean I get the connection of the original Internet interfaces and transfer rates were definitely "crawling" slow", but how come we didn't change the name of the "web" to the "wave"?  You know the "World Wide Wave" we all surf on!  Yet the analogies of getting stuck in a web and the interconnected fixed IP addresses and their links look like a web, yet we seem to surf it in waves and to some extent this is encouraged by search engines.  A popular site becomes more popular...)

Still "It", the Internet-Web-Wave, is full of a lot of garbage, very creative and persuasive sales people and marketers all trying to capture the eyeball and proverbial click.  

I mean what is "Google juice"?   I was throwing this term around the office today telling my partner Diane why she needs to blog on Active Rain and my partner complained it sounded like or reminded her of "bug juice" and grossed her out.   Yet when I showed her how she could leap frog like 15 agents with a couple blog posts, she was hooked and I was there teaching... (non-productive, non-money making time).

Basically, we all want eye balls, we all want clicks, we all want customers, this translates to we want a lot "Google Juice" cause we can toast to the "FREE Traffic"it will bring us.   Is it really FREE?  Probably not, you either need to invest the time, or pay someone to do it for you to get the "Google Juice" up.   As Google is the number one used search engine followed up by Yahoo and Bing.  That too, could change with time as all things do.

One of the big questions today is what do you do with the "Proverbial Click"? Hopefully at a minimum you capture a name and email, or at least try to, for further contact, but for Real Estate its even better if you can capture a phone number and give them a call back as soon as possible.   Balancing the free info, desired free info (behind door number one - if you give us your first name and email) and the irritation and often accompanying fear we all can get from being asked to register for a million things.  

Know this though, on these mailing lists... most of these sign-up auto-responder lists are all Can-Spam compliant, so on any message they send you, you can un-subscribe, so don't be too afraid to try a few out.

So while Technology promises much Greatness, Realtor Leads and Resulting Riches.... most of us, me included, don't have all the pieces tied together in an optimal way, so we get new inefficiencies where the technology took away old inefficiencies, it introduces new ones...

I guess my best advice is plan out a path to your strategy of finding leads on the Internet and converting print ads to leads on the Internet, hopefully so they come "to you" rather than the floor agent, then stick with it for at least 6 months evaluating if it is working.   Don't fall for jumping for every new technology and gadget that comes out, unless you are sure it fills a need in your plan.

FREE trial - is free in the sense that you get to try it out or continue to use a dumbed up small version of the product and if you only have one or two listings and nothing better to do, go for it... But if you are a full time agent with at least 10 listings then I would suggest that you closely analyze it and the alternative solutions before you jump to try it. 

Don't forget about all the time you spend... playing with the new technology... takes away from time you could be finding clients, closing deals or even fishing.   If you like playing with it, like I do, more power to ya, but its like an addictive substance, you need to ration its consumption of your truly productive and income producing time...

Good luck and may you have more Toasts than Moans with your next dose of Technology.

BTW - It also helps to go with proven "Google juiced" techniques... like Active Rain.   I highly recommend it if for no other reason than to extract the "juice" but hopefully also extract useful tips, ideas and thoughts, to keep your own creative juices flowing...  But like everything... We even need to ration our use of Active Rain with our productive time. 

Chris Ormsbee

Century 21 Action Realty

Montrose Gold Team

1245 E Main St. Montrose, CO 81401

(970) 209-0252

www.MontroseGoldTeam.com

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www.C21ActionRealty.com/cormsbee