Nextdoor is a closed social networking system and forum that allows you to learn about your neighbors and participate in discussions that are only viewable by others who live in your neighborhood.

A Private Social Network

Nextdoor allows you to socialize with your neighbors while keeping posts inclusive and private. The app only gives people access to your neighborhood messages if they are actually residents of your neighborhood.

So how exactly does Nextdoor verify who lives in your neighborhood? They don’t just admit any old user into the closed network – this company makes sure that they are a legitimate neighborhood resident first. You can verify your address using several methods, including your phone number or by entering a special code on a postcard that they mail to you. Once you verify your address, then you can start viewing and posting localized messages, and you can even connect with nearby neighborhoods. The ability to view other neighborhood posts makes this invaluable for homeowners who are thinking about buying property in nearby areas.

The Value for Property Buyers or Sellers

Nextdoor could be a game changer for those looking to sell or buy properties. It can help residents get a better idea of the unique activities, culture, and opportunities in a new community. Law enforcement officials have even partnered up with Nextdoor to provide up-to-the-minute announcements regarding crime and safety. This information can dramatically change the way we think about neighborhood values and relocation incentives.

A Bird’s Eye View

So what kinds of posts will you find on a typical Neighborhood page? Well, the Crime and Safety posts can give you a clear idea of community incidents, as reported by actual residents. You can also view announcements placed by local police and fire departments. Nextdoor’s Crime and Safety posts might be able to give you a better sense of a neighborhood than plain old crime statistics by law enforcement agencies. In fact, Nextdoor has become so popular, that some public agencies have already started using this app to post important community updates and emergency notifications.

The general neighborhood discussion posts can help you learn more about a location’s culture. For example, families might be drawn to areas that post frequently about free movie nights, library activities, pop-up markets, and community gardens. These announcements can help foster a strong sense of community, and help newcomers socialize and get adjusted to their new neighborhood.

Building Ongoing Connections

Nextdoor also provides residents with the opportunity to connect based on group interest. This gives the app a miniature Meetup feel – you might be able to connect with other neighbors who enjoy dog-walking together. Or if you’re looking for local volunteer participation, Nextdoor groups can be a great way to recruit nearby talent. Users could post public or closed groups for church functions, charity drives, and other community efforts to a neighborhood page.

New homeowners, do you hate feeling like the new kids on the block? Well, your own personal profile also becomes a valuable introductory resource on Nextdoor. You can volunteer information about your own personal interests and skills, such as “Computer savvy,” or “Dog lover.” Your neighbors can see this information, and then come to you for assistance with their technology or dog-walking needs. This exchange of information helps neighbors learn about the strengths of their own community’s resources. New homeowners can quickly learn about their neighbors’ interests and skill sets, which can open new doors to conversations, housewarming parties, and collaborations.

Ultimately, you have precise control over what people see on your profile. So if these settings sound too obtrusive, you can always fine-tune your privacy settings to just include your name and general neighborhood.

Property sellers can use Nextdoor to gain inspiration for their listings, by noting the positive aspects of their vibrant local community. And recent property buyers can settle into their new neighborhoods faster by connecting with other users via Nextdoor posts and reading about their local area. It is likely that Nextdoor will become extremely relevant in the future of real estate.

Relatives, Friends, and Neighbors

Many buyers (40%) first interview with an agent referred to them by someone they know. The next highest percentage (12%) go with an agent they previously bought or sold through. The number drops to 5% when it comes to open houses or having your name listed on a “for sale” sign. We all know that customer service is paramount in this industry. Getting previous customers to refer you to new customers should be your number one marketing strategy.

Not having many previous clients becomes a real challenge for new agents. The best strategy for new agents is building networks. Not only networking within the real estate profession but also networking with family, friends, and neighbors. Or anyone else that can make a word of mouth referral for you. Make sure you politely ask everyone you know to make referrals to you. Both seasoned and new agents should ask past clients for testimonials that can be prominently posted on their websites.

When You Get the Interview

Clearly, getting the interview is your first goal. Your second goal should be addressing what potential clients are most looking for from an agent during the interview. A full 91% of buyers say that an in-depth knowledge of the local real estate market is the most important attribute they look for in an agent. They want agents that have both a knowledge of the market dynamics and the available inventory.

