When I was a brand new agent, before I even had a listing, I bought a subscription to Real Estate Shows.  I considered it an investment in my new business.  But even as inexpensive as Real Estate Shows is, I still wanted to get some use out of something I’d spent money on.

So when I made showing appointments for my first buyers, I asked the listing agents if it was OK if I took pictures of the house so my clients could keep the details fresh in their minds.  As we set off to view several houses, I told my buyers that I’d take pictures for them and asked them to let me know what they especially wanted to remember about each house.  They were quick to let me know if a particular house wasn’t photo worthy, but if it was a good one they’d smile, nod and let me know what they really liked about the house.  (If you have clients who have a hard time describing what they really want while sitting in your office or in an email, this process will get them talking.)

After we’d viewed the listings and I knew their favorites, I created Shows and emailed them the links that afternoon.   They had no idea how quickly the Shows could be made, but they felt I’d gone out of my way with their “reminder Shows”.  Since Real Estate Shows doesn’t charge by the Show, my only added cost was a little time – which I was more than happy to give them.

They watched these Shows over and over again, and I could quickly tell by looking at my Tracking Reports which was their favorite.  I wasn’t surprised at all when they called to tell me they were ready to make an offer.  As we approached settlement, the hits on that Show continued to pile up as they sent the Show to their friends and family, excited about their new home – and each time my branding quietly announced that I was their agent.

For the final walk through, I brought my camera again.  I took pictures of the empty rooms, ready for the changes they’d make over the years.  Before we left, I got a picture of them in front of their new house.  Of course, I made them another Show, this time announcing their new address for their friends and family.  I made them a copy on CD to keep and gave it to them the next day at the closing table.

I could have just waited until I had a listing to use Real Estate Shows, but I’m glad I didn’t.  One of my first listings turned out to be for one of their family members, and I dealt with several others from their family over the years.  I can’t say for sure that Real Estate Shows brought the business to me, but I’ve always thought that it helped them to remember their “family real estate agent.”

Have you wished Real Estate Shows had a certain feature, or maybe worked in a different way?  If so, we want to hear it!  We’ve just unveiled our new Feedback Forum and we’d love to have your input.  If you have a suggestion, please feel free to add it.  If you see a feature idea you want, please vote so we know what’s important to you.  Check back and we’ll let you know what we’re working on!

We look forward to hearing from you!

Let me tell you about my search for a hotel in New York City for an upcoming anniversary trip.  (You’ll learn why I want you to hear about  it in a minute.)  To begin, I checked a hotel review site online and concentrated in the area where I knew I’d like to stay.  Then, social person that I am, I asked friends through Facebook and Twitter if they had recommendations.  I narrowed my list and looked at hotel websites.

Aside from a few with real personality, most of the websites offered a handful of photos and some flowery words that could have applied to any hotel.   This led me to wonder what the hotels were really like, so I searched Flickr for pictures from people who actually stayed in the hotels.   After narrowing my list down to two hotels, I used online maps to time the walking distance to attractions I knew my husband and I would like to see.  I wrapped up my hotel stalking with a street view from Google maps that allowed me to “walk” around the neighborhood.  Decision made, I booked our hotel.

All this for a three night stay.  Obsessive?  Well, maybe.  Or maybe I’m just comfortable with my computer and online tools and want to be sure I’m spending my money wisely.  All of these hotels had a chance to use simple tech tools to let me feel as if I’d just stepped into their lobby, met their smiling employees and soaked up a little of the atmosphere that makes them special … and yet very few of them bothered.  The ones who did really stood out.

Now let’s imagine me as a home buyer.  I’m no different from the others, I start my search online long before I’ve made a firm decision to move.  I’m toying with the idea and looking for information. 

• Is my current house worth enough that I can afford to move? 
• Can I find a home that fits my needs in a price range I can afford? 
• Should I expect my house to sell immediately, or are they taking ages to sell?  (Think of your website, will it answer my questions quickly and easily?  If not, I’ll move on.)

