Mobile Marketing (along with Social Media) seems to be one of the buzz terms in the Real Estate industry lately. Because of this interest a number of companies have popped up over the last year that claim to have a Real Estate Mobile Marketing solution. Invariably, many of them  have a similar concept; text in a keyword to a number and get back information on the property via a text message. And that is where most of them stop.

Many of these new companies leave out the essential features, options and controls necessary to help REALTORS generate qualify leads via mobile marketing. We have compiled a list of features (and why they are important) that you should look for in your Real Estate Mobile Marketing solution.

• Instant Notifications- These notify you as soon as an inquiry comes in. The notification should provide both the number of the person inquiring and the basic information about the property.  You should have an option of receiving notifications via text (SMS), email or both.

• Link to Mobile Optimized Website or Virtual Tour- Many services claim to be a complete mobile package.  They include a link to the property’s virtual tour in the text message but they leave it up to the real estate agent to make sure the virtual tour is mobile optimized. By having a mobile optimized virtual tour you ensure that the prospective buyer can get the information they want without having to decipher a web site that shows up poorly on their phone.

• Email Package- Text Messaging by its nature is limited to 160 characters.  While you can pack a lot of information into that 160 characters you can’t get it all in there.  Make sure that your Real Estate Text Message provider has an email option.  This will provide you with a way to capture a leads email address and provide the lead with more information on demand.

• Call Me Now Option- I know, the lead is texting because they don’t want to call.  But, once they have the information they requested and have been able to qualify the home as one they want to see more of they are more likely to want to speak to an agent.  Why not make it easy on them and have the agent call?  It is also a way of qualifying very interested leads.

• Reporting- no program, no matter how inexpensive or simple to use is worthwhile unless it provides reporting. All reporting should include date and time of day, property information, phone number and type of inquiry (text, email package, call me, etc…).  In addition to online reporting a weekly or monthly summary that is automatically emailed to you should be part of the package because, let’s face it, you are busy and the last thing you need to do is log in to yet another web site just to run activity reports.

Before you start using Mobile Marketing for Real Estate make sure your provider has these features.

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?

Mobile Marketing is growing fast in the real estate industry and there are a lot of players out there offering different components of mobile marketing to their customers.  Below is a short list of those offerings:

• Real Estate Text Messaging
• Mobile Optimized web sites (Corporate)
• Mobile Optimized Virtual Tours
• Mobile Applications (for the iPhone, Blackberry, Droid, Smartphone)
• Toll Free Call Capture

These are just a few of the mobile offerings in the real estate industry.  Which of these are important to you?  What do you use?  What would you like to see offered?  We would like to know.

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.

Since we launched our Referral Program earlier this month, we have had a lot of agents ask us for a quick explanation of what Digital Home Info is.  We tried to put it in writing but we felt that a video just says it better.  So, below is a video explaining the Text Message / Mobile Marketing, Internet and Social Media aspects of the Digital Home Info Real Estate Marketing system.

As always, if you have any questions please feel free to contact us.

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.