Homes & Land automatically uploads properties for sale from its own website to international partners including The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Dupont Registry, Wall Street Journal, Unique Global Estates, Google and more. Now Realtors and Real Estate Marketers will benefit from a huge Canadian audience as well.

Homes & Land Magazine secures great exposure on GlobeAndMail.com

Canwest is Canada’s leading international media company, representing a portfolio of world-class brands, including two conventional television stations – Global and E!, which in turn, are complimented by twenty specialty networks including TVTropolis, Food and HGTV (with shows such as Makeover Home Edition).

Canwest also reaches 4.9 million engaged readers on a weekly basis, through one of Canada’s largest newspaper chains, which includes the National Post, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen, Winnipeg Free Press, Regina Leader-Post, Saskatoon StarPhoenix, Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal, Vancouver Province, Vancouver Sun, Victoria Times Colonist, Sherbrooke Record, Lethbridge Herald, Medicine Hat News, Kamloops Daily News, Kelowna Daily Courier, Penticton Herald, Belleville EMC, Brockville/St. Lawrence, Kingston Heritage, Frontenac Gazette, Quinte West, Okanagan Saturday and Whistler Question, plus many more community publications.

These publications are complimented by several online properties under the Canada.com network which averages over 4.5 million unique visitors per month.

CTVglobemedia Inc. is Canada’s premier multimedia company with ownership of CTV, Canada’s #1 television network, and The Globe and Mail, Canada’s #1 newspaper. CTV also owns and operates 27 conventional stations across the country, with interests in 32 specialty channels, including Canada’s #1 specialty channel, TSN.

Additionally, CTVglobemedia owns the CHUM Radio Division, which operates 34 radio stations throughout Canada. Other CTVglobemedia investments include an interest in Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., which owns the Toronto Maple Leafs, Toronto Raptors and the Air Canada Centre; and an interest in Dome Productions, a North American leader in the provision of mobile high definition production facilities, and Report on Business Magazine.

 These outlets are front-runners in their fields, whether the field is broadcast, print or Internet, with globeandmail.com and ctv.ca.

 Homes & Land is the leader in Multi-media (magazine & internet) Real Estate Magazine Marketing across North America. Realtors and Real Estate marketers utilizing HomesAndLand.com are full service professionals committed to excellence in their fields of marketing real estate. Do your homework when choosing a Realtor. Choose a Realtor in Homes & Land!

 Homes & Land is a North American wide company annually distributing over 65 million magazines in 30 thousand communities across North America. Our national reach generates more qualified leads from consumers relocating to your area. We are also community experts specializing in local distribution. Our magazines are placed where your prospects live, work, and play. In addition, we direct mail our magazines to target markets that are actively buying and selling real estate.

A quote from  T.Harv Eker’s Secrets of the Millionaire Mind Card Deck.    

Have a seriously prosperous day! 

Empowering Thoughts

I love the Commoncraft series by Lee Lefever where he breaks concepts into really easy understandable terms. Here we can learn about the BLOG in plain English. Enjoy.

Do You Think Like a Salesperson or a Marketing Professional, by Greg Herder 

Understanding the huge difference between sales and marketing is the first step to becoming a great marketer.

Greg examines the chasm that separates these interrelated, yet vastly different disciplines. Working with real estate sales people day after day, I see a huge waste of time, money and energy that comes as a direct result of agents thinking like a salesperson instead of a marketing professional. Unfortunately, most agents have no formal training about what marketing is and how it relates to their sales activities. While most agents have gone through a significant amount of sales training, the sales training they get revolves around classic sales skills that assume that face-to-face selling skills are all you need to succeed as a real estate agent. This training doesn’t cover the impact that marketing has on the overall success of an agent.

The reality is that most real estate trainers do not have a marketing education or come from a marketing background. They were successful sales people that enjoyed training and/or management and teach agents what they did to succeed as a salesperson. So, what is the difference between sales and marketing and why is it important that you understand it?

The classic definition of marketing is that it is the total of all activities involved in the transfer of goods from the producer or seller to the consumer or buyer, including market selection, product or service features, design, packaging, branding, advertising, shipping, storing, selling, delivery and post-sale customer service. Selling is one step out of the complete marketing process and is usually defined as a salespersons’ actions that are used to persuade or induce (someone) to buy something when they are face to face or on the phone with a prospect.

How Marketing Works Think about companies like Proctor & Gamble, which relies purely on the marketing process to persuade people to buy their products. When was the last time you walked into a store to buy a Proctor & Gamble product and a P&G salesperson tried to close you on buying Crest, Tide or any other P&G product? P&G relies on the impact of their marketing and advertising to create a buyer who walks into the store predisposed to buying Crest or Tide.

