Bedford NY area luxury market down 14% | RobReportBlog
Homes selling for more than $2,000,000 – last six months
2012
23 homes sold
2011
27 homes sold
There are currently 135 homes for sale asking over $2,000,000. At the current rate it will take 35.22 months to sell these homes. There is a great inventory of un sold homes to choose from.
Real estate brokers and agents who want more buyers and sellers to discover them on the Internet — and to be impressed by what they find — can start by putting themselves in the shoes of their would-be clients.
If your market is Atlanta, Google “best Realtors Atlanta” or “best places to live Atlanta.” Are you in the results? Where?
Try Googling your own name or your brokerage’s name, and see what comes up — your website, or sites over which you have little or no control?
If you Google your name and “reviews,” what are people saying about you?
This little exercise is one example of what Patrick Grandinetti, head of industry across the real estate vertical at Google, calls finding the “pulse” of online consumer behavior.
Once you’ve found the consumer pulse, he said, respond — either by creating content that will draw “organic” (unpaid) traffic from search engines, or by buying keywords and paying for a set amount of “clicks” (traffic to your website).
Google has an arsenal of tools dedicated to helping you not only create effective content and keywords, but measure the results on your website. Grandinetti made sure to touch on as many of them as he could in a presentation to a room full of Realtors Sunday.
Speaking at the National Association of Realtors’ annual Conference and Expo, Grandinetti seemed intent on winning over any skeptics in the room who might still be spending a significant portion of their marketing and advertising budget offline.
For converts, he also provided detailed insight into how to use a number of Google tools — many free — to grow their business (Grandinetti’s Google real estate team posts updates on Twitter using the handle @GoogleRE — a Web page is in the works).
Having spent nearly a decade in advertising at some big-name firms like Saatchi & Saatchi, DDB, and McCann Erickson before making the move to Google in 2007, Grandinetti understands how traditional advertising works — and how the wealth of information available to consumers on the Internet has undermined its effectiveness.
In the old days, companies with household brand names like Procter & Gamble operated on the premise that there were two “moments of truth” that could make or break sales of their products, he said.
The first moment of truth came when a consumer was, say, standing in front of a shelf of products at a supermarket, with only a few seconds to decide which one to buy.
Consumers had to make a spot decision based on price, their previous knowledge about each product and brand, and whatever additional information its packaging managed to convey.
The second moment of truth was the experience they had when they actually used the product — say toothpaste — for the first time. If they liked it, chances were they’d keep buying it.
“Procter & Gamble says if you can win at the first and second moments of truth, you have a high likelihood of retaining that customer for life,” Grandinetti said.
Google’s ‘zero moment of truth’
But today, consumers can obtain detailed information about virtually any product with a few taps on a smartphone’s touch screen. Advertising may only serve as the impetus for a consumer to launch their own online investigation.
Google calls the decision that results from this online research the “zero moment of truth,” or ZMOT.
Grandinetti told a story about his father purchasing a Canon digital camera after seeing a TV ad featuring Ashton Kutcher.
“I said Dad, he advertised for Nikon,” Grandinetti recalled. After seeing the ad, his father had gone online to research cameras. “He saw an ad for Nikon, but Canon won in that zero moment of truth,” Grandinetti said.
Thanks to online reviews, one consumer’s experience using a product — their “second moment of truth” — can become another consumer’s zero moment of truth.
Consumers have been always been willing do some homework on big purchases like a car or a home. But the rise of consumer rating sites and other sources of online information — and the ease of accessing it via mobile devices — means that the “zero moment” comes into play even with more modest purchases.
Google is so enamored with the concept — which dovetails nicely with the company’s business model — that it’s published an e-book, “Winning the Zero Moment of Truth.”
“Over the past couple of years, online research is changing the nature of the game,” Grandinetti said.
From January 2009 through June 2012, searches related to automobiles were up 262 percent, as were searches related to travel (up 211 percent) and real estate (253 percent), he said.
Applying ZMOT to real estate
Think of real estate brokers and agents as products that consumers research, and it’s not hard to understand how the “zero moment” would apply to them.
Brokers and agents not only need to be discovered, they need people to discover things about them that will differentiate them from the competition.
