LeadPress launched this week, offering mortgage lenders a much need premium option for establishing a superior online presence. The mortgage space is infamous for employing severely out of of date and sometimes tacky websites in the quest for generating mortgage leads. LeadPress fixes the problems exhibited by most mortgage websites today such as employing Full 1003 Applications (lead generation killers), tacky flash intro pages, poor designs / layouts, music and sound effects and many other user experience issues.

As many of you know, we’ve been hard at work on LeadPress for quite a while, so it’s great to finally launch and move into the space.

Learn more about LeadPress Mortgage Websites.

LeadPress is also paying a $250 referral fee through our Mortgage Affiliate Program, if this interests you, drop us a note or call! This is a great opportunity for mortgage / real estate industry facing websites, but a referral via word of mouth works just as well for getting the referral fee.

Related posts:

1. Check LeadPress out on LeadCritic
2. FREE Real Estate RSS Icons!
3. Strategies for Paying Off Your Mortgage Faster

That’s right, we all know about goal setting, realize the importance that setting goals can bring to measuring and assessing success and progress and yet many of us are not consistently setting and measuring our progress towards goals. I am guilty of this as well.

What are your goals / objectives for the day, week, month and year? Write them down, somewhere. Anywhere. Make that place the simplest place to access you can think of to achieve consistency in visiting your goals.

Once your goals are set, evaluate and assess your performance. Did you achieve your goal for the day, week or month? You can only know if you assess your progress. This means a short day end check and weekly and monthly checks….. it only takes a few minutes. Designate a consistent time slot for your reviews, this will help build the habit of reviewing.

If you don’t set a standard of performance or measure of performance, you will find yourself producing and achieving less…. you can’t hold yourself responsible for under performing if you aren’t aware that you aren’t where you should be! Many times we think we are performing at a higher level than we really are.

Most importantly, don’t be too hard on yourself if you are not progressing as fast as you would like. This is why it is important that your goals are realistic. The real goal here is to achieve an overall consistency in evaluating your progress…. not pushing yourself into depression because you didn’t nail your target goals. Not achieiving set goals is merely an opportunity to learn and evaluate so that you do achieve those  goals in the future.

When you are done, click here.

Related posts:

1. The BrokerScience Guide to Building and SEO Optimizing Single Property Listing Websites
2. BrokerScience is Looking For Title, Escrow & Appraisal Bloggers
3. FHA Raising MIP (Mortgage Insurance Premiums)

BrokerScience network blogs (WordPress based) are highly SEO optimized, utilize the latest bleeding edge plugins and can provide an optimal platform for insuring you get the best search engine coverage of your posts. We will obviously maintain the platform rigorously and will build out necessary features you find necessary. That’s right, if you have an idea or format you want us to build out for you, we will do it! Once we obtain a minimal level advertising we will gladly revenue share as well.

If you are interested or know somebody who is, let’s talk!

More and more Realtors are realizing the benefits of creating a new website for each listing they have. The goal in creating a website that is dedicated to a specific listing is to create a powerful online marketing tool, increase search engine exposure, obtain top positions in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and provide an online presence for promoting the listing’s benefits through useful and informative content and beautiful images. We are going to discuss how to build and optimize your single property website and are throwing in a new twist on where your content should be located.

Benefits of Using Single Property Listing Websites:

1. They can be a powerful listing and marketing tool referenced online and offline in marketing materials to help increase listing exposure.
2. They increase listing owners’ confidence in you.
3. They can help you gain more listings and are one more selling point / benefit you can offer when trying to obtain listings or convert FSBO’s.

1) Choosing a Domain Name

The first decision to be made is choosing a domain name. The most common route is simply using the listing address as the domain name, for example, 123MainStreet.com. Many agents cite that they use the listing address as the domain because it provides a keyword rich URL which can be beneficial for SEO / ranking purposes. The truth is that having a keyword rich domain name for SEO purposes alone is becoming less and less important as time goes on (some would argue it is a non factor already), is only one SEO factor among many and as we will explain, there are more compelling reasons to use non-address based domain names.

Make It Easy to Remember. The primary reason you may not want to use the address as the domain name is marketability. Buyers are much more likely to remember “TatumRanchHome.com” as opposed to “1934ViaLindaWay.com”. This holds true whether they are glancing through a magazine and see your ad, are trying to remember the domain name from a flyer they have thrown away, or even more importantly, if they are trying to remember your domain name for the listing sign they happened to glance at as they drove by the listing.