The second most sought out agent attribute is the ability to find and show homes most closely matching the needs of the client. No one wants to waste a bunch of time looking at homes they can’t afford or are not interested in. That means going beyond a tight focus of pushing the properties your company has a listing for and certainly thinking beyond the open house you are showing when you first meet a potential client.

Seller Numbers Resemble Buyer Numbers

The same percentage of sellers as buyers go with agents. And the other numbers closely match as well. 70% of sellers go with the first agent they interview with. Again, the first agent they interview with are referrals from family, friends, and neighbors (38%). Another 22% go with agents they previously did business with.

At 36%, sellers say the most important attribute they look for in a listing agent is reputation. Along with sales activity, they list attitude and integrity as important aspects of an agent’s reputation. Following closely are honesty and trustworthiness.

The bottom line is that agents, whether new or well established should always be working to improve the attributes clients find the most important as well as asking for referrals from every client and potential client they come in contact with.

Author bio: Brian Kline has been investing in real estate for more than 30 years and writing about real estate investing for seven years. He also draws upon 25 plus years of business experience including 12 years as a manager at Boeing Aircraft Company. Brian currently lives at Lake Cushman, Washington. A vacation destination, a few short miles from a national forest in the Olympic Mountains with the Pacific Ocean a couple of miles in the opposite direction.

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That’s what Cindy Jones, a real estate broker in Woodbridge, Va., recently encountered when she saw a listing that noted the seller wanted to take the entire kitchen with them. “How do you explain to the underwriter that the kitchen doesn’t come with the house and expect to get a loan that includes the value of a kitchen?” she wrote in a recent post on ActiveRain.com.

The Los Angeles Times recently featured an article on sellers who may want to take too much with them when they move, and how it can derail a deal. In some cases, sellers don’t tell their agent of their intentions beforehand.

For example, Lenn Harley, a broker in the Washington area at Homefinders.com, says she had a transaction once where the seller removed a crystal chandelier prior to closing. Her buyers noticed the switch during their pre-closing walk through, and ended up receiving a $2,500 credit for the missing chandelier.

Other agents share that some sellers try to swap in inexpensive fixtures, for example, for a higher priced one in the final hour. Others say they’ve had clients try to dig up plants and trees from the yard that they wanted to take with them when they moved. Mark Arlow of Keller Williams in Savannah, Ga., said he had a client who wanted to move the home’s front door with him. It was the door to the family farm where he had grown up.

“When they sold the farm, they kept the front door as a reminder of the farm, and now the door goes with them wherever they go,” Arlow said.

It’s hard to guess what sellers are planning on retaining from their home, so real estate professionals must have upfront conversations with sellers about what stays with the house. If home owners plan to take a certain fixture with them, they may be better off removing and replacing it prior to the home being listed.

After all, “when a seller starts keeping things that should stay with the house, I guarantee that the contract negotiations will be painful,” says Eve Alexander of Windermere Real Estate in Orlando, Fla.

There are two things to consider:

1. Will you do the follow-up and nurturing that is necessary to convert them?
2. Do you have the cash?

The first question seems obvious, but it is trickier than it looks. Most agents will answer “of course” to the follow-up question without really considering what it takes to convert an online lead.

According to Robert Clay, founder of Marketing Wizdom, eight percent of salespeople get 80 percent of the sales (non–real estate specific). Why does this happen? Well, Clay says it generally takes five follow-ups after the initial contact before a sale, and most salespeople give up on a lead after two attempts. Persistence pays off.

Calling prospects twice and not hearing back does not mean the lead is dead. When a customer cannot get preapproved because of poor credit, insufficient funds, or any number of other reasons, that does not mean the lead is dead. Even if they are still telling you their name is Mickey Mouse, the lead is not dead.

Now I ask you again: Will you take the time to follow up on and nurture these leads until they convert? Because if you are thinking, “That seems like a lot of work,” then I say, “No, you should not buy leads.” Don’t waste your hard-earned cash.

If you’re still with me, let’s talk about how to get this done. You will need a CRM, follow-up plan(s), access to meaningful and useful content, and time. Do yourself a favor and download a copy of “10 Days of Pain.” This is one of my favorite lead follow-up plans. “10 Days of Pain” will help you ascertain how motivated a lead is very quickly. Most of the time, you won’t even get through the entire plan before you know where the lead stands. Now, understand that lead follow-up does not end at 10 days, but, after that time period, they will transfer over to what you are used to: drip plans with periodic, consistent contact points.