Finding the pulse of online consumer behavior makes it easier to create relevant website content and keywords.
The process doesn’t have to be rigorous or complex. Grandinetti noted that a quick way to get a feel for what consumers are searching for is to start entering a search term, and see what suggestions Google Instant displays as you type.
As you begin typing “best real estate,” for example, Google Instant may suggest search terms like “best real estate websites,” “best real estate apps,” or even “best real estate companies to work for,” because that’s how most users complete that phrase.
Showing up in a search of “best real estate companies to work for” in your market might not seem like an obvious way to connect with buyers and sellers.
But, Grandinetti asked, “Wouldn’t your customers want to use the company that’s best to work for?”
Google Trends is a free tool that provides more insight, allowing users to type in up to five search terms, and see indexed query growth over time. Users can see results at the global, national, state or local level, choosing the time period that they want to view.
A chart generated using Google Trends shows search volume for “foreclosures” has declined in the Orlando area in the last month, but still outnumbers “vacation homes,” “investment property,” “short sales,” and “rental properties.”
To make sure that Google’s spiders find the unique content you create for your site, Grandinetti recommended Google Webmaster Tools for optimizing websites for crawling.
Grandinetti also recommended another free tool, Google Reader, for staying on top of news about what’s happening in your real estate market and what people are saying about rival companies.
Better to lead than follow?
Many brokers and agents may find that time-tested, proven methods like advertising in newspapers are still working for them today. But Grandinetti suggested that those who haven’t given much thought about how to “win the zero moment,” should feel some urgency to do so.
“Be nimble — experiment,” he said. “Don’t be afraid to innovate.”
There’s often an advantage to being the first to stake out new territory online, he said, citing the example of a “little recipe gadget” Betty Crocker launched that captured the eye of 81,800 users after six months. When Kraft launched what Grandinetti described as a much more sophisticated app, it had only 9,900 users after six months. Betty Crocker won eight times more users because they were first, he said.
Grandinetti encouraged brokers and agents to at least experiment with AdWords, the pay-per-click ad campaigns built around keywords.
“See how many leads you get from spending $50 or $100 day,” he said. “Play around in Google AdWords, it’s an amazing tool.”
To boost your rankings in organic (unpaid) search results, create content that answers questions that your would-be clients are asking.
“Homebuyers have so many questions,” Grandinetti said. “You know how to help them. Position yourself as the expert.”
YouTube videos are a good way to demonstrate your expertise. Choose specific topics that are relevant and useful to your target audience.
“Tips for first time home buyers in Bay Area California,” is a great example of a specific subject that will attract potential clients, he said.
“Don’t be afraid to make a homegrown video of yourself,” he said, citing the YouTube video above as an example.
YouTube — a Google company — is the second-largest search site in the world, he said.
You can build up your customer base by signing up subscribers to your YouTube videos. Create a YouTube channel, and put its URL on your business card.
Research commissioned by Google shows people take three months to one year from the time they begin researching a home purchase until closing (33 percent take three to six months, and 27 percent take 6 months to a year, he said).
Keeping a steady stream of information to those people as they do their research can help you win the zero moment, he said.
Google’s social media offering, Google+, allows users to organize and communicate with their customer networks via circles, targeting specific messages only to first-time homebuyers, or second-home buyers, for example.
“I send one message to one group, another message to another group,” Grandinetti said.
Like Facebook, Google+ also offers the option of creating a business page that’s geared for building a large audience and marketing to it.
Adding a +1 button to your website allows visitors to recommend the content they find there to other Google search users, and share it on Google+.
Google’s “enterprise class” web analytics tool, Google Analytics, is also free because, Grandinetti said, “we believe, if you have better understanding of the data, you’re going to be a better customer for us.”
Grandinetti’s final piece of advice for brokers was to “make plans to win at ZMOT (zero moment of truth). The No. 1 thing you can do is put someone in charge in the ZMOT. If you don’t put someone in charge, it’s not going to happen.”
Most bloggers I know want to reduce their bounce rates. Sometimes it can seem as if it doesn’t matter what the bounce rate for a page actually is, we want it to be lower!
