The Connect Times

When your Real Estate Biography is properly written, it gives clients a warm feeling about your capabilities. Clients want to be assured of three main things: you know the local market, you can understand their needs, and you will work hard for them.  Listed below are a few critical elements to include in your biography that will draw potential clients to you.

• Your Real Estate Biography should only be a few paragraphs and kept to one page or less.
• Always write in the third person, refer to yourself by name, he, or she.
• Make it brief-it’s not just about what you do, it’s who you work with.
• Briefly mention where you were born, where you were raised, where you went to school, previous job experiences, and what they taught you/how they helped you excel in the real estate industry.
• Include a sentence or two about your niche/niches as well as the type of clients you serve.
• Briefly name the real estate organizations, clubs, or professional designations/associations to which you belong.  Spell them out; no one outside of the industry will know what they stand for.
• Mention anything that will enhance your credibility (like published real estate articles or books).
• Aside from experience, talk about your connection to the community.  How long have you lived there?  What hidden gems do you treasure?  What groups or networks are you involved in?  Let them know you live and work nearby, and can provide detailed answers to their many questions.  No matter what your experience level is, a client is more eased with a high level of knowledge about the community.
• Understand what your clients need.  Specify the latest marketing tools that you use, or a particular business style that has helped past clients.  People will trust you more readily if they know you’re keeping their interests foremost in mind.
• Don’t forget to mention the personal qualities that qualify you for the job.  For example, clients like to work with professional, pleasant, hard-working, enthusiastic, and organized real estate agents.   List personal and professional strengths as they pertain to your career in real estate.  If you’re great with computers or have access to exceptional technology tools, say so.
• Remember, an impressive list of credentials doesn’t always matter to clients.  Ease their fears and worries by listing ways you can help solve their problems.  Let future clients feel confident in your ability to communicate clearly and with professionalism.
• Make sure all of your contact information is included in the last paragraph of your biography.  This includes your name, company, address, phone number, fax number, email address, and website address.
• Write, rewrite, and rewrite.  Then edit!  Eliminate extra words and use descriptive words.

Keep in mind, clients want to work with a professional who is attentive to detail, has great communication skills, is comfortable with technology, possesses an inside understanding of the market, and is goal-oriented.  These guidelines will help you compose a biography that will reassure them that you possess these qualities, and are the perfect person for the job.

In today’s competitive Real Estate market, it is essential for agents to stay current with the available technologies that help them grow their business, stay organized, offer exceptional services, and most importantly, set themselves above the rest!  Mobile technologies are completely transforming how consumers experience the Real Estate transaction.  There are a number of applications that can help you organize your real estate business, make your life easier and increase productivity.

Stay Organized:

Docusign: This App allows you to send, sign and save contracts and other documents on the go with any device. It is a huge time saver and productivity booster!

Evernote: As the second best productivity boosting App, Evernote can save inspection reports, client notes, photos, articles and almost everything else. The information is stored on the Cloud for easy access, and it includes a powerful search function.

TurboScan: With this App, you can scan and email receipts, business cards, and even larger items like documents and reports.

Shoeboxed.com: Scan receipts and business cards from your phone or computer and keep them in a safe, secure online account.

Google Drive: Allows you to store all of your files in one place so you can access them anytime from anywhere. You can access photos, documents and files stores on your Google Drive and share any file you want with contacts.

Clear: As one of the most user-friendly and more popular to-do Apps, Clear focuses on a visual interface that allows you to color code tasks. You can easily add a task, delete a task, or check off an item.

Contacts Journal: This App is a mobile CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. It allows you to mark a contact as private and enables you to separate clients from your personal contacts; set to-do’s for your clients; set reminders and make notes about each contact.

Diverse Solutions Mobile IDX: Allows easy searching of the MLS from anywhere. With this app, it is easy to contact the agent and find homes in the neighborhood.

Milog: Keeps a record of mileage for reimbursement or tax purposes.

Great Apps to Use for Photographs, Home Tours, Videos and Property Information:

HomeSnap: By just taking a picture, the GPS in your phone can get instant public information and data on properties.

HaikuDesk: With HaikuDesk, you can create listing and business presentations for your clients to review. It is impressive to clients and is generating more listings for its users.

Magicplan: Creates floor plans and room sizes for listings when you take interior pictures of the home. It exports pictures into PDF, JPG and DXF formats, so you can post images or design interactive floor plans.

Instagram: Ensures that you will never take a bad photograph. Filters lend an artistic look to each photo. The App links to Facebook, Twitter, email, Tumblr and Instagram, its own social media channel. Instagram can be used to promote listings, neighborhood amenities or branding.

Videolicious: An easy way to create a home tour or video, Videolicious allows you can take up to ten videos. After viewing numerous homes, clients might forget which home had certain attributes. Agents can film homes as their Buyer looks at them, and can later send it to their client as a refresher about the house.

360 Panorama: This App is perfect for those large rooms! It creates panoramic photos of any subject in Real Time, a great commodity for listing photographs or advertisements.

Camera+: In order to take better photographs, especially in low light conditions, Camera+ adds additional controls to your phone’s camera.

Diptic: Diptic combines photos and layouts to generate over 52 types of photo combinations and collages.

Tout: This is a great App for agents, as well, especially for those marketing their listings! With Tout, you can create 15 second videos and share them instantly on social media sites, as well as email.

Simplify Your Communication:

Slydial: This is a great App to use when you need to relay important information to a client, but don’t have a lot of time between meeting another client. With Slydial, you just dial 267-Slydial, follow a prompt, dial the client’s number and go directly to their voicemail.

