Roots2RealEstate

My current furry friend lover bloggers just put out a scoop about newspaper advertising and how this source of advertising has gone to the dogs.  See articles at:  http://sandiegohomeblog.com/2007/10/18/paper-trained/

I loved their antidote about moving on to new territory and how agents should be marking their territory with newer sources like Web 2.0. - a more community felt forum rather than a one dimensional ad campaigning like advertising in newspapers.

At every open house (and yes, I still do open houses and Twilight Tours, http://parkalmaden.roots2realestate.com/instant-message/ ) I always start off my first initial conversation with the question  “How did you come to find the open house today”?  I do this survey so I’ll have more than just the number of heads that walked through my clients door, but a further analysis of what type of buyers were out looking at my clients house.  Surprisingly the answer “From the newspaper”, is still one of the comments I receive.  See it really depends on the type of neighborhood your hosting an open house at.  Demographics largly play an important part on who is searching for homes and where.  Un-savvy and not connected to the Internet people are still alive and they do depend on the more traditional way of getting information like newspapers.  I call them for the sake of this post the ”Can’t teach a dog a new trick click”.  They are people like my Dad, who sold computers for a quarter of his life, a man who could tell you all about a computer’s interior guts and all about its motherboards but a man who doesn’t know anything about the software system it runs.  Or another close relation of mine my aunt, who wants a computer but only when she doesn’t have to type or use a mouse, for the mouse makes her dizzy to operate.  I keep telling her that a software has existed for awhile now, but that she needs to train the software to recognize her speech pattern; she then follows with “Well then I’m going to wait until I don’t have to do that”.  Or my husband, who doesn’t get the liberty to be online at work and who hardly gets the time to do so at home, only because email and social networking is relatively new to him and all his time online goes to www.FantasyFootball.com.  I also have several clients and affiliates (26 of them in fact ) who fall into my “Call Only” part of my address book.  Ironically most of these people are seniors, or at least in their minds they are.

At the beginning of this year, I met and listed a home in a neighborhood from an open house newspaper advertisement.  One of the main reasons this client hired me was the fact I advertised in my print ad a website to go to.  This ”I’m too old to learn something new like a computer” senior, knew nothing about creating a virtual online personality but liked the fact that I did.  They also liked how I demonstrated another creative way to advertise the property that I was holding open at the time, by doing something different in hosting a twilight tour of homes for the area, (Think of it like speed dating for open house hunting).  They were intrigued enough to call me and the conversation started from there.  When we met in person, they had a flyer in hand from a door-to-door campaign I did in the neighborhood from two years ago that I had used while I was looking for a home in this particular tract!  This same family was kind enough to give to me right before their move to San Diego all of the flyers they had liked and collected throughout the years from the many agents who had targeted their house along with all the open house flyers that mostly she had visited.  The reason they said they chose me over the other Realtors (besides my patience with them) was that I did something unique, that it matched their pace and I had an appreciation of the neighborhood being a now newer resident of Blossom Valley’s Allen Heights / Santa Teresa Foothill neighborhood.  From their set of open house events that I hosted for them (4 weekends total), I got to meet and list another new client who owns a home that can be seen at: www.AllenHeights.Roots2RealEstate.com

Now of course this scenario doesn’t happen all that often, and yes, there are more buyers and sellers online now more than ever.  So I do agree with one thing my furry friend lover bloggers touched upon, that it’s very important to create something that stands out, similar to marking on a fire hydrant.  By creating a unique presence using web 2.0, it should help an agent attract a stronger more educated type of potential customers.

Or just until the moment before when every agent jumps in and is then doing it too - at that point something new will have to be done to be the next big hype.

If your niche market is filled with folks who don’t want to go online, show them the importance and the power of an agent who can.  Use this opportunity to teach them how, so you may build a stronger connection and relationship with them in the future.