If you’re a real estate broker (or any other kind of sales professional for that matter), you ought to google yourself periodically. Many if not most prospective clients are doing this to you. What does your internet presence look like? Anything embarrassing out there, from the obvious (provocative pictures) to lesser offenses? make sure you look good. This is the era of the instant background check.
I use any number of means to market my commercial properties: costar, loopnet, google base, craigslist, washington post ads, direct mail, email blasts, cold calling, etc. etc. When it comes to selling buildings, there’s still nothing that beats brokers.
When I market empty buildings, I need to reach out to cooperating brokers. Larger users of space got successful by leaning on trusted advisers. They are represented by brokers 95% of the time.
When I market larger investment property, I start with my own relatively conclusive list of owners and investors across the mid-Atlantic. Once I’ve gotten the word out to that list, I expand my efforts to include the cooperating brokerage community.
Most of the buyers the internet brings me are still “small potatoes:” they might buy a $300,000 condo from me, but rarely are they in the market for that $10 million free standing warehouse. I’m not worried about being disintermediated yet (a word we real estate brokers made up I think). The process of buying real estate is still complicated…a lot more complicated than buying a stock.
Google Base is in beta. On full launch, and with some minor tweaking, it could be the commercial real estate category killer. Really a three way killer: it has all the functionality of craigslist, ebay, and classified ads in one site.
There’s next to no property in there, but give it some time…it’s only in beta.
You can create your own Google base home page and Google will also make sure whatever you put in there is search able on Google. You can mass-upload your listings. You can sell stuff. You can tag everything. wow.
For the moment, Microsoft has edged out Google in a battle to photograph the Earth.
I was impressed with Keyhole — a satellite imaging application that allows you to “fly over” and label satellite images, and has great potential for brokers, owners and the like interested in developing sexy marketing presentations. Google showed a lot of foresight in buying this company. They rebranded it Google Earth. Google Earth can give a “simulated” 3-D view by taking satellite photos that were taken from directly overhead and “tilting” them.
Google had a great innovation with its street view photography. In certain cities, you can get street level views of (primarily downtown) areas. [Microsoft actually did this first, but only in Seattle and San Francisco. I've read they may be moving to expand this].
Taking it to the next level are the “oblique” (ie three dimensional, taken from a 40 degree angle) aerial images from Pictometry. These images are acutally shot from light aircraft and are much more useful for real estate professionals.
You can view these images from free when you pick “birds eye view” from Windows Live Search Maps. You can go to a number of vendors on the web that sell high quality Pictometry images for $25 each. I use Mapmart.
With these birds eye images, I know longer have to pay hundreds of dollars and wait for days or weeks for a professional to fly and shoot my projects. If you are in the real estate business, you owe it to yourself to start using Pictometry images for prospecting and marketing efforts.