Douglas Heddings used to rely on direct mail to market himself as a real estate broker, but that was frustrating. Often his mailings would be returned, either because people didn’t want advertisements in their mailbox or because they had moved.
He felt there had to be a better way to “stay in touch with my sphere of clients” and yet at the same time “not be in their faces.”
A friend had started a blog about NBA basketball, and he suggested that Heddings, a senior vice president at Prudential Douglas Elliman, give blogging a try. The friend’s basketball blog became known as True Hoop, inspiring the name of Hedding’s blog, True Gotham, which he started two years ago.
Truegotham.com, which Heddings said generally receives between 10,000 and 20,000 unique visitors each month, is one of a still relatively small number of sites maintained by real estate brokers and appraisers. At one count, according to an Inman News article published last year, there were only roughly 300 real estate broker blogs nationwide.
While there is no exact tally of how many New York City brokers maintain blogs, the broker-bloggers interviewed for this story said it’s not something a great number of their colleagues do, though the number has slowly grown.
“I think there are still only a few locally but many great ones nationally,” said Heddings. “It seems to be a trend, but the new ones don’t tend to be very good or original. Brokers who do it primarily for marketing usually fail miserably. The moment it sounds salesy is the kiss of death.”
If that ‘salesy’ tone is avoided, brokers who maintain blogs say that it’s an effective marketing tool for them, and that blogging is a cathartic experience given the frequently cutthroat nature of their business. Also, the process of maintaining a blog — on top of the desire to produce quality content — has forced blogging brokers to better educate themselves about their business.
As a result, many read trade publications and amass Google alerts (e-mail updates from Google tied to specific search terms) and RSS feeds (services that allow users to track new posts from Web sites of their choosing) to get the latest word not only about specific properties, but market forces and industry trends as well.
All that information, they believe, is good for business.
“I have attracted several clients from the blog, many of them international. Most come through a random Google search,” said Andrew Fine, broker for A. Fine Company and blogger at A Fine Blog. “It would be fair to say that better than a third of my business over the last year has been a result of A Fine Blog.”
When people are looking to hire a broker to sell a property, Heddings said, they generally meet around five brokers before picking one. According to him, though, True Gotham readers don’t shop around as much after alighting on his site.
“People find me through the blog,” he says. “I don’t have to compete with my colleagues. People who read it know who I am and what my business style is.”
Fine believes the same is true of his online persona.
“The clients that have originated from the blog seem to garner deeper bonds than from ordinary sources,” said Fine, who says he attracts roughly 15,000 visitors to A Fine Blog each month and that his traffic has grown an average of 35 percent per quarter over the last six quarters. “It seems like they already know me, and prefer to do business with me exclusively from the get-go.”
True Gotham reflects Heddings’ understanding of New York real estate, he said. Users can read his take on how real estate in the Hamptons fared in the third quarter, for example. In a posting on the “Two faces of residential real estate,” Heddings discusses how he has to fend off lowball bids when representing a seller and then make them when he’s with a buyer.
While most of the posts on A Fine Blog are, like the ones on True Gotham, about New York City real estate, Fine said his blog attracts customers outside of the city.
“I’ve had a number of clients from Dubai come from the blog,” said Fine, who started A Fine Blog a year and a half ago. “Word must be getting around because now we are hearing from places like Abu Dhabi and Jeddah.”
The blog, which Fine said has also helped him sell multiple units at a couple of Manhattan condos, provides links to content from mainstream real estate coverage in Crain’s, the New York Observer and The Real Deal. Mixed in is commentary about the Hamptons, Manhattan and even the recent presidential election.
“When I look at my Web stats, there are a whole lot of Wall Streeters and a whole lot of people throughout the real estate industry” who read the blog, Fine said. “It’s a blend between industry followers and potential clients.”
Broker-bloggers say Web traffic is only one measure of their site’s success, and that the numbers don’t necessarily indicate how influential their sites are.
“The only way I get feedback is when I speak in public, and people come up to me and say, ‘I’ve been reading Matrix for years,'” said Jonathan Miller, president and CEO of real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.
Miller maintains two blogs — the Soapbox (12,000 visitors a month) and Matrix (45,000) — and contributes regular posts to the real estate blog Curbed.com.
Miller said he didn’t get into blogging to promote himself or his business, but as a way to vent about his frustrations with the New York City real estate world.
As the housing boom peaked here a few years ago, there was tremendous pressure from lending institutions for real estate appraisers to “hit the number,” Miller said. Miller saw many “good people” who were forced out of the appraisal business because they wouldn’t play ball and push properties and higher prices. “So that’s what got me to start writing and expressing the issues of valuation,” he said.
In July 2005, Soapbox was born, which focused on the property appraisal industry, and in August of the same year, Miller launched Matrix, which is targeted to a broader real estate audience.
Miller doesn’t feel the need to post every day. He blogs in bursts, whenever the mood strikes, he says, or he feels the need to address a compelling issue. This way, readers see the intensity and the freshness of his content. “I talk to bloggers who are saying, ‘Oh, my God, what am I going to write about today,’ and I don’t believe in that, because the product looks forced or dry,” he said.
As for next steps, Miller says he’ll keep blogging so long as it’s fun. Heddings wants to do more investigative pieces on his blog — like, “Why it is so hard to get an accurate square footage on a property?”
So will broker blogs be the next big thing in New York real estate? That’s anyone’s guess.
“It puts me on a level playing field with some bigger, better-known brokers out there,” Fine said. “I think the blogging trend is really in its infancy. You’re going to see more brokers doing the same thing.”