Classic sales methods were designed to work without any marketing support. From the early-1930s to the late-1970s, there were countless direct sales people who sold aluminum siding, cookware, encyclopedias, vacuums and a myriad of other goods, simply by knocking on doors and then closing. Supporting Your Sales Function By the early ’80s, two-income households were the norm and people became less tolerant of door-to-door sales, and most pure direct sales companies disappeared. The companies that survived were the ones that found a way to give their sales people marketing support – companies like Avon, Tupperware, Amway, Herbalife and others.

These companies’ marketing activities created demand for the products that their salespeople sold, making the salespeople more productive. They also moved from door-to-door selling to home parties, group meetings, seminar selling and other methods that combined marketing with selling. The old-school idea of a salesperson was someone who could sell icemakers to Eskimos based on their charismatic personality and closing skills. I remember one of the real estate sales training seminars I attended in the 1970s was titled “How to Convince Anyone to Sell their Home Anytime.” It was a hardcore sales script using a combination of fear and humiliation to make people sign a listing on the spot. I remember the trainer telling us, “Remember, this presentation works on average one out of every 25 times you use it, and it will also get you thrown out one out of every 25 times.” At this point I realized that if this what being a real estate agent was all about, that I would never make it. I believed there had to be a different way to persuade people to do business with me. A Better Approach to Building a Business In Marketing, I found what I believed was a better, more professional method for succeeding in real estate.

The secret to marketing is strategic thinking, planning and execution. You have to pick a target market that you have a passion for. Develop a point of differentiation and marketing message that makes it easy for prospects to remember you so that you can drive your personal brand into their consciousness.This predisposes them to calling you when they have a need to buy or sell a home.

Finally, you have to execute your plan. Your marketing plan shows exactly what is going to be mailed and when, what ads to run and in what publications, what support materials to send out when people do call, the follow-up mailing plan to convert leads into clients and your service plan that shows how they are going to be treated. This requires an agent to make lots of difficult decisions and trade-offs, and to develop the patience to let the marketing plan run long enough to actually start working – which is normally nine to 12 months. To Build a Business, Resist the Lure of Instant Gratification Instant gratification: the problem that too many sales people get bogged down in the marketing process. The number of decisions and sacrifices they must make overwhelms them, and so does the cost associated with developing all of the pieces needed to execute a plan. Finally they struggle to actually execute the plan consistently over time. As the decisions, organizational details and costs of building a marketing campaign bury them, the lure of getting the instant gratification of a sale starts to pull their focus away from marketing and turn it toward short-term sales activities like working FSBOs, cold calling for an hour a day and door knocking from 6 to 7 each night. Why waste all that time and money on marketing when you can just go out and cold call expireds?

This is why I believe the majority of agents end up failing in real estate and those who do survive simply hang on for 10 years until the referrals from their past client base start to kick in and they finally make a decent living. Along the way, most agents end up trying some sales gimmicks that a trainer or manager they know referred to as marketing. The litany is endless: mailing free CMA flyers, holding a raffle for a new TV, car or other prize, giving away flags on the 4th of July, pumpkins at Halloween, notepads, pens, chip clips, calendars, and a host of other promotional stuff agents give away.

Recently I was asked to judge a special marketing meeting for a large company that had a number of offices. Agents had been asked to bring their best marketing concept to this meeting and share in front of all the offices. Three mangers and I were asked to pick the winner from what we saw presented. Sales Gimmicks Are Not Real Marketing I was totally dismayed as agent after agent got up and presented some sales gimmick, open house invitations with cute bunnies, mailing out half a dollar bill and promising the other half if they would come by an open house, paper weights, magnets, beautiful presentation packages to give to FSBOs and expireds. During a break, the owner came up and asked me “What do you think is the best marketing concept you have seen so far?” I told him that I had not seen a single marketing concept during the first two hours. I explained that what I had seen was a bunch of short-term-oriented sales gimmicks that no matter how clever or cute, were hit or miss pieces at best.

I realized that most agents think sending out a flyer or giving away a note pad is marketing, and that is why most of them become disillusioned with marketing and why most end up failing. A great real estate marketer starts by looking at two things.

