In this week’s Real Estate Sales and Technology news we cover the 2014 Realtor Technology Trends Survey, Mobile Technology Web Traffic for Real Estate, Real Estate Marketing Automation and Real Estate Lead Generation Techniques.

2014 Realtor Technology Trends just released by National Association of Realtors

According to the annual 2013-14 Realtor Technology Survey released last week by the NAR, the vast majority of Realtors, 94 percent, use mobile devices to communicate with clients. In fact, Realtors spend a median 44 percent of their time corresponding with or doing work for their clients via their mobile devices. Use of iPhones continues to increase among Realtors with 52 percent of respondents now using iPhones. Besides technology devices, real estate professionals are increasingly using social media to generate leads and stay in contact with clients. 91 percent of Realtors say they use social media. Tools that allow for conducting business quickly and conveniently from any location were rated the highest by Realtors. Some of the tools include:

-Real Estate software for forms & contracts (DocuSign, Authentisign, ZipForms, DotLoop.)

-Mobile apps (such as Dropbox, e-Key apps, Evernote, Google Maps, Open Home Pro, Paragon, and Supra)

– Electronic tablets, Property Databases (MLS, Zillow..)

-CRM Solutions (Top Producer® and e-Edge)

Read more about real restate technology in the original report at NAR here. And more coverage from Realty Biz News, Real Estate Rama, or Florida Realtors.

Mobile Technology rapidly growing in popularity for Real Estate Sales

The NAR’s Realtor Technology Study claims 94 percent of Realtors use mobile technology for communication with their customers & spent an average of 44 percent of their time in correspondence with their customers through mobile devices. Digital analytics firm, comScore, just released statistics supporting the trend of rapidly growing popularity of mobile devices. For the second month in a row, most visitors to Realtor.com & RedFin were mobile users. Check out the comScore data comparison below or read more about the upswing in real estate technology  in the article “Mobile taking bigger slice of the real estate Web traffic pie”.

Luxury Real Estate Marketing Automation – Your Ticket to Freedom

Do you feel like there’s never enough time to get everything done anymore? The fundamental purpose of automation is to improve productivity and thus free up more of your time. Duct Tape Marketing recently published a great article on marketing automation called “How to Be Everywhere Through Marketing Automation Magic”. It covers every avenue of marketing automation including Lead Generation, Email Marketing, Social Media, and Analytics Automation. Create a system that works, rinse and repeat.

Although here at Clearview we are using Hubspot for both email and social media automation, some of the suggested tools by Duct Tape Marketing for email marketing automation were Aweber and MailChimp for anyone without technical knowledge. And for social media automation, both Buffer & Twittaquitta were suggested. I’ve personally used TweetDeck, Hootsuite and Buffer as successful options. For more info & tools on how to automate your marketing campaign, check out Duct Tape Marketing’s article here.

Real Estate Lead Generation and Conversion Techniques

The folks over at Inman just posted an informative & amusing webinar on real estate lead generation and conversion. They talk with Ben Kinney from Brevity, who gives some compelling in person & online techniques on how to generate & convert a real estate lead. Some of the questions asked were “ How would your business change if you followed up with your leads at least 5 times”? Focusing on the buying signals and setting foundations for long term follow up, were also some of the takeaways from the webinar. And the important 3 questions below were also covered:

• How many leads a successful agent needs every month (it’s a ton less than you think!).
• What to do with “dead leads.”
• How following up forever means providing great customer service.

Watch the webinar below or read more here.

Clearview’s Tuesday Tech Tip: SlideShare

SlideShare is a free content sharing platform for business documents, videos, and presentations. Having grown into a sizable platform, Forbes has called SlideShare “The Quiet Giant Of Content Marketing”. I’ve found SlideShare to be a great tool for breaking down your content into bite sized pieces to help convert your leads into sales. Below is an informative example of a SlideShare presentations created by FitSmallBusiness.com. And another example can be found here.