Altera Performance Group » Web

Then and Now

Jay OHare — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 17:35:07 +0000

Almost 2 years ago we took screenshots of Steamboat real estate websites for a study we were doing. Almost 2 years later (an eternity in online terms) NOTHING has changed. These companies/managing brokers don’t get it. They made their web purchase and set it on autopilot. Same head-shots, same pitch, same tired photos, same 1999 website and the same fundamentally wrong approach to real estate marketing.

Over 85% of home searches START online and these companies clearly don’t care. What an opportunity for those who do.

Click on an image to enlarge.

(If you are reading this in a news reader or email click here to see the large photos)

Steamboat Real Estate

Colorado Group

Old Town Realty

Pam Vanatta

Ken Gold

Buyer’s Agent

Buyer’s Resource

Re-Max

Lisa Olson

Sotheby’s

Stuff You Might Like

Jay OHare — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:51:54 +0000

I just set up a new box on the sidebar called “Stuff you might like.” It updates automatically as I’m cruising the interwebs and find something I hope you readers would find useful. The content won’t necessarily be real estate specific but stuff that can make your day a bit better

And for you RSS gurus you can subscribe here:

Stuff you might like

Cool SEO Tool

Jay OHare — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 18:31:12 +0000

Ever wanted to know how search engine values your site? Ever wanted to know how a search engine values your competition’s site? This cool tool will give you an answer.

Website Grader is a free tool that evaluates your website or any site you enter in the form and returns some really useful information. It doesn’t give you a super in-depth analysis but it does provide a nice overview with easy to understand explanations of what the issues mean and how to fix them.

Check it out at www.websitegrader.com

Steamboat Springs

Steamboat Domain Names

Jay OHare — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:35:34 +0000

A quick review of the current Homes & Land reveals the following URLs that contain the word “Steamboat”

buysteamboatsprings.com

steamboatvillagebrokers.com

steamboatproperties.com

steamboatlistings.com

buyeragentsteamboat.com

stanforssteamboat.com

sharonsteamboat.com

howesenplacesteamboat.com

remax-steamboat-co.com

steamboatdream.com

steamboatsprings4sale.com

buysteamboat.com

steamboatagents.com

steamboat-realestate.com

onesteamboatplace.com

steamboatrealestate.com

forsalesteamboat.com

steamboat4sale.com

steamboatmountainproperties.com

steamboatestates.com

prudentialsteamboatrealty.com

olympiansteamboat.com

alpinemountainranch.com

What gets me about these domain names is that none of them are memorable, interesting or unique. The biggest offenders are

steamboatsprings4sale.com
steamboat4sale.com

steamboat-realestate.com
steamboatrealestate.com

Utterly confusing. Domain names are essentially free and yet these Steamboat Springs brokers are content to stick with confusingly similar domains.

Since a primary function of a broker is marketing, the domain name of choice not only reflects on that brokers marketing and understanding of internet marketing but also can impact the response rates to their magazine ads.

Stinky Water

“stinkywater.com” is one of my favorite domain names for a Steamboat Springs business but it’s for sale for $800. If I had a true need for it I’d buy it in a heartbeat. It speaks to an aspect we all know and love about Steamboat Springs and it’s memorable. A week from now you’ll remember stinkywater.com but you’ll be hard pressed to truly remember any of the names above in any meaningful context. Yes stinkywater.com is odd & “out there” but that’s precisely what’s needed in a very, very crowded market.

Here’s a few tools to help find a unique domain name:

www.nameboy.com This service will search for available domain names based on your keyword input.

www.dnscoop.com Fun site that tells you how much your domain name is worth as well as other stats.

www.snapnames.com If you subscribe to the snapnames newsletter, you can see which interesting domains are about to be sold for not much money. No guarantees as to how effective this service is, but it’s a neat way to think about what to build next.

80/20 and Your Website

Jay OHare — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 23:00:59 +0000

Click on the image below. (RSS readers may have to visit the blog to see this.)

What Are You Missing?

Jay OHare — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:15:34 +0000

I’m at the NAR conference in Vegas and for those of you who aren’t here, I’m posting pictures from my iPhone of some interesting sights from the convention. You can see the photos here:

http://gallery.mac.com/jayohare#100086

Cool stuff here and an absolutely huge event.

