Few things unleash a greater desire for information than consumers hunting for a new home. With the online world offering everything you’d ever want to know, the gap between the online and real world experience couldn’t be bigger. Potential buyers roaming prospective neighborhoods ‘offline’, can count themselves lucky if they can even find a direct phone number for a property for sale. Any ‘interaction’ with the house or apartment of one’s dreams (finding out how many rooms it has or what the asking price is), is non-existent.

That is, unless the property has been put on the market by a real estate agent using Recognized Marketing’s Scannect technology. This service provides potential buyers with an instant connection to information on their cell phones, based on unique QR codes displayed on physical ‘for rent’ and ‘for sale’ signs. Asking price, floor plan, square footage and more, all delivered to the cell phone of a prospective client who just happened to be passing by.

The same QR code would be used on all advertising done for the listing. This would connect buyers reading a real estate magazine, viewing a post card, or reading a newspaper ad directly with the homes information. Find out how this technology can change the way you do business.

There’s a new game in town and it promises to further reshape the real estate industry-mobile computing, mobile Web browsing, QR code interactivity, and SMS text-messaging. No longer are buyers tied to their computers. Now, they can be reached anytime and anywhere, and there are new services that enable real estate pros to easily get mobile.

We all know the huge impact that the Web has had on the real estate industry. In the 1990s, the Web was populated primarily by visionaries who recognized early that the free flow of information would dramatically transform the relationship between buyers and sellers. Now, because listings are so readily available, fully 80 percent of home buyers start their search online, according to Bill Tancer of Hitwise.com. No longer are agents the gatekeepers of real estate information. They are more the experts in the home buying and selling process who must stay on the cutting edge of trends, technology, and techniques as their clients become more informed, increasingly tech-savvy, and younger.

In addition, agents need to provide a level of customer service on the Web that is comparable to what they might provide in-person. If an agent’s online presentation leaves something to be desired, another is just a few clicks away.

Today, there is a new information revolution that is already making that of the 1990s pale by comparison, and its foundation is exponentially more pervasive than the Web. I’m talking about mobile. While the primary purpose of a cell phone is still to make voice calls, the number two and number three reasons for cell phone purchases have to do with text-messaging and Mobile Web browsing. In fact, according to InsightExpress in September 2007, over 50% of the over 240 million U.S. mobile phone subscribers have Mobile Internet access and 75% have text-messaging capabilities. Of this subscriber base, daily usage of text-messaging and mobile browsing is growing fastest among 25-54 year olds with over 40% of them text-messaging daily. To further boggle the mind, the CTIA Wireless Association reported that there were over 28 billion text-messages sent in June 2007. That’s almost 1 billion per day and increasing. The next must have mobile technology will be the ability to scan QR codes.

What does this mean for the real estate professional? For starters, let’s put this into perspective: Every home buyer and home seller has a cell phone with the functionality of a mini computer, and it’s generally turned on and with them at all times. Take into consideration the statistics I’ve mentioned above and it’s not hard to realize that people are walking and driving around with immediate access to an enormous amount of information. What’s more, the power of today’s cell phones give people a number ways to act on that information the moment their interest is piqued. For the real estate professional, this means that there are new opportunities to generate active leads wherever and whenever a buyer encounters an agent’s advertising, whether it is for a specific property listing or for the agent herself.

How does this all work? Current generation camera phones have all the necessary hardware to enable decoding of each technology – QR codes and digital watermarks. The only item a consumer needs to add to their phone is the free application available for download from many websites. Once installed on the cell phone, consumers can begin interacting with any encoded media. Media is encoded with a unique identifier (QR code or watermark) that the application decodes and references back to the content provider’s specified web link. For campaigns this means that campaign messaging can be changed instantaneously. The unique identifier can be re-mapped to a different specified web link at any time – making it easy for companies to modify informational campaigns.

