My Projects
Head Down Working
2010 was a very interesting year. We started the year with three distinct options open for our company to grow. Homequest our software application, custom agent wordpress sites and M Realty our fledgling brokerage. I had the opportunity to speak at many Real Estate conferences around the country about what we think and do. I met many fun smart people and the truth is I became enamored with the talk and debate and LOVED the attention.
However the business of translating ideas and fun conversations into practice on the ground is very hard work. When you are advising your agents to adopt these ideas and their livelihood depends on it there had better be some tangible benefit for them.
Talk is cheap and brushing aside questions about ROI is dangerous. I had a moment this year when I looked in the mirror and wondered if what I was advising our agents to do was bullshit. Jeff and I decided to change our focus from industry talk/debate and presenting agents with “cool” tech and ideas to something much more substantial.
We shifted focus to $ goals and closed transaction goals then began to systematically build tracking for all our key metrics. All SM, blogging, content creation, conversion points, paths to agent/client conversations must be measured. All agent sites and content, development on HQ and agent coaching and accountability programs are now attached to measurable metrics.
This has become our obsession…to understand the paths that lead to real estate conversations and closed transactions. Test…refine…test…refine. Then to assist our agents in the adoption and consistent implementation for measurable results. Our future depends on it.
We have a very clear mission, a system to measure our progress, and a lean smart core group that knows how to get shit done!
Coaching M agents – Marshall Wells Landing page
I will get back to the featured neighborhood pages on Alicia’s site. We have produced close to 50 Neighborhood landing pages on the site but managing the process turned out to be way more complicated than we anticipated. The difficulties include organizing taking the photos, processing the photos & video, writing, and producing the supporting content with multiple people responsible. We have a revised system in place and will be back in operation next week. A big part of why we are trying to create a system for good content production is that we work directly with the agents at M to transfer best practice. Which leads me to Jewel one of our star agents that has taken on a farming project from scratch in the Pearl district adjacent to Downtown Portland.
Pearl District Real Estate
Jewel has produced landing pages for the Condos buildings she is passionate about. She is from New York and loves the converted loft style condos. The Marshall-Wells lofts condo building is a great example. In only 8 weeks Jewel has gone from not knowing what WordPress was to managing a beautiful site with very good content that has a place withing a marketing plan.
Portland Real Estate and Beyond
Hi…my name is Garron Selliken and I am the founder of M Realty and Homequest and this is my personal blog. It is a place to put thoughts and observations about the real estate industry and highlight some of the technology and practices we test here at M Realty. I work full time with my wife and amazing agent Alicia managing our Real Estate websites and assisting her Portland Real Estate team. Most of the articles here are come directly from the experience of actively working on growing our practice.
Yes…the Real Estate Blog is Dead!
My opinion is based on several years of running sites for My wife’s team and working with agents at M Realty.
When it comes to generating leads from search, the past, present and future of real estate sites is SEO, not blogging, transparency, authenticity and finding your voice. The way to get clients is to show up where the most concentrated group of most motivated buyers/sellers are hanging out and ask for the business. This is why SEO focused content kills blogging…it is targeted directly at the relevant phrases and lands on pages designed to satisfy needs AND convert into conversation. Directing visitors interested in Portland Real Estate to our site generates appointments with new clients. People searching for Homes for sale in Sellwood neighborhood will register on IDX display of listing in the neighborhood. As I tailor most of my content to support the landing pages for valuable terms am I still a blogger or have I become an SEO focused content writer…is there a difference?
I am defining the Real Estate agent blog as an agent site to publish thoughts and ideas about real estate and possibly other things. A traditional agent blog can have solid impact in the direct support of an agent sphere relationships. It can become a dynamic newsletter of sorts that can be referenced in facebook and can be the content source of actual email newsletter campaign. This site will not (in general) produce quality organic traffic from search engines that will convert into clients at a rate that justifies the effort. Unless the site is used as a support to a more traditional campaign of meeting people IRL and direct marketing its ROI sucks. If you feel it is your calling to write and this is you outlet fantastic…do it because you love it. If you see a blog as a lead generator think twice.
IMO…the future of agent sites that have measurable ROI are hybrid site that use blogging platforms (WordPress) and employ very good on page SEO targeted to terms that convert leading to landing pages that generate registrations of some sort. The “blog” or “dynamic” content serves to supplement the high quality static landing pages that are the primary conversion points of the site. That is not to say the site necessarily must become a cold site with no agent personality coming through.
The future of web generated leads belongs to agents who become very proficient in SEO, understand conversion, and can write for the humans and bots that end up on the landing pages.