I am not going to tell you where to buy leads. I cannot tell you one vendor is better than another in this arena. That’s because you make the difference here. All of the vendors listed below are top-notch options that will deliver leads. Keep in mind that you are buying a system. The leads are generated through a website they create and passed through to a CRM where you can manage your activity with every contact. Of course, they all have different levels and services that you can buy into, but basically, the end result is the same. Before you buy – ask to speak with a current customer. I have found that agents either love their lead gen provider or are planning to break up with them.

Here’s what really matters: One lead a year or 100 leads a month will not get you anywhere unless you follow up, show some love, and convert. Follow-up should be fast (within minutes if possible). Keep in touch and show them some love by sharing useful information on a regular basis. Focus on getting an appointment. Online leads are not likely to close in three or even six months. Get comfy. You’re looking at working with these folks for nine months to two years in some cases.

If you haven’t realized it already, online leads are not going to feed you. A 2014 study by the National Association of Realtors showed that members get 69 percent of their business from people already in their sphere of influence. The good news is you should already be working your existing database in much the same way, only with more face-time built in.

So, one more time: Should you buy leads? Only if you are willing to put in the work required to convert.

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Every time you can provide value to your reader, you have an opportunity to ask for something in return. Namely, you can ask permission to stay in touch or follow up with this reader-turned-prospect.

Asking permission is as simple as presenting your reader with a pop-up, or having calls to action in your site’s sidebars or within the framework of your site design.

1. Build an Opt-in Marketing List

There’s really no better time to reach out to someone to start a conversation about their needs and wants than when someone visits your Web site to view a home for sale.

When you’re consistently publishing new opinions, analyses, and insight on your site, you have an opportunity to ask readers for permission to send them updates when you add new content.

From personal experience and from what I’ve heard other industry experts report, it takes an average of nine to 18 months of online research and preparation before a home buyer completes a purchase. So an opt-in marketing list is your nine- to 18-month pipeline. If you’re not adding new information to your site on a regular basis, you lose the opportunity to keep visitors to your site updated.

2. Content-Specific Lead Generation

Creating content around current market trends is a great way to offer specific help or guidance related to your content. The best example I have of how this works is a market report that I posted on our Web site a couple of months ago. I based it on a market report offered by a popular research service that I subscribe to, and I broke it down, explaining what each statistic and trend means to home buyers.

I titled the article “The Science of Buying a Home in a Low Inventory Real Estate Market.” The basic point of it was to show that in low-inventory markets, using an agent that has in-depth knowledge of local trends and market conditions will give the buyer a competitive edge.
At the bottom of the article, we added a call to action to sign up for automated “Market Reports” that will keep the home buyer informed and educated and possibly even give them a competitive advantage.

That article generated 10 registrations for market reports in the first 48 hours that the article was published.

3. Financing-Related Lead Generation

The focus of the majority of our content marketing efforts is financing-related challenges, qualifying questions, and assistance opportunities.

One of the most effective lead-generation strategies we use is a buyer assistance finder. This is a form that invites buyers to give us some basic information, and we use it to match them with available assistance once we determine their eligibility to qualify.

This is a great opportunity to get your lender involved in your marketing efforts by asking them to contribute content and share their experience and expertise for the benefit of the visitors to your site.

With home buyers and home owners being of common interest to both Realtors and lenders, there is a great advantage to seeking a marketing savvy, content-creating lender partner. This skill set is more commonly found with an individual loan officer, as opposed to something a company offers.

You’re looking for unique, sincere, well-communicated content. A writer’s resume is their blog. All it takes to interview a marketing partner is a Google search.

Managing Expectations

Content marketing is a long-term strategy that requires a well-thought-out conversion strategy. An important part of your success is expectation management:

• Expect a lot of trial and error.
• Expect a lot of testing and tracking.
• Expect that you will succeed if you don’t give up.
• Expect that your clients will be more loyal.
• Expect to hear, “I’ve been reading your articles for a year.”

Most Web site solutions allow for easy publishing. Hopefully, you are working with WordPress.
Adding content on a regular basis is as easy as spending three to five hours a month or week, which is what I’ve invested for years.