Information Video

Jay OHare — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 19:14:26 +0000

If You Only Do One Thing Today, Watch This Video

This video speaks to one of the most important aspects of your real estate business – information and the creation & organization of it.

Understanding that consumers are seeking, creating and organizing useful information is key to the future of your business.

Click here to view the embedded video.

How can you enhance their experience? How can you tap into these rich resources? Others are providing tools for your potential customers. What tools are you providing? Try these links on for size:
http://www.terabitz.com/
http://outside.in/Boulder_CO
http://www.streetadvisor.com/
http://www.iggyshouse.com/default.aspx
http://www.yourstreet.com/steamboat-springs-co

With 80+% of real estate customers looking for answers online what do you have of true, current & relevant value to offer them when they come knockin’ on your site? Are they coming to you way downstream because others are helping them make sense of information upstream and you’re not?

Those who get this video & embrace it will have an excellent chance to succeed.

Those who don’t will simply create more opportunity for those who do.

You owe it to yourself to spend a few uninterrupted minutes watching. Then, I’d watch it again.

Note:

This blog post belongs to 4 categories within this blog (Tech, Web, Info & Video). See that Category Cloud over there on the right? The various categories grow in size relative to the amount of content in them. Information here is flexible, movable and relevant.

Why can’t the MLS be that way? After all it’s just data. Why do I have to search using the same tired criteria (#bedrooms, #bathrooms…). Why can’t I search by elements that are important to me – morning sun, rural road, pine trees, XYZ school? There are companies out there now trying to figure this out – Google Trullia, Zillow. It’s a shame the NAR isn’t among them. That ultimately hurts you.

5.5 Questions to Ask Your Web Designer

Jay OHare — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 15:51:08 +0000

Anyone looking to get a little nip & tuck or a full blown extreme makeover of their website has a lot of options and a lot elements to consider. Here are 5.5 questions to ask before you get started. The questions are designed to give you insight into a web designer’s thinking. The way we see it, there’s plenty of nuts & bolts type questions to ask but the better thinker they are, the better site & experience you’ll get. That’s where these questions come in. Hopefully these questions will help you find someone who will create a unique presence and give you the tools to help your site succeed.

1. How much does a website cost?

If you get an immediate answer or a ball park answer this may not be the shop for you. The problem with this is there’s no way to know how much a site will cost without an understanding of what your needs are and what you want to accomplish with a site. If you get an answer right off the bat, you’ll probably get a templated site that looks like everyone else and does little to differentiate you to visitors. Ideally they’ll want to know a lot about your business and your clients. So look for and expect deep, probing question.

2. What’s your process?

Many small shops don’t have a process & they wing it. Process is important because it means you’re project is more likely to avoid problems and meet your expectations. If they do have a process, look for elements of “communication” as a key area of their process. Things like “review meetings” are a good sign because you’ll be in the loop upstream in time to make corrections if necessary.

3. How will I be able to update my site?

This is a big one in my mind. Most small businesses should be able to easily update their own site with timely information relevant documents and elements that keep the site fresh. All too often however business owners are at the mercy of a web shop’s schedule. The updates don’t happen fast enough, they often have mistakes and the whole process becomes a big hassle. It becomes easier to ignore the site which then quickly becomes stale.

Instead, make sure that you have a clear method of updating and adding to your site. Insist on tools and/or functionality that’s easy to use, and learn how to use them.

4. How long will it take to finish?

The correct answer here is a site is never finished. An acceptable answer might be something like “Phase 1 will be done in 6 weeks.” There’s always room for improvements, tweaks, value-add-ons and other work to consistently make your site a better experience for your visitors. If they’re a blow-n-go shop you may find you’re abandoned 6 months down the road when you’re ready to revise/add to your site.

5. Are most of your solutions CSS or straight HTML based?

This gets a little technical but a CSS based site will give you much more flexibility than an HTML based site. CSS stands for cascading style sheets. With a CSS based site, the formatting elements for the entire site are controlled within a single file. Why should you care? It makes managing and tweaking a site much easier. Say for example you decide 3 weeks after the site launches you don’t like the font color. You can make a single edit to the CSS style sheet and the whole site changes. With an HTML based site the same change requires manually editing each and every page to make the same change. This blog is CSS based and I can change the ENTIRE look by clicking a button. That’s only possible with CSS.

Tech stuff aside, a shop that’s using CSS indicates they’re committed to the best of breed solutions.

