Among all surveyed buyers, these features were considered most desirable, rising to the top of a list of 33 different home features:

1. Central air conditioning

2. Walk-in closet in master bedroom

3. Cable-, satellite-TV, and/or Internet ready

4. En-suite master bathroom

But digging in deeper, there are also noticeable differences in buyers’ preferences based on geography and other demographics. For example:

How to Use the Data?

If you’re helping a buyer with their home search, general trends obviously take a back seat to whatever specific preferences YOUR buyer wants. But real estate agents can use this data to understand which trends are most appealing to most buyers, then feature those qualities in property listings or blog posts.

For example, if your market is in a Southern state where buyers place a priority on larger, newer homes on wooded lots (and central air!) make sure these features are among the first things buyers will notice on any eligible listings. Also be sure your property photos play up these and other highly-desired features, such as walk-in closets and master bedroom suites.

You can also use findings from the report to write about home trends on your blog, providing interesting content that will attract buyers and search engines alike.

Here are a few more findings from NAR’s  2013 Profile of Buyers’ Home Feature Preferences. See what perks your interest!

Home Feature Preferences

You don’t have to be an expert on home trends to write about them. Instead, rely on the expertise of others and add your own commentary. Here are three different approaches you could take:

1. Summarize formal research. The NAHB, National Kitchen and Bath Association and others periodically survey consumers, designers, builders, etc. about new home trends, then publish a few key findings in press releases. You can usually pick up enough interesting details to write your own summary even if you don’t have a copy of the full study. Add your own spin, telling readers whether you’re seeing evidence of these trends in your home buyers’ preferences.

2. Ask local experts. Stop by a local interior design shop and ask what trends they’re observing (explaining your plan to write a blog post). Summarize what they share, quoting each designer and adding links to the shop’s website. Be sure to alert them when the post is published; it’s very likely they’ll share it with their own social networks, improving the possibility that more people will see it.

(By the way, this technique works equally well with other local experts who can comment on various aspects of the real estate industry — lenders, inspectors, appraisers, etc. — and is an excellent way to cultivate referral business.)

3. Conduct your own informal survey. Ask clients, coworkers and friends. Since you’ll only be talking to a handful of people (not a true sample of the population) who may or may not have much knowledge or interest in home design trends, it may work better to take a humorous approach. For example, instead of looking into the future, look to the past and ask people to name old home trends that now belong on the “bad idea” list. You’re sure to get some fun answers beyond avocado appliances.

Bonus Idea

If you’re writing about home trends and happen to have a listing that features one of those trends, be sure to include an attractive photo of this design feature in your post and mention that it comes from one of your listings. (The objective is to share a bit more about what you do and add visual interest — not to turn your blog post into a listing advertisement.)

Resources

If you now have the itch to write your own posts on home trends, here are a few recent resources you may want to tap:

• 2013 Kitchen & Bath Style Report from the National Kitchen and Bath Association
• What Home Buyers Really Want – This NAHB report can be purchased online; each Wednesday, NAHB also hosts a one-hour webinar on their study. (REBAC members will get a complete snapshot of this report and related trends research in their April issue of Today’s Buyer’s Rep.)
• American Institute of Architects Home Design Trends Survey

And for ongoing reporting on interior design, furnishings, etc. check out various blogs and online resources from HGTV, Better Homes & Gardens, Houzz, and more.

Google reports that real estate-related searches on their site have grown 253 percent over the past four years alone. They also found that consumers used different online tools at various points in the buying process:

• Search engines and general websites initially play a bigger role,
• Maps emerge in importance in the middle of the search, and
• Consumers are most likely to use mobile applications near the end.

Different Buyers, Different Behaviors

I was particularly curious about the study’s comparisons between types of home buyers — differences between first-time buyers, seniors, and buyers of vacation homes. Vacation shoppers rated highest in terms of searching for homes online (93 percent) and for starting their search online (56 percent). This makes sense, since (by definition) vacation shoppers aren’t based in the local market and must rely heavily on the Internet for long-distance research.

