Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Changing of the Guard

Many things are changing in the real estate business this year and some things faster than others. Two of the biggest changes are the number of agents that will be leaving the business between now and the end of the year and the evolution and or demise of the web 1.0 companies. The web 1.0 companies have built their business based on the hay days of late, more transactions and more agents competing for their business, and rapid home appreciation across the country. This is a huge problem as today there are fewer transactions and agents, and home prices in many markets are flat or declining which means there are fewer dollars for marketing. Couple this with the fact that consumers are being fed a new expectation, web 2.0 and are less and less willing to pony up their personal information just to have a real estate agent hunt them down.

So what does all this mean?

There will be more good internet marketing opportunities for the remaining real estate agents and they will cost less and reach more and more consumers. Gone are the days of paying hundreds of dollars a month for a zip code and then having to cough up 25%+ of your commission. As Greg Robertson of eNeighborhoods pointed out, "it's the upstart innovators -- "the guys that come out of the garage" -- to watch for in the real estate market these days" These are the companies that agents need to be on the look out for and there are many very good blogs to help you find and keep track of these new real estate web marketing companies.
These garage companies have the advantage of super low over head while being able to match or exceed the technology of the big boys and because they haven't already built their business on having consumers give up their personal info in exchange for nothing, and they can build their companies on a solid foundation based on today's volume of transactions and the shrinking marketing budgets of the agents who will survive this dip.

What this means for agents is that now is the time to stake out your territory on the internet. Anywhere you can, buy up exclusive territories, shore up your domain names, and start taking advantage of new technologies like map based search, that until recently, were only available to the big companies with big budgets.

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