Listing Village: New real estate marketing company offers unique services
October 16-22, 2017
By Jay Edwards
After a lot of hours and effort the past three years, the team at Listing Village launched their real estate marketing solutions company in June. It is, they believe, a unique platform that will help agents market their business and bring in qualified leads.
The company focuses on three things – A website, a map and social media. They coordinate the three to bring agents their tagline – real estate marketing simplified.
“Real estate agents have been evolving and continue to become even more independent contractors,” says Jason Palecek, director of business development. “Our mission is to help brand the individual real estate agent by providing them their own access to a map that shows all the listings of new homes and open houses. It is constantly updated throughout the day, syncing every ten minutes with CARMLS, which allows us to have the most accurate prices and current listings and sales on the market.”
When a Realtor comes on board with Listing Village, they put together the website, designing it with the agent’s brand identity and giving them the ability to use the interactive map.
“We have designed a marketing social media platform,” says Matthew Young, president and CEO. “The way it works is we take an agent’s listing, placing it on FB, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn. From there we pair down the demographics to find the most likely buyers for that specific listing.”
Young has developed an algorithm to identify who those buyers are. His tech background and website development expertise landed him work in the real estate community where he picked up on what agents were looking for.
“I was building different platforms for Realtors and was hearing things they did not like about Zillow or Realtor.com.” he says. “Or, they would have a website and the map was terrible, so no one used it. So we spent a lot of time building our map. We wanted something the end-user could be comfortable with. The end-user in this case is the client, because ultimately, that’s who we are serving.”
“Zillow is restricted on the listings they can post. Once an agent signs with us they have every single listing in the MLS now available through their website. So we get consumers to use the Realtor’s map, which gets them on the website. It really is a better tool than anything out there.”
The second challenge Young and his team faced, was now that this powerful tool was available, how did they get people to come use it.
When you look at the ads on Facebook now, you likely notice that you are being hit with ads based on what you’ve liked or commented on previously. Facebook constantly searches through what people are saying and what they are looking at. Listing Village uses their own technology in conjunction with Facebook and other social media platforms to qualify people who have the best potential to be buyers, by weeding out the window shoppers. So that when a Realtor gets a lead, it is a real lead. “It is much different than paying 200 dollars for an ad on Facebook that shows everyone a home, because not everyone is looking for a home, in fact most are not,” says Schell Gower, the company’s marketing consultant.
“This is giving you a very targeted way to attract people who are qualified buyers,” said Jacob Feuers, the company’s chief operations officer.
“Another good feature,” Young says, “is the Arkansas Homebuyer Alerts. The way it works is, we bring them in when they look at an initial ad, and then track them and follow up with them on what they are actually interested in. As people go to the website and click on a home, we send back to FB what they are actually looking at. Say someone is looking at three to four hundred thousand in Hillcrest. We will send them back any listings an agent has, which fits those parameters. We know what they want, and that’s what we find and send back to them. We aren’t spending money and time, getting what are likely the wrong home ads to prospective buyers. That is really the goal.”
“And for new agents, who may not have any listings yet, it can still be effective. They pick ten homes out of the MLS and put them on their site, so those qualified leads will get to them just as if someone was searching listings they actually had.”
To learn more about the company and see real agent testimonies, visit their website at www.listingvillage.com
PHOTO CAPTION:
The Listing Village team at their offices on the 32nd floor of the Simmons Tower in downtown Little Rock. Left to right are Jacob Feuers, Matthew Young, Jason Palecek and Jacob Fry. (Photo by Jay Edwards)