Usability Trumps SEO. The bottom line is that you may not want to sacrifice the overall marketability and utility that an easy to remember domain name provides (this is true of any domain name in any vertical) for SEO purposes (keyword rich URL).

Jay Thompson also points out another strategy for choosing domain names, using generic or neighborhood / community based names such as “TatumEstates.com” or “IrvineEsplanade.com”. He points out that these names can be recycled over and over which can save the time and money invovled with registering a new address based domain for each new listing.

2. The Old Way: Placing Your Single Listing Content on a Brand New Domain Name

The Issue With Brand New Domain Names. All of the great content that is created on a new unseasoned domain is working from a position of weakness in competing against more established sites. Since your new domain is not seasoned and has established no history or trust with Google, does it make any sense that your site should perform better than more established sites that already rank well, have high PageRanks, have established incoming link profiles and have already built trust with Google? Of course not.

Even though your newly created single listing site may be more focused for your specific keywords and may rank easily for the listing address, it will not rank as well against seasoned sites for other keywords in your content relating to your topics you will likely discuss relating to features of the listing neighborhood, school district, shopping areas, etc. In short your unseasoned domain and site are at a great disadvantage in performing well for a broad range of keywords even though you may very well rank number one for the actual listing address, a keyword term with little to no competition.

To compound the issue, your single listing website is by nature, temporary, and will likely (hopefully) never be around long enough to achieve the baseline aging with Google (6 to 12 months) necessary to achieve consistent rankings and actively compete with more established sites. It is also very unlike that other sites will ever link to a single listing website and as we all know, inbound links are an important component of ranking well in search engines.

To those that say their brand new domains rank fine: Your brand new domain may rank for some keywords, it will not rank well for more competitive keywords. Just because your domain ranks for the listing address (a very non-competitive keyword) does not mean it is ranking for more competitive keywords. It is worth noting that the concept I am presenting here is not debated in the SEO community and is consistent with Google nomenclature on the subject.

3) The Solution: Host Your Single Listing Website on Your Primary Corporate Website and Forward Your New Domain Name To It

We are going to present a very simple and common sense concept that will improve your single property website search engine rankings, listing exposure and traffic. Traditionally, agents will place their new website content on their newly purchased single listing specific domain name. Why place each of your new listing websites and content on new unseasoned, untrusted domains when you can simply leverage your existing corporate website or blog that is seasoned (aged), has established rankings, has incoming links, has existing traffic and has already established trust with Google?

That’s right, we are proposing that you build out your single listing websites on your existing corporate website or blog domains and then use domain forwarding to forward your new listing specific domain name to the new content on your established corporate website or blog. Domain forwarding is handled by your domain name registrar and enables you to forward visitors to your domain name to any other domain name you choose.

When visitors navigate to “TatumEstatesHome.com”, they will arrive at your single listing website, hosted on your corporate site that looks and acts identically as if it were hosted as a standalone site at “TatumEstatesHome.com” except it is hosted on your trusted and seasoned corporate domain (example: ExampleRealty.com/1989-Via-Linda/). Domain forwarding even gives you the ability to make it so the URL users see in their browser does not change from “TatumEstatesHome.com” when they are actually on “ExapleRealty.com”, no matter where they navigate to, they will see TatumEstatesHome.com; using this features is simply a matter of preference.

4) How to Implement Using WordPress

1. You can use your existing corporate WordPress page theme by doing nothing and creating a new page and naming it your property address (ExampleRealty.com/1989-Via-Linda/), or you can use a different page layout and or look and feel by creating all new single listing centric pages using the WordPress “Page Themes” / “Page Template” feature. This feature allows you to create new WordPress pages using “Page Themes” that you create and import into WordPress with their own look and feel.
2. When you have created your Page Theme page layout it should include a new header, footer and sidebar it it uses them. You will want to make sure that these items have unique names so they do not conflict with the WordPress “header.php”, “footer.php” and “sidebar.php. Also be sure to change the calls for these items in your new page template itself. This will prevent the new page template from calling “header.php” (the header for your corporate / default site) when you really want to call “header_new.php” or whatever you have named it. If you using a new stylesheet, so be sure to change the call for this in your new page theme / header, otherwise you can simply add new CSS to your existing stylesheet. . You can hard code the entire page to taste with layout, content and links, but be sure to add the loop so that you can add content via the WordPress write page as well.
3. Unless you want to hard code links into your header, footer and sidebar, it is a good idea to install the NAVT Plugin (update: plugin deprecated for new WordPress menu system in WordPress 3.0). This plugin will enable you to add a link to any exsiting page, post, category or manually inserted link by simply dragging and dropping via the WordPress dashboard.
4. Finally, you will upload all items (don’t forget images and CSS) via FTP to your root WordPress theme folder. To designate the new Page Theme as a theme, add the following to the very top of the page before uploading:

