I'm Speaking at Dreamforce 2016

I am incredibly excited to be invited by Salesforce to one of the first companies in real estate to be invited to speak about Marketing Automation at Dreamforce 2016 on behalf of Elegran, held October 4th-7th in San Francisco. Dreamforce is the largest software conference in the world, attracting over 175,000 technology entrepreneurs and business leaders, to connect with their peers and learn from industry pioneers. I will join speakers Melinda Gates, Mark Cuban, Marc Benioff, Tony Robbins and many more on the stage at Dreamforce this year. Elegran prides itself as a pioneer in technology and real estate marketing in NYC and is eager to present successful marketing strategies on a national stage to other leaders of the global business community.
Tigh Loughhead, Marketing Director at Elegran Real Estate and Development, was asked by Salesforce to speak at Dreamforce this year about Elegran’s innovation in lead nurturing and marketing automation, which it has used successfully to build an inbound marketing strategy, align marketing and sales teams, and leverage cold and dormant leads. Recently quoted on the Salesforce blog and Pardot product release announcement of Engagement Studio, Tigh has used lead nurturing technology strategies to close the loop between the traditional marketing and sales funnels at Elegran, about which he recently gave a presentation at Salesforce’s NYC headquarters in Manhattan. Details about Elegran’s Dreamforce session can be found below.https://success.salesforce.com/Sessions#/session/a2q3A000000LBY1QAO
Elegran attributes its rapid growth in becoming one of the leading firms in New York City to its high level of customer service, the excellence of its team, and its investment in technology and marketing. Elegran’s mastery of customer segmentation, nurture and conversion have propelled it to become one of the fastest-growing and most exciting firms in the industry; and the first to totally customize Salesforce for real estate, investing in the software for every member of its sales team, becoming one of the leading firms in the world of marketing automation.
Tigh Loughhead is an expert in digital marketing with a background in advertising and real estate technology, helping to grow several startups in New York City. As an expert in marketing automation, lead generation and real estate marketing tech, Tigh brings a wealth of digital marketing knowledge and management skills, such as CRM implementation, SEM, SEO, automation, content strategy, branding and conversion optimization to Elegran. In 2014, Tigh was one of only 10 people asked to sit on Trulia.com’s “NYC Rental Advisory Council." For the past two years, Tigh has run Elegran’s marketing team, focusing on lead generation, data analysis, and aligning sales and marketing to build Elegran as a scalable business. 

All Of NYC's Affordable Housing through the Furman Center's Data Search Tool

Search all of New York City's affordable housing by name, owner, year built, location, financing or physical information (for example by # of building violations in 2010).  Or, you can research all sorts of demographic information from Crime to Education to employment to health to all sorts of housing informtion, to property tax to population, ethnic demographics and transportation.

Online Marketing Group Affordable Housing

The Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy collects a broad array of data on demographics, neighborhood conditions, transportation, housing stock and other aspects of the New York City real estate market. We make our data directly available to the public through our new Data Search Tool, and publish comprehensive analyses of these data in our periodic reports.

The Data Search Tool is a new online application that provides direct access to New York City data collected by the Furman Center. Users can select from a range of variables to create customized maps, download tables, and track trends over time. Users are able to overlay never-before available information on privately-owned, publicly -subsidized housing programs collected through the Furman Center’s Subsidized Housing Information Project (SHIP). Information about how to use the Data Search Tool is available in our online guide.


Online Marketing Group Affordable Housing

From the Furman Center

Backpage Manhattan Apartment Rental Posts Now Free?

I am wondering whether this is a site glitch, or a major move to compete with Craigslist, but rental posting on Backpage appears to be free at the moment...

Rental posts typically cost a dollar on Backpage, either in apts by owner (no brokers), apts broker fee, or  apts broker no fee.  Yet today, everything in the rental section seems free.

 

This is a completely different model than Craigslist, that allows owners to post for free, and charges brokers $7-10 per post to brokers... (and enforces everything rather loosely and randomly)

Walkscore Launches Apartment Search, Integrating Craigslist, MyNewPlace and ForRent Listings

Apartment Search from Walk Score from Walk Score on Vimeo.

Commuting is expensive and time spent sitting in traffic is lost forever. Here are our favorite commuting stats:

  • Over three quarters of home shoppers rate being within a 30 minute commute to work as important. (Source: National Association of Realtors)
  • Commuters waste 4.2 billion hours and 2.8 billion gallons of gas in traffic per year. (Source: Texas Transportation Institute)
  • The average American spends over $9,000 per year on their car. This is the equivalent of a $135,000 mortgage and the second largest expense for most households, costing more than food, clothing and health care. (Source: AAA)

To get started, visit walkscore.com/apartments and enter your work (or school) address, select your preferred mode of transportation, and tell us how long you’re willing to commute.

