About Online Real Estate Newsletter

Online Real Estate Newsletter owner, Roger Bullock, is an industrial engineer with extensive experience in real estate development, residential remodeling, new construction, and real estate investing. He has worked many catastrophe sites for a national risk management company evaluating and estimating costs for reconstruction. He was one of the first responders after hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast. He witnessed first hand the devastation caused by the wind and tidal flooding of this major hurricane. Several months were spent assisting residents in the preparation of cost estimates on structural damages, personal property, and other losses sustained by this major catastrophe.

He has had the opportunity to work with real estate developers and individual real estate agents in several states. Through his work and conversations with these agents, he noticed that most were good at the business of listing and selling properties but were having trouble maintaining client loyalty to fuel their repeat and referral business at levels that met their expectations. The general consensus was that they were missing repeat and referral business because they didn’t have an effective method of staying in contact with past clients. Most said they used mailings of letters and post cards but felt most of these were trashed as junk mail as soon as they were received. There was no value to the client not planning an upcoming move so the mailings were considered as junk mail and in some instances as annoying.

A few agents said they had tried developing and sending out newsletters but had found the learning curve for the new software was difficult and HTML a nightmare. Plus they had the out of pocket expense of purchasing the needed software. The ones that did get past this stage said that coming up with fresh content for news articles each month was very difficult and took a lot of their valuable time in research, writing, editing, and sending the newsletter. As with regular mail, once the newsletters were sent out they had no way of knowing if and who was looking at the material.

Roger was hearing from the realtors that they needed a method of staying in contact with past and present clients that would be perceived as a value to them and not trash as soon as it was received. It needed to create client loyalty and name branding for the realtor. It needed a non-invasive way for the realtors to inform the clients they were the one to contact when it was time for them to make a move. It needed to create ownership of the client for the realtor and ownership of the realtor for the client. It needed not only a way to track who was reading the material but who might be interested or anticipating a move in the near future, which the realtor could use to turn a cold call into a warm call to the client. And most importantly it had to be easy to use at a cost that was affordable. With these parameters set, Roger set out researching and developing a newsletter system that would fill this need.

Early in 2006 Online Real Estate Newsletter was created. Roger contracted with a national marketing and internet software development company to help design an easy to use e-newsletter service. Through extensive development and testing, Online Real Estate Newsletter has successfully created an e-newsletter system that is personalized with each individual realtor’s personal photo and contact information which requires only minimal time and computer experience to use. All the design, creation of content, sending and tracking is handled for the realtor. Clients receive a professional looking newsletter which appears to have been personally prepared by their realtor with value added articles and information of homeowner lifestyle content. Our unique tracking system provides easy to read reports back to the realtor on 1, 3, and 7 days after the newsletter is sent out. It allows the realtor to see who is clicking through to their listing web site and other indicators which inform the realtor if the client is anticipating a move in the near future. This allows the realtor to now turn a cold call to the client into a warm call. Realtors also benefit from drip marketing, name recognition or name branding, increased client to realtor loyalty, and increases the professionalism of the realtor. Studies have found that these are all contributing factors in increasing repeat and referral business.

An additional benefit to the realtors who are using the Online Real Estate Newsletter service, is that they receive a free real estate marketing e-newsletter each month packed with tips and marketing advice to keep them on the cutting edge of customer service.