Bulletins – Hawaii Information Service

Attention Agents!
Spring is the perfect time to seed your business for big growth in the future. Give your website a BOOST by adding IDX! IDX lets your website customers search for MLS listings on your website in Customer Format. Don’t get left behind by your competition. Having a strong Internet presence is essential to agent success!

According to the NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 75% of buyers used the internet in the home buying process. Of these buyers, 90% found their real estate agent online!! Statistics show that the number of internet buyers is increasing, while the number of traditional buyers is decreasing. These internet homebuyers are younger and purchasing more expensive homes than other homebuyers!

SPECIAL OFFER
Sign up for EZ or FULL IDX in April and get FREE SETUP! EZ and FULL IDX are templated versions of the active MLS listings in customer format. You choose the color, we do the rest! Click here to see a sample EZ IDX or a sample FULL IDX.

Sign up for CUSTOM IDX, FTP Feed, XML Feed, or VOW Feed in April and SAVE BIG BUCKS! Setup Fees have been slashed to $200 during the April Spring Fling for these data solutions!

ATTENTION EZ IDX CUSTOMERS: Upgrade your IDX to FULL IDX for $100/mo. Save $1200 a year on this one time only upgrade. Offers expires May 1, 2008 so act now.

CALL COLLEEN YASUHARA TODAY at 1-808-748-8751 or E-mail Colleen: colleen@alohaliving.com

READY TO SIGN UP NOW? Download an IDX Application!

With everybody and his brother talking about the slump in the housing market, agents are looking for more creative and interactive ways to reach new prospects. As I was browsing through my RSS feeds today, I thought I would share some of the more interesting new Real Estate marketing ideas I found around the web with you. Enjoy!

Local Jacksonville, FL Agent Hits the Streets to Drum Up New Business
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZXbZDbCze8 (YouTube Video, Under 60 seconds)

Do You Twitter? If so, you can now prospect to other local Twitter users in your market area using TwitterLocal.net. Don’t even know what Twitter is? Read this article. It will get you started.

Creating a Killer Listing Presentation – Web 2.0 Style

__________________

Blog Post by
Beth Berry
Director of Sales and Marketing
Hawaii Information Service
AlohaLiving.com
Beth@AlohaLiving.com

Attention Agents!
Spring is the perfect time to seed your business for big growth in the future. Give your website a BOOST by adding IDX! IDX lets your website customers search for MLS listings on your website in Customer Format. Don’t get left behind by your competition. Having a strong Internet presence is essential to agent success!

According to the NAR Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 75% of buyers used the internet in the home buying process. Of these buyers, 90% found their real estate agent online!! Statistics show that the number of internet buyers is increasing, while the number of traditional buyers is decreasing. These internet homebuyers are younger and purchasing more expensive homes than other homebuyers!

SPECIAL OFFER
Sign up for EZ or FULL IDX in April and get FREE SETUP! EZ and FULL IDX are templated versions of the active MLS listings in customer format. You choose the color, we do the rest! Click here to see a sample EZ IDX or a sample FULL IDX.

Sign up for CUSTOM IDX, FTP Feed, XML Feed, or VOW Feed in April and SAVE BIG BUCKS! Setup Fees have been slashed to $200 during the April Spring Fling for these data solutions!

ATTENTION EZ IDX CUSTOMERS: Upgrade your IDX to FULL IDX for $100/mo. Save $1200 a year on this one time only upgrade. Offers expires May 1, 2008 so act now.

CALL COLLEEN YASUHARA TODAY at 1-808-748-8751 or E-mail Colleen: colleen@alohaliving.com

READY TO SIGN UP NOW? Download an IDX Application!

Attention Obeo Virtual Tour Customers
Obeo is restructuring their business in Hawaii, and as a result, ordering new tours is temporarily unavailable. While we will continue to offer Obeo Tours to agents, brokers, and vacation rental managers statewide, the following changes will are immediately in effect.

1. All Obeo Customer Service calls will now go directly through Obeo. If you have questions about a tour, problems with a tour, or need something on your virtual tour changed, please call Obeo directly at 1-800-SAY-OBEO.

2. When service resumes, ordering Obeo Tours can still be done through the MLS by clicking on the Order Virtual Tour link on the Listings Tab in REsearch. You can also still call our office and speak to Colleen Yasuhara to order and Obeo tour. But the easiest and most efficient way to order a tour is to go through the Obeo website: www.Obeo.com.

3. Big Island Customers: It is with great regret that we inform you that Heather Lange will no longer be shooting Obeo brand tours for customers on the Big Island. Obeo will be hiring photographers statewide, and service will resume as soon as photographers have been trained to the quality of service that you have come to expect. Heather has been such a wonderful member of our team. We are very sorry to see her go!

Heather, thank you for everything! You’re wonderful.

________________________

If you currently have an Obeo tour on your listing, you do not need to do anything in regards to this announcement. We will notify the membership immediately when Obeo Tour service resumes and you can begin ordering tours again! Thank you for your patience as Obeo reorganizes their efforts in Hawaii.

Today’s answer will cover the following questions.

1. How and where are you marketing my listings?

2. I spend a lot of money on Search Engine Optimization. Am I going to
be competing with AlohaLiving.com for top placement on major search
engines like Google?

Since AlohaLiving.com is operated by your MLS provider, Hawaii Information Service, we carefully consider how and where we market our MLS Public website so as not to be in direct competition with our participants and their websites. This is a very competitive time in internet advertising, and there are agents and brokers who spend thousands of dollars each month to have their websites constantly optimized for top billing on Google and other search engines. We feel it is a conflict of interest for us to compete directly in this space, so we have always chosen to not aggressively pursue top placement in search engines for our public real estate sites.

We take a more subtle approach to Google, primarily participating in Google AdWords so that we have coverage on all islands for the most popular Hawaii real estate and vacation rental keyword buys.

Right now, AlohaLiving.com derives 15 percent of all traffic from organic google searches (non-paid), and another 10 percent from our Google AdWords campaigns. We also send our listing data to Google Base every 24 hours. So, more than 25 percent of our traffic comes from Google without us being among the top results for certain search keywords. And those numbers should improve each month as we add more content, and Google begins to index more of our data. The key to our search engine marketing is content. We’re adding new content daily to drive more traffic to AlohaLiving.com.

That being said, we are taking very aggressive steps in creating relationships outside of Google and other search engines that will drive significant traffic to AlohaLiving.com, and therefore to our brokers, agents, and advertisers. We have recently signed listing agreements that will make us the exclusive Hawaii listing partner on CyberHomes.com and the AOL Real Estate Channel. Anyone who searches for properties in Hawaii on Cyberhomes or AOL will be directed back to AlohaLiving.com to see the property details of our agent’s and broker’s listings. We are also in final contract negotiations to implement the same arrangement with an aggregator that will give us the same exclusive relationship with Yahoo! Real Estate, Zillow.com, Trulia.com, MyRealty.com, Oodle.com, Homescape.com, Homes and Land Magazine.com, Hotpads.com, Vast, and FrontDoor.com (HGTV’s new real estate portal).

It is our policy that AlohaLiving.com will not distribute listing data with any website or partner that will not directly link back to our detail page. Getting the traffic back to your listings is our ultimate goal, and we are committed to making that happen.

We are continuing to reach out to the village of existing real estate portals who want to get complete listing data from the MLS, but would not necessarily make the same type of deals with individual agents or brokers. By creating these strategic partnerships, we will be able to drive more traffic to AlohaLiving.com, and ultimately more traffic to your listings, your contact information, and to you!