Don’t get me wrong I am all for transparency and authenticity. However I would suggest spending significant time and effort on the structure and conversion so your authentic, transparent voice will produce a significant number of transactions not just an opportunity to lead a session at Barcamp. WOW that was a tad snark wasn’t it 
Thank you cards – Traditional & Tech
We are always working on systems to enhance our effectiveness. I meet so many people and generally followed friend and it has helped me cultivate more relationships. I recently had a conversation with a great agent I know who was intrigued by the SM follow up but has been writing handwritten notes to her friends and especially new people she meets. Our discussion led to ideas about how to layer new technology with this tried and true high impact activity.
Lead generation – BuzzRE Orange County
I am Speaking at a great event on April 29th in Orange County CA – BuzzRE OC
Question…what is “Lead Conversion”? I like to bring everything into the real world experience of being an agent. In my mind lead conversion occurs the moment I set an appointment with a new buyer or seller. We will be talking about conversion from IDX registrations and sphere interaction.
There’s a great lineup of smart speakers including Dustin Luther, Linsey Planeta, Stacey Harmon, Robert Luna, Gahlord Dewald, Loren Nason, Dale Chumbley, and John Lansner
Hope you can make it…register here
RETSO preview – Empowering agents 2.0
I am Speaking on Thursday March 25th at RE Tech South to brokers about how to empower agents to better use technology. Obviously a topic I care about and think about everyday at M and HQ. I put together a vid on my thoughts as I am building the presentation today.
Operations, bug killing, and growth
We have been expanding over the last year as a company. New products, HQ IDX plugin, custom website design, expanding M Realty to Seattle and Orange County CA, etc. One of the biggest challenges has become balancing new development, maintaining existing product and scaling.
We have come up with a simple model for evaluating our organization and its components.
The first priority is to establish stable operation of whats working and generating revenue. The components are placed into the “Operational Mode” section. Thankfully we have very good operations people.
After operations we focus on New ideas, Bugs and Scaling.
Ideas – New ideas and enhancements. We have no lack of ideas. we work to collect them and spend a fair amount of time playing and brainstorming. The good ones hopefully end up getting focused effort on our whiteboards and then some turned into tasks that become new features and/or product.
Bugs – Identification and killing of bugs. Must kill the bugs and make sure the number of bugs are stable or decreasing over time. Bugs are not limited to software, they are everywhere. For example, our cool metal M Realty signs keep breaking zip ties and the metal s hooks don’t work when it gets windy. We have a bug in our signs that needs killing. Who is responsible for killing it? Done!
Scale – The most difficult piece especially if it is personnel related. For example we are scaling the design portion of our company to increase the number of custom agent website we can deliver per month. We have a baseline for our current output. The medium term goal is to increase this 5X.
So in conclusion, our current best guess at how to run a company =
Weekly Review of what’s working. Cultivate ideas with a path to operations, identify bugs and how to kill each one, identify opportunities to scale and work on the bottlenecks. Repeat each week with talented team that give a shit.
That is our plan and we are sticking to it…for now
Geographical farming
Part One – Initial site construction
Is high tech farming the next big use for Websites and tech in RE? Our websites has been focused on SEO/SEM conversion for the last few years and done well but there is only so much room at the top of Google for “Portland Real Estate“. As M realty expands and we focus on helping agents build their practice it has become obvious that many agents have expertise is specific geographies often down to the neighborhood level. We are now focusing on building hyper local sites that will become the hub for agents geographical farming activity.
A good example is NWportlandblog.com that focuses on NW Portland Real Estate . We planned our basic page structure focusing on three neighborhoods. Westover, Nob Hill, Willamette Heights and built landing pages. Each landing page follows a format of Main picture, picture gallery, Text blurb, and List of all active listings. The site and initial page content took approximately 30 hrs of work from wp install, planning, page building, Photo/video shoot, widget and supportive graphics creation, etc. Homequest charges $150 plus $80/month for A Thesis theme configured with IDX plugin. and $60/hr. To duplicate the NWPortland.com site would cost approximately $1,950 with $80/mo for the HQ lead management back end and hosting.
The site launched on a new domain on 03/01/10 and within 3 days was getting organic google traffic from indexed listings on the Neighborhood landing pages. The search traffic is nice but we feel the larger value will come from going out into the community, actively viewing the inventory, blogging about market activity/conditions, engaging homeowners directly, traditional marketing, Highlighting local business community, etc.
The site is up, the basic structure is complete…now is it time to go into the community. More to come on what we learn…stay tuned.
An Unconventional invitation (pg-13)
Wednesday October 7th 4:00-6:00
Come visit with us, learn how we use social media, blogging & tech.
Please RSVP – haley@m-homes.net
We work very hard everyday to build strong real estate practices and a brokerage environment that will contribute to our agents success. Blogging, social media, Homequest and technology are part of our daily lives. It has created an environment that is both informal and very focused on success. We are opening up our office to agents to experience what we do and how we approach Real Estate. Please beware the vid below contains two BAD WORDS. But we think it represents us pretty well.
Invite to M Realty (pg-13) from M Realty on Vimeo.