<?php
/*
Template Name: New Listing Theme
*/
?>

1. Now that your new theme has been uploaded, you can create any new pages you want for your single listing website. Via WordPress Page write, create your new page for your listing and edit the URL to something like ExampleRealty.com/1989-Via-Linda/. Before saving navigate to the “Page Theme” option drop down and choose “New Listing Theme” or whatever you have called the new theme. Unless you have incorporated the WordPress loop into your page theme, you will not actually type any content into the “write” box.
2. Forward your new, easy to remember single listing domain name to the URL you have created as the home page for your new single listing site. When a visitor types in “TatumEstatesHome.com”, they will now be automatically taken to “ExampleRealty.com/1989-Via-Linda/”. Your new single listing site acts as an indepent site with its own look and feel, but leverages your existing corporate site’s age, links and authority.
3. Finally Link to your newly created single listing site, “CorporateSite.com/1989-Via-Linda/”, from your home page to expedite search engine spider crawling. You may also want to consider creating a category specific to this listing and adding the listing to it. This could be based on the neighborhood or another related theme.

5) WordPress – Create a Silo to Increase Keyword Focus and Improve Keyword Theming

1. To use this method, your WordPress site needs to use the following permalink structure: /%category%/%postname%/. If your site does not use this structure or you are starting a new site, I STRONGLY suggest you use this permalink structure.
2. Download and install the Page Category Plus plugin from by buddy Andy here. This plugin enables you to assign a newly created page to categories, the same way you do blog posts. Check out his other  WordPress plugins, they are excellent.
3. Follow steps 1 – 7 above and create a new category that is only going to be used for this specific listing and assign this page and any pages you create for this listing to this specific category. You might give it the name of the neighborhood, for example, “madison-meadows”.
   This would result in a home page of your single listing website of ExampleRealty.com/madison-meadows/1989-via-linda/. All content created as a page under this category will be in its own silo.

To create a true silo, you will want to link to this content from your home page and category pages, but will not interlink to this content from any pages in other categories and vice-versa. This helps

6) How to Implement on a Non WordPress Site

1. Create a sub-directory to hold your content / pages that are specific to the new listing. You might call this folder the name of the neighborhood, for example: madison-meadows. You now have a subdirectory of ExampleRealty.com/madison-meadows/.
2. Add the your new single listing home page to the previously created sub-directory. You can name it the listing address if you choose, resulting in a home page for your new single listing of ExampleRealty.com/madison-meadows/1989-Via-Linda.html. Alternatively, you can simply leave this home page titled as index.html if you choose and your home page URL for the listing will be ExampleRealty.com/madison-meadows/. My suggestion would be to use the listing address as the page name.
3. Link to your newly created page from your home page.

7) Rank Well for Local Neighborhood, Schools and Shopping

Are you using single listing websites to try and rank for the neighborhood, schools, shopping or other related amenities of a specific listing? Do most of your listings fall within the same neighborhoods? If so, a better approach to listing for specific listing centric amenities would be to list these as general categories and topics covered on your main corporate blog or site than list single listings you have on these pages.

Link from Local Amenities in WordPress.

1. If a neighborhood you would like to feature is Madison Meadows, you will create a category called Madison Meadows and create a new page that will be the home page for his neighborhood. Than add any new single listing centric sites that are in this neighborhood to this category.
2. Than create a “Listings in this Neighborhood” section and add the following code to the neighborhood home page. This code lists any other pages / posts in this category. You will add any new listing to this category and thus new listings will automatically show up in your “Listings in This Neighbood” section automatically! In this case, any new listings will automatically show up in your Madison Meadows neighborhood home page. The following code will be inserted at the end of your loop:

<?php
/* Check if there are posts */
if ( have_posts() ) {
/* Post index for semantic classes */
$post_index = 1;
?>

<div id=”category_more_resources”> Related Information:</div>

<?php // tr – the following 3 lines list only category posts and exclude sub-category posts

$cat = intval( get_query_var(‘cat’) ); ?>

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<?php if ( in_category($cat) ) { ?>

There you have it! We will likely be refining these ideas and will certainly be adding more in the future.

