RISMEDIA, October 18, 2010—While text message lead generation services have spread across real estate firms nationwide, it always seemed that the use of these services were few and far between when you walked around New York City. Why? One of the reasons we launched our text message lead generation service, Mobile Real Estate ID, was due to my own struggles of walking around Manhattan trying to get property information and pictures. All the building signs say “call” and all I wanted to do was “text.”
I admit, after a couple lackluster responses from agents in the NYC market, we here at Mobile Real Estate shifted our focus out to the suburbs of many of the major metropolitan areas where traditional ‘for sale” signs provided the perfect canvas for a text message sign rider. Since signage in NYC is minimal on many of the old buildings and new high rise apartment complexes, it does present a challenge in advertising “text in for immediate price, pictures & info.”
Well I am very happy to announce that what I thought was wrong and those challenges have been overcome. Earlier this week I got a chance to catch up with friends and colleagues at the Lucky Strike Social Media Club for dinner and drinks in downtown Manhattan. Running late as I often do, I found myself sitting next to someone who I knew I recognized, but hadn’t seen in a while, Sandy Edry, vice president, Citi Habitats. As we caught up, Sandy mentioned to me that in the several months he has been using Mobile Real Estate ID to market one of his buildings he receives on average 5-7 leads per week.
In addition, not only had he had good success with the product, but recently posted a comment online as to why Mobile ID’s (text codes) are more practical than QR codes for marketing real estate. I couldn’t agree more! In fact, while QR codes certainly have a wow factor, and provide advanced mobile users with a unique way to access information, as a real estate professional they do not provide nearly as much of a benefit to you because you do not capture the lead instantly with a QR code while you do capture leads instantly with text codes!
While text message marketing might be an option for every home for sale in NYC I think that it has found its place for real estate professionals who market buildings – exactly what I wanted to use it for when I was looking for an apartment in NYC. As I walked around neighborhoods and saw buildings where apartments were available I thought it would be so practical to simply be able to text-in for available units, price and pictures.
NYC real estate professionals – if you want to see how Sandy is using his Mobile Id to market a building, Text bennett1 to 88500.
Seth Kaplan is the president of Mobile Real Estate ID. Contact him directly at Seth@mobilerealestateid.com or, for more information, visit www.mobilerealestateid.com.
