There’s a scam that comes around every few years. You put an ad up for one of your units. Someone copies it, drops the price and ends up suckering someone out of a damage deposit or a month’s rent and running away. It’s the oldest trick in the book – sell something you don’t own. Here’s six tested and proven tips to help prevent people getting screwed and your name potentially being smeared by angry people.

1. Watermark your photos. Include your website and/or phone number. There’s a number of free options to do this, including the Picasa desktop app.
2. Pick a unique sentence that’s just in your ads and set up a Google Alert for it (in quotes). Then every time it shows up on the web you’ll get an email about it, which should only be when you put up a new ad. **You should also do this with your personal name and the name of your business.
3. Include several references to your name, phone number or website. This means in the body of your ad, not just in the fields where they say to put your name/phone number/email.
4. Inform your  caretakers or existing tenants when you’re advertising and if there’s a property that’s been hit by fraud like this. Also let them know when there’s people who are coming to view the suites.
5. Take your ads down when you’re done with them. This should be a no-brainer, but lots of people go for a shotgun strategy with their ads, meaning they’ll take forever to get them down. (You should be smarter and use a more focused approach to online advertising, but that’s another post.)
6. Include a link to your website and keep an eye on your Web Analytics. You should see each site under ‘referring sites’, or if you want to get sophisticated create URLs that label each site and then shorten them using a service like bit.ly so even if people share the link or copy and paste it you’ll get the referring information.

Photo Credit

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The next full day Internet marketing workshop will be on Sunday, July 18th in Edmonton.

We’ll be covering all the fundamentals of online marketing for Real Estate Investors and small business owners. Topics will include:

• The Online EcoSystem
• Search Engines
• Web Analytics
• Blogging and WordPress
• Social Media
• Email Marketing
• Lead Generation

We’ll be starting at 9am and wrapping up right around 4pm. Lunch is provided and the cost is $297, and registration will be open until sundown on Friday, July 16th.

You can register online here, use the contact form to provide your details or call me at 780-905-7562.

Photo Credit:

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Here is the latest edition of the Calgary rental website ranking report. Like the other reports I’ve released this week, you can find full background and the Winter data in the last edition of the rankings.

There’s been a few small changes that I’ll talk about in a future post, but for now, here’s your very own copy of the Calgary Rental Website report (PDF ~1mb).

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After a brief delay, we’re ready to roll with our exclusive day-long internet marketing workshop! Join us for a day of personalized education and action plan development, get your questions answered and plan for success!

What: Personalized Internet Marketing Education and Action Plan
When: Saturday, May 8th, 9am – 4pm
Where: Davies Management and Realty Boardroom
(#200, 17842-106 Avenue, Edmonton, AB, T5S 1V4)
Who: Beginners through experienced investors interested in using online channels as an integral part of their business. Registration is limited to 8 participants.
Cost: $297 with a $50 discount for REIN members or group registrants. (A muffin/coffee breakfast and lunch will be provided)

Please complete the  registration form (PDF) and forward it via email (info@chrisdavies.ca), fax (780-484-3018) or call us (780-905-7562) to secure your seat.

What You Should Expect

• A full day of internet marketing education and strategy
• The opportunity to develop your online marketing business plan and have your questions answered firsthand
• A supportive and experienced forum to share your strategies, ideas, successes and failures.
• Personal coaching and support to help align your actions with your goals
• Detailed Tips and Techniques for:
  • Google, Yahoo! and Bing – Unlocking Free Search Engine Traffic through SEO
  • Google AdWords, Banner Advertisements and Pay Per Click (PPC)
  • Measuring Success – Free Website Analytics tools the Fortune 100 won’t tell you about (Google Analytics, Website Optimizer and Yahoo Analytics)
  • Social Media – Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – Find the people you need without pissing off your family and friends.
  • Email Marketing – The secret to closing the deal
  • Getting a domain name, website and social media platform setup

Learn Concrete Action Steps to:

• Find and retain excellent equity building tenants
• Understand the Rental Website Ranking Reports
• Unlock your level one/two Joint Venture Partners and line up your level three targets
• Find motivated vendors and pre-foreclosure properties
• Establish and leverage credibility
• Use technology to simplify and streamline your business practices
• Avoid the pitfalls of reputation management disasters, expensive pre-built websites that don’t perform and abuse of social media channels that spam your friends.
• Turbo-charge your real estate results through the use of free and low-cost tools used by Fortune 100 firms and small businesses alike.

