Notorious R.O.B.

Sun Tzu: The Art of War

At REBlogWorld 2010, I moderated a panel discussion on whether the real estate blog was dead or not.  My friend Garron Selliken, a technologist and broker in Portland, wrote up a post that stemmed from a long discussion he and I had with several others in Las Vegas, in which he argues that the “real estate blog” as he defines it is indeed dead as the Monty Python parrot:

When it comes to generating leads from search, the past, present and future of real estate sites is SEO, not blogging, transparency, authenticity and finding your voice.  The way to get clients is to show up where the most concentrated group of most motivated buyers/sellers are hanging out and ask for the business. This is why SEO focused content kills blogging…it is targeted directly at the relevant phrases and lands on pages designed to satisfy needs AND convert into conversation.

Then the brilliant Gahlord Dewald, a SEO consultant and an all-around smart fella, chimed in with his own post on the topic.

Both of them are worth reading in full.

While agreeing with both Garron and Gahlord in terms of what works for lead generation, conversion, and actual revenue generation for a real estate professional… this whole line of thinking raises a couple of questions for me, so I thought I’d puzzle them out with you all here.

Basically, the question is whether a SEO-focused strategy is viable competitive strategy for a real estate agent or small brokerage.

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There is an interesting little dichotomy in the results of the survey that Inman ran recently, and published as a Special Report: “To Be A Broker: Charting a Course for Recovery“.  It’ll cost ya some money, unless you’re an Inman Premium subscriber, but I think Inman did a great job here in putting the information together.  If you care about the industry, brokerage models, and the like, you’re going to want to check out this report.  So go buy one, or subscribe.  (Disclosure: I am a columnist for Inman.com… so uh, if you subscribe and such, I think I benefit through that.  Plus, you can see my archives on Inman.com, which might be entertaining later.)

My first thought upon reading the Report was that the sample might be skewed — after all, presumably Inman contacted brokers in its database of subscriber or some such.  They have to be among the tech elites, these brokers, to be subscribers of Inman.  Then my second thought was, that real estate brokers, more than perhaps any other group of business owners in America, need a remedial class on business strategy.  My third thought was, hey, this might be a good blogpost!

Said blogpost follows.

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