Point 2 has little promos around that encourage us to use "Rich Data" but you still see listings with meagre remarks and few or no photos... why would this be?
My husband and I had our own brokerage in the late 80's and that franchisor got us going on photos well before web sites... we did 8 photos of every listing including an 8" X 10" of the front and 7 others of the features the seller and we thought most benefitial. These were mounted on a plastic pre-printed "photo board" and displayed in the lobby of our office. We did not permit shots to be done with wide-angle or fish-eye lenses for obvious reasons... making the home look larger than it actually is... is pure folly!
We then procured a display booth which we could set up in banks and shopping centres and by putting Velcro on the back of the boards, we were able to display homes in places they would not normally appear... this was incredibly successful for us and gave us a huge "leg-up" in procuring listings. This was our early beginnings of "Rich Data". By the way, we called the display booth "Merlin the Magician" because "he makes your home disappear!"
Very soon after web sites started, we got one and it was very good... we could place lots of photos in the listings and had pretty well boundless room for write-ups. We were flying again and could attribute about 35% of our business right from the web site... but alas, disaster struck and the supplier (who like a lot of others was working out of an apartment in Calgary, Alberta) couldn't make a living and shut the site down. Within a week we were sent a Point 2 Agent BIO (By Invitation Only) which we followed up on and within another week we were "flying" again and had upgraded to Professional.
When "Neighbourhoods" started a bit later we jumped right into that too and upgraded to Premium which gave us our two areas of prime concern included forever. Summer 2006 my husband decided to make a trip to Saskatoon to see if Point 2 had facilities or were working out of a vacant apartment or something... well to his pleasant surprise he arrived at their beautiful premises in most of a 5 story building with about 90 employees! He spent a couple of days there and was treated like royalty.
This site improves every time you enter your "Online Office" and the increase to 36 photos and the automatic "Virtual Tour" takes it up a lot of notches for us! Our business directly from the site has increased to over 50% but the pinnacle for us just occured this week... I listed a beautiful property just shy of a million dollars and my husband took a total of 64 shots of the home and yard and cherry picked 36 for the web site. He carefully set up the remarks to flow and read as though the home was being shown. He downloaded, printed and bound the 13 page brochure. As we "Broker Load" our own listings into MLS, this fine property was placed on display and the sellers took a little holiday to British Columbia to unwind. Well there wasn't much time to unwind!... a woman from Nova Scotia called the Realtor they were working with here telling her of the home she just found on the internet! She made an unconditional full list offer on this property immediately and had her husband who was here go have a look to make sure it was real. We located the sellers by cell phone in the middle of a lake in a boat... e-mailed the offer to them at a cyber cafe and as they say, "The rest is history!"
With digital cameras and some thought this is all so easy AND economical. I had a couple of listings this month that were not near as spectacular as this one in fact 3 lots and all of them out of town... I got photos of two of them from the appraiser who was in the one town and got the seller to take "at least 5 shots" of the other... by placing them now in Craigslist and on NLS Syndication, 2 out of the 3 are sold and the other one is pending.
I just had a call from our sister city 200 miles south off the site this morning with a great referral that is already underway.
If you don't have a digital camera... go buy one, start taking lots of photos of your listings and work on the copy so it reads well and isn't riddled with "Real Estate mumble-jumble" and if you possibly can, make a trip to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and see first hand how hard these good folks are working for you and I. You know I would write this for the world to see but the Point 2 management and staff are so quaintly modest and do not look for kudos! Well here are some kudos to you Point 2!
Regards,
Anastasia Boyd
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and a Realtor since 1976