CleanOffer has been assisting the majority of San Francisco and Marin’s top producing agents for nearly 7 years. More than half of the homes sold between 2005-2008 have been purchased by a buyer who used CleanOffer in their property search.
SAN FRANCISCO—San Francisco’s Financial District is bustling: Consumers walk briskly clutching shopping bags; white-collar workers are rushing to get their morning coffee fix; construction workers and the sounds of their trade fill the air; and the usual group of panhandlers hits up the crowd for some spare change. Overlooking this flurry of shoulder-to-shoulder foot traffic is the historic Hobart Building, a terra cotta building with a marble-finished interior that is the work of renowned architect Willis Polk.
Clean Offer, a real estate service that allows consumers to access detailed property information through connections with subscribing real estate professionals, occupies an office on the 16th floor. The company refers to its offering as a “Client Relationship Management Tool,” as it does not operate an open-to-the-public property-search Web site…Read the rest of the story here
Posted by Matt Harris on 02/04 at 11:36 AM
Permalink
Like you, I am overwhelmed by all the advertising pitches thrown at me every day. Whether by email, by snail mail, in print media or on the Internet, my attention span for these “notice me” attempts is about as short as somebody with ADD on steroids.
I think this marketing recipe described in Inman News is spot on. At best, advertising creates attention. In contrast, good marketing compels someone to buy. For marketing to work it must feel like you are talking directly to me. This is especially true in residential home sales. Real Estate is a relationship game revolving around social networks. Unfortunately, most real estate agents do a pathetic job at marketing, wasting lots of time and money in the process.
1. Practice “Potato Chip Marketing”
2. Target market
3. Research your target market’s wants and needs.
4. Develop a hook
5. Keep them reading
6. Layout to stand out
7. You must have a call to action
Posted by David Faudman on 08/04 at 03:59 PM
Permalink
When I started in real estate many years ago, a top producing agent warned me to never tell a buyer the address of a property until the buyer was in my car or I may lose him/her to another agent. Nothing could be further from the truth. Often (although less so lately) a real estate agent will ask me, “If my clients go on the Internet and learn about all the homes for sale in their area why would they need me?” My answer to the agent is always, “Well, if you feel that way then you are right!”
Saying that “123 Main Street is for sale at $500,000” or “It has a lovely kitchen” is not much value added. Heck, my 9 year old boy can do that! What they want from an agent is local market knowledge such as:
Is this a good price?
Is this a good location?
What inspections should I get?
What do you think about the other agent?
What do you think about the home?
Whether an agent likes it or not, home buyers and sellers want and will get access to real estate data. That’s a good thing. Combining trusted data with the advice of a knowledgeable agent gets buyers and sellers to make easier decisions.
Yet (with the possible exception of Linkedin), the usage of these sites seems far more casual than business critical with sustainable revenue models being highly elusive.
No business relies more on social networking for its success than real estate sales. Realtors, homebuyers, homesellers, title companies, lenders, movers, inspectors and a myriad of other service providers must be well connected with one another in order to successfully complete a real estate transaction. Still, in sharp contrast with the above mentioned social networking sites, real estate is intensely local. As a real estate broker or homebuyer in San Francisco, I really don’t care about the Houston real estate market or who’s the best home inspector in Denver. Several excellent sites such as Activerain, Zolve and Trulia Voices miss this tight local distinction, and while providing good information, have little involvement with actual real estate transactions.
Agents, homebuyers, homesellers and real estate service providers all have a tremendous amount of money and emotion tied up in their local real estate social network. This interdependence continues long after the sale is closed. At the core of this network is the agent-to-agent and agent-to-client relationship. Enhancing this core is what CleanOffer does best.
Real estate is not a national social network but rather thousands of smaller local networks involving people who know each other and are doing actual business together.
Stay tuned for some exciting news from CleanOffer!
Posted by David Faudman on 06/11 at 10:49 AM
Permalink
The press sure loves writing about real estate doesn’t it? “Market Booming”, “Real Estate Collapsing”, “Prices Skyrocket”, blah, blah, blah. But can the information in these news stories really help you make smart decisions if you’re in the market to actually buy or sell a home now?
Unfortunately, the answer is NO, not really. Even if the information portrayed is accurate (questionable), the problem is that closed sales only reflect activity on properties that went into escrow (under contract), 30 to 180 days ago. If you find a property for sale now that you want to buy now, what you really want to know is “How hard can I negotiate the price?” If you are a seller with a home for sale now, you want to know “How hard can I hold out for my price?”
