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Back in May of 2008, when I started the networking site www.REOPro.NING.com aka REOPro, one of
the very first request we received from our membership was for a listing
database. As much as I wanted to fulfill this request, I realized it was going
to be expensive, time consuming and overwhelming so, it wasn’t something I
could do right away. None the less, it’s always been a dream to make a listing
HUB for our members and the general public but, I knew if I was going to do
that, it had to be different, it had to be something special.

As you can imagine, listing sites aren’t really sexy cool
so, how do you make a listing site something people will use, better yet, will
want to use. I started becoming joining all of the popular listings sites, who
will go nameless however, to make my point, at one time, I was a member of
about 11 different advertising / lead generation sites. In fact, some sites I
blogged about because they were so bad. I joined all these sites to get an idea
of my competition, to learn, listen and ingest the ins and outs so I could
figure out what worked and what didn’t. Sadly enough, most everything I
witnessed was working but, not for the agent. Ultimately, this pissed me off
because, I am an agent myself.

After a year learning how these sites worked, after a year
blogging and getting incredible feedback, after a year reading the blogs of our
9,258 members on REOPro, I realized something, I can do this better. I knew
beyond a shadow of a doubt that if I had the resources, I could give our
members a listing database that worked for them. Some of what I learned was....

1. 
   Agents do not like paying large upfront fees.

Our industry is saturated with fly by night operations or
companies that are in the business for one thing and, that is to make money off
the upfront fee. It’s true, I had a CEO of one of my competitors actually call
me and tell me that the largest income stream they have is the fee and not the
referral. Agents are wising up to this business approach and are refusing to
pay upfront fees. The reality is, some upfront fees will have to be paid, the
cost of maintaining a large listing site can’t be offset entirely by referral
fees however, the fees that some of my competitors are charging is highway
robbery. After dissecting these business models, I realized one true simple
fact and, that is it can be done for a lot less, upfront. In fact, for just
property advertising, that could be done for free.

BankOwnedHomeListings.com does have some upfront fees
however, they are less than what you and your spouse or significant other would
pay for a dinner out every month. We also have different plans for different
budgets so, you can choose what is right for you.

1. 
   Reduce the cost to the agent to $0.00

With this realization, I knew I was going to make a few of
my competitors very upset and, that’s a good thing. I want to reduce the cost
to the agent to 0.00 upfront fees. Now, let’s be honest, this sounds like a
insurmountable task but, with a little creativity, it’s truly possible. For
instance, take the most expensive plan we have, the $20.00 a month plan and
multiply that by 12 months, you end up with an annual fee of $240.00 paid out
monthly with no contract, you can cancel at any time. For many agents, in this
economy, $240.00 is not something they can just dish out so, here is what I did.
When you have your first closing on one of our leads, we will refund you back
your annual subscription. So the cost to join our network was essentially
nothing more than your referral fee and you only had to pay that out when you
closed a transaction. Of course, we can only offer this option on qualifying properties,
that is, properties that are sold for enough to cover your annual subscription
fee. For example, hypothetically speaking….

3 Months in, you close your first deal, it was a $100,000.00
property with a 3% commission. That means you make a commission of $3,000.00,
the referral fee on the $20.00 a month plan is 20%, so you pay
BankOwnedHomeListings.com $600.00. We will then refund you 1 year subscription;
we end up cutting you a check for $240.00. In essence, it only cost you $360.00
instead of $840.00. SWEET! Now on properties where we don’t make at least
$240.00…….we obviously can’t activate the refund but, don’t worry, if you don’t
make it on the first deal, we can activate the refund policy on whatever your
first qualifying deal is.

1. 
   Advertising should be free.

The monthly fee is a choice that you don’t have to choose.
If you want to come on, upload your listings and advertise them with us, that
is completely free. Why would you want to do that….well, allow me to explain.

With my experience in the blogosphere and developing REOPro,
I have learned a lot about SEO Optimization or Search Engine Optimization. The
easiest way to explain SEO is to tell you that it’s just the science behind how
to get a website to the top of the search engine list. Now, to understand how
BankOwnedHomeListings.com is going to be so effective with SEO, you need to
know that most organic searches, or searches by ordinary people typing in
ordinary words in the search engine is driven by something called Keywords.
These Keywords are the words that people most commonly type in the search
engine to find a specific topic. This is extremely important because, the more
keywords….or better yet, the most popular keywords, you can use in your web
address, the more likely you will appear at the top of the results page when
John Doe looks for business within an industry segment. I know I have gotten
really technical but, I had no choice.

Think of it this way, when John Doe Home Buyer is at his
computer and he wants to find foreclosed homes, what are the top 5 keywords he
would use to search? Well, we can find that information out by looking at the
keyword statistics that are released by the search engines so, they aren’t hard
to find. For the default real estate industry, amongst the top three search
engines, the keywords that regularly show up are, “Bank Owned”, “Bank Owned
Homes”, “Bank Owned Properties”, “Bank Owned Listings”. Now granted, these
keywords don’t show up all the time and they don’t always take up the top five
slots but, you need to remember, keyword searches are organic, they change
based on an incredible amount of factors. It’s just not possible for anyone to
accurately and precisely obtain a 100% keyword for any one industry however,
you can get very close to that 100% by combining as many of those keywords as
possible in your URL. The biggest problem is, many times keyword combinations aren’t
memorable or if you put them together, they don’t make any sense however, we
are very fortunate that with our URL, www.BankOwnedHomeListings.com,
we combine 4-6 of the top 5 keywords searched for our industry, on average.

I say all that to drive home my point that our URL provides
our agents with a highly effective, FREE, advertising solution for their properties
that you can’t get with many pay advertising sites.

www.BankOwnedHomeListings.com
is going to turn this industry on it’s head and I am so grateful that you and I
are partnering together to make that happen so, stop by, sign up and let’s
revolutionize this industry to the benefit of the Agent.