If I find positive answers, I’ll start peeking at houses currently for sale.  I know it’s not likely I’ll end up with any of these, but that’s OK.  I want to get a feel for the neighborhoods, start forming an idea of exactly what I want and what I might need to spend to get it.  And I’m paying a lot of attention to what information I can find.  In my search, I’m hopeful I’ll stumble across an agent who gives me pictures, maps, school information, panoramas, videos, floorplans, maybe even helps me virtually pass around the house in social networks for my friends to see – let’s add lots more photos, can’t have enough photos — I want a wealth of information at my fingertips!  This is what it takes, enough details and photos for me to feel an emotional connection to a house, and the data to know that it’s a likely a good fit for me.

I want to hire a real estate agent to make this whole transaction easier for me.  If you can give me everything I want to see about a particular house, I know you’re going to make it very easy for someone else to find my house and know that it’s the right one for them.  You’ll be the one I call when it’s time. 

Using Real Estate Shows puts the tech tools you need within easy reach.  It isn’t difficult to be the agent who stands out and gets the business.  If you’d like to be personally tutored how to use our online flyers, video conversion, widgets and more, please call us at 888-580-7627 or email us at info [at] realestateshows.com.

Last week I had the good fortune to attend Real Estate BarCamp Chicago where I got to sit in on a session led by Eric Stegemann of Tribus Real Estate. I’d encourage you to attend a BarCamp if at all possible, and if you’d like to learn about getting your website to the top of Google, make some time to meet Eric as well.

The main thing I took away from Eric’s talk was a remark he made about learning how people view your website. Eric suggested buying a little stack of $5 gift cards from a coffee shop, then politely asking a few customers there if they’d be willing to surf your website for a few minutes in exchange for a gift card. The point is to see how an actual person uses your site, what they find useful about it and what they completely overlook.

Reading your website stats can tell you a lot about how people find you and what they look at while they’re on your site, but sitting beside an actual person while they view your site for the first time can give you priceless information. Questions you may want to ask:

• Did you find the information you expected to see?
• Was the site easy to navigate?
• Did you like the site design?
• Would you know how to contact me if you had a question?

After a few borrowed minutes, give a quick thank you for their time, pass them a business card and let them get back to their coffee. Then take a look at your website with fresh eyes and think about how to make use of what you’ve learned.

Thank you for sharing this, Eric!

From all of us at Real Estate Shows to all of you, Happy Memorial Day!

The video above is embedded from Wordpress.com’s latest upgrade called VideoPress. For $59.95 per year, VideoPress allows you to upload video files directly to Wordpress.com. The video files appear directly in your Wordpress.com blogs and are able to be embedded on other blog platforms, as you see here.

How can you do it yourself?

To post your Real Estate Shows to Wordpress.com, first export them to video. You find this option in the “Publish” section of your account. Then download the zipped video file to your hard drive, unzip the file and upload to your Wordpress.com blog using VideoPress. As you can see, the quality of the video compression is excellent and the video was fully processed in less than two minutes.

It’s possible that you’ve been using Real Estate Shows for years, or maybe you’ve stumbled across this blog almost accidentally for the first time today. Either way, let’s pretend you’re new and just asked me about ways to use Real Estate Shows. I just don’t want you to miss anything good.

We start with a Show of 5, 9 or 15 photos. These photos become the base for advertising your listing. Begin by adjusting focal points, selecting music and adding data. From here you can increase value by adding unlimited additional photos, property mapping, panoramas, print quality flyers and video conversion. If you put in the local school’s zip code, you’ll have local school information added, too.

We offer tracking reports so you can gauge the effectiveness of your marketing. (Clients love to receive these, too.) You can download your Show files and create CDs to give out. You can point to these CD files on your desktop to use in a PowerPoint listing presentation if you like.

Shows can be connected together if you’d like to spotlight the neighborhood or some special aspect of the home. We also have lots of ways to help people spread your Show around for you, such as social bookmarking tools. There’s a button to help buyers make an appointment with you to view the home.

Checking “Viewable in Other Shows” on your Manage page helps to build an inventory list of your Shows. Keep this list up to date and consider adding the URL of your Other Shows to your email signature.

If you prefer the look of an embedded Show on your website or blog we do offer that option as well. It brings more attention to the Show than a little link and it also keeps people from clicking away from your site. Use our listing widgets to display information on your current listings, community information and more.

The Flyers are a favorite feature of mine because they save so much time. You’ve already uploaded the pictures and written the property description, why start over again for a flyer? Just few clicks and you’re done, with a choice of many designs. They can be used online as a listing webpage or printed for use as traditional flyers.