First, the marketplace they are in and, second, their skill set and personality. Then they, based on who they are, determine what segment of the market is most likely to relate best to their personality. They then look for their unique marketing proposition. A UMP should be something that is very hard for your competition to copy and something that you find naturally exciting and compelling. Then you need to take that and turn it into a personal logo; a graphic design that you will use in every single piece of your marketing. Then go to work on creating a basic brand message that will be used to differentiate and make you memorable in your client’s mind. This all takes time, money, focus and it’s hard work. In many ways it’s like growing crops. You have to analyze the soil, select the right crop to grow in that soil, add fertilizer, plant your seeds, water it, weed it and care for it during the spring and summer. All this is done so that when the fall rolls around you have something significant to harvest.

Commitment is Key The most frequent question I have been asked over the last 22 years is something like this: “I can see how marketing is the way to go, and I really want to build my business through marketing, but how can I get started without limiting my options by having to actually pick a niche and by spending almost no money?” It is like a farmer saying, “Well, I don’t really want to commit to growing corn, because I know the wheat market could be good next year, and I really like beans as well, so I think what I will do is plant my field with mixture of seeds from the five crops I think will get me the best price next year.”

We know the outcome will end up in failure, but we get to avoid having to make the difficult decisions that must be made. Yes, you can succeed through a pure sales approach to real estate. Every now and then, I meet one of those incredibly rare, totally disciplined selling machines, who doesn’t get burned out using some script to try and close prospect after prospect. But they are very few and far between. What’s Your 10-Year Plan? I tell people in the long run it is better to go back and get a salaried job for awhile, save up $15,000 to $20,000 to invest in executing a marketing campaign and then do real estate the right way. If you were advising your teenager who just graduated from high school whether they should go to college or not, even if it meant working part-time, borrowing money and struggling a little bit, would you advise them to go out and get a job as soon as they could because it is going to make them more money today?

Ten years from now your life will be determined by the choices you make today. The question is really simple: Which approach to real estate will ensure your life will be what you want it to be 10 years from now? The direct-prospecting person plan or the marketing professional plan? I would love your feedback on this article. Send your answer, along with any questions or comments, to Greg.Herder@HobbsHerder.com or come and join us at  http://www.hobbsherder.com/gateway 

Gateway '09

Hello West Coast Home Sellers!

Selling your home in today’s real estate market requires a full service Realtor who utilizes a balanced multi-media marketing plan to expose your home to the broadest market of perspective buyers.

In fact, the #1 Advise to Home Sellers from Consumer Reports is….Pick The Right Broker…“Look for local agents who are listing, marketing, and selling in your community, even if the market is slow. Ask several Realtors to make a listing presentation to discuss your home’s value, justify their numbers and explain how they would market your property”. 

Hire a Realtor who presents a marketing plan to sell your home that includes both offline and online marketing, not just one or the other.

The National Association of Realtors (NAR) posted an update in September 2008 indicating over 30% of consumers searching for properties use a Home Magazine in their search as well as the internet. 

For expensive homes (over $700,000) it is likely that percentage is even higher as age groups of 35+ are heavier users of magazines than 25 year olds (although magazines certainly motivate younger generations as well).  The following ad illustrates the age breakdowns of consumers using magazines to drive their online purchasing in all industries.

Dan Gooder Richard, author of Real Estate Rain Maker, A Guide to  Online Marketing indicates roughly 47% of people shop through a catalogue and buy from a website.  Also, rougly 30% of website traffic is generated by internet searches.  The remaining 65% of consumers go to a website through some form of offline marketing (print, radio, tv, etc). This means 2 out of 3 people need an offline prompt to direct them to a website.

A Realtor using a Home Magazine such as Homes & Land to market your property is investing in a broader strategy to reach more home buyers by utilizing all of their preferred search tools. Homes & Land Realtors are quite simply – doing more for you!

When it comes to the internet, it is a given that your property should automatically be loaded to the MLS (now Realtor.ca) and your Realtor’s website. 

Although 85% of people use the internet to search for property, a much smaller percentage will actually find and view your Listing from a random property search or from googling real estate terms.

Ask your Realtor if they have a plan to drive specific traffic to your listing, not just to their website or Realtor.ca where the chances of a buyer finding your property are reduced.

Homes & Land is a Multi-Media Platform

In Print, Across the Internet, Through Direct Mail, On Mobile Devises .

Our integrated approach enables you to reach more people in more places – faster.

Research the Realtor’s website to see how easy it is to navigate. What is their online strategy? How many photos do they post of their other listings?  Where else do they distribute their current listings for on-line exposure. 