Apartment listings from craigslist are automatically sorted by estimated commute time and can be further filtered by Walk Score, price and size.

And if you don’t find what you’re looking for, we’ve integrated links to MyNewPlace and ForRent.com to search their national databases for nearby rental listings.

“Access to public transit and minimizing commute times are high-priority, quality of life issues for many renters. We’re very pleased to offer Walk Score users access to MyNewPlace’s extensive inventory of apartments and rental homes in virtually every neighborhood throughout the U.S.,” said Mark Moran, MyNewPlace SVP of Marketing

From WalkScore Blog

My post today on the OMG Blog.

Trulia Launches New Android App: For Rent

Trulia ForRent Online Marketing Group

Ok, so perhaps I am just a bit excited about my new Android phone, but I really like this new app from Trulia.  We work with Trulia frequently for advertising and listings, and although listings in New York City are a bit flooded by brokers (just check out all the listings with the "Address Not Disclosed"), Trulia remains one of the best listing websites out there.  The coolest feature is the location-based search.   I work on 23rd street near Madison Square Park, and now I can search the Trulia database for rental listings near my office just by turning on my GPS.  And, of course I can filter by rent, beds and baths, square footage and a few other features. 

Trulia ForRent Online Marketing GroupTrulia ForRent Online Marketing Group

Trulia has typically been a much more sales (listing) oriented site, but New York City is a far more rental-driven real estate market, topping the list of Trulia's Rent vs. Buy Index.  But with this new app, exclusively dedicated to rentals, Trulia appears to be focusing a bit more attention on the rental side of the market.  And we really look forward to any new tools that enhance a user's search for an apartment. 
 

From the App Description:

Trulia - For Rent: find homes or apartments, share notes and photos - on the go!

Designed specifically for apartment-hunters on the go, Trulia - For Rent takes all of the pain out of finding your next place to live. Quickly find homes for rent or the apartments you like, share notes and photos with your roommates, and stay on top of what’s new on the market. Find your next rental on Trulia!

FEATURES:
• Personalize your search - Quickly find properties you like by GPS or location, get rid of the ones you don’t
• Remember what you liked (or didn’t) about the place - Take notes and photos, and also share them easily with roommates and family
• Never miss out on another rental - Sign up for email alerts right from your phone to know when new properties become available 
• Quickly see what’s new - Marker colors help show you what properties you haven’t seen yet
• Find open houses near you and easily add them to your calendar
• Find properties using voice-based search – Just say the city, # of beds and bath, and price range

Keepsum: Deal Site for Real Estate Professionals

online marketing group keepsum

Although many marketers think (myself included) that the novelty of deal sites like Groupon and LivingSocial is wearing a bit thin (seriously, how glamorous will coupon-clipping ever be, even if you do it with friends...?), Keepsum.com has a new approach to the whole social commerce idea.

At the same time, the viral marketing buzz of daily deals remains a great way to generate exposure for new businesses and tools, and Keepsum offers deals strictly for the real estate industry.  The tools they offer seem quite relevant to my needs and their mandate is fairly simple:

KeepSum is a group-buying service for business owners in the real estate industry. We offer up to 60% savings on the products and services you already use (and those you've been saving up for) to run your small business. We've got deals for almost every part of your business, including:

  • Accounting Tools
  • Training and Education
  • Printing and Marketing Services
  • Social Media Tools
  • Tech Tools
  • Website Development
  • And anything else you think you may need

We're small business owners too and we know there are only two ways to increase your profits:

1- Increase sales and/or

2- Reduce expenses.

I look forward to seeing if this industry specific deals site develops, and the whole deal sites remain a viable business model in the long run. 

VHT Acquires Dwellicious, A Social Bookmarking Service For Real Estate

 

dwell

It’s not enough for pioneering social bookmarking site Delicious to get acquired (twice). No, VHT just had to go ahead and buy Dwellicious, an oddly named service that enables people to bookmark, tag and organize real estate properties online in the same vein.

The acquisition, terms of which were not disclosed, makes a lot of sense. VHT provides technology and services for marketing real estate online, and will integrate Dwellicious into its ImageWorks online marketing platform to provide brokerage clients with a tool for communicating with home buyers.

Dwellicious uses social bookmarking to help home buyers share their favorite properties on Facebook, Twitter or other social media services. Buyers can organize, monitor and compare listings, make notes, add tags, and share and discuss properties with friends, family and real estate professionals.

