Just in….A little scary, and Halloween is still so far away…
WASHINGTON (CNNMoney.com) — A congressional watchdog panel warned on Thursday that mounting commercial real estate losses could endanger the banking system and thwart economic recovery.
A total of $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate loans will require refinancing in the next four years, the Congressional Oversight Panel said in a report. More than half of those loans are underwater, written for properties whose value has dropped like a rock.
Check out the Stevens Estate, a $16+ million listing in New Jersey. This property was featured on a metro NYC NBC station over the past weekend. The property is listed by Erica Levey of Weichert Capital Properties.
I was looking through the 2009 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers research report published by the National Association of Realtors, and I thought I would share some interesting information.
1. What website features buyers value. 97% of buyers thought photos and detailed property information were helpful (not sure what the other 3% are thinking here…?). 89% thought virtual tours were helpful. I would like to think if they all saw a FloorPlanOnline tour, that number would be close to 100%! I would also like to point out that other companies have done research around online content, and several studies have indicated that Photos score the highest in terms of essential content and floor plans score #2! So, if your listing does not have its Floor Plan Online….it should.
2. More and more Buyers are Online to search. The first step taken by far in the home buying process was go online to look for properties for sale – 36% listed this as the first step taken. This was double the next highest action, which was contact a real estate agent (18%).
In addition, 90% of all buyers used the Internet to search, while 93% of first time buyers used the Internet. Again more than any other source. In the key buying group of 25 to 44 year olds, 96% of the respondents used the Internet to search.
3. Websites used in the Home Search process. The most used site by far was the multiple listing service (MLS) website. This could be a factor that agents typically email listing info to their buyers, so it is pushed to them. Some MLSs have their own consumer oriented search site…but I know some do not. The total list of websites used by Buyers (percentages are for All Buyers surveyed):
MLS – 60%
Real Estate Company website – 46%
Realtor.com – 46%
Real estate agent website – 45%
Other websites with real estate listings (Trulia, Zillow, etc) – 30%
For Sale by Owner websites – 17%
Newspaper website – 9%
Real Estate Magazine website – 4%
Social media websites (Facebook, MySpace, etc) – 1%
YouTube – <1%
It is interesting to note that the types of sites used by different age brackets did not differ much at all. The top site for all groups was the MLS, followed by the company site and Realtor.com. Also, there is a lot of hype about social media and YouTube…but this is not necessarily translating into buyers using these sites for searching. For example, between the age groups of 18 to 24 and 25 to 44, only 1% said they used social media websites. The 45 and over crowd said less than 1%. Surprisingly, 2% over 65 said they used YouTube, while all the other age groups responded with less than 1%. Now, this does not mean there is no value to social media or YouTube…these outlets just need to be used in the right way and for the right reason. I also think there is some search engine benefit to posting content on these sites. Note…we will address the YouTube video posting issue in 2010. 🙂
4. The Internet is getting results. 36% of respondents FIRST found the home they purchased via the Internet search. This was the same as through a real estate agent, and up from 32% last year. No other source was higher. Print newspaper was down to 2% now….ouch. Also, 77% of buyers drove by or viewed a home after finding it online, while 61% walked through the home. Another interesting stat – 28% found the agent they used to buy the home online. There was also a high correlation in people that used the Internet to search and those that used an agent to buy – 79% used an agent to buy.
Implications – I think what all of these stats boils down to is YOU need to be online and you need to have the best online content for your listings, because chances are, if you make an impression online, you are going to get a buyer to call you, drive by or tour your listing. The first step is getting the right content. People want to see photos and floor plans. All the other fancy stuff like spinning 360s, deep zoom, property videos with voice over has actually scored lower on the desirability scale. In some cases, like voice over and music playing when you first open a tour scores negative. People want to see the essentials quickly and easily.