Potential buyers need to be able to find them and have an engaging experience on their website or they won’t stick around to see your home. At least 6 photos but preferably 10 or more photos should be posted on every website your Realtor features your home on. Statistics from NAR show 98% of consumers searching properties want more photos and six or more photos outpulls time spent on a property by 300% over five photos or less. 

When you hire a Homes & Land Realtor and your home is featured on our website with 6-photos or more, it automatically turns into a virtual tour to enhance the buyers experience. Then it loads to websites like Googlebase, Oodle, Live Deal, Resort Scape, Zillow, Condo.com, Vast. Properties priced over $750,000 load to The New York Times.com, The Wall Street Journal.com, The International Herald Tribune and properties valued at $1M+ load to Unique Global Estates.com.

Home & Land is the leader in integrated Real Estate Magazine Marketing across North America with a magazine presence in over 30,000 communities and a website that generates over 34 million monthly property views (and growing as we now expand beyond Canada and the US into Mexico, Costa Rica and the Bahamas). 

There is no better coverage available in the marketplace to advertise your home. 

Your home may be your greatest investment. Protect your equity by choosing the right Realtor® for the job. Insist on Homes & Land exposure for your home!

Or better yet…choose a Homes & Land Realtor to sell your home!

If you are looking for real estate in Canada or across North America visit www.HomesAndLand.com.

Join us at www.twittler.com/homesandlandmag

    In today’s residential real estate market it is essential for home sellers to choose the right Realtor® to sell your home.      

    In starting down the road of selling your home in this market, one of key components is going to be pricing your home competitively. Top producing Realtors are experts in their field and know what price your home should be listed at. Be prepared to price it right and then your home deserves marketing.  

Your Home Advertised....In Your Neighborhood and Around the World

    In fact, According to Consumer Reports the #1 advice to Home Sellers is…  PICK THE RIGHT BROKER...

    Look for local agents who are listing, marketing, and selling in your community, even if the market is slow. Ask several of them to make a listing presentation to discuss your home’s value, justify their numbers and explain how they would market your property”.      

    The Realtors that use Homes & Land are dedicated to the marketing of your home and their business even in a sluggish market when perhaps other Realtors are dissapearing from the advertising landscape.     

    Homes & Land is the leader in the real estate magazine business across North America with magazine distribution in over 30,000 communities and a website that generates over 34 million monthly property views.      

    Advertising in Homes & Land magazine exposes your home to tens of thousands of potential local buyers. These magazines get distributed to over 3000 lifestyle locations from Greater Vancouver, The Fraser Valley and across Vancouver Island from Victoria to Campbell River including 5-star hotels downtown & in Whistler, BC Ferries and most Real Estate offices across the West Coast!   There is no better coverage available in the marketplace to advertise your home.

    Add to all of this, massive online exposure. Your home automatically gets turned into a virtual tour  when your Realtor posts six photos or more of your home on HomesAndLand.com.

Virtual Tours of your home

    Then, your home is further distributed  to partner websites like Googlebase.com, LiveDeal.ca and Oodle.ca

    Homes valued at $750,000+ upload to websites like The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune. Homes valued at 1M+ further upload to The Wall Street Journal and Unique Global Estates.     

    In this current economic climate it is crucial for a business to seek the highest value and most cost efficient solutions to drive results for its marketing dollars. Homes & Land is this solution for Realtor’s and the homes they represent.     

    Your home may be your greatest investment. Protect your equity and choose the right Realtor® for the job. Insist on Homes & Land exposure for your home!

    To search for properties internationally go to HomesAndLand.com, in Vancouver; HomesAndLandVancouver.com, Vancouver Island; HomesAndLandVancouverIsland.com or Greater Vancouver/Fraser Valley; HomesAndLandgvrd.com.

Homes & Land Cover 

Presented by Clara Hartree of Remax Masters. Click above and see page 7 in our Ezine or see www.HomesAndLandVancouver.com for more details.

The retail world has been enriched with some new names over the past 10 years: e-tailers, bricks-and-mortar retailers, click-and-mortar retailers, pure-players, e-commerce business etc. Customers can order their goods and services through a variety of channels and it has become rare to reach customers through one single medium.

Most channels work hand in hand. Catalogues are direct marketing vehicles and the web is a sales vehicle. With the growth of web catalogues, some marketers argued that they would quickly replace the printed catalogue. That has not happened.

Recent figures from the United States show the strong position of the printed catalogue. Sales data from more than a hundred catalogue retailers show that 60-65% of their 150 Billion sales originate from printed catalogues. This figure has grown 10% over the years and will continue to grow by 7% over the next five years. The catalogue is the ideal starting point for shopping; more than 50% of retail consumers consider a printed catalogue to be the key factor when deciding where to shop on-line and three out of four people get some or all of their ideas from catalogues.

