tigho is forcery, nyc, real estate, advertising, tech

In many markets the online classified site Craigslist.org gets insane amounts of traffic. Many real estate agents have attempted to take advantage of this by repeatedly posting ineffective ads and conclude it’s not a reliable source of website traffic or lead generation for them. Heck, I was even one of these agents for most of 2010.

You see I was posting ads nearly every day but the only responses I ever got were spam. How can that be? I was using professional looking HTML templates, lots of photos and a several paragraph description of the property and neighborhood amenities. I knew buyers were looking at the ads, but why weren’t they contacting me? I decided early this year to find a better way. I spent a lot of time researching what makes CL classified ads effective and this is what I learned.

5 ways not to suck at Craigslist

1. Stop using the same template as everyone else

Take a few minutes and search your local CL and note what kinds of ads and headlines everyone is posting. More than likely most agents are using the same or very similar ads with little different between them. Your ad needs to stand out from the rest and the more your ad looks like a private party ad the better your results will be.

2. Stop posting every picture & detail

The goal is to redirect that buyer away from everyone else’s ads and get them on your real estate website. If you are including 6, 10 or 15 images in your ad and a paragraph of text the viewer already has enough information to eliminate that property if it does not fit their criteria. Give them a taste and make then click through for more photos and details. That way even if they do eliminate that property once they’re on your site there’s a decent chance they will stay and look around.

3. Include 2-3 calls to action

The first call to action should obviously be a link to the listing on your own site. If you have a good idx solution a link to the listing page is even better. The full listing details and photos are all there and hopefully a call to action to save the listing or request a showing.

I recommend you also create a secondary call to action linked to a landing or other opt-in page. In my example below I include a link to Astoria Oregon homes for sale under $150,000. Try to use a generic CTA that will appeal to most buyers in your market (foreclosures, water front properties, ect.).

The 3rd CTA should be your phone number, front and center. Use the format 212-555-1212 so it’s clickable on mobile devices.

4. Track your ads

The big problem with any marketing is figuring out what working and what doesn’t. If you don’t track your ad views, click through rates, and headline variations it’s difficult to improve your ads. At the minimum using a trackable link in your ad will at least show you how many visitors clicked. From there your website analytics take over and you can monitor bounce rates and other metrics.

CL does block some url’s generated by shortening services like goo.gl, a good alternative if you are using a wordpress real estate website is your own custom short link. The free WP plugin Pretty Link Lite allows you to create your own short links and track the clicks in real time. For example if your domain is www.123realestate.com you can create a link that looks like www.123realestate.com/zxy that points to whatever page you want (onsite or offsite even) so you can track your ad clicks.

Bonus ninja move: Any images you insert as HTML can be tracked this way too, giving you a free and easy way to monitor total ad views. In my market CL has two areas that overlap and by using this method I was able to figure out which area got the most traffic.

5. Less is more

From my experience ads with lots of white space, a single image and 2-3 calls to action work the best. I’ve experimented with inserting a logo, website header image and other items to dress up my ads but the ads with a very minimalist look perform the best in my market. Here’s an example:

example craigslist ad

(the required broker contact info was cropped out, make sure you comply with your state and local rules)

Time to execute

Now that you’re creating clean, minimal ads with multiple calls to action that are trackable you’ve already improved your CL strategy 200% over posting generic HTML ads. Testing different headlines, calls to action and the day/time you post your ads will hopefully increase your inbound traffic and leads further.

Stay tuned for another post on how to create CL ads that work.

From Vertical Measures

Equity Residential, the apartment company headed by real-estate mogul Sam Zell, has emerged as the lead bidder in the contest to buy roughly half of rival Archstone in what would be one of the largest real-estate transactions since the downturn, according to people familiar with the situation.

Equity Residential has offered more than $2.5 billion in cash and stock to buy the 53% equity stake in Archstone currently held by Bank of America Corp. and Barclays PLC, the people said. An agreement is still uncertain and a higher bidder could step in.

Enlarge Image

Close

Bloomberg News

Sam Zell's Equity Residential has offered to buy a 53% equity stake.

The rest of the company is owned by the bankruptcy estate of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., which led a group that purchased Archstone in 2007 and is keeping its holding. Lehman and the banks earlier this year disagreed over how to unwind Archstone, leading the banks to put their stakes up for sale.

The bid from Mr. Zell, a storied real-estate industry maverick, is the latest sign of the high level of interest among investors in rental apartments. While other forms of commercial property have suffered from high vacancy rates, apartment buildings have enjoyed high demand as home ownership rates have fallen.

