Skilpad.Com Community Blog

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.

Sometimes our marketing representatives are asked by estate agents to explain in simple terms how we manage to get all of the properties from their websites onto Skilpad.Com Property Portal as if by magic.

Gloria, one of our marketers, has come up with the best simple answer. “Our little skilpaadjie crawls around your site and brings your listings across to ours”.

And our skilpaadjie crawls so quickly nogal!

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!

Fine&Country this week became the first national real estate group in South Africa to list property from all of its offices on the Skilpad.Com, South Africa’s fastest growing property portal.

The group of independent property agencies (see www.fineandcountry.co.za ) specialises in quality South African property and forms part of the international Fine&Country Group with its headquarters in London

While Fine&Country is the first national group to list en-masse on Skilpad-Com, a growing number of offices of other leading estate agency groups and independent agencies are represented on the portal. At the time of writing, there are more than 45 000 properties for sale or to rent on Skilpad.Com and the number is growing daily.

Estate agents who list properties on Skilpad.Com are automatically entitled to post news or articles on this blog. Here is how: Log in to your control panel, click on “My Reports” and “Add Article” and away you go.

As a visitor to this blog you may comment on any article. Click on the “Comment” link at the end of the article, then click on the “Log In” link and log in if you are registered or register and then have your say.

If you are a real estate marketing expert and would like to contribute news and articles to this blog, then send us an email to support@skilpad.com and we will get back to you promptly.

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.

One of the most common mistakes I notice when viewing South African property listings on the Internet is that many of them provide very little information and either do not display photographs or use poor quality photographs.

If you are an estate agent who lists property on your own website or on property portals such as www.skilpad.com, you would be well-advised to review your listings to make sure that they do not fall short of the minimum requirements for effective Internet advertising. If your ads are too thin on information, property searchers may pass them over in favour of other listings that paint an appealing picture through the liberal use of information and pictures.

I suspect that one of the reasons for skimpy listings is that the property industry in South Africa is in a transition period from advertising predominantly in newspapers, where the cost of space is high, to advertising more and more on web-based advertising where space is cheap. Having sold a number of properties through the Internet over recent years, I have learnt that one of the great strengths of the Internet is its ability to reach potential buyers in other parts of the country and the world. Potential buyers who are far away do not have local knowledge, and so welcome informative listings that spell out the features and beneftis of the property and the area. And all potential buyers appreciate good pictures.

Here are some guidelines to help you ensure that your property listings meet the grade:

1. For residential listings include at least the price and location of the property, the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, and the size of the property. Preferably also include information about other rooms and features of the house (swimming pool, entertainment areas, great view, etc.) the size of the buildings, and information on proximity to schools/shopping centres, etc, and security features.
2. When listing farms and smallholdings, follow the general principles above, but also provide information that has a bearing on the agricultural/eco-tourism potential of the land, e.g. vegetation, topography, carrying capacity, infrastructure, water, electricity, crops, stock, game, proximity to tourist destinations, etc.

The same philosophy applies to any other type of listing: try and put yourself into the shoes of the people who are searching online and do your best to use words and images to sell the property to them before they even set foot on the land.

Good luck with your listings. If you need any help or advice with improving the quality of your listings on our South Africa Property Portal, you are welcome to email us at support@skilpad.com