YouMail: Another great tool, YouMail offers a number of voicemail solutions, including transcription, which converts voicemails into texts. This is useful when you are with a client and receive a phone call from another client. You want both clients to receive personalized service, so taking the phone call, or even checking your voicemail, might not be a good idea. With YouMail, you can read the content of the voicemail in a text.

Checkon.me: This App communicates automatically with a pre-designated contact if you don’t “check in” within a certain amount of time that you set. It is a great App to use while showing a home or conducting an open house. The App can also send the contact the location of your phone.

Social Media Apps That are Great for Real Estate:

HootSuite: This provides agents the ultimate dashboard to manage multiple social media accounts from anywhere.

LinkedIn: A free App, LinkedIn allows you access to your professional network from anywhere. You can follow real estate groups, post content and research your clients.

Flipboard: Agents can use this App to stay up to date on what’s going on in the industry. It is also a fun away to see your Facebook and Twitter feeds.

Zite: For agents who want to stay up to date and current on trends, technology, marketing and more, but don’t have the time to search the web to find valuable articles, Zite can curate the content you want, from real estate news, housing, home improvement, finance, social media and more. You can read the articles for your own knowledge; share them with clients and more.

In today’s competitive real estate market, real estate agents constantly have to explore ways to highlight their listings to make them stand out. With 80% of homebuyers using the internet to search for homes, proper online pictures of listings are essential. After all, the listing pictures are the “first impression” the potential homebuyers receive and it is imperative to make a good first impression. In fact, according to a survey by the National Association of Realtors, homebuyers rated photos as the feature they use the most when searching for a home on the web. Photos are powerful tools for marketing, and they can have a positive effect on the price of the home and selling time as better photos command higher listing prices and get more online attention. Both real estate agents and sellers should follow these do’s and do not’s to attain flattering pictures that will expose the home in its best possible light.

Do:

Invest in a decent camera or hire a professional real estate photographer. For those not using a professional, always use a tri pod to keep the camera steady.

Shoot exterior shots in the middle of the day to create the best lighting, but make sure the sun is behind you. If tall trees create shadows in the picture, shoot on an overcast day.

For exterior shots, use a wide angle lens and stand on top of a ladder or car to create the best possible angle of the home.

Stage the outside of your home for the photo by mowing the lawn, planting some mulch, or placing potted plants by the front door.

Remove cars, trash cans, dead tree limbs, and outside holiday decorations out of view from the photo. Remember to take pictures of the back of the house and yard, as well.

Stage the interior of your home. The idea is to show off the home’s space, not distract potential buyers from what’s in it. Remove clutter from the area before photographing it, clear counter space, remove fridge magnets, hide children’s toys, make beds in the bedrooms, hide trash cans and trash, close toilets in bathrooms, move appliances around, and put away the dirty dishes.

Be sure to photograph the entire house. Buyers want to see pictures of the front of the house, back of the house, living room, kitchen, dining room, family room, master bedroom, other bedrooms, bathrooms, and the best features of the house, like an exercise room or a home theater.

Use as much natural lighting as possible, turn on all of the interior lights, and use the flash on your camera to make the colors and the room look brighter. Face away from open windows to avoid back lighting, and let the flash create even light. Close the drapes or blinds if the camera’s light meter is being fooled by the bright exterior light, or turn off the flash if it turns out making the room look dark.

Choose the best angles and compositions for the photographs. For instance, shoot rooms from a corner doorway to include as much of the room as possible, provide context, and make the home appear more spacious.

Keep a few personal items in the images. Buyers should see that someone actually lives there. Add color with vases of flowers or bowls of fruit and set the breakfast or dining tables.

Move furniture around when necessary so that they don’t block architectural features, like a fireplace.

Make sure to capture special features of the home, like new floors, fresh paint, or spectacular views of a golf course, beach, lake, or mountains.

For empty houses, use a prop like a chair to give an empty room a sense of scale. Photograph rooms that are together, such as the master bedroom/bathroom to add interest to the image.

Take lots of photos! Experiment with a variety of angles and camera settings for every shot, and post the picture that presents each area of the house in its best possible light.

Improve photos by using basic photo-editing software. Crop out ceilings or unnecessary backgrounds and adjust the brightness or contrast.

For condos and apartments, take shots of the amenities offered, like the pool, gym, tennis courts, and more.

Do Not:

Make the home look like something it’s not. Ensure you don’t mislead buyers. For instance, a wide-angle lens can make a room look deceptively large. Buyers will be disappointed and irritated to learn the actual size of the room is much smaller.

Avoid including animals and people in images. This includes both live animals and taxidermy, like deer heads on the walls, as well as anything else that can distract homebuyers from the point of the photo.

Don’t get too personal with staging. The purpose of staging a home is to create a neutral canvas on which a wide range of buyers can visualize themselves and their lives.

Don’t use wide-angle lenses in interior shots. It will distort rooms to make them look much smaller or larger.

Don’t use a camera phone!
Refrain from tilting the camera up or down. It will cause objects to have odd, unnatural shapes.

Avoid taking shots of the back of a chair, book cases and other furniture. Position yourself in angles that show the front of the room, or rearrange the furniture if the best angle to photograph the room will expose the back of furniture.

Most importantly, don’t omit a photo of the property altogether. Take plenty of photos from every room at every angle, and use the best shots.

Listing photos are both the seller and the real estate agent’s main way of advertising the property. In order to generate interest in the home and sell it quickly for the highest possible price, it is crucial that listings include as many images as possible that illustrate the attributes that would make a home desirable to live in. Listings that portray an untidy home, or worse, listings that have no picture at all, turn off many prospective buyers. Although this might seem like extra work and time, the payoff in the long run will be worth it!

Here are few (humorous) examples of what to avoid when posting your listing photos: