Those who know me know I love to rag on other real estate brokers. But sometimes, you run into a competitor who does something that’s not only innovative, but competent. Today I tip my hat to M Realty and its marsupial child, Homequest for their marketing approach.
Homequest is a web platform that integrates residential property search, agent advertising and WordPress, to give the Cliff’s Notes description. I used Homequest for a bit in 2006, when most agent websites were afterthoughts, and showed it. At the time, Homequest could be framed into a website and people looking for homes could do so by neighborhood and register on the agent’s website for updates. I dropped it after a while. My (admittedly few) clients found it clunky and difficult to manipulate. And in those days, Homequest was just figuring out how to do searches by neighborhood, with mixed success, through feeds (I’m guessing) from RMLS, which itself was pretty clunky.
Fast forward to 2011, and Homequest not only has a new look and feel, but–when properly used–takes marketing to a higher and more useful level. WordPress itself has evolved into an incredibly useful and custom-designable (if there’s such a word) product that it now puts most websites to shame. A good WordPress blogsite almost feels three-dimensional. And for its part, Homequest really does an outstanding job of property search by any area–neighborhood, zip code, school zone, whatever.
I’d say 99.9% of real estate brokers use the term “marketing” when they mean advertising. In my pre-license days, I can’t count how many times some broker or other would want to “market” my house or my subdivision, when they meant list it in MLS and advertise it in the paper and hope like hell something happened. Marketing requires two critical elements: A focused strategy, which is often just identifying the demographic to be targeted, and accountability for the usefulness of the media used.
Which is what M Realty does, at least in the instance I saw today of a single property. The home was a new listing of a very special house. Where most of us would have done our thing and taken photos, made flyers, syndicated the listing and hoped like hell something would happen, this M Realty broker used her blogsite to do everything in the preceding paragraph. Instead of an e-flyer being blasted out to several hundred agents who deleted it if their spam filters didn’t catch it, she targeted her advertising to a selected group and followed up with both print and electronic media, with tracked the results with a service similar to Google Analytics.
The home received multiple offers and sold for more than the asking price in, as I recall, eight days.
Now, not all properties will see this kind of success. The quality of the property has a role in all this, after all. But they deserve something better than what the traditional practices deliver. M Realty certainly makes me want to do a better job.
The other thing I liked was how M Realty got it’s name. 
M Realty: A Tip of the Hat to a Competitor
by William Metzker on November 30, 2011
Those who know me know I love to rag on other real estate brokers. But sometimes, you run into a competitor who does something that’s not only innovative, but competent. Today I tip my hat to M Realty and its marsupial child, Homequest for their marketing approach.
Homequest is a web platform that integrates residential property search, agent advertising and WordPress, to give the Cliff’s Notes description. I used Homequest for a bit in 2006, when most agent websites were afterthoughts, and showed it. At the time, Homequest could be framed into a website and people looking for homes could do so by neighborhood and register on the agent’s website for updates. I dropped it after a while. My (admittedly few) clients found it clunky and difficult to manipulate. And in those days, Homequest was just figuring out how to do searches by neighborhood, with mixed success, through feeds (I’m guessing) from RMLS, which itself was pretty clunky.
Fast forward to 2011, and Homequest not only has a new look and feel, but–when properly used–takes marketing to a higher and more useful level. WordPress itself has evolved into an incredibly useful and custom-designable (if there’s such a word) product that it now puts most websites to shame. A good WordPress blogsite almost feels three-dimensional. And for its part, Homequest really does an outstanding job of property search by any area–neighborhood, zip code, school zone, whatever.
I’d say 99.9% of real estate brokers use the term “marketing” when they mean advertising. In my pre-license days, I can’t count how many times some broker or other would want to “market” my house or my subdivision, when they meant list it in MLS and advertise it in the paper and hope like hell something happened. Marketing requires two critical elements: A focused strategy, which is often just identifying the demographic to be targeted, and accountability for the usefulness of the media used.
Which is what M Realty does, at least in the instance I saw today of a single property. The home was a new listing of a very special house. Where most of us would have done our thing and taken photos, made flyers, syndicated the listing and hoped like hell something would happen, this M Realty broker used her blogsite to do everything in the preceding paragraph. Instead of an e-flyer being blasted out to several hundred agents who deleted it if their spam filters didn’t catch it, she targeted her advertising to a selected group and followed up with both print and electronic media, with tracked the results with a service similar to Google Analytics.
The home received multiple offers and sold for more than the asking price in, as I recall, eight days.
Now, not all properties will see this kind of success. The quality of the property has a role in all this, after all. But they deserve something better than what the traditional practices deliver. M Realty certainly makes me want to do a better job.
The other thing I liked was how M Realty got it’s name.