To Register:

Complete the registration form
Call: 780-905-7562
Email: info at chrisdavies.ca
Fax: 780-484-3018

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There’s an ad that Mike Sunley mentioned on myREINspace that’s so funny I had to share. Mike’s right, I’d like to test this style out on some of my own ads.

best of craigslist > SF bay area > Manly Bike for Sale
Originally Posted: Tue, 22 Jul 10:18 PDT
Manly Bike for Sale
Date: 2008-07-22, 10:18AM PDT

Bike for sale

What kind of bike? I don’t know, I’m not a bike scientist. What I am though is a manly guy looking to sell his bike. This bike is made out of metal and kick ass spokes. The back reflector was taken off, but if you think that deters me from riding at night, you’re way wrong. I practiced ninja training in Japan’s mount Fuji for 5 years and the first rule they teach about ninja biking is that back reflectors let the enemy know where you are. Not having a rear reflector is like saying “FUCK YOU CAR, JUST TRY AND FIND ME”.

The bike says Giant on the side because it’s referring to my junk, but rest assured even if you have tiny junk that Giant advertisement is going to remain right where it is. I bought this bike for 300 dollars from a retired mercenary that fought in both World War 1 and World War 2 and had his right arm bitten off by a shark in the Phillipines while stationed there as a shark handler. When he sold it to me I had to arm wrestle him for the honor to buy it. I broke his arm in 7 places when I did. He was so impressed with me he offered me to be his son but I thought that was sissy shit so I said no way.

The bike has some rusted screws, but that just shows how much of a bad ass you are. Everyone knows rusted screws on a bike means that you probably drove it underwater and that’s bad ass in itself. Those screws can be replaced with shiny new ones, but if you’re going to go to that trouble why not just punch yourself in the balls since you’re probably a dickless lizard who doesn’t like to look intimidating.

The bike is for men because the seat is flat or some shit and not shaped like a dildo. If you like flat seated bikes you’re going to love this thing because it doesn’t try to penetrate your ass or anything.

I’ve topped out at 75 miles per hour on this uphill but if you’re just a regular man you’ll probably top it out at 10 miles per hour. This thing is listed as a street bike which is man-code for bike tank. The bike has 7 speeds in total:

Gear 1 – Sissy Gear
Gear 2 – Less Sissy Gear
Gear 3 – Least Sissy Gear
Gear 4 – Boy Gear
Gear 5 – Pre-teen Boy Gear
Gear 6 – Manly Gear
Gear 7 – Big Muscles Gear

I only like gear 6 and 7 to be honest.

Additionally, this tool of all immense men comes with a gigantic lock to keep it secure. The lock is the size of a bull’s testicles and tells people you don’t fuck around with locking up your bike tank. It tells would-be-thieves “Hey asshole, touch this bike and I’ll appear from the bushes ready to club you with a two-by-four”.

Bike is for 150 OBO (and don’t give me no panzy prices)

Time to go biking.

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The book I’m reading right now is called Design Matters: How great design will make people love your company. (In North America it’s called Do You Matter? and you can buy it on Amazon here)

The areas they’re talking about in this book and many other similar books are called Interface Design and Customer Experience design. The idea of customer centric design isn’t something we talk about very often in real estate circles, no matter how much we think about our investors. It seems to be particularly problematic in US real estate circles where there’s a significant hard money lending industry. In Canada, there’s a much stronger emphasis on personal or private loans, and most of us experience a closer personal relationship with our investors.

REIN does one of the best jobs I’ve seen for creating an experience out of investing with the Personal Belize exercise. Helping people create a vision of what their goals feel like is an important lesson.

To apply this design/experience mentality to our investors we have to look outside the typical issues we concern ourselves with. This is more than doing your ROI and cash-flow calculations properly. It assumes your management, book-keeping and accounting are figured out.

