As a real estate professional, you are a natural community builder. How can you differentiate your agency? Easy: add an online community to your website. It should be way more than listings and headshots.
Sure, creating a Facebook Group seems like an easy win. Is it? People are starting to mistrust Facebook. Don’t rely upon Facebook groups or Nextdoor groups in to find out what’s going on in your neighborhood. Instead, be the expert that the community expects you to be.
Posting (publishing) community insights, facilitating community networking, and interviewing local business owners in the community are great ways to level up your real estate business.
Community Insights
Go beyond the MLS listing on your real estate website. Provide information about the benefits of living in your market. Even better, with an online community, you can help welcome people to the neighborhood before they buy.
“Many older, established, top-producing agents are turning to digital marketing. They’re starting to leverage the power of social media channels because they want to not only dominate their neighborhood offline — like the guy with the refrigerator magnets — but they want to dominate online as well.”
Lane Hornung
Community Networking
All communities have events and lifestyles that appeal to the real estate marketplace. Hosting a community forum on your site encourages new residents to make connections.
“The goal with effective real estate community pages is to make anyone that reads them interested to move into the locations they describe.”
Agent Image
Every business needs referrals and real estate agencies are no different. Engaged and appreciated community members will be your biggest advocates. Inviting your clientele to post as experts in your community is a big win.
Community Interviews
With community interviews, your real estate website levels up local expertise. Highlight local business owners and entrepreneurs with an interview series. Ask them about their journey and what businesses inspired them.
“Your interviews will help you connect with business owners on a personal level. Ask them questions about how they got started? Who are their regular customers?”
Grant Findlay-Shirras
Not only is this practice good for SEO, but it will help your community bond with one another — and — remember your agency.
Establish Your Community Expertise
It’s your community, your way with PeepSo. You have all the tools you need to engage your community and expand your network. Create your community your way. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t start today.
Most real estate agents I follow have mashup websites linked to the MLS. What I see top agents doing is capturing an email address from a landing page or social media platform for a later email push with market information. Their focus is lead generation and marketing. I don’t see PeepSo working well on an individual agent’s website or a brokerage site. Also, real estate agents are not needed by the younger generations.
Millennials for example are not buying homes, the live at home or they rent. Many don’t owner a car, so you see the rise of Uber and Lyft. Younger generations are looking for an experience. They will spend money for an Airbnb with their friends to split cost, but they usually don’t go by themselves. They will go to meetups and gatherings with friends to socialize.
I can see the PeepSo platform being used to engage a local community with relevant news and events, like the old community newspapers, but rebooted for the younger digital online generations. Setting up a PeepSo platform to convey what is happening in a community and/or college with Blog and Group posts. Once the community / college students find out it’s a good source for current event information and news, I think a PeepSo powered site could self sustain itself with the community generating posts about upcoming events and news. All it takes an entrepreneur to make a PeepSo site work. It will take a lot of hard work beyond just setting up a PeepSo platform on a server.
Also, PeepSo could even go way beyond what NextDoor.com, Meetup.com, or EventBrite.com are currently doing. PeepSo is capable of so much more. So can PeepSo fit in with these younger generations?
This is where the PeepSo staff needs to do their marketing. PeepSo is already putting the hurt on another social media platform who is offering for a limited time (for the 2nd time in as many months) lifetime licenses. Lifetime licenses make no sense for a business model where a future revenue stream is cut off to fund bug fixes and future features. This type of model is left with always acquiring new (disposable) users. PeepSo should work hard to help current licensed users grow their PeepSo community. If the user’s idea for a PeepSo platform is risky, tell them so. Give them a reality check. Perhaps rewrite the Secrets ebook and put information in about a business plan, market analysis, media kit, pro forma statements, etc. and charge for it, perhaps $99-199. Make it required reading and relevant to a PeepSo platform and list the know risks, just like you would in a private placement memorandum. If the customer purchases the PeepSo platform, deduct the price of the eBook off the platform cost withing a say 30 days. If they don’t purchase the platform, then they learned and weighed the risks of starting a social media venture.