Pat Kitano, former Wall Street investment banker and analyst, founder and principle of leading real estate consulting firm Domus Consulting Group, is the most important visionary pundit in real estate today. His blog transparentre.com, voted one of the top 25 innovative blogs by Inman News, is positing the most important information and predictions available to real estate brokers about the real estate industry and business model.
The following articles are templates for your business planning for 2008 and beyond: “Year of The Blog Networks“, “Real Estate Bloggers, finally a direct channel into online consumers“, “Latest Brokerage Website Trends”, “Counter Intuitive Lead Generation Ideas“, and “Active Rain Review.”
Analysis: Simply put if you own a real estate brokerage firm you should consider Kitano’s warnings and posits as a view into the near future of real estate marketing, the relationship between the consumer and the brokerage, and the changing relationship between real estate agent and representative broker.
The eye opening assertions:
1. Real Estate Blog Networks are like the next real estate franchises
2. Blog networks will integrate with the broker website
3. Broker blog networks will create huge traffic, high Google search engine placement, and lead generation machines as a broker’s selected blogging agents produce multiple articles on hyper local city-neighborhood areas.
4. Consumers want interaction, valuable specific regional information, maps, and tools to help them make their decisions; current broker IDX site models are obsolete and produce little traffic and fewer leads for agents and thus brokers
5. Real Estate Industry is becoming more “agent-centric”, once proud (broker) brand names are becoming marginalized (due to agent’s successful blogging efforts independent of the broker) and agents themselves the influential marketing factor.
The library of strategic information and thought provoking scenarios are too numerous to list here. Suffice it to say that every broker worth his/her salt should take advantage of this free library of information and consider implementing these ideas into their business plans.
