For Real Estate Agents and other Listing Marketing professionals, it is a good idea to post QR codes on all of your offline marketing materials including flyers, sign riders, etc. When someone scans your QR code you can set it to take them to the mobile version of your website, to download your contact information, or to learn more about that specific property (by using a mobile single property website).

Click the following links to download a free QR code reader to your smartphone:

- Android users click here.
- iPhone users click here.

Comment below and tell us some of the most creative uses of QR codes you’ve seen in real estate marketing.

We have compiled the following list of 5 essential FREE apps that real estate professionals need to consider:

1) Zillow
Zillow is a leader in mobile real estate, providing data for all homes in the U.S. on the Zillow network. Making sure your listings are on Zillow will give you a huge advantage, making it easy for buyers to find your listings wherever they are. Buyers can look up rent estimates, home values, homes for sale/rent, and more.

2) Realtor.com Real Estate Search
Realtor.com has a huge amount of listings that are constantly being updated. It has a ton of great features including map search, saved searches and listings synchronized with the website, private ratings and notes, and the ability to share listings with your friends, agent and social network.

3) Trulia
This is another great app for potential buyers to find local homes and apartments for sale or rent. Buyers can also use the Trulia app to search for local real estate professionals and Agents in their area.

4) HotPads
This app is geared towards renters looking for information on apartments, houses for rent, real estate, vacation rentals and hotels.

5) Craigslist
It’s obvious that Craigslist plays a huge part in how people find home and apartments for sale or rent. The app let’s them see all your Craigslist property listings including all your beautiful property images and contact information directly on their mobile device.

What are some of your favorite real estate apps?

What happens when a friend or family member tells you that they “like” something? Does it make you want to experience the same? Referrals and social influence are some of the most powerful drivers in personal decision making. Does this same principle apply to the work of social media? Almost every platform on the web right now provides an option that allows for social “signals”. Facebook has likes, Twitter has Tweets, Google has +1s, and you can almost always count on seeing a “thumbs up/down” option available.

Do these simple buttons increase unique page views though? I came across a very interesting article that tries to answer this very intriguing question. Some important points to note before reading this article:

1) The studies involved are CORRELATIONAL and therefore cannot prove causation.
2) It is important to note that although these studies are correlational in nature we can still draw mature conclusions from the data.

What are your thoughts on social “signals”?

Link to seoMOZ Blog Article

For all of you that are behind the times and still chugging along with those once “hip” flip phones, you now have no more excuses for making the switch. AT&T has finally announced that the Android powered Huawei will be available for $30 with a two year service agreement, which can be as low as $15 a month! The Impulse will be available September 18th and comes with features like GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Check out Wired Magazine’s article for more details and then go pick one up.

Engadget Impulse 4G Article

Impulse 4G Specs via PhoneArena

Is it really any surprise that Zillow (A website listing real estate and mortgage rate searches) is currently experience exponential growth and success? The real estate and mortgage markets have been consistently increasing their presence on the web and for good reason. Internet marketing reaches a larger number of potential leads, which has made print advertising almost obsolete. The Seattle, Washington based Zillow has demonstrated this concept to the fullest:

Some Interesting Numbers:
1) Zillow experienced 23.2 million unique viewers in July 2011, which was a 98% increase from July 2010.

2)Marketplace revenues for Zillow increased 269% and display/advertising revenue increased 30% in the past year.

3)Changes in AVM algorithm improves market accuracy 33%, which means only an 8.5% median margin of error!

Check out this great article in National Mortgage News to learn more!

Follow Zillow On Twitter

Follow Zillow On Facebook

Follow Zillow on Zillow Blog

The world of social media is an ever-expanding one and the newest player in the game is a fancy little platform that goes by the name of Google+. Some have called this new media outlet the “Facebook Killer,” but others have had a more negative experience. I found this great article on the seoMOZ blog, which provides some pretty interesting viewpoints on this new platform from our good friends at Google.

Personally, I have found Google+ to be an exciting new way to share our social lives. There are certainly technical limitations and pieces of the Google+ puzzle that need to be filled, but I also have found a lot of utility. Some of my favorite features:

1) Huddle for Google+: Allows for users to engage in a group-texting feature to communicate with users in pre-determined circles.
2) Stream for Google+: This news feed acts as the nucleus of Google+.
3) Hangouts for Google+: This video feature allows for users to video chat with one another. The camera will actually switch to the person who is currently speaking, which I find to be one of the more interesting features of this new platform.

Great Google+ Review:

Google+ has the components to become a very effective social media outlet and business weapon. How do you think Google+ could help your business? We would love to hear your feedback!

The age of the tablet is upon us and it is time we all drink the Kool-Aid. A tablet can be used as an effective marketing and selling tool with any client. The ability to access listings, photos, and other tools are all right at your fingertips, which will strengthen any selling process. Well, what platform do we choose then?

Both of these tablets can be described as very similar devices in terms of straight tech specs. The ipad 2 and the Motorola Xoom both come with 1 GHz processors, 9″ + screen sizes, Bluetooth capability, and about 10 hours of battery life. The main differences between theses two tablets are their operating systems. The iPad will be of course running via the iOS system, whereas the Xoom will be powered by the Android operating system.