While it’s a stretch to expect we’ll hit a zero bounce rate, for most bloggers, it is worth looking at your bounce rates regularly, and trying to find ways to reduce them where appropriate.
While blogging’s about people—not just numbers—bounce rates can give you hints about the ways individuals are using your blog, and where you can help them out. In this post, I’d like to explain that in a bit more detail.
What is a bounce?
You undoubtedly know what a bounce is—a user who lands on our page from an external source, then leaves our blog without looking at any other pages. It’s a “single pageview” usage of our site.
But what does a bounce mean?
- Did the reader get what they came for, and leave?
- Were they disappointed by what they saw on your blog page?
- Did they arrive at the page expecting to see something else?
- Is the content current and compelling—and clearly so?
- Is it clear from a single glance at the page what your blog is, does, and delivers?
- Are there clear paths from that page to other actions or information that are likely to meet the needs of target users?
- Are the bouncers regular readers who check out all your posts, so each time they just come to the latest one, read it, and go again>
Understanding the possible reasons for the bounce is an important step in doing something to reduce the bounce rate itself. Let’s look at a case study from ProBlogger to see exactly how the diagnosis of reasons for a high bounce rate can go.
The bounces, and the page
On a usual trawl through the site’s stats one month, I spotted this:
These stats were for a single month. As you can see, this page attracted some good views, and almost 95% of them were from new visitors! But the bounce rate was really high, the time on site low, and the average visit duration? Terrible!
My first thought was to visit the page itself. It didn’t take me long to find a few issues—let’s step through some of the main ones I found (note that I’ve updated the post since, so these items have been addressed on the live page):
- The opening dated the article. This piece has a publication date of 2008, but even if the new visitors didn’t see that, the opening, which would have been fine at that time, was written when I was a Twitter newbie—not ideal these days!
- This problem was amplified by the outdated Twitter follower number I’d quoted. I mentioned in the post that I had 5500 followers; now that number’s over 160,000.
- I’d included a link to Twitip in the opening. This immediately pulled readers through to one of my other sites, which doesn’t generate any income. While the content had been valuable, that site’s a bit dated now, due to a lack of regular updates. It certainly seemed smarter to try to keep these new visitors on problogger.com a bit longer, rather than syphon them off to Twitip.
- Much of the content in the article itself was dated.
- The post didn’t provide many links to other great articles we have on topics like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and other social networks, and social network engagement strategies, here at ProBlogger—simply because that information wasn’t available back in 2008 when I’d written the post.
Yep, this page was pretty outdated! But I bet most sites that have been around for a while will probably have a page or two that are in a similar state.
Sources of bouncing traffic
Okay, so I knew I had a problem with the content of the page—and there were plenty of opportunities to improve it. But in order to make the right improvements—improvements that would give me the best chance of reducing that bounce rate by actually meeting individuals’ expectations—I wanted to know what the users were expecting to see when they came to the page. What needs did they have?
So I took a look at the traffic sources for the page:
This was interesting. For any blog that gets a lot of its new traffic from search engines, you might expect the main traffic source to be Google. And when I first looked at the page in question, I’d imagined that most of the traffic to this page was coming from search and being pulled to Twitip. In fact, the traffic was coming from Twitip.
Understanding how the page is being used
Now I was getting a pretty clear idea of how this page was being used, and why the bounce rate was so high.
Twitip users were following a link from that site to this article. The second paragraph of the post was directing them right back to Twitip. In that case, would they feel that ProBlogger was more of an authority on Twitter than Twitip? Not likely. No wonder the bounce rate was so high!
But, as expected, Google was also among the top three referrers, and that traffic had a bounce rate of more than 90%.
Beyond content
Knowing that this page was being visited mainly by new users, it was worth looking beyond the content itself, to the page’s layout, branding, and design.
This page is laid out in the same way as the others on my blog, many of which—even if they mainly attract new users—don’t have such high bounce rates. This suggests that the layout probably isn’t the problem.
Now, the major call to action—the main point of engagement and interaction—on my blog’s content pages is to comment. Comments had long since closed on this post, so users may have struggled to find their way to other relevant content on the site at the post’s end. I’d included a Further Reading list there, but the articles were no longer current.
