http://www.realestateappraisertips.info/ - Tips For Real Estate Appraisers 12/11/2009: 5 Trends That May Affect Your Small Business And/Or Real Estate Appraisal Business in 2010.
John Jantsch, Founder of the now famous “Duct Tape Marketing” blog has written a new article entitled, “5 Trends That Will Shape Small Business in 2010“. While this article may be ahead of the times for real estate appraisers, some will resonate with the directions these trends are taking us. What John says is that we’ve been introduced to Social Media, now we know how to use it and the stage is now “set the table for the realization of some significant trends to bubble up into the world of small business in 2010.”
***TRENDS 1 & 5 MAY BE THE MOST IMPORTANT……NOTE: If Real Estate Appraisers Aren’t Using An Appraiser Blog or Twitter, They’re Not Getting Indexed In Google For Real Time Search Of Their Professional Services! ***
Here’s a snippet of the basic outline of the article:
1.) Real Time Is Big Time
2010 will bring real time search. Today, there was a short glitch in the map server for my appraisal software vendor. The answer to why and how soon it would be back up was on their Twitter Feed.
The RedLaser iPhone app is an example of scanning a barcode in Wal-Mart and having your iPhone tell you where else to buy it and competitor pricing.
Ustream.Tv just released their long anticipated iPhone App that allows one to stream live video on the spot with real time chat. Bryan McDonald, with REBliss.com, demonstrated on 12/9 how this works using the iPhone 3GS. Think about being on the spot at a home needing a final inspection to close the loan, emailing the lender a link to your Ustream.tv account and having them watch as you tour the 100% complete home so they can close the loan without delay! That’s “Real Time” Appraising! Click on the image below to view Bryan’s video.
2.) Location As Plumbing
“Location sharing services like Foursquare, Loopt and Google Latitude, are already receiving mainstream media mention. It won’t be long before every rating and review site, such as Yelp! and Insider Pages, build this into the foundation and push coupons and discounts out to you based on location. Anywhere you go you will be able to locate friends nearby or the location of every Twitter follower in a city you are visiting. Your location, or that of your customers and prospects, will become another data point in the marketing mix.”
3.) Filtering Gets Social
“When you search for the best attorney in town, a good movie or the best place to get some authentic TexMex, not only will you see the organic search results earned through Google’s algorithm, you’ll also see what your friend Jimmy had to say about such things.”
4.) Kitchen Sink On The Cloud
“Will desktop applications and computing become a thing of the past? While not completely, 2010 looks like the year that small businesses will truly embrace applications that exist online only. Entire software suites such as Google Apps and Microsoft Office Live will finally allow document, spreadsheet, database, and presentation software to function as Internet applications at greatly reduced costs and ultimate real time collaboration. File sharing and storage, including total file backup from tools like Dropbox and Mozy, will become standard in the small business toolbox.”
5.) Fusion Boosts Offline
“While the entire focus of this article to this point has been about changes online, the mantra for 2010 will be the convergence of online and offline for the greatest leverage. No matter how wired we get as a society and business, there will always be a need for face to fact trust, building engagement. Now that small businesses have moved more online, the smart play will be to find the best ways to fuse the online and offline activates in ways that make the return on both even greater.”
Image credit: prosto photos
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Video can be very useful, but if we end up posting video or photos of a property we are appraising, that may get us in hot water with clients and somehow violate confidentiality. I’d be cautious.