We often get asked about the signs required to use our service.  What size are they?  Do you have riders? Are they color? Are they reusable? etc…  So here are some answers to many of the questions we have been asked about signs.

How much are they?

18″x24″ 4mm (light weight) Cor-X Panels (including H-stake) are $18.00 each for qty less than 10 and $13.00 each for qty greater than 10

18″x 24″ 8mm (heavy duty) Cor-X Panels (including H-stake) are $25.00 each for qty less than 10 and $20.00 each for qty greater than 10

6″x24″ rider (Cor-X Panels or aluminum) are $12.00 each for qty less than 10 and $8.00 each for qty greater than 10

Shipping is included in the cost of the signs.

Are the Real Estate Signs reusable?

Yes, they are!  Each sign will have a unique code on it.  This code is assigned to a listing when you set it up in our system.  Once you sell the listing you can reassign the code to another property and use the sign again.

Where are the holes in the riders placed?

We will confirm the placement of holes with you before we order the signs.

What do the signs and riders look like?

See image at the end of this post.

I have my own Real Estate sign company, can I use them?

Yes, you can.  We will provide you with a template and guidelines on what is required on each sign.  You can then take this to your sign company and get them or use the guidelines to create your own unique sign.

Do I have to order signs to use your service?

No, but if you want to get the most out of our service it is advisable.  We have many REALTORS® that promote their text messaging and toll free call capture in many other mediums and are quite successful but they still place signs in the yard to get the most impact.

Are the signs full color? Double sided?

Yes and yes.  All signs are full color and double sided.  The colors are designed to match your agency’s colors to provide consistent branding.

Does mobile marketing generate leads for Real Estate? Yes!!! Real Estate is a business founded on the concept of marketing property to prospective buyers and representation for sellers. It’s all about marketing and reaching prospective buyers. One of the key success factors is providing information to buyers in a quick and timely manner. Consumers are accustomed to being able to get the information they want fast. Time is of essence for Realtors. This is where mobile marketing comes in.

Mobile marketing has the ability to deliver information to buyers in a quick, easy, and timely fashion helping Realtors be responsive to requests for information automatically. Over the last few years our society has become more and more mobile oriented. There are approximately 260 million cell phone plans in use in the USA, out of a population of just over 300 million. That covers about 86% of the population. With such a deep market penetration and the growing capabilities of these devices, mobile marketing becomes a natural space for Realtors to reach new buyers.

The question is what mobile technology should I use? There are many technologies for use in mobile marketing and in order to use it effectively you have to be able to reach buyers in the way that they are most willing to communicate. For some buyers this is a phone call directly to the agent, others prefer to get information before talking to agents. This is why a program that offers a well rounded mobile technology package is required to reach the majority of buyers.

What is a well rounded mobile technology package? Based on what we’ve seen and heard, we think a well rounded mobile marketing package incorporates voice, email, text messaging and the web. By using all of these technologies Real Estate Agents can enable prospective buyers to retrieve information instantly via text, listen to a recording about the home property, contact the realtor directly, and get in-depth information via email or web site. At the same time the agents are enabling buyers to learn more about their properties, the mobile marketing package should also be capturing lead data for the agent. While we are seeing many home buyers take the initiative to reach out to the Realtor, we also provide the agent the information about when a request was made, the phone number the request was made from and the property that was inquired about.

Is Mobile Marketing in your marketing plan?  Has it been effective for you?

Virtual Tours have become such an integral component of Real Estate Marketing, we thought we would provide a top 5 list of features to look for in your Virtual Tour Service provider and why they are important.

1. Large Photos – Large photos allow viewers to get a better feel for the size and feel of a home.  Small photos, even very good ones, make it hard to see details and look for features a viewer wants.
2. Share Features – There should be a number of sharing features on a virtual tour.  Viewers should be able to share with their friends and use social media sharing links.  This helps spread your message and information out as far and wide as possible.
3. Appointment Scheduler – Allows the viewers to schedule an appointment to see the property.  This is a great way to collect prospect information in an indirect manner while providing an easy path for the viewer to meet you.
4. Contact Me/Information - All of your contact information should be visible on the virtual tour at all times and there should be a contact form that the viewer can fill out to reach you.  An interested buyer is not going to hunt through a number of links to find your information.  They will find another agent if your information isn’t easily accessible.
5. Agent Branding – Every agent has a brand.  They work for an broker, agency, or real estate company.  Each one has a unique brand.  Utilize this brand and piggy back your own branding on top of it.  The more consistent your message and branding the greater opportunity for recognition.

