Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog

Listing photos are important, I’d hope we all understand that by now, but virtual tours are seriously where it’s at if you want your listing to stand out from the others.

The showing of a house is one of the most important parts of the marketing process. Naturally, if you can give a prospective buyer a walk around the property without them ever leaving the comfort of their computer screen then you’re going to be at an obvious advantage.

I’m not implying that a virtual tour could ever replace a real viewing, but it could be that icing on the cake that secures a viewing in the first place. By the time a prospective buyer even calls you up, they’ve already had a 360 degree view of every room and have decided where the TV will go. And clients who have mentally moved in are the kinda people you want to be dealing with.

So, you’re convinced. You want to be one step ahead of the other agents in your locality and be pimping properties with stellar virtual tours. How do you go about it?

Luckily for you, Zoomf has partnered with smokin’ hot digital-imaging company iLOOKABOUT to offer cutting edge virtual tour photography. iLOOKABOUT uses the most up-to-the-minute technology to capture images in the most authentic and accurate way possible, seriously we have been very impressed by what these guys can do.

For more information on how iLOOKABOUT spruce up your listings, email us at info@zoomf.com and we’ll get you started

There’s a new place to search for property online, at least in the US anyway. Oodle are now proudly powering a new classifieds section on MySpace. The new and improved listings section is aimed to be more social than your average classifieds experience, with users being able to post listings for free that then link back to their MySpace profiles. Users can take advantage of MySpace blogs and bulletins to then promote their listings to their friends or allow other users to search for their listings naturally.

As well as the listings that MySpace users post themselves, users will have access to all the ads posted across the Oodle network, which currently gets around half a million new listings a day. At the moment, less than 1% of MySpace users actually look at the classifieds section, but with the right promotion this could be an interesting rival to the likes of Gumtree and Craigslist.

You betcha it is! The last couple of gems to come from Real Estate Connect relate to some of the key problems that any real estate superhero has to face…

• Your inbox has a zillion emails and keeps getting more, how the heck do you stay on top of it?
• You’ve signed up to twitter and your dog is sick, should you tweet about it?
• You want to manage projects with clients and colleagues, can it be done easily without losing your sanity?

Connect helped property professionals to answer these questions and luckily for us folk who weren’t there, there have been some nice blog posts detailing what was said.

So, if your inbox is making you want to run for the hills then check out Jay Thompson’s post on AgentGenius - ‘Approaching Inbox Zero’. There you can learn how to delete, delegate, respond, defer and do, which should help your inbox shed all that unsightly excess weight it’s been carrying.

If you’ve been listening to all the hullabaloo about Twitter and want to start pimping your property company online, you may be wondering what the best way to go about it is. Well, as Todd Carpenter points out in his post ‘People Really Do Want You To Tweet About Your Cat’ over at RealEstateTomato, the agent who just tweets links to listings and data reports is unlikely to gain any new best friends any time soon. So does that mean it’s cool to tweet about things that aren’t property related, to be (dare I say it) unprofessional? Absolutely! Social networking for business is not about being the formal square in the corner.

And then lastly, if you’re looking for an easy project management tool, Dustin Luther suggests taking a look at BaseCamp. We use BaseCamp here at Zoomf Towers so we concur that it’s a great product (and with it’s 30 day free trial you can decide that for yourself before parting with any cash).

I can’t finish this post without mentioning one of the other highlights of Connect, the Inman Innovator Awards. Major kudos to all the winners, which include the super cool Lani & Benn from AgentGenius and Derek & Co from Roost.

I guess that’s it from Connect, until next time!

You may remember a while back I posted about my crazy night out with the folks from Zappos.com, well that all came off the back of blogging and twittering. Today I just had my latest blogging perk, the gorgeous duo Gia and Grant Freer from Realseekr.com sent over a super duper care package of American groceries from sunny Florida.

Now believe it or not, Zoomf is pretty much run on American candy. Wherever Mike Carter is, a pack of yankee sweets are never far away. And this weekend, I’ll be getting my fix of all things yankee-doodle.

Want to know what I got sent? Check out the video!

We’ve harked on about it before, but it seems there are still plenty of agents who haven’t grasped the importance of property photos in a listing. Over at Real Estate Connect, it’s been a subject of debate at one of the panel sessions. Lorna Borenstein, president of Move Inc, said that their research had shown that consumers doubt the credibility of the agent when there aren’t multiple photos on a listing. And she’s right, a lack of photos is likely to make you think either that the property has something to hide or that the agent simply can’t be bothered. Neither of those are good things for your potential buyer/tenant to be thinking.

John Helm, CEO of the American apartment listing site MyNewPlace.com, said that their research had shown listings without photos only get around 25% of the click-thrus that listings with photos get. In today’s market, surely you want to give your listings the best chance for a click-thru? Make sure your agents carry (charged) digital cameras with them! And then when choosing the main listing photo, choose the picture that best represents the property. If the best part about a property is its fantastic garden, then don’t make the main listing photo one of the kitchen. Simple stuff, but all too often forgotten.

Remember…

• No photos - implies the agent can’t be bothered or that the property is a bit crappy.
• One photo - may whet the appetite, but if comparing with other listings with plenty more photos then the one photo listing will probably get overlooked.
• Lots of lovely photos - leads to lots of lovely enquiries! People can see every room, imagine where they’ll put the TV and will have already mentally moved in before you’ve even picked up the phone.

Yes, this is a real listing photo. No, you don’t need fake people to sell a house. In fact, you don’t want real people in your property photos either.

After all my whining that I wasn’t at Connect yesterday, I almost felt as though I was there thanks to the marvels of Twitter. Anyone that also wants to stay on top of the action should track the tag ‘#icsf‘ over at Summize, that way you won’t miss a tweet.

Zillow’s Drew Meyers has already written up a great post summarizing what went down at one of the morning panel sessions yesterday, the best gem to come from it seems to be from Linda Davis who (quite rightly) chimed…

“If you have a crappy business, a blog isn’t going to help.”

And whilst everyone is playing with real estate trading cards and getting excited about blogging at Connect, Trulia seem to be releasing their very own blogging platform. As reported by our gorgeous friends at AgentGenius, Trulia are (very quietly at this point) releasing their own blogging platform for agents that’s not a million miles away from what we’re used to seeing at ActiveRain. Is this going to crazily shake things up over in the US? We’ll have to wait and see. The usual concerns surrounding SEO and ownership of content are being aired in the comments sections of various posts covering the story but one thing is for sure, Trulia’s got consumer traffic…and tonnes of it.

It seems impossible to tweet, blog or flickr without being constantly reminded that we’re NOT at Connect this year. Real Estate Connect is a 3 day knowledgefest where the great and good from the world of property come together to learn, network and drink beer. And it’s taking place right now over in sunny San Francisco. A quick look at the conference programme shows how useful an event like this is to attend to anyone working in property. Who knows, maybe we should start a British version?

Anyway, we couldn’t get there this time around but we’ll be reading all the coverage with green eyes and we’ll link to the best Connect stories over the next couple of days.

I can list a number of reasons why I wish I was there right now, aside from meeting all my RE pals in the flesh, how about meeting the Trulia Marker Men? They’re too cute for words

MARKER MEN Welcome You to San Francisco from trulia real estate on Vimeo.