Sacramento Real Estate Blog

One of the real technical / managerial / social challenges that I have been giving a lot of thought to these last few weeks is the idea of how one might build a technologically savvy real estate company on the Internet. Part of this is driven by the simply mechanical question of working out how my compensation program will work for the blog I’m sharing with Bridget. Part of it is driven by considerations that are larger in scope.

The problems that I’ve run into in trying to start a more “company-wide” sort of web presence are partly technical, but I think those are the easiest to solve. My IDX provider, IHomefinder, now tells me that they can track (albeit it in a non-automatic way), the leads that are generated from a given campaign. This means that in principle one could build a very low cost company site and let agents link to it from their individual sites and still gain the generated lead. Those agents could use a variety of strategies to drive traffic to their own sites. Pay per click. Blogging for dollars. Article submissions. All the usual suspects.

Moreover, it’s possible one could work the site as a community blog, which could serve as an adjunct to agent’s individual blogging efforts — a sort of Metrolist-only ActiveRain, if you will. Wordpress multi-user would support this kind of thing nicely, and it’s probably a pretty tractable solution for a nerd like me.

So the problems around such an approach are, it seems to me, more cultural and managerial in nature than strictly technical. If you have a tech savvy broker who could pull it off, would agents want training on the relevant techniques and would they be willing to sign the NDAs and “Your broker owns it if you quit on him” sort of language to protect the broker? And if they wouldn’t, how does the broker protect himself once he’s spilled all his trade secrets in weeks of agent SEO classes? Can you hire enough people — or teams of people — who combine the necessary sales and writing skills to pull it off effectively? What do you do about productive sites that agents already bring to the team? In other words, how can the broker optimize those to help his agents while mitigating the competitive risk to his own positions? I suspect that ultimately you’re forced into the same sort of geographical-splitting-up that brokers did back in the old “lead farming” days. “You take the east side, Bill, and Jane over here will take the west side”. But if you do that, certainly the guy who ends up with the blog for Oak Park is a bit less motivated than the owner of the Granite Bay blog.

Anyway, I’m not sure of the answers to all these questions. But as long as you’re not commenting on something, I thought I’d at least try to come up with something worth not commenting on.

Or who knows, maybe you’ll surprise me.