Many years ago, I created a simple indicator of current market “Supply versus Demand” for a location. (in fact we have a Patent Pending approval by the US Patent Office) By knowing what percentage of the listings for sale now in an area are in escrow (under contract) you get a great idea of whether that area is currently a buyers’ or sellers’ market and to what degree.
For example, if there are 100 homes for sale in Palo Alto, California and 15 are in escrow (under contract) than the percentage in escrow is 15%. CleanOffer’s opinion is that 15% indicates a “Strong Buyers Market”. These opinions take into consideration lots of factors including how long it generally takes a property to close escrow once it is under contract.
To get the Market Condition for any listing you view on CleanOffer, simply click the “Market Condition” link under the property photo for that listing.
You’ll be smarter for it!
Posted by David Faudman on 05/22 at 11:25 AM
Permalink
Currently the main focus of the engineering team is to bring over our original North Bay users to the same platform that is enjoyed by our San Francisco, Peninsula, and Austin users. As a result, a lot of the stuff that we’ve been working on is not visible to the larger CleanOffer community. That being said, over the last three weeks we have deployed several small enhancements to the CleanOffer site that do affect all of our users.
Features for both Agents and Clients
Users now have access to the Market Conditions Report. The report gives a simple to understand overview of the market. You can access the report by clicking on the “Market Condition” link on any Property Detail page. This report have been used by our North Bay users for years, we hope that users in other markets find it useful.
The full-sized original listing photos are available. To see the original photo, click on the photo from the listing detail page. You can browse through all of the full-sized photos by using the left and right arrow keys once a full-sized photo is displayed.
In the “My Favorites” portlet of the briefcase you can now see the current price and status of your saved listing.
The “Search History” portlet has been improved to show the type of search that was executed.
The time of the last MLS download is now displayed at the bottom of the search result and listing detail page.
Features for Agents Only
The “My Listings” portlet and quick peek have been improved to disable actions that are not applicable to the listing.
The “My Clients” quick peek now displays the number of saved searches and my favorites for each client.
As always, we are always looking for feedback, so if you have any comments please email them to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).
Last week “Mickey Mouse” (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) actually tried to sign up for CleanOffer. As you know, CleanOffer is a private agent-client productivity tool, NOT one of those anonymous “Lead Generators”. Per our licensing agreements with the Multiple Listing Services, all users of CleanOffer must either be a subscribing agent to the MLS or the client/consumer of a subscribing agent.
I agree that curious consumers should be able to look at real estate online anonymously. This curiosity has been solved by thousands of consumer-facing public websites such as Realtor.com and brokerage websites. The main goal of these public websites is to generate “leads” for real estate agents.
The problem is that those “leads” are rarely serious home buyers or sellers. Generally less than 1% of them result in a closed home sale. In contrast, 40% of the clients using CleanOffer actually buy or sell (or both) a home. Real estate is a Relationship Game. In reality, serious buyers and sellers are represented by a real estate agent in about 90% of residential real estate transactions. This is the group that CleanOffer caters to.
Still, occasionally we do get some unattached consumer “leads” at CleanOffer. If any of you agents out there want us to send you the prospects let us know.
Right now we have Mickey Mouse available!
Posted by David Faudman on 04/28 at 12:39 PM
Permalink
We have just released the beta version of CleanOffer for the Austin, Texas market. Through an agreement with the Austin Board of Realtors, the CleanOffer product now covers Travis, Williamson, Hays, Bastrop, Burnet, Caldwell, Blanco, Llano, Milam, Comal, Lee, Fayette, Gonzales and Gillespie counties. Over the past few years, Austin has been one of the best performing real estate markets in the country. We’re very confident that the CleanOffer product will be well received by Austin agents.
We’ve found that the best marketing of CleanOffer has been through word of mouth. We’re looking for early adopters, so if you know any agents in the Austin market, we’d appreciate if you would contact them and let them know how valuable CleanOffer has been to you.
The re.cleanoffer.com site will be down at 6 p.m. pacific time tonight for our newest release. The site will be unavailable from 6 p.m. PST, until 6 a.m PST.
We apologize for the length of time, but we’re releasing a new version with many new features. We’ll post again here once we’re done. Thanks for your patience!
Update 6 a.m. PST The upgrade is taking a little longer than expected. We are working hard to get the site back up and running as soon as possible. Please bear with us a little longer.
Update 9:30 a.m. PST Upgrade complete. We are still fixing some small issues. Thanks again for bearing with us.
