Skilpad.Com Community Blog

Recently I stopped for coffee at “Die Kraaltjie”, a country shop on the main road close to the Eastern Cape town of Joubertina.

My two passengers and I were tired after a day’s driving and I needed a caffeine boost for the last few hundred kilometres home. We sat down at an outside table and ordered our coffee and snacks from a good-natured old dear. Through the open door of the shop I noticed the “usual” shelves of jams and preserves but I was not about to look at them, having had my fill of tourist traps over the past few days.

But when the coffee and snacks arrived, our interest was piqued by some unexpected items on our plates: namely quails’ eggs and beautiful, deep, green preserved figs. The decent filter coffee worked its magic; the bonsela eggs and figs were delicious and we were charmed by the unassuming generosity of our country hosts.

So you guessed it — I did find myself exploring the shelves inside and I took home jars of figs and eggs for ourselves and friends and family.

Good marketing huh? What lessons could we apply in the real estate market? I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

Skilpad.Com Property Portal wishes South African voters a peaceful election day. Our website statistics this morning show an uncanny lack of activity. I guess everyone is  putting voting ahead of skilpadding this morning — which is how it should be.

Let’s hope for an outcome that will settle anxious markets and contribute towards a recovery in the property industry. Time for cool heads and to celebrate being part of a wonderful democratic country. Julius, chill — bite on a Nando!

Wine that we can relate to!

Yesterday Skilpad.Com Property Portal visited our winelands namesake Skilpadvlei winery near Stellenbosch.

We tasted the winery’s excellent range of wines, including the popular award-winning Sauvignon Blanc and we left with a stash of Skilpad Dop dry red and dry white.

During our visit we had a pleasant chat with Skilpadvlei Marketing Manager J.P Du Toit and agreed that the property skilpad and wine skilpad should support each other with co-operative marketing activities.

For more info about the winery take a look at www.skilpadvlei.co.za

Recently I overheard a businessman from France explaining how it was that when he bought a game farm in South Africa he chose to buy near Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape.

He said that when he became interested in buying a farm in South Africa he sent an email enquiry to a number of estate agents all over South Africa. Only one agent replied and he replied well.

Needless to say, the agent who replied, who happened to be from Port Elizabeth, made the sale. Who knows where he would have bought if the other agents had replied to his original enquiry? And why did the other agents not reply?

There may be a whole lot of reasons why these agents, and many others, sometimes fail to reply to email enquries. It might be that dealing with emails at the end of a pressured day may be the last straw for some. It could be as a result of a whole lot of technical problems. Or maybe some people just feel that replying to emails takes too much time and often is a waste of time. But the moral of this story is very simple: reply promptly and professionally to every email enquiry and you will make extra sales!

I came across an article recently (http://bit.ly/4Hsj6 ) that quoted a study that found that 50% of people who made property enquiries would purchase property in the next 12 months. The article said that most of that group would make their purchase 90 days to 12 months after their initial enquiry. Based on these statistics the article advised estate agents could profitably use a short follow-up email to revive dead leads.

Closer to home, Skilpad.Com Property Portal has recently implemented an automated email enquiry reminder service that contacts real estate agents and property enquirers with a view to ensure that no valuable email enquiries are left unanswered. The response to this intitatvie has been very positive.

So, if you are an estate agent, be sure to attend to that “inbox” and perhaps it is time to sift through those folders where you file old email enquiries.

There has been a shift in mindset in the real estate industry since mid 2008 when we launched Skilpad.Com: Property Portal: at least that is our perception.

When we started introducing our portal, relatively few estate agents embraced our view that it was high time for the Internet to overtake print as the primary medium for advertising property listings in South Africa.

Today, we are taken far more seriously when we present our case. Many of the agents we speak to ask informed questions and we are being  approached by agents who are actively researching online options. More and more Internet savvy real estate agents are also discovering the benefits of participating in social media networking.

…the shift from print to Internet is now entrenched and irreversible

So what has changed? Certainly the current tough market conditions have forced agents to seek opportunities to reduce their running costs. And it is not difficult for them to see that Internet advertising costs a small fraction of what they pay for print advertisements. This raises questions like: What if we moved most of our advertising to the Internet? What if we beefed up our own websites and listed on the best property portals? How would the buyers react?

