Hello everybody,

recently, I was reading an article that some agents use Virtual Assistants to generate prospects.  There was an example of one agent in Florida who has a VA for buyers leads and a VA for sellers leads.

Buyers VA, follows up on every lead and email that comes in from the website.  Sellers VA, generates a list of listings that are expiring that day and calls every listing that is not on DNC list and tries to setup an appointment between the sellers and the agent.  The Sellers VA generates on average 8 appointments per week.  The sellers VA also prepares the listing presentation, a CMA and a CD with the listing presentation material.

I understand these VAs charge between $20 and $40 per hour, but if they can generate enough business for you to justify your ROI, perhaps it can be a great solution to not only grow your business, but to also let you concentrate on business of selling real estate, instead of lead generation.

Russell Volk, REALTOR®

"A web-savvy Bucks County Real Estate expert!"

Hello gang,

just wanted to know if any of you use Virtual Assistants to handle your Internet leads.  What are their tasks?  Costs?

Do you use them for any other tasks?

Look forward to hearing back.

Hello everybody,

yesterday, I was talking to my broker and he really likes how I run my Bucks County Real Estate website.  He wants to open up another brokerage in the area and he wants me to run it.  Basically, he supplies the money and I supply everything else.  Most important, I would be in charge of running and promoting a website.

I don't know anything about running a brokerage, but if it was you, how would you build it?  What staff would you have to have in place?

If you were to open up your own brokerage today and money was no object, how would you run it?  It has to have a major Internet presense.

What would be the ideal brokerage to open up today?

I look forward to your suggestions.

I was thinking of the following situation.  A real estate agent who has been in real estate for about a year, has been working on his website the entire year.  Has great placement in search engines, the leads are coming in, but he's not making enough money to support a family.  Just like many other agents, this one decides to leave the real estate industry.

Here's my question.  Would this real estate agent be able to sell his website?  The site drives traffic and generates leads.

How much would he be able to sell the site for?  It would be to another agent in the same area of course, so it doesn't interrupt the sites functioning and it's position in search engines.

What are your thoughts?

Bucks County Real Estate

I'm just curious to know how many of you drive your clients around and show them houses?  All the time that I've been in real estate, I did not have to drive anyone around, unless it's an out of state buyer, who flew into this area.  If the buyer is local, they follow me.  I have a navigation system in my car, so we never get lost and arrive to showings on time, but I never had to drive local buyers around.

What do you do?

Bucks County Real Estate

Hello everybody,

not sure if anyone noticed, but Google had just changed how they assign a PageRank to a website.  The update took place a few weeks ago.  Many, many sites got slapped.  Not sure what's going there, but that doesn't sound good.

I also noticed that Reliberation.com lost it's PR as well.  They went from PR4 or PR5 to PR3.  My homepage went from PR3 to PR2.  Many others got hit.  Microsoft.com went from PR10 to PR9.  So did yahoo.com.

I'm not sure if that affects the results within searches, but hopefully they will not be hitting those as well.  My PR dropped, but the SERPs did not change.  If it's only the PR, then I really don't care, but if that affects the site positioning, then we need to find another way to work on our SEO.

Good luck to all.

Have you ever had a need to search the MLS for a specific zip code?

It's very difficult to know where the zip code bounderies are.  Some times a client might ask to search for a home for them, within 5 miles of a specific intersection.  How would you conduct your search?  Searching by zip code is extremely helpful.

With this nifty tool, it becomes much easier to find the zip code bounderies.

http://maps.huge.info/zip.htm

Hope you guys find it useful.

I'm not sure if any of you have seen it, but I found this interesting presentation and wanted to share it with you.  Click on the link below.

http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dgnscqz3_0fph9w6

Just be patient as it takes a bit of time to load.

Enjoy!

Hey gang,

I ran into a very interesting situation lately and I just had to share it with you.  Perhaps my story will inspire others to work harder on their websites and continue optimizing it.

Here goes the story.

About 3 weeks ago, I received a call from a lady.  I wasn't able to answer the phone when she called, but she left me a voice mail and I called her back within minutes.  When we started talking, she starts describing to me the following situation.  Her and her husband, went riding on a hot air balloon on a Sunday.  About 45 minutes into their ride, they started experiencing technical difficulties with their balloon.  They had to make an emergency landing.  From above, they spotted a big field and decided to land there.  After landing in the field, a guy ran out to them and started offering help.  That field was actually a farm field.  About 30 acres of land and a beautiful 1850's colonial on it.  So they're all dragging their equipment towards the road, while admiring the area, the view from the field and the house and all of the sudden, the lady sees a "For Sale" sign infront of the house.

The guy who was helping them, was the owner of the house and told them that the house was actually for sale.

She went online, went to Google and typed in "Bucks County MLS".  My website came up #2 in the search and she called me.  She only knew that the house was located near a specific intersection.  She didn't have the address.  So she's telling me this story and said that she absolutely felt in love with that property and wanted to know more information about it. 

