In the past, I’ve never been a real fan of virtual tours for most properties. My thought process was that plenty of well lit photos from the homeowner will do the job and give the viewer what they are looking for. 2 things are changing my stance on this. The first is that the overall quality of virtual tour production is going up. I must admit, these tours are starting to consistently look really really good. 2nd, sellers occassionally take and submit awful photos. 

I’ve gotten to the point where if a seller doesn’t own a quality digital camera or they have difficulty emailing photos, I almost always recommend a virtual tour. The advantage here is not just the virtual tour itself, but also the photographer will take your still shots for you and email them to us for uploading to the MLS.  The difference in a listing with quality well lit photos and dim grainy photos is night and day. Many times you can talk the photographer into taking addtl photos for you or even tip them a few bucks and ask them to take a plethora of extra shots.

http://www.inman.com/news/2008/08/22/realtorcom-sees-search-surge-in-some-markets

This is a great read for those interested in potential future trends. As expected, buyers are beginning to show more and more interest in distressed markets. Las Vegas, Oakland, etc… are seeing a surge in buyer activity and will most likely continue to do so. Certainly many online lookers are not qualified buyers looking to purchase today, however, the article does show us that there are many people out there on the fence or at least interested in getting back into the market in the future. Looking at the other side of the coin, Realtor.com just released their new search feature and they are planning on publishing their Beta Search in the upcoming months. With competition high between Zillow, Realtor.com, Trulia, Craigslist, etc.. Realtor.com will take advantage of every opportunity for press coverage.

In addition to having access to your state specific forms, the private client area acts as a portal for the seller to manage their listing. From this interface, the seller can change their price, add photos, add remarks, even add Realtor.com enhancements. Furthermore, the seller has the ability to submit specific questions through our customer service tab. Open houses can be added, including tag lines, refreshments being served, etc… The private client area serves as a one stop resource for the seller to fully manage their listing from activation to close of escrow.

When a seller lists a property with Congress Realty, they receive an email entitled “Listing is Active”. This email will have the seller’s MLS #, as well as the seller’s login and password to the private client area.

The Congress Realty Private Client area gives our sellers access to the forms they need to complete their transaction. These forms are available for download anytime of day, any day of the year. This service is included with our basic listing package. Let’s say a buyer walks up to your door Saturday night wanting to make an offer. You simply log into our account and print off the docs you need from your home computer. Any form you could need will be uploaded to the private client area for your benefit. Purchase contracts, disclosures, counter offers, etc… it’s all right there for you. The wonderful thing about the private client area is that it is accessible at anytime for your convenience. If you ever have any questions concerning how to download or print these documents, just let us know and we will walk you through it.

The forms in the private client area are state specific to you and your property. Thus, if you are an Arizona seller, your account will automatically have the AZ docs uploaded to your login area, on the other hand, TX sellers will automatically have the TX docs uploaded to their login area….. and so on for all sellers in various states.

2 things to remember: Viewers will always click on what they see first. Secondly, those enhanced listings w/ more photos will receive more click throughs than those w/out photos. Realtor.com displays enhanced listings first on search results. As a result, these listings will receive twice as much traffic as non enhanced listings. If you visit Realtor.com, run any search on your preferred area. You will notice in the search results that those properties on the 1st page have yellow tag lines, additional photos, etc… These are enhanced listings. As a seller, to maximize your page views, you want to be right here on the first few pages w/ the yellow border and additional information.

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Our goal is to provide our customers, prospective customers, and others with valuable real estate information and news, in a much more candid tone than competing Realtor sites and publications.  Feel free to post comments.