Your Next Homebuyer
There is a great post by Bernice Ross over at REIBlog that talks about the upcoming wave of real estate buyers. Drop by and read the whole article.
Section #6 talks about the new generation of buyers and the tools used for communication. They will be heavy on technology and online communication. No secret and something I can validate. The highest percentage of our leads are from younger/first time buyers. This group loves communicating online and they have higher conversion rates on appointments.
Here is an excerpt of the article:
The Great Divide: the Generational Communication Gap
A major challenge that we face as an industry is that the median age of Realtors in the United States is over 50. While there are more than 79 million boomers and traditionalists (those born before 1964), our industry has been somewhat myopic in terms of meeting the needs of Gen X and Gen Y. The Gen X generation was born between 1965 and 1976, and makes up roughly 17 percent of the population, or 40 million. Gen Y, born between 1977 and 1994, makes up about 25 percent of the population, or 60 million people.
Opportunity: Boomers and traditionalists did not grow up with computers. They prefer face-to-face, telephone or e-mail communication. In contrast, Gen X and Gen Y have had computers since elementary school. Mobile access is a way of life. “E-mail is the new snail mail.” When you contact members of Gen X and Gen Y, you had better text message. When they contact you, they also expect instantaneous response. While boomers and traditionalists respond well to brand marketing, the Gen X and Gen Y crowd prefers lifestyle marketing. According to a study from California State University at Chico, “It’s more important to be interactive and to show people having fun. Gen X and Gen Y want to be marketed with a strong dose of the truth coupled with irony and humor. For them, it’s not about reaching the masses; it’s about building a community.” This is evidenced by the stellar growth experienced by such sites as SecondLife.com, YouTube.com and MySpace.com. Gen X and Gen Y want interactivity, and these sites provide it. We are already seeing brick-and-mortar stores showing up on SecondLife.com. Both agents and brokerages may want to consider moving some of their advertising dollars from traditional print advertising to these new venues. Also, since blogs are interactive, they provide the ideal way to reach Gen X and Gen Y.
List your homes online for FREE
Got a spec home sitting too long? Looking for ways to drive traffic to your neighborhood? Try posting in one (if not all) of the free listing services available online.
The leader of the pack is Craigslist. It may not be pretty but it has a large amount of traffic. I have seen great results through our posts on Craigslist and high conversion rates. It even rivals some of our pay-per-click campaigns. And the best part is – it’s FREE. All it takes is a small investment of time and some creative titles to capture the browsers attention. This is a great place to post those inventory or to-be-built homes, hot deals and close-out properties.
Also, be sure to place links to your website on your post. Your goal on is to drive them to your website (which is pretty) and ultimately have them contact you by phone or through a contact form so you can track the referral source.
Another great service which is FREE (for now) is Postlets which allows you to create a slick looking flyer online and post to multiple free classified sites automatically. The sites it sends your listing to are:
Backpage.com
Edgeio.com
Google Base
HotPads.com
LiveDeal.com
Oodle.com
Propsmart.com
Vast.com
Trulia.com
If you already advertise with Newhomesource.com, Move.com or Realtor.com you may see your inventory already pushed over to these sites. For example, Newhomesource.com will send its listings to Oodle.com. Check to see if you are already listed – no need to duplicate your work.
Whatever you do, take advantage of these free listing services and continually look for new opportunities. There are plenty of people looking online, make sure they can find your homes.
Real Estate Search Coolness
OK…I try to keep this site focused for homebuilders but this is too cool to pass up.
This is how all searches for a resale home should work – it’s beautiful. Check it out here: ColoradoHomeStop.com
Colorado-based Metro Brokers, Inc. unveiled a new real estate search site at ColoradoHomeStop.com. The site uses a map-based interface to guide users to neighborhoods and specific listings in Colorado markets. Using Google Maps’ platform, it offers a fast search as the pages do not have to load each time a section of the map is clicked on. The initial launch includes access to nearly all Denver metro listings from the Metrolist MLS.
Leveraging your database of leads
A new report at USAToday talks about the positive growth in the Tulsa housing market. This is exciting news for us (we build in Tulsa 
Metro) and something that we can use in our marketing materials. It compares our market to other states and gives examples of buyers who sold their house and moved here.
Because we have managed our leads effectively, I will now be able to segment my list specifically for out-of-state buyers and send them an email with this article today – the same day the article came out.
If we didn’t have a program like this set up – what would I do? Print off the article and show it to our walk-in traffic. Not many out-of-state buyers walking into the models. Now I can leverage this information to invoke a response from the relocation buyers who have shown interest over the past 2 years.
This is a great example of how you can manage incoming leads effectively, segment your buyers and create the unique message for each market.
The $140 million pre-sale campaign
Check out this great “real world” example of a pre-sale campaign for the Glass House in Denver that resulted in $140 million in revenue – not too shabby and a perfect example of how you you can sell out a community before you open. A great inspiration.
View the article at Seth Godin’s Blog
Check out the Glass House website.