It’s about how the experience, from purchase to return, feels, smells, sounds and tastes. Approach it from the JV partner’s side:

- How does it make them feel when they receive statements, emails or phone calls from you?
- Does the layout of your emails, statements, letters, website and other marketing create a feeling of unity? Conversely, when you send things out in 3 or 4 different formats/fonts/colours does it create feelings of chaos in your investor?
- Is there an advantage to physically taking your JV partners to the properties? How will those experiences make them feel? Does it fit with their goals? Is it a good use of their time?

Your real estate business is about more than properties and numbers. It’s about relationships and if, like most of us, you don’t have all the money you need, your business should be designed from the perspective of your investor.

Image Credit:

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Renters and Real Estate investors both have similar needs. Renters want a place to live and investors have a place for them. Getting the two parties together can be a difficult exercise. However, there is one thing which brings us together. You might jump to the conclusion that it’s just the Internet. You’d be wrong.

The internet is a disjointed web of billions of pages, from the smallest one-page site to the massive and useful. Both have one thing in common: search.

Before the birth of the internet, the field of information retrieval was working to make search a reality. Today we see the impact of search in a very profound way. People use Google (orYahoo, Bing, Ask or AOL) for almost everything on the internet. Even when we know the address of a website (like www.chrisdavies.ca), we frequently Google it. The word ‘chrisdavies.ca’ is one of the most popular keywords for this website.

Skip straight to:
The Top 15 Websites
Download the full report

The Goal of This Survey

My intention is to provide real estate investors with a list of the most visible rental websites so we can advertise our vacancies where they’re most likely to be found. There’s three aspects I’ve considered when scoring these websites:

• Search Engine Market Share
• Keyword Search Volume
• Organic Keyword Position (ranking)

Search Engine Market Share

It’s no surprise that Google is the leader when it comes to search engines with 80% of Canadian searches. The full breakdown of Canadian search engine market share can be found in my post of internet marketing resources at the end of June. This edition of the rankings only accounts for Google rankings, however the future editions will consider Google, Yahoo and Bing, each weighted appropriately.

Keyword Search Volume

Not all every keyword phrase is a popular as the next. This chart shows search volumes from Google’s Keyword Tool (Canada, May 2009). To come up with the keyword list for this exercise I’ve applied the same methodology I use in my work as a SEO at Enquiro.  Scores are weighted for the popularity of the keyword.

Organic Keyword Position (Rank)

For anyone who has a website or has done any reading around search engine optimization (SEO), it quickly becomes evident that websites get more traffic for a given keyword if they’re at the top. Enquiro did some pioneering research into this using eyetracking software, and the full report is available for purchase. (Shameless plug: the other whitepapers are great too!)

I’ve weighted each ranking based on the principles laid out in our research at Enquiro.

The Results

This report was intended as a test and began with the keywords. I used the results of my keyword analysis to cast a net and see which sites appeared organically (no pun intended). Here are the winners.

The top 15 sites  are:

1. bwalk.com
2. apartmentcorner.com
3. places4rent.com
4. 247apartments.com
5. apartmentscanada.com
6. gottarent.com
7. homerent.ca
8. rent-ontario.com
9. room4me.ca
10. viewit.ca
11. kijiji.ca
12. rentedmonton.com
13. gscrentals.com
14. canadarentals.net
15. renters.ca

The full report includes more information on:

• Methodology
• Keyword Selection
• The Full List (76 Websites!)
• Tips and Tools for Investors

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Real estate investment requires all sorts of marketing, from simple word of mouth to wide-scale marketing on the internet to fill vacancies. Measuring the effectiveness is important, because paying for advertising that doesn’t work is expensive. There are two important types of measurements we’ll focus on, but first, a word about tracking.

There are a couple types of tracking you’ll need to do.

First, have a channel-level tracking profile. This means that you’re going to want to know how each site/or channel is performing. Ask your own questions like:

• How long until my ad is on page 2….or page 10
• How many clicks, emails or phone calls do I get?
• How many views does my ad get?
• How often do the leads I get from a certain ad turn into real tenants.

