My Projects
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.
Explore tech for fun!
I got an awesome longboard for christmas this year and decided it would be fun to throw the gopro cam on the nose. Plus I recently washed my 2g iphone and got me a new 3GS. Vid from phone right to youtube. Easy and fun video publishing to blogs is here!
WordcampPDX - presentation notes
Last Sunday I presented our IDX and Non IDX versions of the octomap WP plug in. We still have some development to do in order to get it into a distributable state. Here are my notes and the links to the sites I referenced.
Wordcamp PDX
Octomap plug-in demo
I can get really spastic sometimes. I am very susceptible to going off on tangents.
In trying to figure out how to cover this subject I decided to trace our thinking and dev over the last 1 1/2.
Little Background
We develop property search sites for agents and we are agents with a brokerage here in PDX. Our primary focus has been on neighborhood level map property search. About two years ago we decided to use WP as the front end for all our sites.
Mportlandrealestate.com this was our first site for my real estate team. its focused on property search. then we thought it would be cool to add community content to show that we are out in the community. (demo site - community content, neighborhood search, author in hover)
Our little brokerage has been growing and all the agents are blogging and twittering and being really real estate 2.0.
Marisa’s sites: pdxmetroproperties & Modernhomesportland.com
where is she part of the community and what is she passionate about. (demo sites - activity, montavilla, modern)
As we started to grow we needed a corporate site for M Realty - Mportlandhomes.com - so we of course made a cool WP theme. then can a little ah ha. what if we fed posts form all the agent sites into the main site so people could see which agents where active in the different parts of the community. (demo site - the content is carrying the people)
Outside of real estate
PortlandOctopus.com
Early on we saw the power of wordpress posts about neighborhood shops, events etc. we were getting long tail traffic to our real estate sites.
We created a site for local content called portlandoctopus.com. it has no real estate listing content is a magazine type multi author blog site. Map with categories.
More octosites. Our support guy Tyler started Portlandroots.com about green issues. and Haley and I are working on a cool site endpoverty.theoctopus.com
SImilar to the real estate site we felt it would be cool to aggregate posts from multiple sources and the use geography as the association rather than time or category.
We created theOctopus.com as the main hub that aggregates content for the site on this MU install.
Demo the post editor -
Geotag
Categorize
Syndicate
Map Sidebar
Next steps.
You can create a site on our theoctopus.com site in fact we would love to get a core group of blogger interested in local and global stuff.
Few more bits of basic functionality to add in the next few weeks. one of which is the ability to make folders to save content to retrieve later or share.
Octomap a download-able plugin for wp.org sites. We hope to have it all done and out by the end of the year.
Anyone who would like to create sites on our theOctopus.com and help beta would be much appreciated
Animation of Ideas
I recently went to Inman Connect in San Francisco. Tons of great Ideas and very smart people talking about RE issues. One of the most compelling items for me was the use of animation to convey ideas in a very fun way. We have all the equipment so we decided to write a script and try it. I would love feedback on this first attempt. Does it hold your attention? does it convey a message? What is the message? is it entertaining? thanks for the help:)
Why M Realty from chris lynch on Vimeo.
WalkScore heat mapping
WalkScore is a data tool that allows you to look at a property as it relates to walkable places in the community. The heat map shows the concentration of walk scores as an overlay. You can use it as a guide to listings that have a high Walkscore…or low walk score if you hate walking:) Use the live version to search portland real estate with the Walkscore heat map.
Vblogging from the M car
Is vblogging from a moving car safe? I say yes. Matt from Walkscore says “unsafe at any speed”. Verdict = safe yes very safe. In fact maybe safer that driving while not vblogging.
Smart WordPress Lightbox
We love this Lightbox modification. It scans the page looking at each image then on click brings up the lightbox. It dynamically loads an image viewer or pano viewer based on the image scan. The effect is that you can upload any combination of panoramic and normal images into the next gen gallery and the light box will sort out the rest.
The lightbox will go full screen when activated on the normal page view and will light box the map div when viewing the post from the map view
This is a gallery of panos and regular stills. click the thumbs the scroll the next an previous.
Panoramic Gallery
We are utilizing Next gen gallery to manage our image galleries and we modified Lightbox 2 to load a Pano viewer if it encounters an image it thinks is a pano. The pano viewer is only working in Map view currently. click here for map view
M The new brokerage
I always feel like such a goof when I see myself on video! But this is me. Please give me some feedback on this video. I am contemplating placing on our corporate site. Is it too long? to informal? too anything? Thanks
Setting the Appointment
You have spent the time and effort to build good traffic to your site. People like what you have to say and they are obviously interested in Real estate because they are searching for homes, saving homes and sometimes even requesting showings. Congratulations!! Now the big question…are you doing any business?
If the answer is no or not much, there is a conversion problem. The first step to conversion is identifying motivated people, the second is asking for an appointment Yet many agents I see don’t take this step. Your conditioned knee jerk reaction to someone saying “I am interested in Real Estate” should be great “Would you be open to getting together for a cup of coffee to see if we are a good fit to work together.” Or something to that effect.
Of course many times the prospect does not come right out and say “I am interested in real estate please help me”. However, if you are consistently paying attention to the communication you will see “I am interested” conveyed in many ways. The key is to listen and ask questions this is a skill and some people have it naturally and some of us have to learn it.
Listen for any sign of “I am interested in real estate” then ask “would you be open to getting together to see if we are a good fit.” That’s the simple take away message.
DO NOT follow with. great let me run back to the office and send you tons of crap about me and the market to prove to you that I am a great agent and know what I am talking about…oh and I always put my clients interest first and some shit about my personal mission statements;…oh and here is a picture of me on the top of Everest with my shaman….oh and did you know I am not like all those other agents (who are Idiots) I always call back…oh and the ten thousand other things you could say.
Just meet with them to see if you would be a good fit to work together…then take it form there.