Internet Usage

What was surprising was the high level of Internet activity among seniors, especially compared to first-time buyers. Even though roughly half of first-time buyers used the Internet for house hunting, a full 75 percent of seniors were online for some aspect of their home search. Who says the senior crowd isn’t Internet-savvy?

Keywords

The top search terms used by different types of home shoppers also reveals insights into their primary interests — and ways real estate agents can attract their attention. Not surprisingly, Google found that first-time buyers are searching for information about obtaining a mortgage and/or mortgage assistance (see list below).

While these topics have always been of interest to first-time buyers, the current lending environment has accentuated their importance. Likewise, real estate agents who publish timely blog posts and related online content with helpful advice on mortgages and financing assistance will be more successful in attracting first-time buyers. This is especially true if you include localized details that help connect your business to buyers in your immediate area (such as information on buyer assistance programs offered by your state or municipality; seminars at a nearby community center to learn more about financing options, etc.).

Top Search Terms

Google’s analysis of senior home buyers pointed towards heavy searching for terms related to retirement homes and communities. Similarly, searches for vacation homes were concentrated on the rental aspects of these properties. Google did not publish their methodology, so it’s not clear how they identified these top search terms. Still, it’s a helpful starting point for any real estate agent interested in monitoring consumers’ online behavior, especially in terms of their house-hunting efforts.

To view the full NAR/Google report:

Study Digital House Hunt 2013 01 by REALTORS®

When I start planning and organizing a new project, I’ve learned that things go better if I work on the big picture first—envision what the different pieces will be. Mapping it out often prompts more thoughts about other pieces to add—or eliminate—from the plan.

At this stage, a list or a timeline usually doesn’t work as well (as a mind map) and can actually interfere with the brainstorming process, probably because lists and timelines are better for organizing what happens first, second, third, etc. That’s important too, but AFTER I’ve decided how all the big pieces of the puzzle come together.

Image from Exobrain.co

Examples

What are some ways you can use mind maps to coax out your best thoughts? Here are a few suggestions:

Writing blog posts — Flush out an idea for a post (or an article) by putting the headline in the center and surrounding it with the various sub-topics and drill-down details. Capturing your thoughts this way, while they’re fresh, makes it easier to loop back later and concentrate on writing. I also find the map approach preferable to an outline, which invariably steers me back into sequencing my ideas, instead of just getting my thoughts down ‘on paper.’

Working with clients — Use a mind map to help explain how something works, especially if there are multiple elements or inter-relationships. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, you could explain the common provisions of a purchase agreement with a map that displays the major components—legal description of the property, sales price and terms, earnest money, etc.—adding any related points as the next level of detail. Discussing these concepts will help your clients feel more comfortable reviewing an actual real estate contract.

Drafting a marketing plan — Map out all the major building blocks of your marketing plan—blogging, e-mail campaigns, social media activities, etc.—to get a better handle on everything you want to tackle and how these activities relate to one another. Then use your map to assign specific tasks to different people and put target dates on a calendar.

As a presentation tool — Just as mind maps can be helpful in explaining how things work in one-on-one meetings with clients, they can be equally effective in group settings. One approach is to copy/paste your completed mind map into your presentation. Or consider building your whole presentation around a mind map, starting with a blank screen and adding details as you cover each related topic.

Other Brainstorming Options

One reason I like Exobrain is that it’s extremely user-friendly with the right balance of features—very robust, but not overly complicated. It’s also a web-based application, so there’s no software to download and you can access your maps wherever you have an Internet connection.

But if you want a more full-featured tool, you might prefer XMind, which is offered in free and premium versions. Or, if you’d rather draw freeform instead of using these structured frameworks, check out AWW (A Web Whiteboard), which simulates drawing on a white board and even works with touch-based tablets and smartphones.

The right idiomatic phrase can bring a dull topic to life. Why say “I’m scheduled for the first flight in the morning” when “I’m catching the red-eye” is more interesting?

