Nobu Hata

By Nobu Hata

Has anyone else started having the “Google” question pop up during their listing presentations?  Not your website, nor your blog, or your Facebook page inquiry – the “can you make our home show up in Google?” question.  It may be just that my clients tend to be a little more tech-savvy than your average buyer or seller, but it’s beginning to freak me out.

It didn’t help that I saw a report from my own company saying GoogleBase was the number three Web referrer to my company’s website.  (After Facebook, if you’re wondering.)  Fortunately, my brokerage has been forthright and progressive thinking enough to start feeding GBase our listings, but how many brokerages haven’t?  Do you use these tools to market your listings?

Google Base, Maps, Real Estate (the closest thing to a national MLS), the forthcoming mobile ads and augmented reality features; what freaks me out isn’t that Google is getting into the real estate game — it was inevitable… hello, revenue stream! — it’s the fact that our clients will utilize these tools before many of us will.  Check out http://maps.google.com/realestate, in the area immediately surrounding my home, roughly half were the “Big Three” brokerages in my market, the others were FSBOs, knowledgeable sellers using Craigslist (which uploads to GBase) and the like.  What’s yours look like? Continue reading »