A Look at Top St. Louis Agents

According to many news outlets, St. Louis, Missouri's property market is already crashing. On the outskirts of the city, underwater mortgages exceed 16% in some areas. Prices are falling like a rock too. And, with a recession ramping up nationwide, the real estate community should be in a kind of panic, if it's not already. And what this means for buyers and sellers should be patently simple. I'll cut to the chase here. Clients are going to have to find the best St. Louis Agents out there to either buy or sell in the coming months. The boom is over, and now the winners and quitters will become obvious. Here's a list for St. Louis, most of whom will probably end up surviving what could be the biggest bust economy in over a decade.

The Garcia Properties website has one of the lowest SEO scores of any agent website I’ve reviewed so far. A 61/100 score means there is a score of errors, improvements, and other fixes needed for the site to rank anywhere near the top for St. Louis. Aesthetically and functionally, the site is wonderful except for the clear back-end problems. It’s a bit of a shame, given this agent has so much going in the right direction. Traditional media outreach and other branding aspects seem to be Garcia’s short suit. This is also unfortunate since she’d be in our top 10% across the US. Really, her Facebook and Instagram efforts are this good.  

The company's last blog post was two years ago. I hunted like Sherlock Holmes and found DRG's Facebook presence. It's been a year since anything was posted there. So how does this superstar of St. Louis Agents do it? He used to be a police officer, maybe he arrests people and jails them until they buy? For once, I have no answers. No traditional media mentions. A token Twitter effort for some months in 2012.

Gobsmacked, I almost ended his assessment prematurely. But something was eating at me. Could any real estate agents out there pound the bricks hard enough to be a winner without marketing? Delhougne is truly a smart cookie, I discovered. He shortcutted the whole online marketing effort by buying Google ads targeting the top search terms. Voila! I feel vindicated somehow. Nice job, Matt. It can work. The only problem I have is the misleading heading and the direct straight to your listings on your site. That's misleading, which is an indicator. I was even dizzier when I found a Youtube "how to" from this agent explaining how digital marketing is key to selling homes. I won't share it. The image of Delhougne is a screen from that video. There are not very many images of him on the internet, so.

He has a blog that is semi-up-to-date. With all the five-star awards from Zillow, Yelp, Google, Expertise.com, etc., the agent should be hammering it. But 32 sales this past 12 months tell me he's not. Maybe my perception is wrong, but anybody with this kind of know-how should be murdalizing the competition. I'm telling you, analyzing his sparse Twitter and Instagram shares, the guy's brilliant at getting across to people the core value of a property. Something's up. His Facebook profile shows an outdoorsman and a sort of adventurer. I'd be interested to know what he's been up to. For now, though, he's not competing with Garcia in any area that matters - except potential.

Krummenacher makes this St. Louis agents list because of 64 sales in the past 12 months and because everybody submitting a review there loved her effort. Interestingly, she joined Twitter very early in that platform's evolution. She started Tweeting in 2008 and stopped last year. Just 7 really bad Google reviews might have kept her out of this list, but St. Louis is another American town not all that rich in property pros with awareness or aptitude for marketing.