Ur on the money.

In my first GRI course one of the oldest instructors said “You’ve gotta have time or money to devote to building your real estate business, if you don’t have either your $hit out of luck, but you must have at least one”. SM is one avenue those agents (new or old) can venture down when they might have more time than money. Yes, our time is money, but if you don’t have a large $ marketing budget for things which cost real greenbacks, you can put that time to work building and strengthening connections in your local market. It doesn’t have to be the only thing you do, but it can add to your other efforts with 0 dollar outflow.

The best 2nd quote I’ve heard lately regarding time was when someone answered the “how do you have time for SM” question by saying “you don’t do it in blocks, you grout your day with it”. As mentioned above, you do not have take 1 minute away from your normal activities and still have time to pop in a Foursquare entry, a FB update, a Twitter response, etc. at down moments here or there. If you have a smart phone, even easier, in line at the bank, waiting for a client, etc. When you have a free second here or there, no big deal.

Final thought, I am not sure where the idea that anyone positive about SM is a self-proclaimed guru or trying to sell something (other than RE). Sure, there are SM gurus out there trying to sell their services (to the RE community and every other industry out there) but by and large, the ones I see who have spoken positively about it for THEIR businesses are actual agents, out there selling RE now Guru Services R US…

I know we’ve beaten this to death, but just thought I’d beat it a bit more and make it a whipped souffle just in time for the Holidays

Well said.

I received a contract yesterday on one of my listings from someone who came through one of my open houses this past Sunday. Their agent had never shown them the property.

I define effective by closed sales.

I don’t know what the numbers are, I’ve never seen them reported. Assuming your data is for a national scope, then it’s worthless as we all know real estate is local. If your data is for the Miami area, then it’s worthless to me.

MY data is zero percent for opens and about 75% for social media (counting blogs, which IMO clearly fall into the SM category).

But that’s just me. I’m sure there are people out there that could flip those numbers around completely.

If you want to talk Twitter only, I can attribute eight closed transactions this year to Twitter (loosely. as I pointed out before, it’s almost impossible to say if it was Twitter alone that resulted in someone becoming a client. The eight I’m referencing are where I know and can confirm that Twitter was the “first contact” from a prospect that became a client).

No, eight transactions a year isn’t going to make a career. It’s not a bad supplement though (it’s right at a million in sales volume, and sadly, only 21% of the members in my MLS made that level in 2008). The problem is, as I’ve been attempting to communicate and failing miserably apparently, is it’s extremely difficult to separate these different social media tools and say which specific ones resulted in a closed transaction. They are simply too mushed together and integrated to separate.

I don’t know what the average close rate on open house is in my market. I hate them, I suck at them, so I don’t do them. Hence I could care less what the closure rate is. Even if someone could prove to my I could triple my business by holding opens, I wouldn’t do them. So I don’t really care what the ROI or closure rate of opens is.

The same pretty much holds true for SM. I like it, I enjoy it, and I’m satisfied with my personal business and the business and growth of my brokerage. So I don’t really care if the number is 2%, 28% or 114%. Common sense tells me that of all the SM tools, blogs by far and away are the primary driver. But integrating some of the other SM tools into the model seems to help. I don’t care to get into analysis paralysis and try to figure out if I should spend X amount of time on one or another for Y% increase in business. That reminds me far too much of the corporate life I left behind and have zero desire to return to. I do what I enjoy, and what works for me. What that is is going to be different for everyone.

If open houses only yield @3%–and knowing that SM would be lower than that, why is this delivered to agents like it’s the end all, be all?

(Lani’s gonna come in here right after I post this comment–she automagically appears when the term “end all, be all” comes up…..)

I hear people say it all the time Kevin. I teach a CE course for the AZ Dept of Real Estate on social media. I see the eyes rolling and the head shaking and have people tell me straight to my face it’s “stupid”, it “takes too much time”, and I just “get lucky” with my efforts. I sat in a keynote by Gary Vaynerchuk at Inman and heard two people sitting right next to me say “none of this remotely applies to real estate”. I hear people mumbling as they walk out of panels and classes — free classes, not some snake-oil smarmy sales guy selling crap classes.

On the other hand, I also know people that are successful with it. I’ve got agents having success with it.

Again, it doesn’t work for everyone, and it’s not some magic pill. But it CAN be an effective weapon in the daily battle…. it’s just one of many. Some methods work for some, some work for others and sadly, none seem to work for another segment (though I’d argue that’s because those people don’t put in the effort required).

There’s not many people saying it won’t work….I don’t know if you noticed that.