I found the house she was looking for, we all went to see it the last weekend, they loved it, put in an offer on Monday, offer was accepted on Tuesday, they offered the full asking price of $1,850,000.  The settlement is December 14th.

If I didn't spend all that time and effort on optimizing my website towards specific keywords, the lady would find somebody else and would buy that property through another agent.

It's a strange story, but is it destiny or is it smart SEO?

Good luck everyone.

Hey guys,

even though I enjoyed the topic of purple cow, rock star, the Thanksgiving video and the whole other nonsense, I think it's time to get back to being helpfull to each other and share our own tips and tricks with each other.

I'm looking for a place where I can store files for free.  Not just photos, but the actual JavaScript files with extension of .js.  I'm not looking for anything fancy, but a place where I can drop these files.  I'm trying to modify my site and I found a nice script that I can plug in, but it requires a call to external files.  I would really appreciate it if someone could direct me to that source, without blowing their own horn ;)

BTW, if someone is looking for a good site to store photos, I just started using photobucket.com and it's free and their connection is superfast... faster than comcast.net.

Thanks in advance,

Russell Volk

Hey guys,

just wanted to get your feedback and find out how effective your emails are that are being sent out from your P2 site.

Every lead that I get, I set them up on a drip campaign and add them to a prospect group.  On the first of every month, I send out a market update to the entire group.  On September 1st, I sent an update to the entire group (280 prospects).  I like a little utility where you can check who's opening your emails.  When I checked on that groups email activity, only 70 emails were opened out of 280.  That's only 25%.  I'm not sure if some of the opened emails are just not being recorded or people are just not opening the emails or maybe some of the emails are just not reaching my prospects.

I thought that perhaps the emails go to a Spam folder, but there are no images in my emails.  Just plain text with links to my site.

If you watch your groups email activity, please share your experience.

Take care,

Russell Volk

Bucks County PA Real Estate

Hello everybody,

I was showing a property on Saturday at 11:00am and since the property was pretty large, it took us about an hour to walk around.  At 11:30am, while I'm still with my client, I receive a phone call from a listing agent for the property, asking me for my feedback.  I was being polite and I told her that we're still at the property and I would call her later.  She insisted on asking me questions about my clients, the property and their feel for it.  I kept telling her that I'm still with my client and we're still at the property, but she continued to ask away and asked me to call her back after the showing.

I always give feedback on the showing, but this time I did not return the call.  The listing agent sounded really desperate and in my opinion was rude, knowing that I'm still with my client.  Next time, I will just leave my cell phone in my car during the showing.

Any of you had similar situations?

Take care,

Russell Volk

Real Estate in Bucks County, PA

Hello everybody,

I've been reading a lot of articles on real estate investments and I'm trying to learn as much as possible, but seems like all the articles are geared towards actual investors, without a real estate license.

I've been thinking of starting investing myself, but I'm just not sure how different the process is when you're licensed.

So here are my questions...

Do you invest?  If you do, where do you find your investments?  MLS (active or expired), listing interviews, word of mouth, etc.? 

What type of deals do you do?  Lease options, Subject To, rehabbing and flipping, rentals, etc.? 

How did you learn to invest?  Books, internet, broker, mentor, coach, another investor, etc.?

Please share your advice/suggestions and I think this can be a really informative and helpful thread for many agents out there, who are thinking of starting to invest themselves.

Thanks in advance,

Russell Volk

Hello everybody,

I haven't had a chance to participate in all the discussions lately, but I have been reading most of them.  I'll try to contribute more as the slow months of summer are upon us.

Here's my question, have you noticed a traffic decrease in the month of June?  My website went from an average of 150 unique visitors per day in the month of May to about 80 unique visitors per day in the month of June.  That's almost a 50% decline.  I can't wait till September.

I was checking my Google rankings today and my home page is concentrating on 18 different keywords.  For 15 keywords I'm on the first page of Google and for the other three, I'm on a second page.  I'm very happy with my SEO efforts and seems like all this hard work is finally paying off.  But I did not notice a large increase in traffic.  Maybe an extra 10 visitors per day.

I can't wait till September, so I can trully test the effect of better rankings.

Hope you're all having a wonderful summer so far.

Best regards,
Russell Volk

Bucks County, PA Real Estate

Hello everybody,

since I've installed the MLS search on my site, I've been getting a lot of leads with valid email addresses and phone numbers.  The problem is, I'm not that good incubating a lead over the phone.  My preference is to have a conversation face-to-face.  So I was thinking of working with a buyer's agent to call these leads and try to have them either come to the office for an initial interview or schedule a showing.

If any of you have experience with this, do you pay the agent hourly or from your commission?  How does this usually work?

If you've done this before, please share your results on numbers before you hired a buyer's agent and after.

Also, I'm still not sure if it's a good idea, because I still want to provide my visitors a personal service.

Thanks in advance.