The iOS system is said to be a more “user-friendly” operating system, as all of the updates are centrally controlled by the tech gurus at Apple. The Android system will be updated by a combination of sources, which include Google, Motorola, and Verizon. The tablets will set you back anywhere from $499 to $829.

So, what to choose?

Either machine will be a great addition to your arsenal allowing you to quickly access information for your clients on location. As of right now, I would lean towards the iPad 2 for my tablet of choice due to the stronger computing power, lighter weight, and the iOS App Store. Check out a more in depth review of these two tablets by the tech experts at pcmag.com.

Jing helps you to create a screenshot that is stored on the web. This means its easy to share images of anything – property, contracts, a Google MAP – anything!

Jing can be very useful in a variety of situations – but especially when trying to report problems and issues to web services or software providers because you can now just embed a link to to a screenshot that shows the issue, rather than trying to create a screenshot image to  send as an attachment!

Here’s how to get it – and use it.

Go to http://www.techsmith.com/download/jing/
(or just go to http://www.techsmith.com/jing )

Download and install.

Installation can take a few minutes and you may be promoted to also download Microsoft.NET framework – go ahead and allow that to happen. If you are promoted to install Microsoft.NET this can take 4-5 minutes!
Once that’s completed, the Jing install will then complete.

At the end of Installation, Jing will start automatically and ask you to create an account.

Then Jing is ready to go.

Jing can then be used to capture an image of your screen which is then stored on the web and you are given a special URL which shows that image!
So no downloads, files or attachments – just a simple web link!

Here’s how to do this:

The use CTRL+F10 on your keyboard to start a screen capture
Then drag the area with your mouse.

Click the disk icon to save the area as an image.

On the next panel, choose to share via Screencast.

Once it’s saved, the image’s web address is already in your clipboard.

So I just create my email or ticket and then PASTE or CTRL+V which inserts the image URL.

If you want to, you can even add annotations and arrows etc.

Jing is a great tool which will save you a lot of time and effort!
I can’t believe how many times a day I use Jing.

Its a great tool to help you with your real estate marketing!

Here are some keynotes in the newsletter:

Breakdown by Geography
Our anonymous database has aggregated geographic breakdown at the country level. Here are a few representative countries and their respective aggregate metrics. The first number in each cell represents the metric for the date range 11/1/10-2/1/11. The parenthesized number is the Year over Year delta compared to a year ago.

For bounce rate, the distribution by country is plotted below.

Breakdown by Traffic Sources

In summary, visitors are spending less time on websites, overall bounce rates have fallen and search engine traffic is up.This information is particularly helpful to those that want to compare their website analytics to the published data.

For the the whole report visit Google Analytics Benchmarking Newsletter.

But first – I was prompted to write this blog post because of an article I just read that explained that so-called ‘strong’ passwords can now be hacked in matter of seconds using appropriate math algorithms and very fast computer processor chips. So, the example stated shows that a password “like ‘fjR8n’ can be broken on the CPU in 24 seconds“. Yikes!

The conclusion is that its the length of a password that stops it being hacked. Anything less than 14 characters long is considered risky!

Certainly worrying! You can read the whole article here.

So, what to do!?

Well here’s the approach I use

Use PASS PHRASES.

Here’s an example of a pass phrase: “I love to have cake and tea with my aunt Dotty every Sunday at 11!“

The idea here is that you make a pass phrase thats very easy for you to remember and then take the letters and create your password from them. So the above pass phrase might lead to this 17 character password:

IlthcatwmaDeSa11!

Easy! And because this is 17 characters its basically going to be impossible for anyone to break it.

I like to use rules that help mix things up – like adding in numbers (11) and also capitalizing proper nouns (I, Dotty, Sunday).

And of course, its OK to have several different pass phrases – e.g. for your various online general services and then you might have others for more sensitive accounts.

So, password problem is now solved.

Lastpass Password manager

The other problem I had was trying to overcome the inconvenience and time taken to continually type in passwords and having to remember what password was used with any particular service.

But Lastpass came to my rescue!

This is a great web service that is currently free and has received many rave reviews. Lastpass works well because it’s a free plug-in for most browsers that automatically remembers all your passwords and do do really clever things like auto-log you in etc. to your commonly used services like EMAIL.

With a master password (mine is many characters long!), you turn on the Lastpass service each time start up my PC, or launch my browser, and then it starts remembering and recording for you. When I go to my email account, my credentials and password are automatically filled in and I can even auto-login too. It is saving me a lot of time and frustration!

All your password data is kept on their secure servers and is encrypted at every step.

You can even change the way it works on a mobile device like a laptop, to use a special encryption key that you need to print out and refer to. In other words if my laptop is stolen, then its still impossible to access my Lastpass account without my unique key.

I feel secure using Lastpass because it has great security features that I have been able to customize to meet my needs.

In conclusion, I would strongly recommend that you update all your passwords and start using PASS PHRASES. You will be amazed at how easy it is to do this.

If your work environment allows it then you might like to try Laspass too!

Stay safe!