Related posts:

1. BrokerScience Acquires BenBehrouzi.com
2. Realtor.com Blog Hacked Day 2: Google Delisting on the Horizon
3. The Beginner’s Action Guide to Learning about ePerks / Ben Behrouzi vs Vlad Zablotkyy

The mortgage lead generation model as we know it is severely broken. Not surprisingly, it has been broken for quite some time. Need proof? Ask any consumer that has submitted their information via a “LowerMyBills” style application (where you can compare rates by receiving quotes from 4 or more lenders) to get mortgage rate quotes and ask what their experience was like. Enough said.

The two main issues cited by those that have requested a mortgage quote online are:

1. I received a barrage of calls and lenders were overly aggressive.
2. The calls didn’t end after the initial application period, they continued for weeks and months, sometimes 6 to 12 months or more.

The Issue: The top companies in the mortgage lead industry vertical have failed to exhibit the leadership necessary to innovate and evolve the stale and consumer unfriendly mortgage lead model currently used today (LMB style application). The industry has also had more then its fair share of issues with customer data leaks and the over-selling of leads is a pastime of sorts, like baseball for the lead generation industry, if you will. These issues have been discussed within the industry, among consumers, and among industry watchdogs for years, but not a whole lot has changed. The industry as a whole has declared churn and burn as its motto and model by proxy via its actions.

While the industry is great at A / B testing to find out what layouts, copy and form types convert the best, improving the consumer experience is simply an afterthought that gets little to no attention. The time is long overdue for the industry to address the consumer experience as it relates to consumer control of how personal data is used, how and when the consumer is contacted and what happens to the data after the consumer requests a rate quote.

Why the Industry Should Care: Simply put, improving the customer experience will improve your bottom line. In the booming market of years past, the short-sighted approach taken by the industry (and today) in how it treats consumers may have worked, but in the future, lead aggregators that put their own interest in front of consumers will pay the price in the form of lost repeat business, lower revenues and lost business to those that do improve the consumer experience. The existing model is so obtrusive that many consumers put off getting rate quotes until the very last minute or at all as opposed to checking the market at regular intervals to see if a refinance makes sense for them. The end result is that consumers find the rate quote process so distasteful that they request less rate quotes at less frequent intervals.

How Did We Get Here: LowerMyBills has not only defined the medium through the “compare rates with 4 lenders” model and as one of the industry leaders in volume, they have the undignified distinction of setting the bar so low in marketing taste and sensibility that I have little doubt that if they could insert porn into their ads an get away with it, they would do so in a heartbeat. That’s where we stand today, a market leader with no values or ethics and an industry that is content to follow the “leader”. LendingTree’s mortgage broker bashing marketing campaigns are not much better and only serve to paint the very industry they depend on in an unflattering and unprofessional light. Where are the creative marketers that understand the benefits of building brands for the long term and the power of intelligent marketing?

On a side note, the infamous “Creative Director” for LMB (linkedin profile: here) has not included any of her famous LMB ads in her portfolio on her personal marketing site, we don’t blame her.

The Future: The company that spearheads the next generation of online mortgage lead generation by improving upon the LMB model, giving more control to consumers and addressing consumer privacy and service issues will stand to gain longer term users, higher revenues, and increased market share. Those that do not adapt to the new higher level standards will fade into oblivion.

While the next generation lead model may or may not be different radically different as a whole from what we see today, it will be branded as being radically different and this “difference” is what consumers will gravitate towards as they desperately search for a new way to get mortgage information. It is likely that one major player will take an early lead and will dominate with a majority of marketshare.

Where To Start: When a consumer requests a rate quote, this does not give lenders a license to call this person for life. Many lenders recycle their leads so that leads that are not converted go into a pile and when a new loan officer is hired, they are given the pile to prospect. This may happen over and over and is why consumers continue to get phone calls form loan officers they have never spoken to months and years after they requested a rate quote. This problem is compounded when unscrupulous lead vendors oversell leads or sell aged leads. While requiring lenders that purchase leads to only call leads for “X” amount of days might sound like a good idea it would be impossible to enforce.

One Possible Option:

Another Simple Idea:

Implementing these two simple ideas can take the existing model worlds away from where it is today, in fact there may be some lead generators already practicing one or both of these ideas already. The bottom line is that companies that embrace smart standards for providing a more helpful and healthy user experience will be more successful in the long term. Embracing transparency, data and privacy control standards, and using common sense in providing the best consumer experience possible is smart for not only for the mortgage lead generation industry, but any industry. More importantly, it’s what consumers demand and expect.

