Rain City Guide's Dustin Luther Talking about online real estate

Dustin Luther 4realz broker consulting how his background has equipped him to help brokers be more effective online.

BrokerIPTV: Here from Inman Connect NYC 2008 with Dustin Luther one of the originators and founders of ActiveRain out of Seattle, also formally with move.com. Dustin what you just tell us a little bit about yourself?

Dustin Luther: Sure, with the website is started as actually Rain City Guide. We want to get that one right. It is out of the Seattle area and it was a came about 3 years ago I was look in to market my wifes real estate business and had done a lot of blogging and had been on the internet for a while, so went ahead and started this real estate blog, got a lot other contributors in it definitely flourished in many ways, thanks to some of the great writers that I was able to bring on between some other brokers, other real estate professionals, buyers and title representatives and that kind of thing and real fortunate that after I was doing that about a year, just a little bit over year I got a job with I got an offer from move who is the people that run realtor.com and Top Producer in Moving.com and some other large real estate web sites move.com and so I worked every body year and a half and then it has been a lot of time in the marketing department laid up a grass roots marketing efforts and its really very fortunate that I had some lot of real great backers and some of the executives there, so I was able to get it real involved in some really fascinating projects but after about a year and a half there it was just time to move on, so I have gone on, I have started my own consulting firm, I am going to be looking to bring doing some seminars for real estate professionals, it is going to be one of the main things I have done some of that in the past and they have been quite successful, so I am looking forward to using this for realtors to really reach out to the real estate broker and agent community and educate them on how they can improve their online marketing. That is going to be the crux of what I am doing onboard.

BrokerIPTV: Excellent, in your new company 4realz.net?

Dustin Luther: Yes, it is 4realz.net and on site now, today I do a lot of blogging, surprise surprise about the industry. I have a couple of other things that I do. I run a real estate newsletter that once a week I send out the kind of hot news from the week that tends to be very popular. I actually had a lot of executives I was doing it when I was moving out of lot of executives that move who commented on just how valuable was to get a weekly shot of here is what you need to know and the kind of on line real estate technology world. So I have continued to do those e-mails now that I am my own but I open it up just a bit that the general real estate community and it seems to be a fun endeavor and some thing I back to bring at a lot of positive feedback on, so lots of things like that I am doing just to really reach out to the community and in help educate about a online marketing and in online technology in general.

BrokerIPTV: Excellent, two things you can tell brokers, they will have to do to survive in 2008?

Dustin Luther: Two things you got to do, one is well, you know the changes are coming, I am not sure they will have to do in 2008. But things I would I will phrase it that way is I would really start trying to understand your online marketing in your brand building and understand social networking and how to get in there so. We start reaching out get involved, start a blog or reach out if you are a broker and you have got agents who are blogging, communicate with them kind of trying to get their knowledge in terms of what they are doing and why there are doing and how affected that is, I think you are going to start seeing more and more consumers gravitate towards these social networks that really bring out the experts, a real estate professionals, so trying to understand why consumers are gravitating online to those areas just going to be a critical bit, so the first thing I would say is really get out there and just get a better understanding. I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand it and there is a great place for brokers and agents to really get involved. The second thing I would say is especially when you start looking at ad spend, at least some of the agents, a lot of the agents I have talked to, they dont necessarily do a great look at their return on investment. So really getting in to the analytics of your ad spend will be on can really provide some real interesting insight. I would think in to how you can be going forward. So if you are looking at how you are spending your ad money offline and or online there is often some really interesting online options, they would provide an extremely good return on investment, in a particular in some of these social networking kind of areas looking at where you can spend your money that to be most effective in particular I would say its online and in its moving off line but just having the numbers to back it up is really at the first step to understanding that process.

Interviewer: Right, Dustin thank you, pleasure

Dustin Luther: Thank you.



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Posted on January 27, 2008 16:50:14 by Mark.Eibner
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