Search options at iDiomCorner.com 

When are idioms a bad idea? Any time they might be confusing or misunderstood. The biggest risk occurs when your potential audience includes non-native-English speakers or people from a different cultural background. (Also machine translation systems.) After all, you can’t assume that someone raised on the Queen’s English will know an Americanized phrase like “throw him a curve ball.”

So my advice is to use and enjoy idiomatic phrases whenever possible, but be careful that you don’t inadvertently drive someone up a wall or risk eating your words. All good things in moderation, please.

If writing is your thing and you enjoy chatting it up with other writers, you may also be interested in joining iDiom Corner’s online community.

If you’ve received messages alerting you to endorsements from others, you’ve probably wondered how they chose those skills. When endorsements were launched, LinkedIn created a preliminary set of skills based on your profile content, subsequently spewing out these skills as endorsement options whenever your first-degree connections view your profile. Some of these phrases are on target, but others miss the mark.

In either case, don’t sit back and let this computer-generated set of keywords dictate the first impressions you project to others from this point forward. To get as much benefit as possible from your Linked endorsements, make these five types of edits to your profile:

1. Eliminate redundancies.

Your list of skills may include overlaps and duplications. For example, my initial skill list included Social Media, Social Media Marketing and Social Networking. Sure, I do all those things. But are they really that different? Since I already have several endorsements for Social Media, I eliminated the other two skills from my profile.

I’d rather see future endorsements strongly concentrated on Social Media than spread out across several similar terms. I don’t expect people to look closely enough to notice the overlaps and do the math. You can make your profile stronger by eliminating similar redundancies.

2. Fill any gaps.

There are probably a few terms you’d like to add to provide a more complete picture of your skills and expertise. I found that my marketing-related skills were well represented, but the fact that I know a lot about the real estate, financial services, and food and beverage industries was missing.

Take an inventory of your own skills and areas of expertise and make sure they’re all included. A real estate agent, for example, will want to include various areas of specialization like types of home (Lakeside Properties), types of clients (First Time Home Buyers), or specialized knowledge (Short Sales).

3. Select higher-trending skills.

If you’re not certain about the best keywords to describe a skill, take advantage of LinkedIn’s trend tracking tool, which tells you whether a skill is currently gaining or declining in popularity. Just hover over the skill term (in View Profile mode). A balloon opens, displaying this information and providing a link to read more.

4.  Rearrange the order.

Once someone endorses you for a particular skill, you have no control over the order in which it appears—your skills will be listed by the number of endorsements received. But you can rearrange the order of your other skills. And you’ll WANT to do that so your higher-priority skills appear first, increasing the likelihood that future profile visitors and endorsees notice and select them.

5. Don’t go overboard.

LinkedIn lets you add up to 50 different skills, but only the first 20 will be visible (unless you click on View More). My mantra is that quality trumps quantity. Concentrate on presenting a tight list of the best terms to describe your unique strengths instead of stuffing your list to its limits.

Taking these steps right away will result in a much stronger LinkedIn profile. Not only will you shape your profile to your liking, but you’ll also make it easier for people to endorse you for the skills that best represent your genuine strengths.

Once you’ve finished updating your LinkedIn profile, why not go ahead and endorse others? It’s an easy way to spread good will—a nice thing to do at any time, but especially at the start of a new year. And who knows, you may be pleasantly surprised to receive more endorsements in return.

Behind the scenes of every blog, a lot of other stuff is going on including how the programming code is written, how keywords are used, how search engines are courted and more. Yes, blogging sounds complicated.

If you’re already writing articles to help promote your business, e-newsletters probably seem more straightforward. Build your list, write your article, hit the send button. Write the next article, send it out. Repeat, over and over.

Your content may be great, but what happens after it’s sent? Hopefully people read it the moment it hits their Inbox (although we both know that’s unlikely). But if they don’t read it right away, how long will your message last before it’s forgotten?