Yet, given how outdated the post was, and the tiny average visit duration, I guessed the visitors I was getting probably weren’t making it that far through the post anyway.
Understanding your bounces
As you can see, a little sleuthing can go a long way in helping you to understand the reasons for high bounce rates.
I try not to be thrown into a panic by the numbers alone. When I look a little deeper, I usually hit on more information that can help you take action on the bounces—if indeed that’s what you want.
In the case of this page, we made some tweaks to bring the content up to date an try to draw search traffic more deeply into the site.
But the reality for the high bounce rate from Twitip users is this: Twitip targets a different audience from ProBlogger. While it’s not unlikely that bloggers will read Twitip, that site is at once far more focused (Twitter tips only!) than this one, and more broad (it targets anyone who wants to use Twitter better—which could include casual, social users of the network, right through to online marketers in corporate environments).
So while ProBlogger contains Twitter tips, to try to convert traffic from Twitip into readers of this blog is probably a bit of a challenge. The two audiences want different things. While it was definitely worthwhile updating the ProBlogger post, the Twitip audience, on the whole, probably isn’t going to be interested in what we’re doing over here.
And that’s an important thing to realise: not all bounces are bad, and not all need addressing. Many do and will, and they’re the ones you’re better to spend your time trying to fix. But you won’t be able to work out which ones they are unless you take a few minutes to dig into the facts behind the bounces in the first place—to think about the individual users behind the numbers.
What do you do about your blog’s bounce rates? Have you been able to lower bounce rates through any specific tactics? I’d love to hear your tips in the comments.
Too many thoughts, not enough leaders.
There is no shortage of advice online right now. Especially when it comes to social media.
The problem is, many of the sources of information lack credibility and substance. They are failing to effectively implement new media tools for their own business, yet they preach to others what is right and wrong with social marketing.
We are in unchartered territory for business owners. Consumers have been empowered with a voice they never had before. This changes everything we know about marketing.
Who you decide to listen to has never been more important.
I pride myself on being a curator of great information. A lot of it comes from the three people mentioned below.
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For that I thank them.
Their advice doesn’t just make sense, it also makes the companies they work with dollars.
A highly underrated metric as of late.
3 Social Media Gurus Actually Worth Listening To
1. Mitch Joel
I was first introduced to Mitch Joel three years ago when a friend recommended his book, “Six Pixels of Separation.” It’s truly a must-read. The best way I can describe the book is that it reminded me of Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Crush It,” except it focuses on businesses, not bloggers. Mitch is a partner at Twist Image, a highly sought-after digital marketing agency based in Canada. The Twist Image blog is an amazing resource for marketers. Be sure to check it out on your mobile device to see a mobile website done brilliantly. Mitch releases a new Podcast every Sunday that I never miss, also entitled Six Pixels of Separation. With more than 300 past episodes in iTunes, Mitch has built a digital footprint second to none. His past guest list reads like a who’s who of the marketing, PR and social media spaces.
2. Neil Patel
Neil Patel is the founder of KISSmetrics. KISS (keep it simple, stupid) provides easy to understand and use social media analytics software. More importantly, their blog has some of the best and most in-depth research on the Web regarding the usage of social media for business. I especially enjoy their extremely well-done Infographics and Marketing Guides. Neil also founded and blogs frequently at Quick Spout. In my opinion, no one does list style posts (7 ways to accomplish X) better than Neil Patel.
- Investment activity recorded a positive 2011. Based on data from Real Capital Analytics, more than 13,000 major properties traded hands during 2011, totaling $205.8 billion in sales, representing a 51 percent increase from 2010.
- The data analyzes properties priced at $2.5 million and above. Based on the 2012 Commercial Lending Survey, REALTORS® handle an even larger number of transactions of properties valued at less than $2.0 million.
- The aggregate portfolio composition in this value spectrum is varied and representative of small business across the U.S.
- Multifamily sales were the largest property type, accounting for almost 20 percent of the market, followed by land sales, comprising 13 percent of sales. Industrial warehouse sales rounded up the top three, with 12 percent of transactions.
