The XBroker: New Marketing Strategies Via Social Networking Channels for Real Estate and The Big Push for Compensation Reform

‘We are the fossils, the relics of our time, we mutilate the meanings till they’re easy to deny.’

- William Corgan

I hear many mortgage and real estate professionals within the industry still spouting off about how no technology will ever replace them…no, technology won’t, but the professional that leverages technology properly will eliminate the agent that doesn’t.

Today, I’m hyper-focused on two issues that are effecting both the mortgage and real estate industry’s:

• New Marketing Strategies via Social Networking Optimization
• The Big Push for Compensation Reformation

Both issues are intimately connected via the advent of progressive Technology (proper).

SEO vs SNO…Spy vs Spy…
SEO is an eyeball catcher that brings potential buyers to your front door, however, what you show them, the level of service you provide, and the subsequent chance for referrals is rooted in proper SNO strategy, a strategy that involves giving a network the ability to spread your seed for you.

As a service provider, there is no higher compliment than a referral from a satisfied client that generates a new client. All the SEO in the world isn’t going to help a company foster satisfied clients. If you think about it, a bad service provider with good SEO is dangerous, it’s very indiscriminate in this way… Proper Social Networking Optimization is where it’s at for the future of real estate and mortgage marketing and will pave the way for future compensation reformation.

Side note: Real estate and mortgage professionals should stay away from technology providers who are in the business of selling you ‘SEO solutions’. Chances are they have no idea WTF real estate and/or mortgage is about, and are solely in the biz to make money off of your ignorance. They’re the type to buy a house on emotion, try and get you to commit fraud in the process, get it financed any way they can, then blame you for paying too much and having an effective interest rate in the 14% range. These are the same people who will tell you blogrolls are bad, although sites with PageRanks of 7 and higher routinely have home pages with hundreds of links on them.

SEO is getting to the point of ‘fire and forget’, and is getting easier for the laymen to implement…here watch, I’ll demonstrate:

I use WordPress for my website and a few free SEO plug-ins (and here too) that automate those ’secret strategies’ that are supposedly the proprietary wares of other so called company’s.

Use this plug-in so Google and Yahoo can crawl your sites ’site map‘.

One-click makes it easy install and activate any of these plug-in’s, with, well, one-click.

Want great SEO and/or blogging advice? Get it straight from the sources, like SEOMoz, Copyblogger, Pro Blogger, and HubSpot.

Want a canned solution? Check out Real Estate Tomato, Incredible Agent, and Realivent.

Need ground level, top notch, hands on education and consulting? The fellas at Domus are second to no one…

There, you have 97% of the resources you’ll ever need to maximize your sites potential SEO. Now you just have to write (or aggregate) some compelling content to keep those unique visitors coming back for more…

Please excuse the following ’self-promotion’, I’m going to make a point as to how SNO can serve as a new marketing strategy through compensation reformation in the mortgage industry…

I’m currently working on a few initiatives for the mortgage and real estate industries, one of them is called RateSpeed. If you’re a regular reader of The XBroker, you have heard me talk of this ‘tool’ before (many delays with many reasons that really don’t matter at this point). RateSpeed has absolutely nothing to do with SEO, it’s all about SNO.

For those who haven’t heard of RateSpeed, real quick…It’s akin to a ‘black box’ that aggregates a mortgage professionals wholesale lender interest rate pricing feeds, organizes and redisplays them according to best case results dependent on the consumer end-users credit and financial risk data.

Mortgage professionals will have no ability to manipulate the data between the wholesale lender and the consumer using the application and MUST disclose up front a flat fee (of their discretion) for services…These are the issues at the core of the problem to today’s mortgage mess, IMHO. RateSpeed displays raw rate pricing, showing the exact YSP down to the $.01, and how it can be applied to closing costs, if that is the consumers want, but most importantly it shows this directly to the consumer.

It’s also happens to be a an efficiency and lead generation tool for mortgage pro’s willing to embrace transparent philosophies. RateSpeeds ability to auto-price and sort through the myriad of lenders they’re approved with stands to save a mortgage pro’s inordinate amounts of time and related cost. RateSpeed, at it’s core, stands to alter how mortgages are sold through compensation reformation. By showing consumers exactly how mortgage professionals make money, reform will (is) be(ing) demanded, evidenced by HR 3915. (Nod to Brian Brady for his copious amount of research and opinion on the issue).

I know many mortgage professionals who practice this level of transparency in their day to day business, but there are too many who don’t, and they’ve screwed it up for the rest of us. Some will say it’s too confusing to the consumer, others just want to continue the practice of personally enriching themselves through consumer ignorance. Anyway, how RateSpeed specifically works isn’t what this post is about, so I’ll move on.

RateSpeed will be distributed via a network mortgage professionals as a widget, a chunk of code that is embeddable on current web/blog sites to professionals who embrace transparency and ‘do business’ in such fashion. Real estate professionals can also embed RateSpeed on their sites because it will (must) be directly connected to their selected (and approved) mortgage pro(s) who are ‘in the network’.

From a Social Networking aspect, it will seam together hubs of like real estate agents and mortgage professionals who appreciate, practice and preach a common, open philosophy when it comes to providing mortgage services. To take it a step further, RateSpeed will have the ability to permeate existing social networks like LinkedIn and FaceBook (if think you are reading between the lines here, you are).

After reading Brian Larsons piece last year and (at about the same time) engaging in a mile long comment thread on Redfin.com(s) former ‘Wall of Shame’ category that involved the ethereal term ‘Procuring Cause’, I was drawn to Greg Swann’s perspective on the issue of divorcing real estate commissions. It is voluminous, the most comprehensive resource and reasoning of it’s kind. I’d be lying if I said I read it all, though I’ve been a proponent of much of the content within the diatribes I’ve speed read. What’s most compelling about the topic for me is two-fold: A. Who is tirelessly arguing for it…a practicing real estate professional, and B. The argument is synonymous to calling for the end of the MLS as it still stands today, a dinosaur of a database that was meant to guarantee inter-broker compensation.

Compensation reformation or divorcing real estate commissions is coming, since inter-broker compensation can be handled outside of the traditional MLS (as Greg and company tirelessly articulate). There have been a plethora (more than I care to link to) of proposed solutions, albeit most of them still require prohibitive adoption methods and maintain confinement to, and within, a defined box. A different version of the same thing isn’t a viable solution and mass adoption of isn’t probable considering the openness of the technology landscape, 2007-08 forward.

Zillow and Trulia aren’t it either, nor are their widgets. Why would an agent want to feature an application on their website that leads a potential client away from their website? Both well funded 3rd party destination real estate information websites business models revolve around advertising. Advertisers pay money to players like Z & T because consumers are carousing their sites, not an agents or brokerage, so it would seem fair to say that both entities would like to keep the consumer there. This isn’t a knock against either company, they do what they do and make no bones about it, however their respective agendas don’t line up with the individual agent. Both company’s (I can hear David G. coming now) will maintain that they exist to improve the consumer experience and send visitors (back) to the individual professionals. This may work in theory, but in the end both are pretty much destined to become Phone Book 2.0…which is fine.

An application (technology, widget, et al.) that allows for a real estate professional to ’share’ their valuable information and market their services to others within similar spheres, while insuring an acceptable assurance of reciprocity has yet to be identified…though it should involve a strategy that implements an open Social Networking Optimization framework that allows birds of a feather to flock and fly together…

More on this later…I wanted to get at least this much out before I left for NAR…*whew*

I’ll be at Incredible Agents Booth #3444 in The Sands on Wed, 11/14 @ 1pm…