Carolyn Capalbo asked:




If your blog is just a repository of your latest listings, it’s time for you to make a change. One way is by connecting features in your listing to interesting information – history, how-tos, stories, etc. By making your blog of interest to more people than just real estate buyers, you will gain authority and influence beyond your sphere as an agent. In turn, this can help with your marketing of your services.

For many agents, the blog on their website is for showcasing their listings and bringing new listings to the attention of their readers. But does this really give you an audience? I mean, sure, if your readers are interested in a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom home in Neighborhood X in City Y, maybe your latest blog post will be of interest to them. For most of the mortals casually visiting your website, it’s just another boring listing – something that takes them a tenth of a second to glance over and discard.

Imagine, though, what they might do if you had the beginnings of an interesting story or some history about the house style or a how-to?  They might be encouraged to read further.  Reading further means that they are interested.  If your blog is interesting, they may well come back – just for the articles, but in the meantime, your name and business are getting branded on their minds – or tell their friends or post a particularly interesting post on their Facebook or Twitter… and suddenly your blog gets a lot more hits and you get a lot more free advertising.

How do you make your listings interesting?   Start writing short blog posts to go along with them.  Make them of note to people interested in real estate, the community the home is in, or the history of home styles or home construction.

History of historic home (if you know it) and how it relates to the history of the community History of the home’s construction style (Victoria, Craftsman, etc) Interesting tips about renovating and maintaining older homes. Home care tips are always popular, especially seasonal maintenance reminders Eco-friendly home solutions are getting huge amounts of popularity Gardening advice Staging advice for home sellers Moving organization advice Garage Sale tips Home buying tips

If you don’t know a lot about a subject, this is a great time to contact your local experts and feature their wisdom on your blog. Many people will be happy to share their expertise, especially if you’re giving them or their business free advertising.

Make your blog entries short: three to five hundred words. Make them concise. If you want to really make your listings shine, make a feature of the listing a key point in your blog post. Go local; if you need information, go to or email a local business for information. Talk about local events. This is a wonderful way of establishing links in your areas of service.

Your blog can be more than just another listings repository. Make it shine with information that interests, excites and informs your audience and you will develop a following that can net you leads in the future.

Brant Douglass asked:




There are a plethora of Realtor blog posts on the internet, just do a search and you can read a great number of interesting articles about home selling and buying and home staging; but dig a little deeper and you can also find realtors with blog posts up with articles and jokes that are racist, religion-bashing/atheist-bashing, anti-gay, and political party bashing. This is a disturbing trend, no matter how you look at it.

As realtors, we counsel our clients to stage their homes in a neutral way to help prospective buyers picture themselves in a home but we should also take this advice to heart when we’re putting our opinions out in a public forum with our name attached to them. Just as a client with a home for sale might have very strong views on politics or religion, so might you as a realtor; just as we would be best advise a client to keep those strong opinions to themselves, we would do well to do the same when talking to prospective clients or in an online forum.

If a prospective client is looking for information about local realtors, many of them look to the internet as a source of information to base their decisions on. The internet is a great place to start when clients are looking to find someone to represent them in the house buying or selling process, after all.

It’s surprisingly easy to find an assortment of blog posts from realtors that convey a staggering array of very thinly veiled racism, stifling religious and political fundamentalism, and sexism. While this is all perfectly within your free-speech rights, it’s a pretty terrible business choice to post this in a professional public place with your name on it! While some people might feel a connection to a realtor because they come across like an ethnocentric misogynist, it’s far more likely that expressing these opinions will cost you clients than gain them.

Remember that your blog should reflect who you are as a professional and does not need to include every opinion you have about the world and the types of people living in it. The key here is to be professional; if you want to tell your friends what you think about some certain politician or ethnic group then by all means do that privately, but ranting about politics or religious groups on your blog with your picture, name, and realtor status attached to it is tacky and unprofessional. Remember that people in this country can be from any ethnic group or religion or gender and it makes good business sense to not alienate prospective clients.