5.5 How many other real estate sites have you done?

Conventional wisdom would say “go with a pro” someone who’s done a ton of real estate sites. But I’d challenge that notion. What you want is fresh thinking not been-there-done-that-so-here’s-your-site thinking. A shop that really understands usability, design and experiences but is light on real estate development could be just the ticket for a stunning fresh site. Remember, at the end of the day it’s not about what you think is great, it’s about what your visitors think is great. Sometimes we’re so in the bottle and can’t read the label that we need this outside perspective.

Happy hunting!

Free Stuff

Jay OHare — Wed, 26 Sep 2007 17:04:19 +0000

What a great time of year it is!

I thought you might like to know that most of Altera’s photography is available online at full resolution and is free.

Some old skool shutterbugs may frown on this but we think it’s a lot better to get this stuff out there for people to see & use rather than sit locked up on our hard drives.

The pictures are covered under a creative commons license so you can’t sell them directly and if you do use a photo, you have to give attribution to us. So use them how you like for things like a brochure for your business or a greeting card to a friend etc.

So head on over to our account on flickr.com and check it out. We’re adding pics all the time and most are tagged on their mapping tool so you can see where the picture was taken .

Free stuff is fun!

Canary In A Coal Mine

Jay OHare — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 12:02:21 +0000

Canaries were once regularly used in coal mining as an early warning system. Toxic gases such as carbon monoxide and methane in the mine would kill the bird before affecting the miners. Because canaries tend to sing much of the time, they provided both a visual and audible cue in this respect.

Is housevalues.com a canary in the real estate coal mine?

Several years ago I got suckered by a TV commercial. We were considering selling our home and a commercial advertising an online service to give us the value of our home caught my attention. I should have known it was too good to be true. I was envisioning a site where I enter my home information and viola I get a value estimate. What a cool service I thought. So I logged on to housevalues.com and was immediately disappointed. What I was told in the commercial was not what I got. Instead of a service built with my needs in mind it was nothing more than a form promising someone would get in touch with me. The dreaded lead-trap. I knew that entering any information here was a prescription for a lifetime of spam. I quietly closed the browser.

So I wasn’t surprised to read this week that housevalues.com just laid off 100 employees and is closing a call center. They call their business “lead generation” and “lead management” but that’s just putting lipstick on a pig – it’s a lead trap. Consumers have been abused by these services for so long, they’re no longer responsive. Funny thing is, the CEO of housevalues.com blames brokers for the trouble by saying brokers aren’t investing in marketing as much. Uh, hello, maybe the data is junk. Most brokers have subscribed to some sort of lead service and the ones I’ve spoken with no longer subscribe because of that very reason – the leads are junk and there’s no value.
The lead trap game has changed dramatically in the past few years. Here’s a few reasons why:

1. Consumers are exposed to over 1100 advertising messages per day.
2. There is more choice than there has ever been.
3. For most people spam has reached unmanageable proportions.
4. Identity theft has caused most people to be wary of anything online especially forms asking for information.
5. Companies broke their promises.
6. Companies didn’t ask permission.

The last point, asking permission, is probably the biggest factor in either growing a business or killing a business like this. housevalues.com will argue that everyone who signed up acknowledged the “terms & conditions” but that’s not permission in my book.

I had a similar experience recently right here in Steamboat Springs. Buyers Resource website (www.servingsteamboat.com) is a lead trap. You get one free search of the MLS then you have to pay. If you want to search again, you have to fill out their form. You have to pay them with your information. So I played along and filled out the form. They offer several opportunities to opt-out of being contacted – the default is their assumption that I want to be contacted. I opted out of all contact.
I got a phone call within 15 minutes of filling out the form.
I thought I said don’t contact me?

I got an email that day.
I thought I said don’t contact me?

I was then locked out of viewing any other broker other than than the one who was assigned to me by the computer round-robin algorithm. They broke their promise. I’m sure they’re great people who got sold a story for a marketing product that is now out of date.

As these channels mature we’ll see some things that once looked like a great idea don’t work anymore. It’s up to us to adjust how we do business to account for changes in the market. Take a clue from the canary in the coal mine, housevalues.com. The lead-trap game is over, the customer is in control and in a world full of infinite choices if you don’t give them what they want and treat them with respect they’ll find someone else who will.