Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Well known industry news website Inman News conducted a survey called “Diving into the Mind of Today’s ‘Free Agent’”. Directed towards real estate professionals, over 80 questions covered topics such as agents’ earnings, time spent working on various activities, and amount spent on technology and marketing.
Image courtesy IntelFreePress - flickr.com
The correlation between technology use and financial benefits appears to be pretty solid. Agents who spent more on real estate technology and internet marketing earned the most - $100,000 or more per annum, whereas those who spent less time keeping their sites updated, engaged less in social media or failed to take advantage of available technologies earned much less.
Among the survey takers who had six figure annual earnings, more than half reported that they used $2,500 or more on technology every year - a quarter of them spent $5,000 or more. On the other hand, among those agents who earned less, nearly 90 percent spent less than $2,500 on technology.
The higher income agents obviously worked longer hours - confirming the fact that hard work can certainly pay off, however the fact that technology plays such a big part of their success is certainly enlightening. At the least, it should have agents taking a closer look at their own marketing strategies.
This fact should come as no surprise - the trend towards mobile purchasing is increasing exponentially. In fact, during the 2011 holiday shopping season, online sales beat out in store sales for the first time. It’s expected that by the end of 2012, money spent on internet marketing will exceed that of traditional print advertising.
As more devices come onto the market and more individuals jump into the electronic marketplace, mobile technology and social media will play an ever greater role in how individuals shop for their next home. Statistics show that smartphone and tablet sales increased by 58% in 2011 while social media use grew by 43%. Obviously, as a realtor, you need to go where your target is - and real estate technology can help you increase your sales.
Some of the technology that savvy realtors use include social networking sites, blog sites (realtors who maintain a blog or contribute to a blog increase their presence in the search engines), a company website, picture sharing websites, video marketing and more.
If you’d like to know more about how you can use real estate technology in your business, check out our website for more information.
Please share your thoughts with us. Has technology helped to shape your business?
Anita Cooper has been writing about real-estate topics since 2010. Her articles have appeared in the trade magazine "Real Estate Wealth," as well as on various websites. Cooper owns and operates a small writing business providing website and copy-writing material to real-estate professionals.
