While real estate broker Sharon Steele waits to pick up her children after school, she is on her BlackBerry, updating her Facebook page with a new listing in Union County.
Throughout the day, she checks in with friends and followers on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, responds to comments and communicates with potential clients or sellers from across the country who found her online.
Sharon Steele, a broker with Coldwell Banker, uses her BlackBerry to update her Facebook page while visiting a home she is selling in Cranford. And it all pays off: Last summer, Steele made a sale after she met a couple at an open house in Union and followed up with a Facebook message.
They closed on a home in September.
Using social media to attract home buyers has changed the way real estate agents do business.
Any tool — online or otherwise — that helps a broker land a sale is welcome, especially in a sluggish housing market.
"What I want people to do is to get to know me as a person so that they can understand how I run my life and how I run my business," Steele said. "Facebook is like a giant cocktail party — you have to talk to people, and you can't just talk business."
Steele, who broke into the business three years ago at Coldwell Banker in Westfield, now speaks at conferences about her online routine. She maintains three Facebook pages: a personal profile for family updates, a page of property listings and links to interesting news and a page where she posts activities or community events in the Cranford-Westfield area. For every real estate post she makes, she tries to post three additional personal items. And she avoids discussing religion or politics so as not to alienate her audience.
Social media experts said real estate's interactive nature is ripe for online marketing. In those spaces, brokers can meet people and brand themselves outside their immediate towns, as well as showcase an agent's expertise in a specific area.
Business consultant Patrick Healy encourages his clients to incorporate social media into their regular business strategies because it is similar to traditional media but without any costs, except time.
But that’s not to say those strategies should be taken lightly. Healy warns clients to make sure they have a game plan.
"Don't use social media for the sake of social media," he said. "You don't have to do this. You're not going to go out of business."
But, he added, "You're going to go out of business if all the people in your market are on it, and you're not."
Jodi Stasse, a broker in Hudson County, is a believer in social networking.
At the Canco Lofts in downtown Jersey City, she created a Facebook page as part of the building’s marketing plan.
Her staff posts property updates and relevant news, and potential buyers can ask questions of current residents.
“It’s been a huge selling tool for us,” she said.
Stasse’s firm picked up 14 prospective buyers through the Facebook page in the last year and a half, six of which were sales.
Social media also has changed the way prospective home buyers can research property listings, realtors and information about towns.
The online home of The Star-Ledger, nj.com, hosts more than 250 online forums about towns and posts its active real estate listings on Twitter.
“Our forums have been a really active, lively place for discussions about everything going on in New Jersey towns,” said Colleen Stone, nj.com’s content director. “It’s not surprising that people looking to move to a place in New Jersey would pop into one of these forums to get some information about what it’s like there.”
Steele is just one of the many real estate agents who are now turning to social media, like Facebook and Twitter, to locate clients and make sales.Brokers are catching on. In an age when consumers can find almost any listing online, brokers are realizing social media tools can help them attract — and keep — clients.
Colts Neck-based broker Sarah Bandy credits her online networks as the reason her business expanded so quickly last year.
Bandy “checks in” to open houses on Foursquare, a location-based online community. She also produces video home tours for YouTube and finds clients through Facebook. It means competitors also know what she’s up to, but Bandy is more concerned with attracting new clients than revealing her sales methods.
“I’m giving agents who follow me ideas, but I’d rather them say, ‘I saw that on Sarah Bandy’s site,’ as compared to trying to hide it and keep it to myself,” she said. “Eventually, it will come out.”
But, for all of the advantages, social media expert Sree Sreenivasan cautions against expecting too much too soon from these platforms. Instead, he suggests users hang out in the spaces and study the landscape before settling into a routine.
"It's still in its very early days and we are trying to figure out what works and what doesn't
in terms of marketing," said Sreenivasan, who teaches digital media at Columbia University. "It's very unusual to have both the consumer side and the business side all changing at the same time, on the fly.
“That’s what happening right now.”
Sarah Portlock: (973) 392-5994 or sportlock@starledger.com