You may have noticed that most of these features are about using media to either get direct contact with a viewer or to share your information with someone the viewer knows.  You don’t know where your next buyer is going to come from and utilizing every opportunity to spread your message as far and wide as possible just makes sense.

Since we just rolled out our new REALTOR.com® enhancement, we thought it would be a good idea to explain some of the benefits of posting your virtual tour links to REALTOR.com®.  Aside from the ~90,000,000 page views/month that REALTOR.com® receives, some of the benefits include:

• Your complete Virtual Tour is linked to your listing on REALTOR.com® – This allows potential buyers to see all of your photos, your contact information, flyers and relevant information.  While at the same time distinguishing you from others that don’t link to their virtual tours.

• Greater Distribution – Your listing link is displayed not only on REALTOR.com® but also on the entire REALTOR.com® distribution network which includes many national real estate portals such as homes.com, move.com, and national franchise brand sites such as ColdwellBanker.com, Century21.com, ERA.com, and REMAX.com.

• Better Search Results – The volume of links generated through the REALTOR.com® distribution channel increases the chance of your home being found when potential buyers are searching the Internet.  All of these links connect back to your virtual tour leading potential buyers directly to you.

The list above is a small portion of the many benefits and marketing opportunities that Realtor.com provides.  If you are interested in learning more we recommend that you check out their site at realtor.com.

The REALTOR.com® logo is a registered trademark of the National Association of REALTORS®

Digital Home Info is excited to announce that we are now capable of posting Virtual Tour Links to REALTOR.COM.  This has been an often requested feature and we are pleased to make it available to our customers.

To use this feature simply click on the “Realtor.com” link in the Active Listings section of the management portal and follow the directions presented.

If you have any questions please feel free to call or email us.

Digital Home Info announces another enhancement to it’s Real Estate Marketing system. All of our customers now have the ability to upload a custom flyer for each listing.

We have added an “Add Custom Virtual Tour Flyer” section in the bottom left column of the Listing Editor. Simply choose the file you want to upload and press the “Save Flyer” button. You can change or remove the custom flyer at anytime.

If you choose not to upload a custom flyer we will still provide the default auto-generated pdf with every listing.

Let us know what you think!

Many of our customers know that we are constantly releasing improvements to our Digital Home Info Real Estate Marketing system. Today we are releasing our latest enhancement to the service, Unbranded Virtual Tours. Every listing now has an unbranded virtual tour link that can be found in the Digital Home Info dashboard. The link is under the Social Media sharing icons in the Active Listings section.

This link can be clicked on to view your unbranded virtual tour and copied to other systems requiring unbranded virtual tour links.

Check it out and let us know what you think. We are always looking for great feedback and ways to improve our product.

Do I have to record my own voice messages?

No, with the Digital Home Info Real Estate Marketing system you do not have to record your own voice messages.  We take the basic information about  the home and use text to speech to play it back to the caller.  We do provide an option to record your own message if you like.  It is as simple as recording your voicemail message on your cell phone.

Based on feedback from some of our customers we have changed the initial ordering of uploaded photos. All photos are now uploaded with a default position of 1 instead of 0. This means that you only have to change the order of one photo to get the front of the home to be first in the virtual tours and syndication. Simply change your picture you want to be first from 1 to 0 and the rest of the photos will follow in random order. Want to set the exact order of all of your photos? Number them (beginning with 0) in the order you would like them to be seen. This change will not impact any photos already uploaded.

We have recently changed the mobile virtual tour so that all home photos download at once when the link is accessed. This eliminates the potential buyer having to hit next to see additional photos.

The image to the right is an example of what our Real Estate Mobile Virtual Tour looks like.

To see a demo of what your listing’s mobile virtual tours looks like goto http://www.digitalhomeinfo.com /[propertycode] from your mobile phone or visit http://www.digitalhomeinfo.com /mdemo.php?id=[propertycode] from your pc.

(Replace [propertycode] with the numeric portion of your property code.)