Technology has a role to play in how you market yourself and your properties online.  Don’t give away control of the enquiries.  We tell you how to make the decisions yourself and have all the leads come straight to you.

Topic – Top 5 Prop Tech developments of 2018

Mentor – Kylie Davis

• The good and bad of VPA
• Forced to innovate
• Fish where the fish are

Prop Tech with Joel Leslie – Join us in NY next month.  Here is why.

Transcript:

Kevin:   Welcome back once again as we talk about the prop tech innovations developments of 2018 that Kylie Davis, who is our guest, has noticed and is talking about this week. Kylie from realcontent.guru, who’ll be one of our guests at the Inman Connect Conference at the end of January. We’ll be streaming content live over the three days. It should be a real hoot, Kylie. Looking forward to it.

Kylie:   I’m so looking forward to going. I love New York. It’s my favourite town.

Kevin:   Yeah, well we’re going to be there to launch Property TV. It’ll be a great opportunity for you. It’s actually live now, but we do the official launch in New York and we tell you all about Coicio and how you can properly promote your properties through social media, which is really what we’re going to talk about today. Marketing and social media and the role it’s playing and the developments that have happened in that area for real estate agents and real estate professionals, Kylie.

Kylie:   Yeah. Look, this is a really vibrant part of the prop tech startup community, marketing and automation. There’s a whole lot of innovation going on in this space and a lot of it’s coming out of Australia. What we’re seeing is there are some great companies that are helping real estate agents automate their content and how they send emails out.

Kylie:   And as part of that, like so Active Pipe, able to both help you schedule your emails that are going out, but then also gain more intelligence from what’s coming back from those emails or the responses that you’re getting, and then using that information to target more and more deeply.

Kylie:   We’ve got other businesses like at Phoenix and Tiger Pistol who are doing work in that social media space. So helping agents automate and get insights and target their social media advertising much more effectively so that it’s kind of point and click rather than having to go through all the drama of trying to learn Facebook ads, which is the bane of every normal person’s existence.

Kylie:   And we’re also seeing the content itself and how you create it and how you do that really quickly to create great quality content, or have it available as quickly as possible. We’re seeing some great work in that space too. Companies like Home Preso that are able to help automate and make that happen a lot faster so that you don’t have to be a content expert to create a content calendar and have things new and interesting to post on a regular basis.

Kevin:   Mm-hmm. One of the things we’re excited about, of course in launching PTV is our association with Coicio, which also falls into that category. And it’s free to list on Coicio all your properties and then they automatically feed through to Property TV.

Kevin:   So the whole scene is changing. And you mentioned there, Kylie, that a lot of it’s driven out of Australia. One of the reasons for that is that Australia is still the most expensive country in the world to advertise a property online and that has to change and it is changing.

Kylie:   Yeah. Well, we have this legacy which is good and bad. So while our commissions are a lot smaller than the US. So in the US, property commissions are six percent, which is three percent to the selling agent, usually and three percent to the buying agent. In Australia, we’ve had much lower commission levels, but we’ve always charged for vendor paid advertising and we’ve had some very motivated companies in Fairfax and News Corp who have been very keen to help real estate agents spend that money. And they’re my old cohorts, so I take some of the blame.

Kylie:   So because of that, because we have this heritage of vendor paid advertising and understanding the power of marketing and being able to talk to our vendors about how important that is, that’s one of the reasons why I think advertising’s so expensive. But it’s also one of the reasons that is encouraging all of this innovation to help make it more affordable for agents to do things differently and hopefully better.

Kevin:   Yeah, well it’s actually forced us to innovate, hasn’t it? And look for other solutions because consumers are getting really quite weary about having to pay for the advertising when they know that there are cheaper alternatives really.

Kylie:   Yeah, I think some of the legacy ways of advertising have a place, but what we’re seeing now is you need to, if you’re serious about doing marketing, you need to be fishing where the fish are and making sure that you’re targeting and that targeting is a lot more affordable.

Kylie:   But the downside to it is that you then also have to create content that you can target off, that is actually genuinely interesting. So it’s not just about property listings, it’s actually about thinking who your audience is and what we’re seeing is some really exciting stuff coming out that’s helping agents not just think, oh, house for sale, house for sale, house for sale, but actually thinking of ways they can be useful.

Kevin:   Yeah, we’re providing content as well. I mean it’s a whole new atmosphere. It’s one of the things we do through Property TV. Hey Kylie, great talking to you. Thank you very much. We’re going to talk about big data tomorrow and the internet of things, which is an unusual turn of phrase and hopefully you’ll explain that for me tomorrow when we get together.

Kylie:   Sure will.

Kevin:   Kylie Davis is my guest and Kylie of course is from realcontent.guru and she’ll be back again tomorrow. Talk to you then, Kylie.

Kylie:   Thanks so much, Kevin. Speak to you soon.