What Did You Do in 2009 That Made A Huge Difference?

2009 was a great year for helping clients put together online lead generation tactics that actually work. You know how sometimes you post your listings online, or blog, or tweet, or pay for traffic and hold your breath, just hoping it gets results? Sometimes it doesn’t. And because you’re so close to it, it’s hard to know why. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a broker or an agent, you have to figure out what’s going on so you can start getting better results. In 2009, it really made a difference for my clients and me to take it, analyze it, and tell you exactly where to focus so it starts generating more leads and sales.

Integrated house tweets into our single property websites

A client and I created a house that tweets as a way for the house to tell its story. There's now a stream of tweets from coming from the house we’re selling on its single property website. Check out the house tweets: http://www.355santarita.com
"I'm three blocks from Starbucks."

"There's some great tennis courts around the corner." 

"I'm open today from 1:30 PM to 4:30. Come see me!"


People follow the house, and tune in to its story over time. And it's fun to do! 



Agent recruiting campaign
A client is growing his real estate brokerage and wants to recruit the right agents to his firm, but there aren’t enough hours in the day to meet and follow up with his long list of topnotch candidates. So we’re extending his reach with a lead-generating website and email campaign to help him cultivate relationships with agents he’d like to hire.
 [Check out a few pages of the website mockup at http://www.slideshare.net/DreyfusProperties/dre... 


Buyer lead generation campaign

I'm now working with a broker on a lead generation system that delivers homebuyer leads to agents. The goal is an Internet marketing system that’s scalable and automates follow up to generate Internet leads and help agents manage leads more effectively. We plan to buy PPC traffic from Homegain, paired with a backend contact management system that works with our IDX. Jeff, hats off to you for implementing your CRM system in 2009!

With me it was more fundamental. I totally adopted web 2.0 as my business model. Social Media, bloging, video bloging, New Blog Site.... Totally opened me up to a whole new stream of business.

Bob, a simple, yet highly effective answer. I may use it on my next post! Happy New Year to all!

Pretty good stuff Jeff. I need to rethink my IDX signup based on that post. Happy New year Jeff, and best to you in 2010.

Hey Tony,

You might want to consider it :-) I hope you have a great 2010 as well!!

Jeff - first of all what an EXCELLENT idea for a post. Right on the money of collaboration, etc. Ok - here goes.

1. We built a whole new company website thinking about it from the consumers point of view (www.atproperties.com). Integrated all of the hyperlocal data we could find to make this the best customer experience we could think of (and we're continually building it!)

2. I recommended that all of the agents I work with incorporate some kind of CRM strategy for tracking their clients, leads, etc. Personally I'm a HUGE fan of HighRise from 37Signals.

3. PUSHED as hard as I could to get my agents to become ambassadors of both Macro and Micro market data. I really don't care if they use Altos, LPS, Agent Metrics or (my favorite) Steve Harney's Keeping Current Matters (www.keepingcurrentmatters.com) but it's something that has made a huge difference in their business, pricing, etc.

4. Embrace the "1 New Idea per Quarter" idea and had my agents and myself track it. Each quarter we pick a new idea that we are going to try out for 90 days. (video, podcasts, email campaign, etc.) After the 90 days we sit down and compare notes, metrics and results.

5. Video for everything - I started taping ALL of my training/coaching classes and have had many of my agents start doing this with their listing presentations, buyer interviews, negotiations, discussion of market data (using Camtasia) etc. and then review and roll out to the general public.

These have proven to be awesome ideas that we have implemented and have made great improvements to all of our business. Hope this helps out!

Hi Matt,

Thanks for sharing!!! Those are all great ideas. I love how you have your clients work on 1 new idea per quarter. If they work on too many things they can get over whelmed for sure.

Using a CRM is definitely a must. We developed one that is integrated and works with our IDX. It has really been working great!

I am also a huge fan of 37Signals. I refer back to their book "Getting Real" all the time ;-)

I would love to chat with you sometime.