At the same time there are changes afoot that will improve broadband access and affordability. Wireless broadband, including 3G/HSDPA mobile data services now rival available fixed-line ADSL offerings in terms of both speed and price. Telkom has launched a WiMAX service and others are following, including the second national operator Neotel. The arrival of new international submarine fibre optic cables later this year will bring down the cost of international bandwidth dramatically. The rapid growth in the availability and performance of internet capable mobile phones is also providing the South African public with more reasons to makes us of purpose-designed facilities like http://mobile.skilpad.com for mobile property searching.  Another interesting statistic noted by Nielsen Online researchers is that the age group that saw the highest growth in Internet usage in South Africa in 2008 was the over-50s.

Taking all of the key factors together, viz. vastly cheaper advertising for estate agents, improved and more affordable connectivity, and much more convenient and more efficient property searching on the Internet, I believe that the shift from print to Internet is now entrenched and irreversible.

It may take a while before 87% of property purchased is first found on the Internet, and 92% of estate agents contracted are found on the Internet, as is the case in the United States. But it is definitely moving that way!

Skilpad.Com has launched a South Africa Property Video Competition to promote the use of its innovative new video tools which allow estate agents to add video clips to their property listings.

Estate agents can win prizes by entering video clips into the competition. The judges are looking for entries that make the most effective use of video to market their properties. All entries are profiled in a competition video gallery that can be viewed by all visitors to the site. Visitors can comment on the video clips and there are also prizes for the best comments. Entries close on Saturday 11th April and the winners will be announced on Monday 13th April.

Following the long awaited arrival of Google South Africa Maps with adequate street information, Skilpad.Com now uses this service to power its dynamic maps.

One of the reasons for this change is to take advantage of the satellite and hybrid (combination of map and satellite) views that Google offers.

When anybody searches for property on Skilpad.Com, a region, suburb or street map is generated, corresponding to the search parameters. The maps are zoomable and scrollable. More map functionality will be added soon.

Let us know what you think of the new-look maps.

The South Africa Property Portal Skilpad.Com is shortly running a competition to identify estate agents who make the best use of the new virtual video tools on the portal.

The tools make it really easy for estate agents to add video clips to their property listings. More news on the competition shortly. Meanwhile here are links to some property listings that include video created by the new tools: Seafront flat Summerstrand and Summerstrand apartment for sale.

Skilpad.Com Property Portal has introduced two new tools that enable estate agents to add video clips to their property listings.

With these tools agents can choose to add video to their listings via the Internet or directly from their cellphones.

One of the goals of Skilpad.Com has been to provide estate agents with a really easy new way of adding impact and useful visual information to their property listings. Video was chosen as the ideal medium to achieve this goal as most estate agents already routinely use digital cameras and cellphones with video capabilities. The new Skilpad.Com tools simply make it quick and easy to transfer this video directly to the desired property advertisements on the property portal. The video tutorials at how to add video to property listings show just how easily this can be done.

To the best of our knowledge, Skillpad.Com is the first property portal in South Africa to provide its users with video tools. It is also, possibly, the first in the world to offer a tool that uploads video directly from cellphone to agents’ property listings.

Anybody who has owned a website for a while will have received a spammy email from a “search engine optimization” expert who claims to have visited their site and noticed that they were not registered on major search engines”.

I chuckled recently when I read on a Google support site that the world’s leading search engine company itself receives this email: Dear Google.com. We have visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most major search engines and directories.

The Internet is full of self-proclaimed search engine optimization (SEO) experts who take advantage of website owners’ legitimate aspirations to improve their visibility on search engines. As a property website owner you need to be cautious when it comes to paying for SEO help: you could pour money down the drain or even worse, you could incur Google penalties that would decrease your search engine visibility or even get your site blacklisted.

As a general rule I advise that you should ignore websites and unsolicited emails that:

The truth is there is not quick fix method to achieve great search engine visibility. It takes time, perserverence, application and above all the commitment to build and maintain a quality website that delivers real value to visitors.

So where can you go for guidance on SEO? A good place to start is to study Google’s Webmaster Guidelines The Google Webmaster Help Forum also full of useful advice. You will gain knowledge that will assist you in your own SEO efforts. And if you do decide to hire an SEO professional to assist you, you will be better equipped to find the right person.