The second step is get this content distributed to the KEY places people search. Your virtual tours need to be linked to your MLS (use the unbranded link – in many markets we do this for you automatically), on Realtor.com (we link the tour for you automatically….and it is FREE if you are a Realtor.com Showcase member), your company website and your website/blog. This will get you 95% or more there. You can then use our tools to link the tour to your Facebook site, Twitter, and more. Realtor.com has a nice Facebook widget to add your listings to your Facebook profile. We also are posting listings to Google Base now. We will be working to add more sites like Zillow, Trulia, Craigslist, etc. in the coming months (however you can do this now manually).
In addition, talk to your company IT people about posting the company tours to Zillow, Trulia and others. As part of this make sure your virtual tour links come through with the data feed. Most if not all of these sites can include the virtual tour link…but the company needs to send it along. As I stated in a previous post, your company should really be posting tours to these other websites….There is a hierarchy Zillow and others use, and companies like us are the last on the list. So if we link a tour to Zillow, for example, and your company pushes the listing there, it will push our link off…and if the company info does not include the tour link, your tour will not get exposure on Zillow. So, push your company to post listings to these other website portals and make sure the virtual tour links are included. You paid good money for the content and you deserve the most exposure!
All for now…time for the weekend. Thanks for reading
I am very pleased to announce that one of our long standing FloorPlanOnline customers (actually, THE FIRST customer in the US, since she is my mother!) was honored last week as the 2009 Kansas City Regional Association of Realtors Salesperson of the Year! Congratulations Linda!
Linda is an agent with Reece and Nichols in Kansas City. She has used FloorPlanOnline from the beginning….so I would like to think we had something to do with her success, but I am also sure her hard work and dedication to her clients and community contributed to receiving this great award! Linda can be found online at www.KansasCityLifestyles.com (note, this site is something I put together for her using WordPress…..it is a great tool for real estate agents. Contact me if you want more info).
We found out last week when we are all vacationing in Maui as a family. I took a video (using my iPhone, so not the best) of the announcement by Catherine Clark, Linda’s broker. Just play the video below to see more (Hawaii was awesome, by the way… :)).
If you have news about you or someone else that uses FloorPlanOnline, we would also love to hear from you. Just email us and we can create a blog post and possibly even create a press release to mutually benefit both of us!
If you had a strong background as a project manager in the corporate world and decided to take on a new opportunity in real estate as a career, where would you focus your attention in the market today? That question was on the mind of Rhyne Gamble, RE/MAX Realty Suburban, Shawnee Mission, Kansas, just over two years ago when he decided to leave his career as the director of a sales and service company and join his my wife, Tonya, who had been in real estate for 15 years, to create the “The Gamble Team”. The Gamble Team now numbers five employees with Rhyne specializing in listing only and his wife and the rest of the team working with buyers.
After analyzing the market conditions and what prognosticators felt would be happening, Gamble’s choice for direction was to focus on the distressed property segment of residential real estate. What he saw was a financial market which was focused on foreclosure and was being “shepherded” by a special type of real estate agent who was focus mostly on the transaction, not the relationship with the homeowner. As he observed, “The typical REO agent just put a sign in the yard, put the listing in the MLS, did not spend any money on marketing the property and proceeded to answer their phone once a week to sort through all the calls from interested prospective buyers so they could find one offer to present to the lender owning the property.” He saw how long this process took and learned how costly this process had become to both homeowners and lenders as the U.S. residential real estate market continued to escalate downward. Industry experts estimate that the cost of foreclosing on a residential property have been running as high as 50-60% of the value of the property during 2008-09, for example.