Gaining a competitive edge in your online market may be as easy as creating more content than your competition.

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Many of your online readers will land on your site because you sent them there, either through advertising, flyers, Craigslist, pay-per-click, or just conversations on the street where you collect an e-mail address and shoot over more information about what you were just talking about.

But have you made plans to generate other paths to your online content? It could take as little as six to eight months of consistent, local, timely, and relevant content creation for your Web site marketing to start generating unpaid, organic, search-driven traffic through search engine optimization. But the best news is that you have to devote only a couple of hours each month to get the ball rolling.

Here is a simple “blogging blueprint” that focuses on three conversation-starting topics. It should take you no more than three hours a month to expertly create a conversation around these topics.

Blog Topic No. 1: Market Reports

Time Investment: 2 Hours

Whether you are trying to attract buyers or sellers, both will want to have a conversation about market conditions. This should be relatively easy. After all, if you’re an active agent you probably have a conversation about market conditions on an almost daily basis.

The foundation for this blog post can be as simple as a comparative market analysis, a tidbit from the National Association of Realtor’s research department, or a Realtors Property Resource analysis. The key is to present economic conditions or other data that you use to create and deliver an accurate assessment of the current state of the market in your community.

Prepare your market report as if you were intending to deliver it to the biggest potential buyer or seller of your life. It is truly that important; treat it as such. The time you invest in this one topic should be reflected in the end product. Take your time, do your research, and produce the market report of your life.

Invest two hours once a month. Is that so hard? No, it’s not.

Blog Topic No. 2: Curated Content

Time Investment: 30 Minutes

Curated content requires that you take timely and relevant articles that others have published and add your local perspective.

Using well-written and timely content as a launchpad for your own point of view is a powerful way for you to show your local expertise and experience in matters relevant to your target reader.

Best Practices for Curating Content:

• Your commentary about the story should make up no less than 30 percent of the total word count of the blog post. For example, if you are writing a 600-word story, you should sandwich the curated material between at least 150 of your own words.
• Sandwich the content between your introduction to the story and the wrap-up of the story, reinforcing why this story is valuable to your reader. But remember: Club sandwiches are delicious for a reason. Instead of simply writing an intro and closing, consider weaving your commentary in and around the curated content to dive deeper into why this story is important to your local community. It takes a little more time, but building on varying sections of content from curated sources by adding layers of your own perspective throughout the story pays off in rich content. Just make sure that your thoughts are visually distinct from the curated content.
• Choose topics based on your readership.
• If your target clients are buyers, curating information about loans and mortgage qualification is a great way for you to brush up on the ever-changing lending markets while at the same time providing more value to your readers.
• If you target sellers, look for content about home values, low-investment strategies for getting the highest price for your home, avoiding packing and moving nightmares, and so on.

Blog Topic No. 3: Local Events & Activities

Time Investment: 30 Minutes

This is a powerful yet simple way to create trust and exposure as both a local expert and advocate for your community. Foster contacts in community politics, public schools, and local charities. Use your site as a platform to drive awareness of and exposure for things you are passionate about. It should take you no longer than 30 minutes a month to find one event, activity, or cause that you can stand behind.

This content is not about real estate; it’s not supposed to be. There are no calls to action in this content (unless it’s to a link to sign up for an event or get more information about a cause or activity).

If your experience turns out anything like ours, this small time commitment will grow as the rewards of your community outreach efforts spread through your office and your community. There’s something incredibly powerful about adopting this kind of pay-it-forward program in your office.

Keep the Conversation Going

Imagine the conversations you’re able to start with this small time investment. Because you’ve documented all of this content on your Web site, your knowledge and experience are now reference material for potential homeowners and homebuyers.

Let’s say someone you’ve just met asks, “How’s the market?” You can now roll out a brief summary of what you’ve just studied and documented, and offer to e-mail them a link to your in-depth analysis of last month’s activity. Once you built it, you will start to find all kinds of opportunities to talk about what you’ve just learned.

Certainly, there are plenty of opportunities to interact with people, transfer value, and generate leads from platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. Still, real estate professionals consistently make mistakes in their overall social media strategy.

Here’s a list of common social media missteps to avoid:

Don’t Spend Too Much Time on It

Real estate sales, no matter where the leads are generated, is and will always be a face-to-face service business. Most buyers and sellers need to meet with us in person. Use social media to create leads but get those leads to meet with you face-to-face.

