I have been talking with Gillian Shaw at the Vancouver Sun about our work with Realtors and getting them online and blogging and today, she wrote an article in the Vancouver Sun that talks about Realtor Blogs. She took the time to contact some of our clients, including Joel Carcone, Daniel Hunter and Marty Pospischil. I have cut and paste the article and posted it below.
Real estate agents building blog houses
Gillian Shaw
CanWest News Service; Vancouver Sun
July 15, 2005VANCOUVER – If your real estate agent is one of a growing number of blogging realtors, you can get a healthy helping of industry gossip, news about the greatest listing that never made it to market, and advice on everything from interest rates to staging your home for sale.
“Blogging is a necessity and it’s another tool,” said Daniel Hunter, an agent with Angell Hasman & Associates Realty in West Vancouver. “Some of the older guys, they are like _ `Blogging, why would I want to do that? It’s just a waste of time.’ But one of my goals in this industry is always to be reinventing ways of doing things, to always be innovative, thinking outside the box and accepting change.
“If you don’t keep up you will get swallowed and stomped on.”
It’s a trend that spurred Stephen Jagger and his partner Michael Stephenson at Combustion Labs Media to diverge from their web-hosting business to devote their entire company to the task of bringing real estate agents into the digital age.
Several times a week, the folks at Combustion take classes of real estate agent clients on an online tour, instructing them in the company’s new software, Ubertor, in the joys of free listings through Craigslist.org and other digital diversions.
“We had a couple of real estate clients among our web-hosting clients and they were faxing their listings to someone to have them uploaded onto their site,” said Jagger. “They asked us to build a little engine to do that uploading and we were very successful in creating an engine that allowed realtors to manage their own listings online. It spawned this whole new software company.”
Ubertor a name combining the slang for super or ultra with tor, as in realtor is software that allows even the most techno-challenged realtors to manage their online offerings, from websites right through to their blogs.
Some 200-plus realtors are blogging among the company’s 4,000 clients and that number is growing as the bloggers discover their diary entries are boosting their online profile.
It’s not surprising that at 24, Hunter considers himself the youngest realtor to have a web log, an online diary known as a blog. As a product of the Internet age, it’s a natural for Hunter and the upcoming generations of clients to expect the digital delivery of information, just as their parents counted on the real estate paper.
“I work with a younger demographic and to be quite honest with you, they do all their research online,” says Joel Carcone, who, at 27, is another agent who counts among the twentysomething crowd and can be found blogging. “As part of my marketing plan, my blog has been effective.
“I am quite happy with it. The downside is, being a one-man army, I am the only one able to write for my blog and I am so busy I drop the ball a lot.”
It’s not necessarily a natural fit for the average middle-aged real estate agent who didn’t grow up in the Internet age, but for the up-and-comers, it’s a given.
“I don’t have a choice,” said Carcone. “In order to be very competitive in today’s business climate, you don’t have a choice but to be Internet friendly. I deal with a younger clientele because I am younger, but even with older clients we do almost all our communications via e-mail. I think anybody who says they don’t need the Internet is losing market share, plain and simply.”
It’s all about moving up the search engine list.
“Blogs aren’t something people are going to read and call you to list their home,” said Marty Pospischil, a Vancouver realtor who sold a character Kitsilano home listed at $1.2 million last weekend that he chatted about in his blog. “It is more an indirect source of information that legitimizes you as a professional.
“It increases my exposure on the Internet through the search engine results and it sends more business to my website.”
Pospischil said three years ago he tracked a mere one per cent of his business to his Internet presence, but that number has grown today to 11 per cent.
“The advantage I find is not only that it is growing, but as it grows, the cost associated with that form of advertising doesn’t grow,” he said. `I can have 10,000 hits and it doesn’t cost any more than 10 hits.”
Vancouver Sun