Today’s real estate professional needs to stay connected to many social networking platforms. It can be overwhelming trying to keep track of all your login credentials, media files, contacts.

Marketing and participating on the web has become more than search marketing. Our client base is becoming more involved in the social web. They look to their online friends for recommendations.

Flock aggregates all your social web accounts and services. You only need to launch the browser and you’re instantly logged into and have access to all your accounts. It also brings together all your friends into one unified sidebar. From there you can view your Facebook friends, your twitter followers and the people you have a connection with on Digg, Flickr, Picassa, MySpace and YouTube.

It provides media streaming from all the above sources and you can choose which of your sources that you want to include in your media stream. Flock also provides access to your web mail (Gmail & Yahoo Mail), your Delicious bookmarks and RSS feeds from your favorite blogs.

If that’s where it ended, it would be worth the install, but there is so much more. The power of Flock is the ability to drag and drop between your social spaces. Like a blog story and want to share it with your friends? Simply drag it to your people and it’s done.

Flock has sidebars for My World (a dashboard similar to IGoogle), People (aggregated from all your sites), Feeds, Web Mail, a pretty decent favorites tool, Accounts and Services, a very powerful web clipboard, a blog editor and a photo uploader.

If you like using toolbars and add-ins, Flock has you covered. Because it’s built on Firefox, just about any plug-in can be added.

Flock needs a lot of screen real estate. If you have a widescreen LCD, you’re set. It looks great on my 24″ widescreen!

Here’s where you can download it: http://www.flock.com/

The browser comes with a flash tutorial, but I found these video links:

A basics video from the makers of flock - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pbRUgzRRdlE

More detailed screencast explaining the basic features in more detail - (Be sure to check HQ in the YouTube controls) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crB8CcYBnBQ

And a really detailed video on configuring Flock - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ID_t-omG4aY

Happy Flocking!

There was a time when we advised Realtors that their phone number was the most important element on their for sale signs. Now, it’s most certainly your web site address that should receive special attention. Here’s why:

If you were to read three signs with the lines below, which would be the easiest to remember?

I always tell my clients that they don’t need to include “www.” on their signs. Home buyers know it’s a web site when they read the “.com” or “.net” suffix. You should alway capitalize the first letter of every word in your domain. Domain names by themselves are not case sensitive.

We’ve all been tempted to use images found on Google & Yahoo image searches. Unfortunately, “borrowing” these images will almost certainly bring you copyright troubles. So, I turn to two of my favorite sources for images:

Open Clip Art Library is a great source of illustrations that can be freely used. All the files are available as PNG or SVG filetypes.

Dreamstime has a huge collection of royalty free images at very reasonable prices. I really like their wide selection of photography.

JR Screen Ruler is a very useful and compact utility that allows you to accurately measure anything on your screen. I use it all the time to measure space in various browser windows, size of photos and graphics.

Pixie How many times have you run across a site with a truly inspiring color scheme? Just don’t know how to communicate those colors to your web designer or printer? Run your mouse over any on screen object and Pixie will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values.

Inkscape is an open-source (free) vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator, Corel Draw, Freehand, or Xara X. Professional graphic artists use vector graphics so logos & illustrations can be enlarged without loss of quality. This is especially important for sign graphics. You can also create Flash-like web content using Inkscape because was designed from the ground up to use Scalable Vector Graphics.

ActiveRain is, according to their website, “the largest and most active social network in the real estate space”. Launched in 2006, it’s present membership consists of 97,454 real estate bloggers. Unique in it’s Realtor to Realtor content, it is full of ideas and great advice. Sure, there’s some off topic posts, but it’s pretty easy to find members and groups that provide valuable real estate related content.

One of the best features is it’s specialized groups. You’ll find groups focusing on technology, marketing, referrals, regional content and company/brand specific private groups. I would encourage any real estate company to start a group for their agents - it could take the place of regular office meetings!

Last week, a potential client came to us with hopes of us making his sign more interesting. He was looking for new ideas on how to make his company’s sign more appealing. The original sign design was very outdated and resembled a driver’s license. It was my job to create a new, more attractive sign.

The original design was flat and boring. In order for me to create a more attractive sign I had to turn to Adobe Photoshop, which provides me with limitless possibilities. I started by adding a small gradient to the bottom of the sign, while making the phone number larger. This makes the phone number stand out more as it is the most important element of the design. I also added a slight drop shadow to the company name to give it more contrast to the orange background behind it. Next, I worked on the company logo. In the original design, the logo blended in with all of the other text because it had no contrast from the elements around it.

The last idea I had for the sign was to make the photo not look so much like one from a driver’s license. The first thing I did was mask out the background. I deleted all of the ugly green color that was behind Darin’s head, and it became the red that the rest of the sign is. Doing this created another problem though. His shoulder was cut off, making his photo look very awkward on the sign. It looked like it was just plopped on top of the sign. To fix this, I had to re-create his shoulder. I used various tools in Photoshop and hours upon hours of painstaking work to make it look realistic. His new shoulder blended the photo into rest of the sign, creating a better overall look for the sign.