I don’t know about you, but if I don’t read an e-newsletter within the first day or two of delivery, I probably never will. Analytics data confirms this. In fact, email software providers routinely default to 5-hour reports for evaluating results.

How is a blog different? 

When you publish an article on a blog, that content lives publicly on the Internet, where it’s indexed by search engines…which means that people can find it LONG after it’s published. Instead of hitting a dead end in an email Inbox, an article written on a blog continues to live on, and delivers many residual benefits. Keep publishing articles, and over time your traffic and keyword rankings will continue to improve.

But, you argue, aren’t e-mail lists valuable, and isn’t it important to cultivate these relationships by sending my contacts meaningful content? Yes, you’re right. But in this case you can have your cake and eat it too. Publish your articles on your blog AND send them to your email list.

There are a variety of ways to do this. You could literally duplicate the content from your blog post in the body of your email message. Or, you could publish the full article on your blog, but send only the headline and opening paragraph via email, providing a link to the blog to read the full article. (Once on your blog, your readers may find other interesting content and explore further!)

Of course, you’ll also want to attract new readers, so be sure to offer an email sign-up for future blog posts (in addition to an RSS feed, for people who prefer subscribing that way). And you’ll want to make it easy for people to share your blog posts over various social media networks, but that’s a subject for another day.

In any case, don’t let blogs intimidate you. If you’re already producing articles and other quality content, blogging can help you leverage those assets much more than any one-way marketing tool, like emailed or printed newsletters.

Rather than single anyone out, I’ll simply describe what happens: this person periodically reappears near the top of my follower list. Since Twitter displays followers in reverse-chronological order, my assumption is this person un-follows people, then follows them back again, repeating the process every week or two.

So I ask myself, why would someone do this? Do they think they’ll get more followers if they keep appearing as a “new” one? It’s true that I only check my most recent followers for people I want to follow back. I’m guessing most other people do the same thing. By this logic, once someone drifts down the stream, it’s unlikely they’ll ever get noticed again.

But do repeat attempts pay off? In this case, I DID decide to follow back…that is, until he STILL kept reappearing at the top of my follower stream. Now I want to ask him, “Didn’t you notice we are ‘connected’ and you don’t need to keep doing this? Don’t you realize you seem clueless about how your Twitter actions appear to others, and that you’re starting to creep me out?”

So often, well-intended people fall into social media traps, not realizing that their actions are generating negative reactions. If you’re a political pundit or an edgy comedian, I guess you may WANT to provoke people. But if you’re a real estate agent or other professional using social media to support your business, obviously you don’t want to embarrass yourself or cause people to avoid you.

I don’t know what term best describes this particular type of bad Twitter etiquette. Hopefully it doesn’t catch on with others. But rest assured that I, for one, will be adding this to my own worst-practices list when working with clients on their social media efforts.

Have you noticed the same thing on Twitter? What other bad practices have you observed?

It’s a legitimate question. The answers may surprise you. If you’re already familiar with Facebook, the first thing you’ll notice about Pinterest is that conversations are virtually nonexistent, seemingly defying most people’s notion of social media. But Pinterest’s simple, streamlined interface hides many of the subtle but important dynamics driving the site.

First, there are strong visual and psychological aspects at play–most real estate agents would agree that visual appeal and psychological factors also loom large with home buyers. If a picture is worth a thousand words, imagine the impact of a whole collection of images. But how do you harness the power of images to build your business? Here are six ways real estate agents can benefit from Pinterest:

1. Understand your clients’ dreams. So often, home buyers have a vision of what they want in a home, but struggle to communicate what’s in their mind’s eye. Try suggesting that they use Pinterest to collect home images they love, both interiors and exteriors. A quick glance at their boards will tell you SO MUCH about their home preferences. Consider the time you might save avoiding inappropriate homes and the delight you’ll bring to buyers if you can show them properties that come closer to matching their favorite features.

