There is evidence that the soft real estate market is stabilizing, but let’s not gets too carried away! Signs of weakness in the real estate sector are slowing and while that is surely a welcome sight, it is important not to confuse these signs with an actual recovery.
Anthony Tjan, CEO, Founder and Managing partner at VC firm Cue Ball believes that businesses rely to heavily on demographics to understand their customers when instead they ought to be focusing more on their psychographics. But now, with new technologies such as OpenID single sign-on service, gleaning that data could change all that. Read more over at Harvard Business Publishing in his post titled Want to Understand Your Customers? Go Psycho.
Marketing used to be simple. A flyer. A postcard distributed to your farm. A newspaper ad in what once was a robust real estate section filled with listings. Today, simplicity has not be replaced, just relocated to the Internet where social networking websites are providing small business great new opportunities to market their services and wares. Rhonda Abrams digs into the top 5 and how small business can make best use them in her post titled Strategies: Which social networking site is best for your small business?
Not much surprises me. I’m a Jersey girl, born and bred. No one has to convince me the Paterson Waterfalls should be a National Landmark and “How you doin?” rolls off my tongue naturally. I did witness something recently though that literally stopped me in my tracks.
My normal driving route to the gym takes me along a strip of the Passaic River in the pre-dawn hours. The mist was heavy over the murky waters this chilly morning and I noticed movement through the fog. I slowed my car and watched a figure take shape. First, the reflective vest outlined a silhouette, then a vessel came into view. A lone canoeist gliding across the water in the pre-dawn hours is not commonplace by any stretch of the imagination. I pulled to the side of the road and watched.
Have you ever stayed at a Ritz Carlton Hotel? Bought a pair of shoes, or returned them at Zappos? These two companies immediately come to mind when you think about exceptional customer service. While the two companies couldn’t appear to be more different, when you drill down, they are very much alike in their core values and business and leadership principles.
Providing exceptional service begins with understanding the customer. In case you haven’t noticed, the needs of the customer have changed a lot in the past few years, and will continue to evolve. Creating an exceptional customer experience doesn’t mean you have to be twice as good as your competitor, just be a little better. That’s easy if you have the right culture in place.
U.S. home prices are their most affordable in at least 18 years, according to a report released Monday published on CNNMoney that offers insight into
I bought a home back on December 10th of 2008. That is almost exactly 5 months to the day and I am still receiving those automated MLS listing alerts from the first agent I ever spoke to about buying a new home. Being in real estate now for almost a year I find them sort of fascinating because I am curious if I actually bought at the bottom of the market in my town. Turns out I didn’t, but that isn’t the point. The information (listings) contained in these emails can be very powerful motivators to get an active buyer or someone on the fence to engage an agent. The most important reason is that the information contained within is the most accurate and trusted source for new listings and listing status changes (price drops and under contract). With such a powerful vehicle for information, I wonder why it misses the mark on so many levels for the average home buyer.
To fail or not to fail. Just as real estate is finally contending with the reality that newspapers really don’t deliver value and that their demise might open up mew opportunities, Washington steps in and talks bailout. Is this a good idea? The Business Insider Silicon Alley had some thoughts on that this week.
Lynda Gratton is a professor at London Business School. She often writes smart/feel good articles. Learn to Glow is one such example that offers us insight into how to become invaluable at work.
Can you over Twitter? Yup. And when you do, you run the risk of loosing followers. Check this video by RodneyB from Reachd.
In the early days of the economic downturn, many broker owners took a “wait and see” position, hopeful that the market would turn around quickly. As the bad news continued, survival mode kicked in and brokers found themselves playing catch up and making tough decisions they never thought they would have to make such as closing offices, downsizing staff, merging with competitors. The focus was primarily on doing the things in the present that would help guarantee a place in the future. Times such as these do not allow most of us the luxury of thinking ahead and planning for what the future will look like in this industry.
Programmable Web keeps a running directory of mashups adding 36 new ones last week to the list. Lot’s of good ideas here for real estate
Bill Gates, Barry Diller and about a billion dollars in venture capital have been thrown at real estate. Yet for the most part, the transaction today looks almost identical to what it was back in 1990. Brian Boero from 1000wattconsulting takes a peak at real estate past and present. He wonders if we have reached the end of the real estate story or not. This is a riveting post worth reading.
Lon Cohen, writer and Director of Communication at als-ny.org publishes 7 Ways to Approach Twitter published on Mashable that includes a litany of great links to learn by example.
We know how well the big sites in real estate (Realtor.com, Zillow, Trulia) rank in the search engines. And we are clear about the vast amount of traffic they receive. We also know that consumers are drawn to these sites first before drilling down to the local broker and agent sites. What we inside real estate know that most consumers may not is how many local listings are actually missing from these search sites. Jay Thompson digs a little deeper into this discussion in his post this week titled Where to search for homes online.
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