Gamble’s analysis led him to focus on the Short Sale approach as the preferred way to address distressed properties. His research revealed that over 50% of homeowners who have fallen behind on their loan payments have never contacted their lender (mostly out of fear or lack of understanding) and that after 3-4 months of the lender not getting any communication from those homeowners, the lender proceeded with foreclosure actions. And, in many instances the homeowner became emotionally distraught enough to proceed with trashing their own home, thereby further increasing the cost of foreclosure. He reasoned that there was a huge disconnect between the lender and the homeowner—-and, certainly a very poor communication channel between the two and that there had to be a way to mitigate the communications gap between the two. He reasoned that it would be far better to reach out to homeowners who were delinquent, helping them understand that there is help available to them before it is too late and providing them with assistance in negotiating with their lender so the homeowner does not let their credit rating be destroyed with a foreclosure and so the lender is able to liquidate the property at a much lower cost. As Gamble says, “It just seemed to me that there is a true “win/win” solution which was not being focused on by enough lenders and homeowners. I felt that there had to be enough lenders and homeowners who can be brought to understand that there is much more good in negotiating a Short Sale than continuing down the path of foreclosure. I also believe that it was most important to invest in marketing the property vs not spending anything on marketing like most REO agents have done in the past. The need is to get this sale completed as fast as possible—everyone benefits if the transaction is completed faster! So, I researched the market for a concept which would be easy to employ, which would be state-of-the-art and which would differentiate my listings from all the others in the market, so my sellers’ properties would be on the market for fewer days and sell at a higher percentage of the listing price. I found that the FloorPlanOnline (www.floorplanonline.com) concept gave me a solid competitive advantage and I have utilized it on properties priced as low as $200,000 most successfully.” 50% of his business today is distressed properties and by far the majority of Gamble’s Short Sale listings are sold to owner occupants as a result of his marketing program.
Gamble soon learned that he was a bit naïve’ in thinking that all parties would automatically recognize the virtue and the “win/win” in his Short Sale approach and, when the average Short Sale took from 90 to 180 days to close after submitting an offer to the lender, he quickly learned how to cut corners within lender’s organizations so the homeowner’s situation could be mitigated prior to foreclosure proceedings being enacted. In fact, during Gamble’s two plus years of focusing on Short Sales, he has only had 1 transaction which went to foreclosure. Gamble’s success ratio (% of Short Sale transactions which get closed) is 95% vs the national average of 20%. But Gamble believes there is good news on the horizon. Gamble believes that lenders are finally getting the message from the federal government, which is strongly encouraging lenders to focus on Short Sales as the primary approach to liquidating their deliquent home loans vs the foreclosure approach. Gamble believes that lenders are increasing staffing so Short Sales can be negotiated faster and so Short Sales can be closed much faster, thereby salvaging the credit of more homeowners. Rhyne Gamble can be reached at rhyne@key2kc.com or 913-220-0818.
Mouse Over with Photo Thumbnails. Today, we released a small but useful feature – Photo Mouse Over. Now, when you are viewing an Interactive FloorPlan Tour, you can mouse over a camera icon and a small thumbnail image of the photo will pop-up next to the camera icon. Click, and the photo will change on the left. This new feature will allow users to quickly preview photos of interest, and then click to get a larger view. It is available and live today on all tours – you do not need to do anything!
Embedded Object Enhancement. We have also enhanced the embeddable object for the Interactive FloorPlan to include the mouse over feature, although a larger size photo does show. In addition, we have included navigation buttons on the photos to allow for easier navigation between photos – just click the arrow buttons to go forward or back. The old way required you to click a camera icon, then close it, and then click another camera to navigate between photos. This new feature should make it much faster to view photos on the embeddable FloorPlan Tours.
You can easily add an Embeddable FloorPlan Tour to your blog sites or on many company sites (like Windermere, John L Scott, Coldwell Banker Bain, and others). Just think of the SEO benefits of creating a blog post for each of your listings – name the Post the address of your listing, add your marketing text, and then include the embeddable FloorPlan Tour. You can also add the video if you want as well! It adds more content to your website, keeps browsers there longer and turns them into buyers!
To configure your tour’s embeddable objects, just go to Manage Orders, then click the View link under Marketing Materials, then click the Embeddable Object button to get to the set-up page. You can change the colors of the buttons and the text on the buttons, and you can elect to show a “Full Tour” button (or change it to other text), which when clicked, will open a new window with the complete branded tour. All you need to do when you have completed your customization is hit the Apply button, then click the link above the code and right click your mouse to copy the embeddable object code. Then, go to your blog or listing detail page for your listing and right click your mouse to paste the code in the desired location. Add additional explanatory text on top or below the code, and save. That is it! It is cool, effective, and keeps the buyer on your website longer to become a buyer!
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