Getting the best use out of your money

It takes a lot of experimentation to find out which programs and features are worth spending the money on. Especially when they are starting out, agents don’t have a big budget to spend on real estate websites.

“According to NAR statistics, in 2012 agents spend less than $500 in marketing per year,” Dollinger said. “To put that in perspective, if you made $50,000 dollars last year and spent $500 in marketing, that’s reinvesting 1 percent of your earnings.”

But if you have a yearly budget of $300, Dollinger says it’s not worth spending that money on real estate websites.

“Don’t do it,” he said. “You’re probably not a listing agent and you’d be better off  spending this $300 a year on mailers to your SOI, thank you gifts, or taking past clients out for coffee.  You can still take advantage of the portal’s free services like ‘Trulia Voices’ or ‘Zillow Advice’ to interact with consumers and build your online brand, but for $25 a month, none of the portals provide a service worth paying for.”

He says the same goes for a yearly budget of $500, however you “may” be able to afford some of the entry-level products for enhancing your listings and preventing competitive advertising from appearing. Dollinger recommends focusing on your current/past clients or SOI unless you are a listing agent that falls into the following:

• You are with a small agent team or independent broker
• Your company does not feature their listings online
• Your company is sending leads off of your listings to other agents

Dollinger said one of the ways to do this is taking advantage of the “Featured Listing” packages Zillow, Trulia and Realtor.com offers (especially Zillow) to prevent competition on your listings, assure leads from your listings will go back to you and show up higher in the search order.

“You’ll also be able to use this in listing presentations and some of the analytic tools to better communicate with your sellers during the transaction,” he said.

And if you have a yearly budget of $1,000, Dollinger says you can begin to “act like a marketer and invest some money in your business.” He said to take advantage of the “Featured Listings” products real estate websites offer, and look at the opportunities they can give you and ask yourself some questions. Examples of things to think about include, “Is this zipcode, neighborhood or geographically specific?”, “What is the current average traffic to these specific areas?”, “How many agents do leads get sent to at one time?  All at same time?” and “Do I get all the customer information sent to me?” (meaning, do you get the customer’s actual contact information, or a proxy email).

For Dollinger, Trulia and Zillow are the options he would prefer to use, but understanding what the traffic looks like for an area that you want to do business in is going to be important.

“I would focus on the inclusion of featured listings in package, how much of product is focused on getting you in the “lead contact box” (not banners or mobile) and how and how much of the client’s information is provided to me,” he said.