VHT ImageWorks is used by more than 100,000 real estate professionals across the United States.

via techcrunch.com

Postlets Pro Now Free for Everyone!

What changes have taken place since Zillow acquired Postlets in April?

For one, last month we developed the ability for real estate agents, sellers, property managers, and landlords to post for-sale and for-rent listings directly from Zillow to Craigslist — for free!

Today, we’re thrilled to announce that the Postlets Pro program is now free. That’s right — we are opening up this program, which was previously a paid, subscription-only program, to everyone, for free!

That means that starting today, all new for-rent and for-sale listings on Postlets are free and will include:

  • up to 18 large photos
  • a rich listings template with multiple tabs
  • the ability to embed community information (i.e. Walk Score, school data)
  • video capabilities

Previously, these enhanced listing features were only available to paying Postlets Pro subscribers.  And, of course, Postlets is still committed to listing syndication, which distributes your listings across 13 real estate and social media websites.

Postlets now has multiple tabs for richer property information

Large photo display of up to 18 photos

Real estate agents, landlords, and property managers, we hope you are as excited about this announcement as we are! Start uploading your for-rent and for-sale listings to Postlets today, and continue to look to Zillow for innovative tools and resources to market your listings and grow your business.

Joining the Real Estate Search Party Online

UNTIL recently, real estate brokers in New York City rarely shared information about one another’s listings. As a result, buyers had no way of knowing whether their agent was showing them every property available, and sellers wondered whether their homes were getting the exposure necessary to secure the best deal.

 

Neil Binder, the president of Bellmarc Realty, says its VOW will allow property comparisons.

Companies like StreetEasy, Zillow and The New York Times have helped open up the market by gathering listing information from various real estate databases and making it easy for consumers to search for homes online. But many brokerages still display only the firm’s exclusive listings on their Web sites — either because they are focusing on selling their own properties or resigned to the fact that customers have migrated elsewhere to research what is on the market.

Other brokerage firms are getting into the digital game themselves, creating a “virtual office Web site” or VOW. These are sites operated by brokers that enable clients to search for most of the available properties in a particular market, not just the firm’s exclusive listings.

While brokers have mixed feelings about whether these sites are worth the investment, the emergence of the VOW is yet another sign that once tightly guarded listing information has finally been set free in New York.

“Five years ago, protecting listings was the single most important thing, and people were very selective about where their listings ended up,” said Eric Gordon, the managing director of RealPlus, which develops VOWs for clients as well as operating the listings database used by members of the Real Estate Board of New York. “Now they want us to send their listings to every site we could possibly send them to. There are exceptions, but in general, the feeling is, ‘just get our listings out there as quickly and efficiently as possible.’ ”

The virtual office Web site concept was spurred by a 2008 settlement between the Justice Department and the National Association of Realtors, which forced brokerages to share listing data with their rivals, including Internet-based firms that offer rebates or other discounts to buyers willing to do most of the legwork to find a home.

In most parts of the country, brokers share information about properties through a multiple listing service, or M.L.S., a database operated by a real estate association on behalf of its members. Although Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx each have a multiple listing service, many agents in New York City are not members and instead participate in a similar service managed by the Real Estate Board of New York, called R.L.S.

Agents who belong to these services are typically required to share property information with other brokers within a day or two of signing an exclusive listing, and these databases now share listings with each other as well as sites like StreetEasy, The New York Times, and hundreds of national and international portals like Yahoo and Google.

Sites like StreetEasy have free rein to publish listing information online for customers to search, aggregating data from various sources to create fairly comprehensive databases of properties available in New York City, including homes for sale by owner. But if brokerages want to post other firms’ listings on their Web sites, they must go through the process of becoming a virtual office Web site.

For prospective buyers the main difference between a VOW and other real estate search sites is that a VOW has to adhere to rules dictated by the Justice Department settlement, including a requirement that customers register with a name, an e-mail address and a password before they can search for listings.

Required registration can be a turn-off, some agents say, especially for casual shoppers.

“The problem I have with VOWs is that they force you to register before you can get information about properties,” said Douglas Heddings, the president of the Heddings Property Group. “To me it seems like a step backward, in that it’s holding the information hostage.”

Although the Heddings Property Group was one of the first firms in New York City to create a virtual office Web site just last year, Mr. Heddings said he was planning to abandon it in favor of a partnership with Buyfolio, a company that allows agents and their customers to search for listings as well as share feedback about properties.

