Neil Schwartz has been in the real estate industry for over 30 years. He is the broker of Century 21 Masters, the #2 Century 21 office in the Nation. He blogs on neilschwartz.net, providing valuable information to agents regarding sales training, real estate marketing, social media, and technology.
Google Alerts is a monitoring service that alerts you when there are new articles, blogs, discussions or videos on any subject that you choose to be alerted about. It is a great tool for real estate agents and brokers.
In life, and especially in real estate, reputation is critical. A great review by someone on a blog can increase your sales while a negative review could be disastrous. That’s why I urge each and everyone of you to place yourself on Google Alert to keep track of what comes up. Brokers should monitor what is on the web concerning their agents, themselves and their company; Google Alerts makes this simple. It may prove to be time consuming to check on all of your agents, but it is worth your while.
It is critical in any business to keep current and to know what is going on in your market. Agents should stay up to date on various topics, including: real estate trends, mortgage rates, events in your market, and school rankings for the areas you service. With a few keystrokes, you can receive automatic updates on all of these topics and more.
We are always looking for things to talk about with our clients. Often, we know what our clients are interested in but don’t know much about the subject. Google Alerts is a great tool for you to keep up on your clients’ interests. Through Google Alerts, you can get free updates on sports teams, specific athletes, political issues, school teams, vacation spots or anything else your clients are interested in. When you come across something that you think your client might enjoy, call them and/or email them the article you found.
Google Alerts is an agents free research assistant; it gives agents information which is critical to their business. I highly recommend that you start using it today, you will be glad you did. Let me know how Google Alerts works for you.
