Real estate agents embrace Twitter

Published 2:32 pm Friday, May 1, 2009

Open houses, online listings, curbside fliers — maybe even the occasional bunch of eye-catching balloons or plate of cookies. Traditionally, these are the things real estate promotion is made of.

Now, you can add tweeting — the accepted term for posting on the micro-blogging Web site Twitter — to the list.

Twitter has exploded into pop-culture consciousness during the past year, and real estate agents are dipping their toes in the tweet pool, seeking new ways to fish for potential clients in a tough housing marking.

Some have gone beyond the toe test and plunged right in, keeping colleagues and clients (along with anyone else who cares to read) apprised on available properties — and sometimes other tidbits of information.

“Housing analysts predict the bottom is near. Experts agree market will shore up in early 2010,” Lynnwood-based agent Jennie Fan wrote last week.

Just hours later, the John L. Scott agent known as “tweet_homes” on Twitter was writing about “American Idol.”

“I can’t believe Allison is only 17, such big voice! I’ve just started noticing her the past few weeks,” she wrote in a response to a Colorado-based real estate agent.

Fan prefers using Twitter to Facebook for professional purposes. Not only is the account easier to manage, but she doesn’t have to worry about what friends post on her page.

In some ways, Twitter is nearly tailor-made for real estate agents. Newspaper classified ads have already trained agents to sum up a property in a short blurb, and an application called TwitPic lets them post photos of a property.

A few other real estate agents at the John L. Scott branch in the Lynnwood area are also active on Twitter, though not to the same extent as Fan. But instead of listing one home after another, she prefers to tweet home-related information and network with other agents.

“So far, I haven’t heard of anyone selling a home through Twitter,” Fan said.

Industry experts agree it isn’t often that social networking plays a direct role in selling property — but there are exceptions.

One homeowner in Durham, N.C., tried listing his house on Twitter in March, tweeting: “Is it possible to leverage power of Twitter to sell our house.” He accepted an offer a few weeks later after receiving national media coverage for his stunt-like selling technique.

But though most buyers aren’t trolling Twitter looking for listings, the site does pose abundant opportunities for networking with other agents. Fan is following agents she knows and works with, as well as others around the nation.

“It’s nice to know what’s happening in their local markets,” she said.

Last week, Twitter directory We Follow had more than 1 million users categorized under the hashtag #realestate.

The Twittersphere isn’t just attracting agents. Mortgage brokers, developers and real estate investors are staking out space on the increasingly popular site, trying to create a dialogue with clients and each other.

Chik Quintans, a Lynnwood-based mortgage broker, started with a blog a few years back, seeking a way to interact with clients and establish himself as an authority in his industry.

“It’s kind of like moving from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0,” he said. “My Web site before was very static — it was a one way conversation.”

Twitter was the natural next step, he said. Now, he tweets daily mortgage “lock or float” advice from the blog, along with other mortgage-related news – and some news less relevant to mortgages.

Links to articles on the housing market appear alongside news that Quintans left his ATM card in the machine for the second time. (Someone brought it inside the bank, prompting him to tweet, “There r good folks out there!)

Quintans likes Twitter’s immediacy — and its brevity.

“You can’t blather on and on,” he said.

Each update on Twitter has a 140-character limit, posing a new dilemma to some agents: How can you sell a house in such a short message? No formula has emerged as the most effective, but a real estate listing on Twitter could end up looking something like this:

“RT @homeseller 3 bdr 2 bath in Shoreline, $280,000 — just reduced. DM for info. #realestate.”

And you thought classified ads were hard to decipher.