Featured news & tips — posted December 2, 2004

In celebration of the New Year — a completely new XSites version

Our Agent XSites were introduced to the real estate market a little over a year ago. In that short time, they've become known as the most intuitive solution available. While other providers continued to clunk along with clumsy interfaces and poor flexibility, we introduced a sophisticated website that even the least computer savvy agents can build, manage and use every day in their businesses.

Now we're ramping up to release an entirely new and improved version just in time for the New Year.  Included in the new version — which is free to all Agent XSite owners — are the tools that will help you work more efficiently and gain new business. While many websites are nothing more than online postcards, the new XSites are websites that “actually do something.”  In addition to releasing an entirely new interface, we're also releasing time-saving features to set you even further apart from competitors. Here's what's coming in our new release:

E-prospect flyers.  Take advantage of the library of professionally written content we provide you without having a ton of pages overwhelming your website. After completing a lead generation form, prospects scroll through a list of 60+ reports, like "Applying for a Loan" and "Curb Appeal Checklist." When a prospect checks a report they want, XSites automatically e-mails it to them. You get a qualified lead and your visitor gets helpful information about buying, selling and/or owning real estate.

Your marketing and contact management launch pad. Daily targeted marketing is essential in building relationships with new prospects and strengthening ties with existing clients. 
XSellerate, our new client relationship management and marketing solution, combines professional print and e-mail marketing with web-based client communication tools — and it's designed to work in tandem with your XSite. With this new release, leads are automatically added to your contact manager from your XSite and are ready to start receiving a drip marketing campaign from you. Using XSellerate you can assign contacts to multiple groups based on the lead generation form they submitted, such as "buyer," "luxury homes," etc. and they will automatically begins receiving marketing messages from you.

Precise leads. With this new release, you can now specify which contact category any particular lead generation form will be assigned to. For example, if you do a lot of business in the luxury home market, you can assign the leads generated from your luxury home listings and information pages to be sent to your own custom “Luxury Home Buyers” contact category.  And if you use XSellerate, you can designate drip e-mail campaigns to your individual categories for precise, targeted marketing.

Users forum. You'll also have access to the XSites' Users Forum where you can “chat” with other XSite users, ask questions and get tips and advice topics like search engine optimization and website marketing.

We'll roll out our new XSites version over the next several days.  Shortly after, we'll follow up with yet another release focusing on a whole new set of lead generation tools.  This will be the third major upgrade we've released this year; all of which our subscribers have gotten free.  Each and every one of our competitors would charge their customers for a new version with new tools. We don't, and never will.

Our new engine release allows us to finish this year strong and start off the new one off with a bang.  We hope you enjoy our celebration, along with all the goodies that will come with it.

Missouri REALTOR® celebrates birthday in style with new Mercedes

Meet your future customers: Generation Y

Many of them wear multiple piercings, own a cell phone that takes pictures and they're even more technologically savvy than their older brothers and sisters of Generation X.

They're Generation Y — and many of them are going to be your customers very soon.

The label "Gen Y" roughly refers to those born between 1979 through today. And at 60 million strong, more than three times the size of Generation X, they're the biggest thing to hit the American scene since the 72 million baby boomers.

Gen Yers also have lofty financial and personal goals and fully expect to meet them, according to the book, In Managing Generation Y, by Bruce Tulgan and Carolyn A. Martin, Ph.D. In fact, most surveys of Gen Yers report that they expect to earn very high salaries by the time they are 30 years of age. And with high salaries come big houses.

And enough of them are buying homes already. The number of sales to buyers under the age of 25 rose to 345,000 in 2003, up 20 percent from 287,000 in 2001, according to the National Association of REALTORS®' (NAR) statistics. Sales to that age group outpaced home sales in general, which rose 15 percent from 2001 to 2003.

There are a lot of factors playing into this trend. Of course, we can thank the low interest rates and flexible loan options for much of the growth in this age group. But there's also been an increase in homeownership education efforts by the media, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and realty firms.

Further, there's more awareness nowadays of the investment and tax break advantages of owning one's own home. Plus, many of them are just plain tired of seeing their money disappear in rent each month — and living at home with the folks is not always an option for them.

And if they can't afford to buy, in some cases, mom and dad help foot the bill for their home. Parents who qualify for the Federal Housing Administration's (FHA) so-called "kiddie condo" program are allowed a 3 percent down payment and tax break if they cosign a mortgage for their college-enrolled children. Parents see the home as an investment that will pay off more than shelling out $300 to $400 a month for a dorm room or apartment rent.

Most real estate professionals say they see good prospects for home-buying students because parents support them financially, and after graduation they usually get jobs. In fact, one agent told the Louisville Kentucky Journal, "I've had med student clients who have a minimal amount of income. But because they're going to graduate and get a job, they can get a loan based on their potential income."