Overall, a few slight modifications to his original design created a much more modern look for his sign. It is now more visually appealing, as well as more informative to anyone that sees it.

Ordinances usually start as well intentioned responses to improper use of temporary signage other than real estate signs. The law must treat all content equally; so these policies can affect the real estate industry negatively.

This is a story of a group of Realtors who banded together and challenged a potentially restrictive sign code.

Our village was updating their zoning code for the first time in decades. In the past, political signs where not posted even though there wasn’t a law prohibiting them. This particular year a few candidates challenged the village’s “unwritten law”. Since the trustees were rewriting the zoning code, they proposed requiring a sign permit for ALL temporary signage.

Their thinking was that individual homeowners probably wouldn’t foot the $25 -$35 permit fee to post a campaign sign. But, certainly, Realtors (and home sellers) wouldn’t object to such a small fee considering the thousands of dollars in potential commissions. WRONG!

Our local board decided that a few of the brokers with offices in the village should meet with the mayor and village administrator before the public hearing on the matter. The officials explained that they didn’t consider realty signs a problem, but they had to treat all temporary signage equally. The village trustees would vote on the issue at a public meeting that week.

Over 250 brokers and agents and countless number of their listing customers descended on a public hearing room that seats 40 people at best! The Realtors made their case:

The vote was unanimous. The trustees decided against temporary sign permitting. Certainly, it was the unique ability of Realtors to work together that made the difference.

Brochure boxes (sign boxes, info boxes, flyer boxes) have been around for years. Our’s are affordable, durable and attractive. Top agents swear by them.

Here’s some tips on using this important marketing tool:

Home buyers shop neighborhoods, not newspaper listings. People prefer to do drive bys when house hunting. At this early stage, buyers don’t call to gather information. They expect a flyer. If there isn’t one, then they don’t call.
Today’s home buyers expect immediate access to ALL information on the property, either from the web or from a flyer they get from the brochure box. The key is providing the right content. Entice, but leave the buyers wanting more information. A good rule of thumb is to have at least the information that’s available online with the addition of your personal marketing message.
Keep them filled. Recruit your seller to check the box daily and re-fill information sheets a few at a time. Sellers are extremely motivated these days and will happily work with you.
It will surprise you to learn how often homes are sold because of the brochure box. Make sure you have one for your listing!

Shop for Brochure Boxes

My name is Jason Russo. I created the website and shopping cart system for RealEstateSigns.com.

I met CEO Jim Calabrese in 2000 and was interviewed for an internship. At the time, RealEstateSigns.com was a mere one page website consisting of just one graphic. Upon completion of my internship I was immediately hired on to continue working on the website.

We were eager to create an ecommerce site tailored to a real estate agents needs. We quickly learned that this could not be accomplished by using a purchased e-commerce application or as we like to call it an “in the can” solution.

The decision was made that the cart was to be designed from scratch. Since then, Realestatesigns.com has evolved into one of the most successful real estate sign websites in the real estate market today.

It is with great pride that I can say that, There is no other shopping cart script like this one in the world today. It is truly one of kind!

Programming Tools

My preferred method of programming and development is windows notepad. I never use programs editors like Dream weaver, or FrontPage. I found once I learned the code myself, I could easily build sites, and programs that are much cleaner, faster and more secure. I could build programs and easily debug them since I didn’t try to use someone else’s script or code. Even though I’m in the technology field, I’m a bit old fashioned.

I believe in memorizing code; this way, if your computer crashes, you’ll still be able to work from another machine as most machines have some kind of basic text editor.

S.E.O. (search engine optimization)

Everything from images, page titles, descriptions, body copy, alt tags, to the very page names themselves are meticulously thought out. Both Jim and myself have spent long hours building and tweaking the website in order to get better ranking with the Google search engine. Chances are, that is how you came to our site.

As a sign designer, I’m often asked for suggestions of good sign colors.  I answer with a question: what colors do the large independent real estate companies in your area use? Avoid those. Stay clear of colors used by the franchises. Go for unique. Color is a huge factor in how memorable your yard signs are to buyers.

The biggest mistake I run across is limiting yourself to one or two colors, picked from the 12 main colors of the color wheel. [Flash back to high school art class]. Our graphic artists and screen printers have thousands of colors in their palettes. They love creating color schemes if given the opportunity. Give them the freedom of using three or four colors for your signs…ooooh, they’ll be fighting each other to work on your sign design!

Look at product packaging on supermarket shelves for potential color combinations. Millions of dollars are spent on package design. You won’t find too many red and black on white color schemes there.

Here’s two great web sites that will give you ready to use color schemes to use for your signs and other marketing materials:

Colour Lovers Explore the latest color schemes for brands, web sites, summer dresses and even tatoos! Man, I could spend days there.

Kuler An Adobe web site (you’ll need the latest version of Flash to use it). Great color combinations from a community of graphic designers. You can even create color themes using flickr images.

Finally, check out our Real Estate Sign Gallery. We’ve assembled over 400 of our favorite designs, many with unique color schemes.