We help you connect online to sites such as Realtor.com, your MLS, Trulia, Zillow, Facebook, Homes, Google base, Viewr, Vast, Geebo, Hotpads, Ebay, Craigslist and more!

We also offer a large selection of pre-made Instant Shows that you can customize or use as-is to keep in touch with your clients, family and friends, like an e-card that subtly advertises you as an agent. (They’re great in your blog or website, too!)

Video conversion is currently in beta testing. (Not available in trial accounts.) If you have an account with YouTube, we’ll upload directly to your account there, or you can download the video file and upload it to the video hosting site of your choice.

We also have a nice customer service staff who really want you to succeed and are always happy to discuss marketing ideas with you. I’ve thrown a lot of information at you and there is STILL more you can do with Real Estate Shows, so if you have questions or comments please feel free to ask here, email us at info@realestateshows.com or call us at 888.580.7627.

We have a new Mother’s Day Show available in Instant Shows. This Show features beautiful, welcoming homes and is suitable for sending to your Mom clients.

If you’d like to have this Show in your own Real Estate Shows account, just click Instant Shows on the Main Menu, then Import Show. Once it’s in your account, feel free to edit or personalize in any way you like.

Don’t forget your own Mom — she’d probably love a Show with pictures of you growing up, and Grandma might appreciate a Show of her little angels to share with all her friends!

Makita makes drills. They wanted to get the point across that their drills are precise, hard working and comfortable to use. After some creative thought, they ended up constructing a billboard made entirely of holes drilled in the surface of the outside wall of a hardware store. Changes in tone were created by varying the depth and size of the 20,562 holes. Instead of telling us their drills are a precision tool, they showed us.

If you don’t see the video above, click here.

This made me wonder about how to best show someone your expertise in real estate. And I’m cheap, I want to do it for free – so let’s use the blog or website you already have and start from there. (If you don’t already have an online presence, consider this your call to action.)

Let’s talk about a testimonial page. It’s a simple thing, and if someone is thinking of hiring you as their agent, it will help them to hear from others how they felt after going through a transaction with you. You can tell people how awesome you are – but hearing it from other people really means something, doesn’t it?

So let’s build content that lets your past clients and listings speak for you. Hopefully after you sell a listing, you’re going back to the Manage page in your Real Estate Shows and clicking that little dropdown box that says “Move Show Into” Sold. (Bonus points, doing this also “unsends” any Flyers you may have distributed online so you’re not advertising a sold listing.) Go to your Real Estate Shows Manage page and click on the Sold tab. Click Get Widget at the top of the page, copy the code and use it on your testimonials page.

These Sold listings are telling the story of your real estate experience. If you sold listings before you found Real Estate Shows, consider creating Shows of those listings now so you don’t leave any of them out. Each one speaks of a satisfied client, a goal achieved.

Also remember you don’t have to have been the listing agent to include a home in your Sold category. Take your camera to the final walk through and make a Show. A shot of the exterior with their smiling faces is a great gift to them (make a CD of this Show and run it by to stay in touch) and it speaks volumes on a testimonials page. (And just so you know, your buyers will likely pull out that old CD when they think of selling their home, just to see how much they’ve changed it since they moved in. Seeing your name again at this point is HUGE. Make sure they have that CD!)

The next step is at the closing table. You’re beside your clients and they’re happy to be there. Pass them a sheet of paper and ask if they’d mind writing up a short testimonial for you to use on their website. Ask if it would be OK to use that picture of them smiling in front of their new home, or even to embed their personal Real Estate Show.

Or you may even want to consider making one Real Estate Show to illustrate your Sold listings. Use one exterior shot of each home, use the address as a photo title and embed the Show on your page. Be sure to add to it as you go along, upload new Solds as Additional Photos to stay current quickly.

There are a lot of ways to make the tools you’re already using work to show off your expertise, whether you’re selling real estate or drills. Using Real Estate Shows alongside feedback from your past clients can help a potential client feel comfortable initiating contact with you.

I’ve been on a reading spree lately, concentrating on business books that focus on social networking. I have a pretty wide definition of “business” and the first book I’ve included is a work of fiction.

