TechTools Tuesday: Cool Tools to Sell Homes

PowerSites™ by AgencyLogic lets agents create single property websites which can show any home beautifully.

Easy to create and very affordable, PowerSites™ websites give you flexibility and many great features including:

• A vanity URL dedicated to just that property
• Large photos to grab the attention of prospective buyers
• The ability to upload and caption as many as 100 photos of the property and surrounding community
• Unlimited text so that you can describe the property in as much detail as you wish
• Syndication to many of the major real estate search portals so prospective buyers can more easily find your listing

There’s even an optional PowerTalk “click-to-talk” feature that lets prospective buyers place a call to you directly from the property website.

To get an idea of the power of PowerSites™, take a look at how one professional is using it to market a home formerly owned by President and Mrs. Gerald Ford.

TechTools Tuesday:  Cool Tools to Sell Homes

Prospective buyers who use the Internet to preview homes are often want to know what the homes are like on the inside. Photos and video tours can provide some information, but often it’s still hard for buyers to get a feel for room dimensions and home layout.

click for FloorPlanner demo

Two web 2.0 products now give prospective buyers that sense of space and dimension by allowing agents to include floorplans with their listing information.

Floorplanner lets agents create and share interactive 2-D or 3-D floorplans.  Using point-and-click, drag-and-drop tools, agents can easily create floorplans of their listings that can be saved, sent, printed, shared, or uploaded to their website.  To get an idea of how it works, click and watch the video above or try the free demo on the company’s website.

The interactive floorplan tours offered by FloorPlanOnline® let prospective buyers see a floorplan of the home and then click on various spots on the floorplan to see a photo of that room.  As they say themselves, “there’s no more guessing which photos go with which rooms.”  The company offers several different products and levels of service.  A self-service options, for example, lets agents submit their own photos and floorplan sketches which the company transforms into Internet and social media-ready floorplans with interactive tours.  Or, FloorPlanOnline® can send a professional to the home to take the photos and sketch the layout.  Click here to watch the video on their Fan Page or visit their website for a complete rundown of their products.

Google continues its relentless effort to catalog all of the world’s data and make it available to be searched.   Part of that effort involves real estate, as Google continually adds new features to allow consumers to find properties for sale.

For example, did you know that you can do a real estate search on Google Maps?

1. Click the drop down menu that’s labeled “More” and check the box that says “Real Estate”.
2. Enter an address or a zip code in the search field.
3. Refine the search by price, number of bedrooms and number of bedrooms.

The result is a list of properties for sale—certainly not the entire MLS right now but enough to get a consumer started.  And you can be sure Google will add more features as time goes on, and improve the search so it draws from more sources.

Currently the listings on Google show multiple photos, property descriptions, maps, public transit information, and a button that makes it easy to e-mail the listing to someone else. If the property has been listed multiple times, data from each of the listings—including the listing broker, listing agent, and list price—may also show.

It’s interesting to note that properties offered by brokers are shown right along side properties listed on Buy Owner.

So, will Google someday replace the local MLS?

Click the image to see the electronic magazine

I’m always excited when I see real estate professionals using Internet technologies in creative ways. That’s why I love these two examples of e-magazines created using Issuu.

Rated by Time Magazine earlier this year as one of the 50 Best Websites of 2009, www.issuu.com lets users publish electronic magazines like the one above created by Prudential Becky Hamlin Realty, Inc. or the one below by the Ogeechee River Group of Keller Williams Realty-Coastal Area Partners. I particularly like the one below because it’s published not by a real estate board or a marketing company, but by a real estate team, and it appears to be made using tools most of us have on our computers. Yet it looks good and it’s efffective.

That’s one of the beauties of Issuu—it’s incredibly easy for almost anyone to create a professional-looking product. You create a magazine by uploading a document such as a Microsoft Word® file, a pdf, or a PowerPoint® presentation and Issuu transforms that document into a electronic flip book that appears on Issuu’s electronic “newsstand” and can be embedded in a blog or website. The other good part is that the basic service is free.

