Mobile Marketing Start-up Helps Real Estate Agents Stand Out

For about a year, Seattle-based Knovolo has been offering real estate agents a text-messaging and mobile-Web service. Direct spoke with content manager Jay Holcomb to find out how the service helps agents in that beleaguered industry and what its chances are of becoming the next big thing in online marketing.

DIRECT: How does your system work?

HOLCOMB: It's a combination of text messaging and the mobile Web. We use it to deliver a marketing message to a campaign. A typical marketing campaign delivers a message in a variety of ways: radio ads, signs, fliers. Text messaging is another way to do it.

DIRECT: How long has your company been around?

HOLCOMB: Three years. We started the real estate service about a year ago.

DIRECT: Who's using your service?

HOLCOMB: We've been focusing mostly in the real estate sector so we have a bunch of clients who are real estate agents or agencies. They use our service to get their house listings on the mobile Web (at www.knovolo.com). So you have your ‘For sale’ sign and further down on that sign you'll add a call to action. A call to action goes like this: ‘For more information, text this keyword to this short code.’ The keyword is what you put in the content of the text message and that identifies the particular campaign or listing you're working with. The short code is the six-digit phone number to which you send a text message and receive a response.

DIRECT: Real estate is in a lot of trouble now. How responsive have agents been to your service?

HOLCOMB: We were kind of worried about that, but so far it's been working to our advantage. People have been cold-calling us because they're looking for new ways to battle the real estate crisis. So far it's been relatively successful in cities like Seattle, Chicago and Los Angeles where people are very techie, good with texting and use their phones a lot.

DIRECT: How many clients do you have?

HOLCOMB: We probably have between 15 and 20 — half are individual agents and the others are agencies that pass the service on to several agents.

DIRECT: How do you make money with this service?

HOLCOMB: There's a monthly charge for each keyword clients subscribe to.

DIRECT: What's the fee?

HOLCOMB: Depending on the type of real estate, it's between $50 and $150.

DIRECT: How did you arrive at those figures?

HOLCOMB: We determined the charge through a combination of all the resources we devoted to putting one keyword together combined with what we perceived as the average market price.

DIRECT: How do you come up with keywords?

HOLCOMB: It depends on what kind of message you're trying to convey. Keywords also should be short because you have to keep the mobile-use case in mind. If you want to have someone text in ‘House for sale,’ that's a whole bunch of extra characters. But if you just require users to text ‘home’ or ‘house,’ it's a quick and easy way to get instant access to information.

DIRECT: You're working in real estate now. What other industries are you looking to move into?

HOLCOMB: We're trying to partner with other companies that help market — a very broad kind of thing. It's pretty much anywhere you're trying to get information to people and they're not in front of their computer — on radio or TV, for instance. They're good possibilities for mobile use.

DIRECT: How successful has the service been for your real estate clients?

HOLCOMB: There are two aspects to it. One is giving more information to people. And it's not wildly successful. Take Terry Miller, a Seattle real estate agent and our first customer. It'd be great if she put up all these signs and got 10 hits a day. Each listing will get two to five hits once it's been up six weeks. But this helps Terry stand out as a real estate agent when she's trying to get more listings to sell. When people are looking for an agent to help sell their house and everyone else has the same bag of tricks, she has this texting thing most people don't have yet. This adds value to her as an agent.