For Buyfolio, a relatively new company focusing on the New York market, these collaboration tools are a key selling point. But now that real estate brokerages, technology start-ups like StreetEasy and media companies like The New York Times all have access to the same basic data about listings, the competition to attract buyers searching for homes online is heating up.

“You’ve still got to bring people to your Web site,” said Steven Spinola, the president of the Real Estate Board of New York, or Rebny. “Just creating a VOW doesn’t mean people are going to come and use it.”

So far, 98 of the 484 residential brokerage firms that are members of Rebny have created a virtual office Web site, Mr. Spinola said. This involves paying a fee to have the board audit the site to ensure it complies with the standards, like how client registration is handled and how listings data is managed.

But when the board recently overhauled its own Web site, now called NY1Residential.com, it partnered with the local news channel NY1 and decided not to create a VOW, partly to avoid the registration requirement.

“We made a decision that we weren’t going to ask people to sign in,” Mr. Spinola said. “It was just the sense of the members that they wanted to keep it an open Web site that anyone could search.”

Among New York City real estate firms, there are mixed feelings about whether a VOW delivers enough benefits to justify either the cost of creating one or the trade-offs involved in complying with rules about how these sites interact with clients.

After signing up for a VOW, customers have to wait for an e-mail to confirm that they have registered, and must also agree to terms and conditions that can run as long as a dozen pages. Those terms typically include an acknowledgment that the customer is entering into a lawful consumer-broker relationship with the agency, legally required language that does not obligate the buyer to work with the agency. This can seem like overkill just to search for, say, two-bedroom apartments in Chelsea.

But some brokerages are wagering that the hurdles are worth jumping, that there is money to be made from providing clients with a comprehensive set of properties rather than just the firm’s own listings, the traditional practice. Most VOWs also include tracking features that allow the agency to monitor customers’ searches, potentially producing useful data about what clients are looking for online.

“It was complicated to become a VOW, and it was costly,” said Dottie Herman, the president of Prudential Douglas Elliman. But, she said, the company’s Web site is more client-friendly now, allowing searches for properties in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, the Hamptons and Westchester County, including listings from other firms.

As for the registration requirement, Ms. Herman said she would have preferred that it be optional, but she doesn’t view it as a major deterrent. “I think most people don’t have a problem with it, because everybody asks for your e-mail address today,” she said.

Visitors to the Prudential Douglas Elliman site, once they have signed up, can search, sort and save listings. Results are displayed with the firm’s exclusive listings first, then those of other firms. But unlike, say StreetEasy, there is no direct link to the other firm’s site.

Bellmarc Realty is another big firm that is embracing the virtual office approach. Neil Binder, the president of Bellmarc, said that after experimenting with allowing individual agents to offer a VOW, generally using third-party software, the firm decided to develop a company-wide site instead, which will debut once it gets Rebny’s approval.

Mr. Binder said that the Bellmarc agents who tried VOWs created by third-party vendors did not find they generated much business, but he believes the new VOW will be more effective.

“It’s going to be more of an evaluation tool than an information tool,” Mr. Binder said. “I’m trying to create a process of comparison to show how properties stand up next to each other.”

Other large firms in the city are taking a wait-and-see approach. Diane M. Ramirez, the president of Halstead Property, said that about a quarter of the company’s agents had incorporated a VOW into their individual pages, but that Halstead had not developed one for its corporate site.

Corcoran has not jumped on the VOW bandwagon at all, said Pamela Liebman, the company’s president, partly because listing information is already widely available and partly because of doubts about VOWs.

“We’ve watched the traffic of some of the firms that have put VOWs on their site, and from what we can see it hasn’t increased,” Ms. Liebman said, adding that Corcoran also had not experienced an uptick in the number of deals it is doing with buyers’ brokers who have virtual office Web sites.

Beyond basic listing data, real estate Web sites compete for buyers, and page views, by offering additional information: price histories, recorded sales, building details and school district data — as well as discussion forums, mapping tools and features that make it easier to search for homes and then sort the results.

Zillow and The New York Times offer real estate apps for mobile devices, and these mobile users now account for a third of Zillow’s traffic on weekends, said Amy Bohutinsky, the company’s chief marketing officer, a trend that could put VOWs at a disadvantage as more people embrace smartphones.

However, brokers say they are not trying to compete with these sites, which are viewed more as information distributors than rivals, especially at a time when so much data has been digitally set free.

“Now listings are all over the place — all that information is published by a million different sites,” Ms. Herman said. “This is the world we’re in today, and if you don’t embrace change I don’t think you can be in business.”

     -via NYTimes