Click the image to see the electronic magazine

Although quite a few luxury home magazines and local property marketing publications have found their way onto the site, only a handful of agents and brokerages are using it.

That’s too bad because it’s a great tool that more real estate professionals should know about.

Backpage.  One-line listings à la Craigslist. Offers everything from jobs to electronic equipment to pets and personals. Currently available in 120 cities.  Repost your listing every 7 days to bring it back to the top.

Craigslist.  The dean of online classifieds, available in dozens for geographic areas.  It’s hard for consumers to search and the basic ad is visually unappealing.  But lots of consumers know about it.  Services like vFlyer can give your craigslist ad some pizazz.

Cyberhomes.   Listings of homes for sale along with housing market indicators and property valuation data that keeps consumers coming back again and again.  Cyberhomes data is fed to the real estate section of AOL, giving properties listed on Cyberhomes wide exposure. Brokers can co-brand with Cyberhomes so that Cyberhomes’ data appears on the broker’s website.

DotHomes.  A real estate search engine that links back to the agent’s website.  Therefore, to list properties on this site, you have to have a website that DotHomes can link to.  Currently, listings in the South and West seem to predominate.

Frontdoor.   Created by the folks behind HGTV.  Slideshows, pictures, and articles combine to give consumers a sense what it’s like to live in a given community. Currently listings come from data feeds from brokers with no provision for agents to upload single listings.

Geebo.   Online listing site for real estate as well as jobs, services, vehicles, and the like.  It’s free to post a listing and listings  stay active on the site for 90 days.

Google Base.  Lets you add your listings to Google Maps.  Agents can submit individual listings, but listings can also be submitted by MLSs or by brokers via data feed.  Consumers can find your listing by searching for real estate on Google Maps.

Hotpads. Calls itself “The Place to Find Your Place.”  Choose a location on the map, then click on an icon representing a property to get information about that listing.   It’s well connected to other Internet sites so you can log in, save searches, and post listings using your Facebook account.  Also allows you to tweet your listings using your Twitter account.

Housing Maps. Post your listing to Craigslist and it will appear here in a Google Maps mashup.

Kijiji.   Free local classified on an easy-to-use interface. Upload up to 8 images of the property. Free Iphone app lets users search local ads, reply to listings, or post new listings easily from their Iphone or Ipod Touch.

New York Times Real Estate Classifieds. Place a classifed ad in the online version of the New York Times. Forty-five lines of text and up to 10 photos for $125.

OLX.  Online classified ads that are used in over 89 countries in 38 languages.  Listings appear as simple, uncluttered ads–truly an electronic version of a newspaper classified ad service.

Oodle.  Classified ad site that has listings for vehicles, jobs, and personal items along with real estate. Offers basic online classified ad with one picture.  The ad links to your website where you can promote the listing in more detail.

Realty Feeds.  A directory of data feeds from websites that cover hundreds of real estate topics in the US and around the world. If your website puts out an RSS feed, you can have that feed published to Realty Feeds.

Redfin.  An online broker describing themselves as a cross between Century21 and E-Trade.  Using cute videos and easy-to-understand language, they welcome consumers by promising top-notch service and rebates for homebuyers.

Trulia.  Offers listings, maps and comp information for each property you upload. You can include multiple photos or a slideshow and your listing will include a link to your website.  Agents can submit listings one at a time or brokers can submit listings via data feed.

Vast.  Makes it possible for consumers to shop for big ticket items like cars and real estate on websites all over the Internet. Brokers provide listing data via a feed. Vast makes the data available to consumer shopping portals and websites.

Yahoo Real Estate. Refined real estate search capabilities at a portal many people already know and trust. Submit single listings for about $50 or brokers, MLSs, and listing aggregators can send listings for free via direct feed.

Zillow.  Homes for sale, mortgage quotes, and Zillow’s Home Value Index with neighborhood statistics.  Submit your listings for free one at a time  (with up to 50 photos and a link to a virtual tour) or via data feed.  Promote yourself by creating a profile, answering questions, and participating in discussions.  There’s a huge amount of data here for consumers.