Research provided by BIGreasearch also indicates that Magazines are the top driver of web traffic in every age demographic (click to enlarge).

Magazines & Demographics

Many companies notice the interplay between on-line, catalogues and retail channels. One of the most striking examples of this interplay between web and printed catalogues is Amazon, which uses printed catalogues to promote its sites and its goods. Amazon.com was the first major internet company to publish catalogues. In 2000 and 2001 millions of catalogues were mailed out to customers.

In 2004 eBay started to use catalogues to promote its website. The catalogue helps to keep eBay at the forefront of people’s minds as a shopping site and demonstrates the new role for the catalogue: to generate traffic for the web-based activities.  Homes & Land Magazine achieves the same results for Real Estate marketers. Research illustrates the point further.

Realtors fully utilizing HomesAndLand.com and all of the on-line features express similar views. Brian Jarvis of thejarvisgroup.com comments….” in reviewing for a successful 2009 I reviewed all my lead generation sources and next to Realtor.ca, Homes & Land generated more views to my website than any other media.”

With more and more dollars pouring into internet to compete in your community for the elusive on-line property consumer how will you drive traffic to your website?

The old rule was that on-line advertising would surpass off-line but the new rule suggests the combination will now win out every time. We believe Homes & Land integrated offline & on-line strategy will help YOU win every time.  Click on the image below to enlarge.

For more information contact us at Office: 604.904.8662

Other ways to contact me:

Twitter: angelabowolin

Gone are the days of putting a sign in the yard, listing a home on the MLS and calling it a day.

Today, one of the largest activities Realtors are going to grapple with is MARKETING.  On-line and off-line marketing with an integrated approach and in a very big way. Marketing is going consume time in 2009 and it is also going to eliminate many Realtors from the industry. Those not interested in figuring out Internet-strategies and the emerging Social Networking World are going to begin to retire. Let’s try make some sense of it here.

SEO (search engine optimization), Global Listing Distribution, Blogging and Social Networking (Linked-in, Facebook, You Tube, Activerain, Twitter) all integrated with current activities will become the rage for most Realtors in 2009 and beyond as the industry rapidly moves in this direction.

The question is “How does one now accomplish current activities (that already keep us busy) and add a whole new online marketing platform without having to hire teams, bust the bank and/or lose our minds figuring it out?”

It is going to be an interesting year for most Real Estate Marketers including us at HomesAndLand Westcoast as we all move into the new digital age. The answers as we are finding are easy but do take time.

Social networking is free and now with programs like Ping.fm  you can enter one update and have all your social network sites updated.

A blog is easy and free to set up at wordpress.com and can be linked to your own website. Blogging is also a fantastic way to enhance paid for SEO efforts. Also, Activerain.com is a blogging site that specializes in real estate professionals and marketing information. It too is free and very informative.

Some bigger strategies will include listing distribution online and driving traffic to your website to maximize exposure to your listings.

This is another area where HomesAndLand.com is a terrific partner. Not only can Realtors plug into a massive on-line distribution network that automatically distributes all your listings to many online partners (like our newest partnership: www.uniqueglobalestates.com) but it also offers an integrated media strategy (an offline magazine that drives local traffic to your websites)…the new winning combination in todays research. Amazon.com and EBAY just launched catalogues as there is a direct correlation between magazine advertising and online sales….(magazines drives traffic to your site for conversion). Realtors already using the programs fully can’t believe more Realtors are not utilizing the integrated program.

SEO (use specialists)….we use Stepforth Media from Vancouver Island and recommend them as they have done a great job for us. Check with colleagues and see how they are ranking and with whom. Remember SEO takes a bit of time but with an expert shouldn’t take too long or cost too much. 

Lastly, most Realtors complain about dollars spent on local newspaper advertising. Research shows consumers are not paying attention to your ads. We believe if it’s not working for you – you need to step up to the plate and be the “Paid Expert” that you are. Stop letting home sellers dictate your advertising if it doesn’t work. These dollars are precious and need to be spent strategically. Only products that drive awareness of your listings, that can be easily measured by traffic to your website (so that you can convert online consumers into buyers) are worthy of your hard earned marketing dollars. Manage the expectations of your home sellers by figuring out what truly works, insisting on it, and implementing it – you will be respected for it and as more Realtors move away from newsprint the less pressure you will feel to use it.

Have a fantastic day and we look forward to marketing with you in 2009!