Imagine home buyers driving through their favorite neighborhood and they see a Realtors for sale sign. They immediately wonder, how much are they asking, how many bedrooms are there, is there a pool. They see the for sale sign has a QR code on it. They grab their cellphones and scan the code, instantly being connected to the homes listing information, pictures and virtual tour. They also recieve information from the listing agent, and with one click can request a showing. This same QR code would be on all of the listings marketing materials including magazine ads, postcards and other print media. For real estate professionals, this not only let’s them turn lookyloos into leads anytime and anywhere, but also let’s them squeeze more value from their existing print advertising expenditures.

Other advertisers are using SMS text-messaging and the Mobile Web to augment their print advertising. MGM Mirage promoted its MGM Grand property by announcing on billboards that people could get on the VIP guest list to one of their nightclubs by texting the event keyword to 646629 (in this case, "ROK"). Because potential patrons could respond to the billboard ad at the moment they encountered it, the response rate was higher than in other media. In fact, the International Data Corporation says that "due to the sense of immediacy and relevancy, SMS text-message campaigns can result in response rates of up to 10%."

According to Shuki Lehavi, CEO of Gumiyo.com, "We’re seeing tremendous interest from the real estate sector for our mobile marketing services. Real estate pros are the ultimate self-promoters and they are fearless when it comes to trying new technologies that can help give them an advertising edge. However, they’re also going to be the first to realize when a ‘new-fangled’ technology doesn’t do anything for them. What’s good about a mobile service like Gumiyo is that agents and brokers can get a mobile marketing strategy going for very low cost, but they start generating an ROI almost immediately. By adding their Gumiyo Go Code keyword and MLS IDs to signs and ads, they instantly increase the power for those signs and ads to generate opportunistic leads."

How Agents Get Started

The first step is to get listings optimized for the Mobile Web. Most real estate Web sites don’t look so great on a cell phone, and many are just too big to be downloaded through limited mobile bandwidth. The next step is to get a QR code to allow buyers to connect with them. While it’s possible to launch a mobile Web browser, type a Web address, and navigate to listings; it’s much easier and faster for the buyer to scan something and have the results instantly delivered to the phone. Once an agent has chosen a mobile marketing service to setup mobile versions of property listings with a means for buyers to access them, the value becomes readily apparent.

By placingQR codes on an agents signs or bus bench ads, buyers or clients can scan it to get back information about the agent with links to all of their active listings. Voilá, a lookyloo has just turned into a lead.

It should also be noted that web addresses sent to a buyer’s phone remain there until manually deleted. This means that whether or not a potential buyer connects with a listing agent, the web address with the listing information remains with the buyer like a bookmark.

The same can be done to augment any form of advertising, and it can be done so without adding any additional cost. Most agents are already doing this by adding a Web address, or URL, to their printed property listings. Great idea, but how many interested buyers either forget the address or simply lose the motivation in the time it takes to get in front of a computer again? By including an QR code on a printed ad, a sign, a flyer, or a billboard, a potential buyer or client can immediately get more information because, as mentioned earlier, the cell phone is already in his pocket.

Hits to mobile listings and mobile home pages will be tracked and any e-mails sent by buyers will be recorded. This is particularly relevant to enhancing an agent’s image as technology-savvy in the eyes of her clients. Obviously, a seller wants his property sold as fast as possible for the most he can get. By adding the mobile channel to the advertising mix, an agent not only increases the visibility and opportunities for buyers to connect with a listing, they also demonstrates to their client that the’ll leave no stone unturned to find a buyer. The data from mobile inquiries reinforces this.

As proven advertising channels that increase interest in property listings, the marriage of offline and online advertising brings a real estate business "inline" with its message and its buyers. Rather than complicating this marriage, the mobile channel functions as a tie between the other two channels into a neat and effective "trifecta" of an advertising strategy. By transforming print into an interactive medium that drives traffic immediately to online listings (and all that it implies), the ubiquitous mobile phone becomes a crucial yet inexpensive tool in the real estate advertiser’s quest to sell more and sell faster.