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Real Estate Services by Jon Griffith

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Archives for 2014

E-mail and Websites for REALTORS, The Basics

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As a REALTOR, you need to maintain a digital presence.  At minimum, you need an e-mail address.  You could choose to use a free e-mail provider, or you could do it the right way, by registering your own domain name and making up your own e-mail address.  For example, you@yourdomain.com.  The only way you can achieve this is by thinking up and registering your own name.  Do this at Godaddy.com.  Register it for a year, so you don’t over commit to a longer period of time, in case your name doesn’t work out for you, and don’t privately register it.  You don’t need ANY other extras.  Just the name.

Once you have the name, you can do whatever you want with it, but the first thing you’ll need to do is establish your e-mail system.

Your best bet in our current internet climate, is to subscribe to Google Apps for Domains.  You can do this by visiting http://www.google.com/apps.  You get a 30 day trial, and after that, your cost is minimal.  It gives you a platform full of organizational and collaboration tools that are perfect for what you do.  Setup is a breeze, and the web interface works with every computing device and browser that exists, so you don’t need your own computer to manage the information, and the information remains updated, live, across every device you have, inherently.

The second task that is associated with your domain is establishing a website.  Find a hosting provider you trust, create your account there, then tell them that you already have Google Apps for Domains set up.  They’ll need to help you configure an account with them so your mail still goes to Google’s servers and not to theirs.  The last thing you want is a proprietary e-mail system hosted by a web-hosting provider, as they are sub-standard and do not play well with the rest of the online world.

You’ll want to lean towards WordPress as the framework upon which your site is built.  From there, you’ll choose from a host of free site themes, premium (paid) site themes, or custom designed themes.  Then, you’ll have your choice of free plug-ins to enhance your site, and/or paid plug-ins for features such as IDX property searches.

Once you have these two major components of your domain in place, you can forge ahead worrying about little more than providing good quality content regularly.

About Registering a Domain Name

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Thousands of professionals use e-mail every day under “free” e-mail providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, Outlook, and Juno.  If you’re in business, you owe it to yourself to create an identity.  Not only is this a good plan for branding your business, but it’s also a good plan for establishing a permanent “world address.”

Many years ago I registered my name, jongriffith.com because I wanted exclusive ownership of that name.  I wanted complete and total control over all of the traffic that the internet sent to that domain name.

Think of a domain name as your surname.  No matter where you go, no matter where you live, your name will always be the same.  Your numeric address over time will change, but your NAME will always be the same.

In the internet world, we don’t refer to destinations like we do in the world of the U.S. Postal Service, although the system is similar.  There’s the Griffith family household at 1234 Main Street, and there’s jongriffith.com at some arbitrary, hidden number that would be too hard to remember.

I bet, in fact, that even though you know where some of your friends and family live, by landmarks alone, you don’t know their address.  You also wouldn’t know if they moved unless they told you, and if they did move, they would have to tell you.

On the interwebs, if you move, if your “house” is burned down, (your house being the computer where your website and e-mail reside,) you never have to tell anyone that you’ve changed your address.

This is NOT the case if you use Yahoo.com, or Juno.com as your e-mail provider.  Imagine one day that Yahoo announces that they’re either a) ending free e-mail as you know it, or b) went out of business, or c) changed their name.  Now you’re stuck having to announce to everyone, yet again, that your “digital address” has changed.  In the process you lose connection with some people because there was an interruption in continuity between you and that person.

Establishing your own domain to handle your website –and– your e-mail traffic will eliminate this from EVER being a possibility.  You probably apply this logic already to your cell-phone, which should, unless the entire system changes one day, always be the same number, for the rest of your life.  Why not make your e-mail address behave the same way?

Using Google Apps for Domains (let’s just make the safe assumption that Google isn’t going anywhere) you can establish a domain name and a permanent online web-presence that will never change.

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Ditch the PC and Switch to a Mac

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As a former PC technician with over 20 years experience in distribution, retail, networking, and repair, I abandoned the world of Windows and PC’s in 2010 with the purchase of a new MacBook Pro and my efficiency has gone through the roof.  Short of a few hardware issues here and there, the most maintenance I’ve had to do on my Mac involved backing up my data and replacing the batteries in my Bluetooth wireless keyboard.

I don’t use a PC for anything, and I don’t print documents.  All of my business is done digitally between my MacBook Pro, my iPad, an Android Nexus 7 (non-Apple) mobile tablet, and my iPhone.  That’s it.  That’s all I need to conduct every form of business I encounter.

If you’re looking for someone to help you solve your PC problems, you may want to check out Data Doctors.  I’m in the efficiency business, and the most efficient and problem-free path to getting more homes sold and more business done, will be found on a MacBook.

There’s an initial investment, but count the cost of your time, and the initial start-up costs to owning a MacBook are well worth it.

Stop Using Paper Altogether

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I’ve been a REALTOR for 3 different brokerages.  I’ve closed dozens of real estate transactions.  I’ve also trained and coached some of the top producing agents in the Valley of the Sun, Phoenix, AZ.

In every one of the environments that I’ve been a part of, there wasn’t a single day that passed where someone didn’t have an issue printing a document. It didn’t matter how well the office computers and network were designed, the problem still persisted.  Even after building a 9-office network, following industry standard practices, I was unable to prevent printer related problems, no matter how hard I tried.

Some of these problems at times were due to standard maintenance issues.  Some of them were due to the computer that the user was printing from, often owned by that person, and almost ALL of the problems occurred on Windows based computers.  The only actual reason I found that was causing the issue was the expectation the REALTOR had of the technology tools that the brokerage had put into place.

Brokers do NOT educate REALTORS in basic computer literacy says http://www.workbootsnerd.com, and 99% of the printer problems I’ve witnessed on a day to day basis have been directly related to what the agent expects the printer’s capabilities to be contrasted by the level of computer literacy that particular agent possesses.

I have been closing sales for 5 years without needing to print a single page.

 

Have I printed?  Yes.  Have I needed to?  No.  Today’s digital tools empower you and eliminate the headache associated with printing paper documents.  Let go of the printer.  It is a cost center.  Not only does it cost in materials, it costs you in time.  Your competition is paperless.  I can teach you how to be paperless too.