Facebook Groups Offer Insight Into REALTOR Psychology

by Daniel Rothamel on December 12, 2007 · Comments

in Industry Issues, Social Media

When I first joined Facebook a few months ago, I created two groups in my local geographic network (Charlottesville, VA). I titled them “Charlottesville Area Home Buyers,” and “Charlottesville Area Home Sellers.” The purpose of the groups is to give people who fit into those two categories a place to go where they can share information and experiences, along with asking questions and such.

To date the “sellers” group has 1 member other than myself. The “buyers” group has 9 members other than myself. All of these members are REALTORS.

Aside from the obvious fact that my groups haven’t exactly worked as I intended (no problem, I can work on that), I am interested in what the groups stats have to say about the current state of the psyche of REALTORS. The interest in the group for prospective buyers is almost 10x greater than the interest in the group for potential sellers.

Thoughts?

  • It's a sign of herd mentality. (I was the second member, I think)

    Another question is - how did they learn about the group?
  • John Novak
    Stats from KW's research show that about 80-85% of the leads generated online will be buyers. They also found that sellers go online to find out current home values, but not necessarily to find a listing agent. For that they rely on more 'tradtional' methods such as referrals from family and friends.

    It looks like the other REALTORS® in your group are using this more as a Trulia Voices forum and hoping to pick off a few leads. Do you have a strategy to connect with other FB'ers within the Charlottesville network? Maybe you could offer buyer and seller workshops through the Events section.
  • I've been at this blogging and lead generation thing for 3 1/2 years now, and I've generated somewhere around $15,000,000 in sales from internet leads in that timeframe, accounting for about half the volume of my 2-person team (me and my wife).

    I generate anywhere between 10-30 leads a week. The answer to the question I always get - "How do you generate so many leads?" - has never been about FaceBook, MySpace, Web 2.0 -this-or-that, Twitter, or whatever the soup d'jour of the web world is made from.

    It's about providing content that generates traffic, and converting that traffic into searchers. I won't divulge some of my secrets for generating traffic because, well, that's why they call them secrets.

    In the end, all buyers want to do is search the local MLS for homes for sale, and buyers (this is key) want to find the prices actually paid for homes in their neighborhood. If you can provide sold property price data, you have something that very few people have on their web sites, and you create a value proposition that you can sell.

    In general, you just won't find buyers or sellers out on FaceBook or most other social media web sites. However, I've found a couple of sites that work well, and they are more focused on local professional recommendations and consumer reviews of varying services and products. I've found that working these little niches is much more productive than focusing on the huge, well known mega-sites.

    All of this is purely my own opinion based on my own experiences. I'm sure there are others who have been successful through other means and mediums.
  • Daniel Rothamel
    @Chicago- Great points. I addressed some of those issues on another post of mine entitled, "Why blog?" I don't write this blog specifically for lead generation, I am working on another blog for that. This blog is a bit more comprehensive and deals with subjects that might not interest the average home buyer or seller. I think you can do both effectively. Facebook may not be the most profitable venture for agents today, but that may change in the future. It has other purposes besides lead generation. It is extremely good at creative drip marketing, for example. There are lots of great tools out there in the social media space, it is just a matter of putting the right ones together.

    Nice neighborhood video on your blog, BTW. More on video applications to come. . .
  • Thanks for the comment regarding the video. Yep, that's the wife - the public face of the team in the video. She's much prettier than I am, so she gets to star in the videos.

    I started fooling around with creating my own video tours back in 2004. Back then, I was one of the only people doing the still photo panning and zooming types of tours with some background music - like a lot of people do today. We'd burn the movies onto little credit card sized CD ROMs, put custom lables on them, and give them out at open houses - a great promotional tool.

    As we saw video mature a little, many people started doing the slide shows. So we figured we'd up the ante a little, and produce "real" video. So we hooked up with friends who worked in the video and audio production business, and a new business was formed - Curb Cut Media. I have the domain name purchased, but have not put up a site to promote our video production services yet.

    If there were only 48 hours in a day!

    Anyway, the video (if I do say so myself) is unlike anything I've seen out there. We pretty much nailed the concept we were driving for - fast paced, emotional, hard driving music, and no "I'm the greatest REALTOR in the world - hire me" stuff.

    All done in 16 x 9 format. You can't tell on the internet, but much of it is shot in High Definition, too, with better-than-CD quality music, which makes for a QuickTime file over 4 Gigabytes. Even the downsampled video was about 750 MB.

    The guys at WellcomeMat.com do a great job of hosting the video and delivering services to producers and agents alike!
  • Statistically your 'sampling' is too small to draw any conclusions from.

    However, since listings on the www are basically a buyer attraction thing, it's no surprise that a majority of Realtors looking for those buyers are here as well.

    In my market right now I would not be too excited about having a high end listing unless the seller was very, very motivated.
  • Anon E. Moose
    My thoughts? Quite black and white, Mr. Zebra. No realtor can walk down any block without tripping over three sellers. Qualified buyers on the other hand, are considerably more scarce. Realtors need buyers and sellers to make a deal. They only have one side of the equation, so they are spending their time looking for the other.
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