Barry Kushner

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Wonderful column, Kris. You've touched a nerve, perhaps even opened a wound, that's been festering in me for many months. You see, I have an extraordinary IDX-based search-the-MLS site that generates hundreds of buyer leads each month, and I find lots of consumers who have no interest in using my services take advantage of it. Some of these people readily admit that they're already working with another agent. When I ask why they're searching for listings on my site, www.Search4PA.com, even though they already have an agent, they explain that although their agent emails them listings through Trend, the MLS for the Philadelphia region, they like to surf for homes on any site that promises to show them lots of listings. While I applaud their proactive effort, I tell these buyers that I can't allow them to abuse me and my very expensive search site. I politely but firmly tell them I'm going to disable their username and/or password that's used to access the site and the listings they covet. I email them that their site access has been disabled, and I use the following language: "As a Buyer's Agent who uses this site to generate business, I will not allow anyone who uses another real estate professional to access www.Search4PA.com. And I also feel that any buyer who uses the site, but does not use my services to help them find a home, is behaving unethically. If I've jumped to an erroneous conclusion about you, please advise me to the contrary." Most buyers who receive my "your site access has been disabled" email or phone call sheepishly admit that I'm not wrong about them. But one recent abuser wrote back: "My husband and I have not signed a contract with any realtor. Yes, there are 2 who send me occasional emails with listings that may match our criteria. "If you feel that means we are using another realtor, you are mistaken. And we have always felt it appropriate to ask the realtor who has sent us the listing to show us a particular property that we like." I declined to contact this buyer further, and stood my ground. I'm simply not interested in showing homes to people like these without an exclusive buyer-broker relationship. If these consumers were shopping for mutual funds, for example, would they buy Fund A from one broker, Fund B from another broker, and so on? Of course not! They'd obviously use a single financial services company for all their fund purchases. So why are real estate professionals singled out to be abused by creepers, as you call them, in this manner? The answer, more than any other factor, is that the proliferation of home search sites like mine makes it almost too easy for buyers to become proactive -- even though they already have an agent behind the scenes searching for a home for them. While some search sites are merely listing aggregators -- including many of the most popular like Google Base, Trulia and Zillow -- and therefore not as accurate or as current as sites like mine that are MLS-based, the vast majority of consumers don't know this. Buyers I work with frequently email me listings they've found on other search sites and ask me, "Is this one still available?" While I don't mind responding to these inquiries from my clients, I'm also inclined to say, "You've already found the best home search site in this market and it has all the listings. What makes you think you'll find homes on other sites that aren't already on mine?" Some of my buyers get the point, but most consumers seem to think that their "perfect" home just might appear elsewhere on the Web and they casn't afford NOT to be proactive about their quest. Again, I applaud them for being proactive. I just don't want my buyers to abuse another Realtor when they're already using me. Barry Kushner REALTOR® Realty Professionals of America Huntingdon Valley, PA 215-698-2654 home office 215-868-1194 cell BarryKush@aol.com www.PhillyDreamHome.com www.Search4PA.com

Speaking of watching and tracking where Web surfers are clicking, the back office of my IDX home search site - www.Search4PA.com - lets me see every home a buyer clicks on in real time the moment they click on it. (That is, if I'm online and happen to click on a buyer surfing at that time.) And my site maintains a permanent log of every home clicked on by each buyer - and this list can be sorted by price, by when viewed, by square footage, etc. The value of this feature is not that I become Big Brother and I'm watching them conduct their searches, but that it makes me aware of which homes my buyers are most likely to want to see when they go house hunting with me. Hence, it takes some of the guess work out of the search process. Plus, my back office lets me see which homes my buyers have bookmarked, so I get a better feel for which homes are most appealing to them among all the ones they've seen on my site. Again, this helps streamline the house hunting process. And my back office even displays a map view function that shows the geographic distribution of all the listings a given buyer has viewed. That way, I can schedule the initial round of home showings for the area with the greatest concentration of listings viewed by a particular buyer. The newest feature of my back office is a price preferences section that gives me, at a glance, the price range for all their searches, as well as the median price and average price for all the homes they've seen on the site since they first registered. This is an invaluable tool because now I don't really have to question them about their price range. So, by using Web-based technology that lets me pay attention to what and where my buyers are clicking on, I'm in a much better position to help them and make suggestions that actually may improve their home search. Barry Kushner REALTOR® Realty Professionals of America Huntingdon Valley, PA 215-698-2654 home office 215-868-1194 cell BarryKush@aol.com www.PhillyDreamHome.com www.Search4PA.com

Hey, Teresa, thanks for sharing your healthy sense of skepticism. FYI, I used to be a vendor and sold web sites (Number1Expert) to agents & brokers. Then I became an agent myself and now I sell houses. I'm in my 3rd year and I'm finally doing very well, working with lots of buyers, some of whom actually pull the trigger and make an offer on something that actually gets accepted. At some point in my 2nd year I found what I would refer to as the magic bullet...the holy grail...the WOW of online lead generation. I've mentioned it before on Inman News and I've also talked about it on RealTalk. I also invite (via emails and phone calls) other top Realtors around the country (many of them my former N1E clients) to join me in using it. Unfortunately, most of them, like you, are quite skeptical. But that's a good position from which to start learning that WOW just might really exist. The product I'm talking about delivers about 100 leads per month directly to me, and to each agent on our small team. The leads are genuine: real names, real email addresses, even real phone numbers. The leads bring us real business; not just buyers, but sellers too. The product is so good that most agents don't believe it's as good as I say it is. Yet, it's also deceptively simply. So simple that I've wondered why no one thought of it before. Here it is: a non-branded (aka "stealth") IDX web site, driven by search engine PPC advertising, that captures as many leads as you want to pay for, and includes an automated contact manager that emails listings to the buyers based on the search criteria they've entered themselves. In a nutshell, the product is the perfect marriage of IDX and PPC. It works because it's what buyers want. "Just show me all the listings in the geographic area I'm interested in," they tell me. So, here they are. All the listings. Right at the top of a Google or Yahoo search in my market (or any market). At the moment, there are a small handful of vendors offering this kind of product. Maybe only 3 or 4 of them nationally. The vendor I happen to use (and whose praises I sing) is a small start-up based in L.A called TigerLead Solutions. They aren't perfect (I just discovered a couple of minor glitches in their system; I am a techie, after all.) But they are very nearly miracle workers. And, at a mere $11 per lead (the approximate cost in our market), it's ultimately a cost effective means of capturing buyers (and some sellers) without having to stress out over other online marketing tools like blogs and SEO and listings syndication. Listen, I've been looking at lots of struggling agents scrounging for business in my market (and in lots of markets) over the past year or so, and when I tell them I have more good buyer leads than I can possibly handle, well, you can imagine their level of healthy skepticism. Anyway, if you or any other Realtor would care to check out my lead generating IDX home search site - my magic bullet - please visit www.Search4PA.com. And feel free to register. No one but me will see your contact info, and at least you'll get to see what my buyers see and why so many of them are glad they've found the site, which helps ensure their loyalty to me as their new best friend and buyer's agent. And if you or any broker, team leader or top selling agent would like to see my amazing back office, just call me and I'll be glad to walk you through it. One really cool thing about my search site's back office is that I can see every listing a buyer click on...the moment they do so. Big brother really is watching, you know. Barry Kushner REALTOR® Realty Professionals of America Huntingdon Valley, PA 215-698-2654 home office 215-868-1194 cell BarryKush@aol.com www.PhillyDreamHome.com www.Search4PA.com