Local to your specific area--and refreshed monthly--the SmartBroker Report summarizes key real estate sales data, including the latest home price trends, sales transactions by type, total sales today vs. last year, negative equity sales, foreclosure trends, and REO inventory trends.

This is the fourth in a series of articles that began with “Connecting with Internet Savvy Consumers”, posted on March 13, and is available here on BrokerCafe. Part 2 – “Creating Differential Value” was posted on April 12, and Part 3 – “Good Enough Is the Enemy of Better” was posted on May 1. If you haven’t seen these articles, I encourage you to peruse them first, to better understand the context for this series, which concludes with this installment.

In the Lead Wars, we’re not always so lucky to have a batch of fresh, warm hand-raisers waiting for us each morning as we stroll in our offices with our high hopes and vanilla lattes. Though a steady stream of leads, through the brokerage pipe to your morning screen, might be Nirvana – the reality is many of the leads come through old fashioned, grind-it-out prospecting. If you’re not on the receiving side of the boss’s “Glengarry Leads” (you know those, right?) or the red referral phone isn’t ringing off the hook, then finding prospects in the farm is still the go-getter’s way to go and get.

I’ve heard that 80% of the times, realtors don’t get called again to list the same home they helped their (happy) clients purchase. Sure, lots of things happen in those five or so years. People forget your name, forget your brokerage, get a hot tip at a back yard barbecue about the hotshot realtor who helped them fetch top dollar, or just the messy details of life conspire to wipe away your name into the churn bucket. For successful realtors, the secret is not only getting plenty of leads and lots of referrals, but also retaining their happy clients for the second and third transactions down the road.

Sometimes what you don’t see matters most. Every webpage should contain information that you won’t see in the main section of your web browser. This information is contained in what are known as Meta Tags. Meta tags exist to help search engines determine what any given webpage is about. Careful management of these tags can go a long way towards good search engine placement.

This is the third in a series of articles that began with “Connecting with Internet Savvy Consumers”, posted on March 13 and available here on BrokerCafe. Part 2 – “Creating Differential Value” was posted on April 12. If you haven’t seen these articles, you may want to read them first to understand the context for this series, which will conclude with the next installment (Part 4).

Social media is like the sexy, enigmatic guest at a cocktail party that everyone can’t stop talking about. It’s still shiny, new and let’s face it…shrouded in a haze of mystery. Though its users are in the millions globally, many of us are still wrapping our heads around how exactly to utilize it and apply it effectively and productively to our business strategies. Its stronghold on online media, 500 million plus users on Facebook alone, dictate that we cannot afford to ignore this audience, so a social media presence is increasingly becoming a core piece of branding and marketing planning for countless companies and rightly so.

Most of us pay a professional to build and maintain our Real Estate website. I’m going to share four things you should check to see if you are getting your money’s worth. Time and again I see good looking websites that don’t rank well because of simple errors. I suggest you check the following four items as a litmus test.