Jon Larrance’s Realtor.com Blog

The Denver Board of Realtors’ Directors election is finally over.
The 2009 Directors are Charles Roberts of Your Castle Real Estate, Greg Geller of Vision Real Estate, and myself (Jon Larrance of Perry & Co).

Read the full story on the Perry & Co. Blog.

You may know that one of my goals as a DBR Director is to promote our city in the international markets.  To that end, if you have any opinions on the subject, I would sincerely love to hear them. I also represent Denver on the LuxuryRealEstate Board of Regents Executive Committee - and am outspoken in that group on behalf of the Colorado membership.

Thank you for your encouragement!
Jon
303-336-4744

Now is the time to get busy on those summer projects!  For a limited time, June 1 - 15, 2009, the Denver Building Department is issuing FREE construction permits to homeowners, and licensed contractors, for qualified home improvements or repairs to existing one and two family dwellings, which can increase the value of the home.  In order to benefit from the free permits, you must submit your plans for review no later than the June 15th deadline.  Like all Denver renovation permits, you must complete the work within 180 days of issuance or be required to reapply at the standard permit rates.

A variety of home improvements are covered by the “Home Renovation Bonanza,” including:

• Exterior Remodeling such as Stucco or Siding.

• Roof Covering Repair or Replacement.

• Interior Remodeling such as Kitchen, Bathroom, Bedroom, or Basement Remodeling.

• Replacement of water heaters and central heating and air systems.

• Insulation.

Have questions about the anticipated return value of your upcoming home improvements?  Please give me a call.

On March 17, 2009, we won’t be adding green dye to our drinks (it doesn’t change the color of coffee anyway), but we will be continuing our efforts to add “green” thinking to our business practices.  Like most of you, we’ve learned how to adjust our thinking to conserve energy, to recycle, to car-pool – but it’s one thing to think about doing it and quite another to actually do it.

At Perry & Co., we’ve been recycling all of our business paper for many years.  The recognizable blue bins can be seen at every staff person’s desk and at all our printing stations.  We recycle so much that Denver Recycles gave us our own dumpsters.

As most of you know, we tour our new property listings every week – ensuring that any agent answering the phone at our floor desk has actually seen your home and can answer questions about it.  Plus, all of us are passionate about real estate and this weekly trip allows us to see and feel what we sell.  This requires a LOT of driving, all over metro Denver, and frankly, it’s too important to give up.  So, the tour is planned a day in advance to allow for the most efficient use of time and gas.  And, of course, we car-pool. 

Direct mail, flyers and brochures are used to sell our listings and they are an important part of our marketing efforts.  While it’s comforting to know that ALL of our printed materials can be recycled once they are received, we also use a 30% recycled-paper product for printing.  In addition, we limit mailings that require envelopes, preferring to market using postcards.  Three years ago we brought a lot of our printing in-house to alleviate trips to the copy center.

Of course, it’s always lights out at the end of the day and now that Daylight Savings Time is here and it’s lighter throughout the afternoon we keep our upstairs lights down in our headquarters office to keep it cooler during the warm weather. 

Several of our agents have their EcoBroker designation and are educated about green building techniques for remodeling and retrofitting homes to conserve, and re-use, energy.  Several other Perry & Co. Agents committed themselves to getting the National Association of Realtors’ Green Designation this year in honor of St. Patrick. 

We’re always open to new ideas about being green and would love to hear yours.  The patron saint of Ireland would probably be glad to know that folks are using the “green” moniker and his namesake day to be more responsible, more respectful and ultimately gentler towards this beautiful planet we call home (Don’t forget Earth Day is right around the corner on April 22^nd).

Happy St. Patrick’s Day from all of us at Perry & Co. - where Green is a standard business practice!

Customers, and Agents, are always asking us, “How many Hits does your real estate company website get?”  Well, the simple answer is that PerryAndCo.com averaged about 1,500,000 ‘hits’ per month during 2008.  But Hits is a rather nebulous term, and it really doesn’t tell you much about how much traffic a website gets.  For instance, each picture on a webpage constitutes a ‘hit’, thus every time someone views the Meet Our Agents page, for example, our statistics package would register over 60 hits.  The point being, don’t be impressed when being told that a real estate website receives over a million hits a month, because by their very nature real estate websites are loaded with pictures (more pictures = more statistical hits).

However, there are other web traffic terms that you may be familiar with that are meaningful – Visitors and Pageviews.  What you really want to know about a real estate company’s web traffic is how many people, or Visitors, are looking at homes for sale and how many property web pages they are viewing.  In 2008, PerryAndCo.com averaged 1650 unique visitors per month, that’s about 55 people per day.  “Unique” in terms of web visitors, refers to a single person, regardless of the number of times that person visited the site.  The more telling statistic is Pageviews - PerryAndCo.com averaged 35,000 property pageviews per month last year.  Doing the math tells us that on average every person who visited Perry & Co’s website looked at over 20 homes for sale. 

All these numbers may, or may not, be impressive when compared to our competitors, but they are only a fraction of the total internet exposure that each Perry & Co. real estate listing receives.  Have you heard the term “Listing Syndication?”  We syndicate our properties to over 20 other popular real estate websites such as AOL, Homes.com, MSN, Yahoo, Zillow, Trulia, and Denver Post/Rocky Mtn News.  In fact, all Perry & Co. listings even appear on ReMax.com, as well as most of our other competitor’s websites through IDX.  That means that on virtually every website that a consumer might use for their home searches Perry & Co listings will appear. 

On Realtor.com alone, Perry & Co. listings receive over 120,000 Property Page Views per month.  Note: that Realtor.com is by far the most used real estate website in the US – they claim that near 80% of all Americans looking to purchase a new home will use Realtor.com (that’s why Perry & Co enhances all of our listings on Realtor.com).  Additionally, Perry & Co. listings over $500,000 appear on LuxuryRealEstate.com – the world’s most viewed luxury real estate website.  Then there’s CraigsList.  We also talk about Denver real estate and homes for sale on our blogsite, 3033997777.com, so the number of Perry & Co. Property Page Views just keeps climbing up and up.  In summation, we provide our clients’ properties maximum exposure.

So next time a real estate agent starts overwhelming you with statistics about how many Hits their website gets, ask them, “On which other websites do your real estate listings appear?”