The real estate pros who earn the greatest income are the ones who have more time in front of clients and prospects. They are face-to-face with more people more often and for longer periods of time than lower-producing practitioners.

Generally speaking, if you are spending hours a day on social media communication, it’s too much time. The method you use to contact prospects and clients influences your conversion rates and success rates. The more barriers between you and your prospects and clients in time, space, visual, and verbal mediums, the lower the conversion rate on prospects and leads.

I encourage our clients to invest 30 minutes a day—or less—in social media communication. It can take up your whole day if you let it.

Communicate Value and Exigency

When using social media, position yourself as an expert on the industry. Use market stats, market trends, key reports, NAR research, board results, company track record, and your individual numbers to reinforce your conclusions on marketplace trends. Build messages of urgency of the advantages of acting now in today’s marketplace—for instance, clearly explaining why a seller should list now rather than wait for the spring.

Right now, we can use the tax credit (which expires on April 30), forthcoming interest rate increases due to the Federal Reserve ending their program to purchase mortgage-backed securities by end of March, the current low inventory levels in most marketplaces, and the phased-in changes of FHA mortgages between now and summer to emphasize the importance of acting immediately.

Use It to Find People

The volume of people on Facebook is astounding. Because so many people are using this social network, you can often find people or reach people through it that you don’t have phone numbers or other contact info for.

For some of my clients who are working expireds and can’t secure a phone number off the MLS or other Internet sources, they search Facebook and make contact using that medium. The connection rate is lower than using the phone, but there usually aren’t many other real estate pros who have made that connection. It gives you the inside track if they are considering relisting their home.

Social media can be a good way to generate connections and leads with prospects and clients. Be sure to invest time and resources into this area. Just don’t overdo it—it’s only one lead-generation stream among several.

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The search results are ranked by the post time, post engagement, and the levels of relationships, BusinessInsider reports. For example, posts from your first-degree network will be ranked higher in your results than those from public posts from friends of friends. The search tool will also uncover posts from pages you follow. You also can search as far back as when Facebook first started its news feed in 2006.

Last month, Twitter launched the ability for its users to search for every tweet since 2006, the year when the social network launched.

The new search tools eventually may be handy among advertisers who want to serve up more targeted ads. The New York Times reports that Facebook has been testing the use of contextual ads that can use keywords in posts. Analysts speculate that Facebook will eventually work with marketers to show targeted ads based on post keywords. If that’s the case, a real estate company, for example, may potentially be able to show targeted ads for home listings whenever someone searches for a local real estate term on the social network.

Facebook’s search feature rolls out this week on the iPhone and desktop computers. (The Facebook iOS app is available as a download or an update.) An Android update is coming soon, but Facebook has yet to announce a specific release date.

That was the most telling discovery from a recent survey that asked 342 North American real-estate agents and brokers if — and how — they used search engine optimization, also called SEO, to uncover sales prospects.

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The survey was conducted last month by WebsiteBox, the technology firm that offers do-it-all real estate websites for a $99 one-time fee.

“We already know that search is the number-one traffic driver to real-estate websites – and that search is way more important than social media,” said Peyman Aleagha, WebsiteBox CEO. “So, if 90 percent of prospective home buyers search online, and three-quarters of those buyers never click past the first page of search results, then it’s crucial to make sure your website shows up at the top of those results.”

Big Three: Keywords, Coding and Content

Survey respondents – who were all WebsiteBox customers and real estate professionals – indicated they have a basic understanding of what SEO means: encouraging search engines like Google and Bing to direct interested property buyers to their business websites and sales listings. In fact, 83 percent said they believed SEO to be the most important source of online sales-lead generation.
The WebsiteBox survey results suggested that most realtors are making an effort to comply with best SEO practices: relevant keywords, compelling content, and sound website coding. More than half of the respondents said they already use keyword research, and 35 percent said they employ website meta-tags and backlinks. A respectable 45 percent said they are blogging and posting content that buyers would find useful.

For all their effort, few respondents (4.9 percent) said they generated referrals through SEO. The problem may be that the agents are using the wrong tools. Indeed, 69 percent of the WebsiteBox survey respondents said the tools they have don’t seem to get the SEO job done.