The proposed sale to Equity Residential would value Archstone at about $16 billion, including some $11 billion in debt held mostly by government-sponsored mortgage companies Fannie Mae​ and Freddie Mac, the people said. At the time of the buyout, Archstone was considered the crown jewel in Lehman's commercial real-estate portfolio and was valued at about $22 billion.

The lower valuation for Archstone partly reflects the $2 billion in assets the company has sold since the Lehman buyout, leaving it with stakes in about 77,000 apartments. Equity Residential, which owns stakes in 119,000 units, also would be getting a discount because it would be buying into a contentious partnership, and no single owner of Archstone can make major decisions without unanimous consent.

If sold as a whole company, Archstone currently could be worth as much as $18 billion, according to Craig Leupold, an analyst with Green Street Advisors.

Barclays and Bank of America also received bids from three other firms: apartment company AvalonBay Communities, Inc., private-equity firm Blackstone Group LP and Brookfield Asset Management Inc., a Canada-based investment firm, according to people familiar with the matter.

If Equity Residential wins the bidding, it could set up a high-stakes battle with Lehman over control of Archstone, pitting Lehman, which is now being steered by the restructuring firm Alvarez & Marsal, against the 70-year-old Mr. Zell, who has developed a reputation as a motorcycle-riding, casual-dressing risk-taker.

Mr. Zell, who is chairman of Equity Residential, declined to comment through a spokeswoman. In an interview earlier this month in Barron's magazine, Mr. Zell said that he favors rental apartment buildings over other forms of commercial property like office and retail. "The housing bust has made renting a much more popular alternative," he said. "Many no longer regard residential real estate as an investment vehicle, and renting allows them to avoid a large down payment and maintenance costs."

Enlarge Image

Close

Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal

An Archstone apartment building at 800 Avenue of the Americas in New York. Sam Zell's Equity Residential has bid for part of the firm.

At the end of the third quarter, 5.6% of the nation's apartments were vacant, down from 5.9% in the second quarter, and the lowest level since 2006, according to Reis Inc., a real-estate data service. Strong demand for apartments also has pushed up the value of multi-family property to record levels in some markets.

This rosy outlook has caused Equity Residential's shares to climb, giving the company valuable currency to bid on Archstone. The company's shares closed at $58.75, up 99 cents, in composite New York Stock Exchange trading Tuesday. That price is above its 2007 peak price of $55, though down some from its all-time high of more than $63 a share in July.

Lehman could block Equity Residential because it has a "right of first offer," meaning that the banks must present Lehman with any offer they would like to accept and give the estate a chance to match it. Concerned about Equity Residential's bid, Lehman is in talks with Blackstone and Brookfield about bringing in the firms to match the offer, according to people familiar with the matter.

For much of this year, Lehman, Barclays and Bank of America have been tussling about how to dispose of Archstone, with Lehman favoring taking the company public once again with a stock-market offering, and the other banks favoring selling the company in a private transaction.

Lehman is concerned about having Equity Residential as a partner partly because the apartment company already has a large management operation of its own. Lehman fears that Equity Residential may seek to replace Archstone's management team and apartment management operation, which Lehman values at more than $1 billion, with their own managers, according to people familiar with the matter.

The deal would be, by far, the biggest investment made since the downturn by Mr. Zell, who made an enormous fortune during previous periods of carnage in the commercial real-estate industry through well-timed buying. He and his companies have bought relatively little during the current downturn, during which Mr. Zell has been distracted by his disastrous foray into publishing with his purchase of Tribune Co​.

Equity Residential's shares closed at $58.75, up 99 cents, in composite New York Stock Exchange trading Tuesday.

Media­tive has done a lot of online research over the years, using eye track­ing tech­nol­ogy, remote sur­veys, click map­ping and face-to-face inter­views to exam­ine how peo­ple inter­act with web pages.

Loca­tion based mar­ket­ing has become a crit­i­cal com­po­nent of dig­i­tal mar­ket­ing strat­egy. With that in mind, we wanted to exam­ine how peo­ple inter­act with search results from Google Places list­ings to answer these questions:

• Where do searchers look on the page?
• Does it make a dif­fer­ence if a list­ing has reviews?
• Do peo­ple really look at the map?
• Is Google’s Golden Tri­an­gle still applicable?

Using the Tobii eye track­ing tech­nol­ogy in our Toronto office’s Tive­Tank™ research lab, we put Google Places busi­ness list­ings to the test. We also ran the study online and mapped vis­i­tor click behav­iour. In the study, we cre­ated a sce­nario that included searches across four cities, on a vir­tual road trip.