2. Compile resources for clients. Home buyers have questions, right? Lots of them. Imagine ways to answer their questions through pictures. What kind of fence should we build? How do we clean and maintain our floors? Our siding? Our appliances? Create a variety of boards around these and other themes. You can easily search for and repin images from other pinners. If your images come from local business websites, your clients can go straight to these sites via your pins. That includes boards about local shops and restaurants–a great way to use social media to link your real estate practice to neighborhood businesses.

3. Share interesting original photos. Does your new listing include a beautiful stairway? Or a lovely garden feature? It’s fine to share unique photos related to your business. Ideally, you should publish them on your blog first, then post the linked content on Pinterest. That way, anyone who sees your photo on Pinterest can easily connect to your personal blog by clicking on the photo. However, DO NOT post your listings on Pinterest. This violates their terms of use, not to mention that it’s a huge turn-off to consumers when real estate agents do this.

4. Create and pin other original content. Do you blog about real estate? Pin your posts! (using a nice companion image) Do you make real estate videos? Pin those too! Videos are easy to view on Pinterest. “How to” content is extremely popular. So are infographics. Get creative about the many ways you can share visually-oriented real estate content on Pinterest and other social media sites.

5. Give your SEO efforts a boost. Pinterest is the number one referral source among social media sites, driving more traffic than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined! People LOVE to share on Pinterest. In fact, over 80 percent of pins are repinned! Pins are automatically linked back to the source. But if you include the url to your site in your captions, Pinterest adds bold font to the url, helping others recognize a clickable link to see more.

6. Encourage pinning. Add a Pinterest widget to your blog or website so visitors can easily share your content, which in turn could help many other people view and possibly repin it. Adding a Pin It button to a real estate agent site is a relatively simple process, similar to adding a Like or Tweet button.

These are just a few ways real estate agents can leverage Pinterest in their business. What’s worked for you?

P.S. If you’d like to connect on Pinterest, you’ll find me here.

Now, if you have an iPhone or an Android device, the answer is one photo away. That’s right, simply take a picture of the house and HomeSnap by Sawbuck will provide the address, pinpoint the property on a map, and give you an estimate of its value. If the house is currently on the market or recently sold, you’ll also be able to view interior photos. Flag favorite properties or share them with friends via email, text, Facebook, or Twitter.

Real Estate as Entertainment

In all honesty, HomeSnap doesn’t do anything you couldn’t already accomplish on several other (yawn) real estate apps. But they aren’t nearly as much FUN. HomeSnap practically turns real estate into a game. Just one photo lets you quickly and easily answer questions like:

• What is my house worth?
• What did the new neighbors pay for their house?
• This house sold, but are there other similar homes nearby?
• If I wanted to move to this neighborhood, how much do the houses cost and where would my kids go to school?

You can also receive updated information for any houses you save. New price reduction? Be among the first to know. The house you always dreamed of owning just went on the market? You’ll be alerted.

Is It Accurate?
As real estate practitioners are quick to point out, apps that rely on automated valuation tools have their limitations. Sawbuck claims to have over 90 million homes available to snap, drawing from live multiple listing service (MLS) data. But when it comes to valuation, the MLS is only part of the story.

Time on market, local inventory, unique property characteristics, foreclosures and for-sale-by-owner homes are just a few factors that must also be evaluated when deciding how much to offer in a purchase contract. This is why any serious home buyer should work with a qualified buyer’s representation in order to have an informed perspective on price and develop a solid negotiating strategy.

Bonus: A Negotiating Tip
Apps like HomeSnap may be fun and hip, but don’t let them unintentionally trip up your negotiating strategy. If you’re the type who likes to broadcast your life over social networks, be careful about hitting that Share button in HomeSnap and telling your 5,000 Facebook friends “After touring 20 homes we finally fell in love.” Fifteen friends comment on your status, including one who happens to be connected to the listing agent. Whoops, sounds like the seller’s counteroffer just went up a few thousand dollars…

The best advice is to simply enjoy HomeSnap for what it is—a new mobile app that puts an entertaining spin on real estate.