Agents Lack Time, Money, Expertise for SEO

Could it be that they don’t have the budget to spend on professional SEO tools? Currently, the majority of respondents (80 percent) spend less than $500 per year on SEO tools, and 85 percent use SEO tools and tactics less than 10 hours per month.

Aleagha pointed out that 75 percent of survey respondents said they don’t know how to create content that encouraged SEO. And few would feel comfortable hiring an SEO expert: 75 percent said they want to manage SEO themselves.

“Let’s face it,” Aleagha said, “Most real estate agents aren’t SEO experts. They don’t write code. They don’t know how to find viable keywords, and they don’t blog. So, they drum up leads the old-school way, and miss out on the gold.”

Aleagha said the survey helped WebsiteBox product developers create easy-to-use, low-cost SEO add-on tools that integrate seamlessly with WebsiteBox websites. The company recently introduced an SEO app that offers WebsiteBox users SEO keyword, coding and content help.

WebsiteBox has presented an infographic with its findings that can be seen here.

The double-edged sword for this industry is how easy it is to just throw your listings up as Facebook updates or Tweets. That kind of post takes no time at all, which is great… but it’s also really boring and shows that you don’t really get the point of social media.

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Not all business owners understand that social media is not merely a free advertising platform – it’s a tool you can use to authentically build relationships with potential, current and past clients. And the absolute wrong way to do that is to constantly push your properties in their faces.

Think about what you do when you go on Facebook, for example. You’re probably there when you have a few spare minutes and you feel like being entertained. Since we know that that’s people’s intention, we need to do just that.

1. Local Interest

The fact is that most of the people following you on social media aren’t necessarily in the market for a new place at the moment, but most of them do probably live in your city. So, post about cool events, interesting history, new restaurants, and anything else you think your fellow residents would like.

If it’s done well, you’re actually offering value to your followers and establishing yourself as a reliable source of info for your city. Plus, when you feature interesting local goings on, people are much more likely to share it with their friends, which boosts your social media cred and provides a lot of free exposure.

2. Living Tips

All day, every day you help people imagine themselves living in various homes. You hear their quandaries about space, décor and storage, right? So you’re the perfect person to offer great tips and solutions to the most common issues. Your clients are always worrying aloud about finding room for a home office, so use your social media to share ideas on how to create versatile live-work space in a small home.

If this isn’t exactly your area of expertise, just raid Pinterest for ingenious ideas and images of any and all possible décor or storage solutions. As a culture, we really can’t get enough of easy, smart DIY ideas for the home – take advantage of this obsession and give the people what they want.

3. Humor

We’re lucky to be in an industry that deals directly with people’s everyday lives – it makes using humor as easy as pie. And, as you well know, the posts that get the most likes, comments, and shares are often the funny stuff. Think about the kinds of laughable things we all deal with in owning/buying a home or renting/hunting for an apartment and go from there.

The best part of using humor is that you come across as a company that’s made up of people instead of a faceless front for a business that only cares about money. Plus, remember that clients end up spending a lot of time with their agent, and they’d rather work with someone they like, so make it just makes good business sense to make your company likeable.

4. Insider Advice

You are uniquely positioned to offer your followers the inside scoop on buying or renting a property. And the more you show that you’re an absolute expert with loads of knowledge to offer, the more likely people will trust you to help them the next time they’re looking for a new place. Just make sure that the tone is conversational and almost conspiratorial, like you’re letting them in on industry secrets.

5. Beautiful Images

Social media is an image-driven medium. Basically, we all love looking at pretty pictures, so fill your updates with them. When you do feature your properties, post just one jaw dropping gorgeous image of the property instead of a whole block of texts enumerating all of the benefits of the place. A picture of an amazing kitchen or a view you’d die for is much more powerful than a rundown of features any day.

You’re a real estate agent, so of course you’ll still go on featuring properties on your social media. But they should be far from the only thing your followers see. In this arena, it’s far more important to entertain and inform your audience with your brilliant and funny updates on a daily basis.

About the author: Noah Tennant is a real estate expert writer and the CEO of the Chicago Apartment Leasing Group, a rental agency that deals primarily with the city’s most high end downtown buildings and properties. Noah is a frequent contributor to several lifestyle and real estate publications, in which he offers renters and peers helpful advice and tips. For more, check out www.ChicagoALG.com today!