We looked at the impor­tance of social sig­nals in a Google Places list­ing, the effect of thumb­nail images, and what hap­pens when a list­ing offers more click­able assets.

Here’s an exam­ple “heat map” from the study that shows the aggre­gated results of where peo­ple were look­ing on the screen.

The full results of the eye track­ing and click map­ping research will be released in a whitepa­per exclu­sively to Media­tive sub­scribers on Novem­ber 5^th. The whitepa­per will include heat maps, click maps, and analy­sis of the results with rec­om­men­da­tions on mak­ing the most of your Google Places listing.

Sub­scribe now to receive this valu­able insight.

Nobody ever said renting is easy. Sure, there are brokers out there to help you on your way, but for every decent broker, there are three more who will try to charge you 17% of the annual rent on a 3BR that’s actually a 2BR with a cardboard partition set up in the middle of one of the rooms. Hey, we’ve all been there.

Luckily, the internet provides renters with numerous apartment-researching options that prevent you from enduring the torture of having to speak to another human until it’s absolutely necessary. Intern Jeremiah Budlin has taken the liberty of attempting to rank some of those websites by using them to look for a 2BR in downtown Manhattan that costs no more than $4,000 per month (ha!) that he is going to move into with his imaginary girlfriend, Sharice (who sleeps in a separate bedroom, apparently.)

How'd we fare? >>

SeriousRenters:

SeriousRenters allows you to fill out an extremely specific “Renter Resume” that leaves no stone unturned, from the basic (preferred rent, location, rooms) to the almost superfluously precise (is “Abundant Natural Light” “Required,” “Preferred,” “No Way!” or “Indifferent”?) After filling out the resume, users have to option of paying between $50 and $100 to share it with a list of brokers, so we have no idea how well it actually works.
Website design: 9
Listings found: 0
Strength of listings: N/A
Overall: 3

InsideDigs:

InsideDigs users can refer five friends, share information about their apartment, or pay a $20/year fee, in exchange for which they receive information about soon-to-be-vacant apartments from the current tenants. The search features are fairly limited and there aren’t a whole lot of listings, but the upside is that you should be getting the real scoop about what there is like or not like about each place. We found two places in the East Village, one looking for a sublet, and one that would be "perfect for hipsters." Overall, not much to go on.
Website design: 7
Listings found: 2
Strength of listings: 4
Overall: 5

UrbanEdge:

UrbanEdge is simple, easy to use, and allows users to search listings according to neighborhood, price-range, and amenities. It has plenty of listings and users can view them immediately without having to pay a fee. There were numerous listings that fit our criteria, ranging in price from $2,300 to $3,750, mostly in the East Village. All of the places had a phone number to call, but less than half had interior photos and/or a website, so it was tough to tell which ones we were interested in. We wanted to set up some viewing appointments, but ended up getting into an imaginary argument with Sharice about how many places we should try to look at in a day.
Website design: 8
Listings found: 27
Strength of listings: 8
Overall: 8.5

Rentenna:

Rentenna, which launched just over a month ago is equally as easy to use as UrbanEdge, and the criteria users can search by is identical. That’s because Rentenna’s listings all come directly from UrbanEdge. The (urban) edge that UrbanEdge has is more listings. The edge (suburban edge? rural edge?) that Rentenna has is that it assigns each building a score out of 100 that is derived from a secret algorithm (much like the “secret” “algorithm” we’re using for this article) which takes value, user ratings, amenities, landlord, and neighborhood into account. Unfortunately, the most highly-ranked building that matched our criteria was rated 77/100, but it's possible that that's the best we could hope for in our price range.
Website design: 9
Listings found: 14
Strength of listings: 7
Overall: 8

NYBits:

NYBits is old school, and it kind of looks it. Still, if you’re looking for a resource to avoid using a broker, you could do a whole lot worse. It’s very simple and easy to use with no sign-up required and it has plenty of listings. A lot of the ones that fit our criteria seemed a little on the shabby side, but that might have been a product of unflattering photography.
Website design: 6
Listings found: 27
Strength of listings: 7
Overall: 7

Loftable:

The main feature on Loftable is a map that claims to show all of the city’s no-fee apartments, which would be a good start except that it’s also the site’s only feature. It’s good for browsing, not so much for searching.
Website design: 5
Listings found: N/A
Strength of listings: N/A
Overall: 3.5
-Jeremiah Budin

After a few minutes of browsing Craigslist, the apartment listings start to blend together. So we popped them all into Wordle to get a sense of which words really appear most frequently in NYC's Craigslist listings. Terms we're surprised not to see in a size we can read without glasses: "luxury," "massive," "lavish," "easy share."