Posted by Nadeem Bitar on 04/07 at 03:47 PM
Permalink
Patrick Barber (SIR- Senior Vice President/Managing Broker, San Francisco) and Frank Symons (SIR- Executive Vice President/COO, Western Region) forward thinking brought CleanOffer to the San Francisco Sotheby’s office just over a year ago. Now it’s being introduced in the SIR- Carmel offices which will also reap the benefits of a special Sotheby’s branded CleanOffer site.
More than 70% of SIR San Francisco agents use Private Client MLS powered by CleanOffer, and within the first two weeks of its release in Carmel over 15% of SIR Carmel agents have adopted the tool to use with their clients. Agents and clients alike love it. We are excited to witness the same success in Monterey as we have in San Francisco.
A special thanks to Patrick, Frank, Kent Nelson, and all the SIR agents and management who supported us and gave us testimonials.
Posted by Matt Harris on 03/28 at 01:04 PM
Permalink
Yesterday we previewed the new “My Briefcase”. Today we want to preview one of the portlets that is going to be on the Agent’s dashboard: the “My Listings Portlet”.
My Listings Portlet
In a previous release we’ve added the ability for agents to promote their listings on Google Base. We later realized that it was hard to let our users know about this new feature; and once we announced it, it wasn’t intuitive for them to actually promote their listing on Google Base unless they’ve done it at least once.
The My Listings Portlet gives you, the agent, access to all the listing tools on the first page. So promoting your listing on Google became as simple as going to CleanOffer, locating the listing you want to promote inside the My Listings Portlet, and selecting promote on Google Base.
Listing Tools
Not only that but you can feature your listing on CleanOffer, view your property comparison report, view your listing report and much more with the same ease.
On top of that the My Listings Portlet has a quick peek to your listing report allowing you to quickly view your listing report without navigating away from your dashboard.
My Listings Portlet Quick Peek
Posted by Nadeem Bitar on 03/26 at 11:05 AM
Permalink
On April 8, we are releasing a major new version that features a completely redesigned “My Briefcase”.
The current “My Briefcase” was conceived as a central dashboard for agents and clients to quickly access the tools they need, and view at a glance important information.
Unfortunately as we added new features to the application, the dashboard (My Briefcase) did not expose them and they ended up hidden behind a series of links making them un-discoverable and less useful. The dashboard became a glorified navigation system and the information displayed (view screenshot below) became meaningless.
The Old My Briefcase
We completely redesigned the dashboard for the upcoming release to address the current design’s shortcomings. We’ve introduced portlets which put the most important information and tools at your fingertips. Here is a screenshot of the upcoming “My Briefcase” page for agents.
The New My Briefcase
The agent’s dashboard will have 7 portlets:
My Clients
My Listings
Saved Searches
New Matches
My Favorites
Client Invitations
Search History
The portlets should be self explanatory and I’ll cover a few of them in an upcoming blog post.
The new Briefcase accomplishes a few things:
Lets you view valuable, timely, important information quickly.
Lets you perform your task in an unintrusive way.
Lets you discover new tools and functionality with minimum effort.
Over the next week we’ll be unveiling more details about portlets and other upcoming features. Stay tuned.
Posted by Nadeem Bitar on 03/25 at 01:05 PM
Permalink
Whether you are a real estate agent, a serious home buyer or serious home seller, it is critical that you stay very knowledgeable about your local real estate market. Empowering yourself with this information keeps the playing field “un-leveled” in your favor.
• What just got listed?
• What just went into escrow?
• What just got priced reduced?
• Are homes selling and for how much? Agent blogs like this Austin one provide a good market overview. Still, if you are truly serious about local real estate, you must possess real-time market data about specific listings of the types and locations that matter to you. In local real estate, knowledge truly is power.
We are all very busy, so how do you get this information with minimal time and energy on your part? I manage various online real estate service companies while remaining an active real estate broker. Combine this with being an involved single parent and my time is extremely limited! Here is how to stay on top of the real estate market with ease using CleanOffer.
1. Search CleanOffer.com for the areas and types of properties that matter to you
2. Save those searches on CleanOffer.com to automatically get “New Matches” emailed to you
3. Save individual listings to “My Favorites” to get instant status and price change email alerts about those properties
By saving properties to “My Favorites” you will immediately know when a home goes in or out of escrow or has a price change. You are also notified when it sells including the sales price.
The result is that you truly stay on top of your market with very little effort. Being instantly smarter about local real estate helps you buy the right home at the best price, sell your home for the highest price and make you more money as a real estate agent.
Coooooool!
Posted by David Faudman on 03/17 at 01:11 PM
Permalink
Subscribe