Second, you’re going to want a lead-specific (individual person) profile. When someone actually comes to view a property or fills out a rental application you should have a record of how they first contacted you. This means there’ll be a line in your tenant records saying ‘email from craigslist’ or something similar. Every few months, go through your tenants and see where they came from. Most importantly, use this information to start defining what your prefect tenant looks like. If you only deal with furnished executive rentals, you might eventually find that while one site doesn’t refer many applications, when you do get a tenant they stay for 5-7 years and never miss a rent payment. Armed with that knowledge you can make much smarter decisions about where to spend your advertising dollars, and how long you can afford to let a suite sit vacant.

The most important metrics we’re going to track are conversion rate and return on investment (ROI).

Conversion Rate = # of times viewed/# of responses

The responses can be whatever you want, and it’s likely best to consider a few. Not all conversions are created equal: phone calls are usually better leads than emails (more likely to become tenants). Measure several conversions and understand which ones really matter to your business. It doesn’t matter what the email conversion rate is when every person who emails becomes a great tenant.

Return on investment is an easy formula, but sometimes difficult to measure completely.

ROI(%) = {Return (Profit) / Investment} X 100

The investment is the easy side of the equation to measure. The return is the more complex part. I’ve had tenants live in the same suite for nearly 20 years, likely generating tens of thousands of dollars in profits. To make things manageable, start by assigning some arbitrary numbers by following these steps.

1. Assume a tenant stays for a year on average and the monthly cash flow is $100 per month. The value (return) of leasing that unit is $1,200.
2. Assume you have to show the unit 6 times before you get the right tenant and they take the unit. The value of showing a unit is then $200.
3. Assume that you get 20 phone calls and emails (new leads) to find those six showings. The value of a phone call or email is $10.

Now that we know the real value ($1,200) of the average tenant, we can figure out what our ROI is. It’s easy to spend $100 on advertising when renting a unit. If you spend $100, your ROI on your advertising spend is 1,200%. If you can manage to cut out the advertising that dosen’t work and only spend $20, now your ROI is 6,000%. Spending less to get more is just smart.

One final thought about ROI: determining your return can be complex, particurlay if you’re new to real estate investing. Don’t be afraid to pick arbitrary numbers. If you have existing data, gather it in one place and use it. Find out how long your average tenant stays and what the cash flow from that unit is. Start tracking activities, collecting data and using it to make your business more efficient.

The best tool you’ll have for tracking all of this is a simple notebook. Write everything down as it happens each day.

Then it’ll be a simple, if time consuming, task to gather information like how many calls you had on a particular property. But you’ll be well on your way to marketing smarter.

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I gave a talk about marketing for Canadian real estate investors this week, focusing on internet marketing. Given that I work as an SEO, it’s a topic I know a bit about, so combining internet marketing and real estate investing was a pretty good fit.

Here are some of the resources I promised people.

Canadian Search Engine Market Share

Hitwise is finally publishing Canadian-specific search engine statistics. You can see their full press release here.

Google Receives 80 Percent of Canadian Searches in April 2009
Search Engines, Social Networking and Entertainment top visited categories in Canada
New York, NY - May 27, 2009 – Hitwise, an Experian company, announced today that Google search properties accounted for 80.17 percent of all Canadian searches conducted in the 12 weeks ending April 25, 2009. MSN search properties, Yahoo! search properties and Ask search properties received 8.84 percent, 7.34 percent and 2.75 percent, respectively. The remaining 41 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1 percent of Canadian searches.

Percentage of Canadian searches among leading search engine providers
Domain	April 2009
Google search properties	80.17%
MSN search properties	8.84%
Yahoo! search properties	7.34%
Ask search properties	2.75%
Note: Data is based on 12-week rolling periods

Google Trends

Google’s Keyword Tool

Gmail (and how to use multiple addresses via Gmail)

Google Docs

Google Analytics

Google Webmaster Tools

WordPress.org (for install it yourself)

WordPress.com (which is simpler, but less powerful)

Netfirms (which also offers one-click WordPress.org installations)

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This week’s Song of the Week is Blue Boy by Orange Juice. Wierd, I know, but it’s not as much about the music this week. It’s about the really cool, really random video.

It’s part of the Because We Can campaign put on by 42BELOW Vodka. It’s a little insane, and I’m enjoying it. I might have to sample their product….

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