Tag Archives: Zillow

Wow…I’m an App!

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Believe it or not, my chosen career and the tools of my trade date back to the late 1800’s, when real estate brokers would gathered at the offices of their local associations to share information about properties they were trying to sell. They agreed to compensate other brokers who helped sell those properties, and the first Multiple Listing Service (MLS) was born, based on the principle that’s unique to organized real estate: Help me sell my inventory and I’ll help you sell yours.

The MLS became a National Organization in the early 1960’s and “The Book” would be delivered weekly to the local Realtor’s offices and was generally out dated by the time it arrived!  If you were a buyer, you had to go to the Realtor’s office and look through the Book to find a home and hope it was still available.  Contracts were typed on a manual typewriter or hand written and you physically had to sit down with each other to get the job done!

It wasn’t until about 1994 that home searches began to be publicly available on the internet!  That is less than 20 years ago!  Technology has moved very quickly in the last 19 years…

1999 – the first Internet Lead Generation programs started making an appearance

Early 2000’s – Internet Data Exchanges (IDX) were launched for website

2005 – Google and MOTOVO brought map and neighborhood searches to a new level

2006 – Zillow begins the Zestimate for home value…BEWARE…the zestimate is not based on anything of value, it is an ESTIMATE and wrong 99.999% of the time.

2007 – Trulia adds Trulia Voices, their question and answer section.

The advent of the internet and it’s tools changed how we all live our lives, I now have websites, a blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and regularly Google myself to see where I show up and what information is accurate and try to change what isn’t.  These are my two primary websites:

Contracts are completed online, electronic signatures are commonplace, our office is striving to be paperless, everything lives in the cloud, “i” stuff, tablets, e-readers are becoming more commonplace than books and we have “smart” phones that I still feel to dumb to own!

And now I have an App?  This is an amazing thing for me, computers were just coming into play when I started my career at Bank One, I had one of only two in our office!  By the time I left the corporate world behind, the iPads and Tablets were becoming popular and now look at me…I’m an App!

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Vicki Reed

Is your Realtor serving you?

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As I work with Buyers, I’m often baffled by the lack of information on listings…you know, the Multiple Listing Service or as it is know in Indy, the Broker’s Listing Cooperative (BLC) or just MIBOR (Metropolitan Indianapolis Board of Realtors).  Information from this source is what feeds the internet…Trullia, Zillow, Realtor.com and a host of others…95% of Buyers find their next home ONLINE!  Are you certain your agent is getting your home online in the best possible way?

In addition to active properties, I am often trolling the expired listings in specific neighborhoods that my clients are interested in…who knows, it may be the perfect home for my Buyers and the Homeowners may still be interested in Selling!  I recently found an expired listing in the mid $200,000 price range, over 2,500 square feet and the agent had only 8 pictures of the living area, nothing upstairs, backyard and no virtual tour…and you wonder why this property never sold?

When considering who to hire when Selling your home, ask a lot of questions, not just about what they do to sell homes in general, but specifics!  How many pictures do you use?  Do you use a virtual tour?  Do you work with a lender partner?  Besides putting a sign in my yard, what will you do to sell my home?  ASK THE QUESTIONS!  Remember, YOU are hiring ME to represent you in the best possible way in the sale of your biggest asset!

The BLC allows for 24 photos AND a virtual tour…how many photos has your agent put on your listing?  The quality of those photos?  It is not necessary for your agent to hire a professional photographer, we’ve been in the business a while and understand the best way to take photographs and are generally quite good at it.  There are only 500 characters available for describing you property, but we want to make everyone count!

What about information packets in the home?  I always create a packet of information with the sales disclosures, a list of upgrades and features of the home, school, church and shopping information.  This same information is uploaded to the listing.  I also add a stand-up display for the home flyer along with bottled water and snacks for prospective buyers.

I want to Sell your home, I will work to serve you.  I am part of the Number 1 Real Estate Company in the Nation, you not only have me working for you, but every Keller Williams agent in the country.  Click here for videos about my service…then call me!

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Vicki Reed