Ready for National Open House Weekend? We Can Help!

Have you started preparing for the National Association of REALTORS® 2012 Nationwide Open House Weekend, April 28 and 29? State and local REALTOR® associations across the nation join NAR in hosting the nation’s largest open house campaign.

Open houses open doors to buying opportunities! So what could be better than a weekend full of open houses, encouraging people to tour homes? This coast to coast event brings value to both buyers and seller offering buyers a stress-free way to tour homes. For sellers, the weekend provides a high-visibility effort to promote traffic and drive home sales. It provides real estate agents a tremendous opportunity to promote the benefits of home ownership and have open dialogue with consumers about housing issues that matter most to them.

As your partner in your success, Fidelity has promotional materials and resources available to ensure your open house stands out.

Our Realtor Advantage Package for $69.00 maximizes your value by reducing costs and time with an all-in-one listing package that includes:

50 Full color flyers on your new listing

HighRes Media or AZ Imaging HD VIRTUAL TOUR- Tours are posted to Realtor. com, Homes.com, Google & Yahoo.com included

“Custom listing website” to showcase your new listing. Advertise on 9 Different Sites!

Online Print Ship Login-Quick, Easy and Affordable Printing with 24/7 Access!

Our Luxury Package:

The best rates for your luxury virtual tours and flyers. A savings of $300 exclusively through Fidelity National Title

HighRes Media Virtual Tour - daylight or twilight package available daylight package :$249 (regularly $539.45)

Twilight package: up to 5,000 sf $390 (reg $724) over 5,000 sf $490 (reg $825)

Tours posted to Realtor.com, MSN, Google, Trulia, Zillow, Yahoo, Top Producer, Frontdoor, VisualTour, UniqueGlobalEstates.com, craigslist.org, Vast, Overstock, oodle, The Real Estate Book, &LuxuryHomeVideosOnline.com.

50 Premium Flyers 8.5 x 11 (2-sided, Full-bleed Color, UV Coated Front/Back, 111# Gloss Cover Stock)

100 Jumbo Postcards 8.5 x 5.5 mailed to 100 properties surrounding the properties. (2-sided, Full Color, UV Coated Front, 16pt Cover Stock) MAILED FOR YOU!

30% discount on full page advertising with Luxury Home Magazine

Ala carte pricing: Daylight Tour Only: $150
Twilight Tour Only (under 5000sf): $250
Twilight Tour Only (over 5000sf): $350

A host of other open house tools are also available, including Fidelity Data Shop and Premiere Leads. Contact your Sales Representative today to make sure YOUR open house shines!

Leveraging Foursquare For Your Real Estate Practice

In mid-June of this year, the location-based social network, Foursquare announced they had reached a major milestone: 10 million users! This is particularly amazing in that they’re pretty new in the social media realm, having started in March 2009.

Of those current 10 million users, about 3 million check-in somewhere each day, and about 400,000 businesses use Foursquare as a marketing tool.

Checking in is becoming more and more popular. The latest ComScore report released in May 2011 revealed that nearly 1 in 5 smartphone owners access check-in services via their mobile device. Foursquare had 381,576,305 check-ins in 2010 alone.

So how exactly does this affect real estate? We are starting to see brokerages adopting creative social media strategies, like the ‘Race for the Home’ event that Prudential Georgia Realty did. Based in metro Atlanta, they teamed up with property search site HomeFinder.com and mobile gaming platform SCVNGR to offer some 500 prospective homebuyers the chance to compete for a $15,000 down payment on a home purchase. We’ve also seen The Corcoran Group, a New York brokerage, embrace Foursquare and is now a major brand on Foursquare. Foursquare fits beautifully into Corcoran’s core brand ideas in that the process of searching for a home is just as much about what’s outside of the 4 walls than it is inside.

What are some of the ways you can start leveraging Foursquare in your own business?

Add your own business location to Foursquare - Provide clients who check-in to your location regularly with loyalty rewards. Offer incentives for people to write tips that mention you by name e.g. “Go to Jones Realty and ask for Sally Jones. She knows Jonesville like the back of her hand.” It’s a great way to generate word-of-mouth referrals.

Check-in when you’re doing an open house - If you are a Realtor sitting at an open house, do you have a Foursquare special set up? Think of it as just one more way to market to the people who are in the immediate area and just may be looking at open houses on your block. Remember, EVERYONE who checks in somewhere nearby (the local coffee shop, hardware store, etc.) sees not just the place they’re checking into but other places nearby; including your open house IF it’s there to be found! Your Foursquare check-in provides a map to your location. Conversely, it also works the opposite way. If someone comes to your open house by way of seeing it in an ad, but are unfamiliar with the area, they can use the ‘Explore’ tab on Foursquare to check out nearby places friends have visited or are popular with locals. It’s a fantastic way to go somewhere new and try something different. You can even filter it by the type of venue you’d like to visit – the type of food you like for example. Their vast inventory of user-generated tips is the content that ultimately describes what those experiences are going to be like prior to actually going there. If you’ve never tried it, it’s a powerful form of suggestion-based marketing that often leads to some amazing recommendations. Most importantly, it keeps people engaged with you and your content in a meaningful way. The unexpected search result or experience in a sea of noise, that creates real value related to what the user was originally looking for, can be a very powerful place to position your services.

Advertise that the property is open for review on Foursquare - Mention in your web advertising that you’ve added the property location to Foursquare. Invite home open visitors to write a review. Their review will be available to other Foursquare users.

Ask your colleagues to check-in when they show the property - Get them to add a brief review while they’re at the property on an agent caravan or when showing buyers. And reciprocate by doing the same for them.



Sources: Mashable, Tech Savvy Agent