My expectation is that while some may embrace my assertions, many lead providers will vilify them and I can only hope that is the case. In certain circumstances, offending or upsetting people is confirmation you are on the right track. It is completely normal to have a negative reaction when you propose ideas or thoughts that might be considered a threat to the livelihoods of others. If the idea of change threatens you, consider that you might be looking at the issue from the wrong perspective. The change I’m writing about is a threat to those that are lazy or don’t want to change, but is a huge opportunity to leaders that are looking to innovate and thrive by improving the consumer experience.

Twitter Uptime Resource #1

Twitter Uptime Resource #2

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1. Feedburner Testing Real Estate Blogging Groups
2. Realtor.com Blog Hacked Day 2: Google Delisting on the Horizon
3. Realtor.com Blog Hacked

I just received yet another call from a mortgage broker asking me for information regarding a mortgage lead company called Target Publishers. This time the broker received my information via records at the Reno Courthouse. I’ve been receiving such calls for the past two years since I first did business with Target Publishers. All of the calls follow the same script. A mortgage broker has purchased mortgage leads from Target Publishers, the leads were never delivered, Target Publishers has ceased all communication and is refusing to deliver leads or a refund and the broker is wondering how he is going to get his $x,xxx back. In the case of the latest call I received, the broker worked in a shop with 4 loan officers and had lost $6,000 to Target Publishers.

When I purchased leads from Target Publishers, the campaign started two weeks late, didn’t deliver the daily number of leads required and after around the 15th unsuccessful transfer attempt over the course of a week (all leads ended in static, echos, and or hangup) I requested a refund. After paying $1800 for a test run, three weeks later I had nothing to show for my time or money. When I attempted to contact Jacob Larson (the contact person usually mentioned in various complaint threads across the interwebs) or the owner (according to Jacob this is Darren McDowell, whom may or may not be a real person) they became abusive and stopped all communication.

I filed a BBB complaint (they’re no longer members), posted a friendly warning on brokeroutpost.com (which Darin promptly deleted, sadly enough to this day I still see the occasional brokeroutpost poster announcing that they too have been ripped off, who knows how many of these could have been prevented), and filed a small claims case in Reno with the hope they would settle out. Ultimately, I sued them in Reno Small Claims Court and won a default judgment when they did not show up. My intention was not to follow through with the small claims case because of the dollar amount, but once the ball got rolling, I figured what the heck and followed through, even though it meant having to fly from sunny Huntington Beach, CA to Reno.

Until recently, their address was a Reno address which happened to be a PO Box at a UPS store. My belief is that they actually operate out of California or Oregon. I attempted service twice without success at the UPS PO Box, once at the home of “Darren McDowell” in El Cajon, California, and once in Las Vegas, NV before successfully serving the original UPS PO Box when we learned the owner was not accepting the service when he was actually supposed to.

After winning the judgment, it came time to collect. The original Bank of America that cashed my check was in Beaverton, OR, so I naively assumed that I had to serve that specific branch in order to garnish Target Publisher’s bank account. This required filing a Foreign Judgment in Clackamas County, Oregon in order to validate the Reno judgment in Oregon. This was at least as much work as the original small claims case.
When the Write of Garnishment was eventually served, there were no funds in the account so I got nothing.

I then posed as a lead buyer to get Target’s latest bank information to see if they had changed banks. They had not, the bank account number was identical and was still used in their day to day operations. On a side note, Target does not accept credit cards, yes I know, HUGE RED FLAG. I again served the Writ on Bank of America and again was denied as there were no funds available. As long as they immediately transfer funds out of their bank account when they receive payment from customers, they seem to be protected. A call to the Bank of America garnishment department confirmed this.

The bottom line is that Target Publishers is very good at what they do. They immediately transfer funds out of their corporate account whenever they receive a payment and thus are protected from creditors like myself. They also make serving them very difficult. A quick google search of targetpublishers.com shows the three of the top five listings are discussing Target Publishers as a scam, yet they continue to operate year after year. They haven’t even had to change their name, which is the first thing they will do once they get catch enough heat.

I have a call in to Target Publishers for comment.

Have a Target Publishers story? Share it with us here.

Related posts:

1. The Evolution of Online Mortgage Lead Generation
2. FREE Real Estate RSS Icons!
3. LeadPress Has Launched!

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