I read “Down and Out In the Magic Kingdom” by Cory Doctorow at the recommendation of Daniel Rothamel at Real Estate BarCamp Virginia. This is a work of science fiction, based in a time where death is obsolete and money no longer exists. In place of currency, your net worth is figured in “Whuffie” – and Whuffie is exactly why I’m recommending this as a business book. Oh, it’s a great read on it’s own, but if you’ve looked at “social media” from the outside and wondered what value anyone would see in sites such as Twitter or Facebook, the answer is Whuffie. Whuffie is just a measurement of your social worth, respect or esteem. If you provide something of value to others (in this case, educational links, breaking news, solutions to problems or just simple friendship), their good feelings towards you will increase your Whuffie points and you’ll have a higher net worth. We may not be keeping a numerical score, but Whuffie is out there. You can download this book, in many different formats, for free here.

World Wide Rave by David Meerman Scott is about how to create a viral event using the power of social media. I bought the book not for it’s intent but because the book speaks very much to the way consumers view the market today. This book concentrates on advertising through means which cost little to no money, how to reach a large audience (surprisingly, sometimes by starting with very few people) and how not to alienate the very people you’re trying to reach. World Wide Rave suggests turning advertising around to solve your clients’ problems rather than preaching about what you can do. It’s about THEM. (Bonus points to the book because it features my friend Mike Lefebvre. Hi, Mike!)

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis is kind of a survival handbook for businesses that might need to evolve to better fit in our Googled-up world. (Hint: as an independent contractor, it’s a good idea to know this stuff.) You’ll learn how customer service is the new marketing, how a group of fans on Facebook discussing your product is worth a thousand ads and that when you give over control of the direction of your business to the people you’re trying to service, you ALL win. Get out there and listen to the people you want to work with!

Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky explains how groups form, work together and accomplish goals. When you first join a network such as Twitter, you may see what looks like the whole world streaming by and wonder how you’d ever keep up. If you stick with it, you realize that you can follow your friends, family, associates, random interesting people, celebrities and more, and you create a little group all your own. Here Comes Everybody explains how we keep groups to a manageable size for ourselves while still having the power of a much larger community. Members of groups tend to want to help each other, following an unwritten rule of “if I take care of you now, someone will take care of me later.” The easy formation of groups makes it possible to “fail faster” so you can get past it on with the stuff that works.

A funny thing happened after I read What Would Google Do?. I tweeted that I’d just finished WWGD and loved it – what should I read next? My answer came from Jeff Jarvis himself, suggesting I read Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. As you’ve just read, I took his advice and I’m glad I did. If you’d like to follow all four of these authors on Twitter, please do:@doctorow, @dmscott, @jeffjarvis and @cshirky.

And if you’d like to suggest what I should read next and why, please do!

Recently I wrote about Connecting Shows Together as a way to share more detail for your listings. After creating the main Show of the house, you may want to add secondary Shows about whatever features you feel may really help this house sell: a beautiful lot, desirable neighborhood or spotlight a gourmet kitchen or spectacular master suite. (After creating all the Shows, click Connect Shows Together, chose the Shows you want to connect and name them appropriately. At then end of the main Show, the viewer will be asked if they’d like to see more.) Be sure to take loads of pictures of your listings, because the best ideas for a Show often strike after you’ve left.

Drew Fristoe lives and works in historic Fredericksburg, VA and wanted online buyers to really connect with a special property. After creating a main Show, he might have included more photos under the Additional Photos section of the Real Estate Show. Instead, he wanted potential buyers to realize this home is a cut above, so he created and connected new Shows for The Gardens, Unique Features and even Scenes From the Wall Paper in the Living Room. (The Unique Features Show is full of the kind of details that would help me to fall in love with a home, and also makes a great reminder for someone who has already viewed the home.)

I can only imagine that his sellers are THRILLED with the extra care that Drew has given their home. When buyers find this Show, they’re going to know this is not just another listing. A buyer that is particularly attracted to this home is going to thrilled to have so many views inside and out — instant gratification like that is why we put so much information online for buyers in the first place!

In case you’re wondering, you can use these connected Shows in your MLS. If you add the MLS compliant version of the main Show, all of the connecting Shows will automatically be in the same format.

Thank you for sharing your beautiful listing with us, Drew!