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The investment forum designed to generate leads
Nigel Bailey, founder of
Red Sea Developments, is a fan of investment forums. He’s made two direct sales from investment forum
TotallyProperty.com in the past few months and can spend up to two hours a day online answering investor questions.
According to Bailey, investment forums deliver an audience of serious buyers. “Members are either very interested in purchasing or have bought and want after sales advice, for example about furniture packages,” he says. With the right membership base, it’s arguably the quickest and easiest way for investors to gather local market information. The problem for agents and developers has always been finding a way to tap into this community. Investors can spot vested interests a mile off and overtly soliciting business is more likely to cause resentment than result in sales.
Trade focused business model
Founder of TotallyProperty.com, Bob Sheth, thinks he’s developed a business model to address the issue. Agents and developers can pay US$33 (£17) a month for the extra kudos of being a “Premium Member”, which comes with an enhanced profile, website links and importantly the ability to upload properties to the site. It’s the first investment forum to intentionally provide trade users with business development opportunities. He even offers agents the opportunity to delete any “defamatory” posts associated with their listings.
Sheth launched the service in December last year and currently has 50 agents and developers using it. He says his top agents make between £2,000 and £10,000 in commission a month. However, agents expecting instant returns should be warned: “Just becoming a Premium Member and listing your properties is unlikely to get you leads as you need credibility,” says Bailey. The trick according to Sheth is to “pretty much jump on any query a new member makes and then demonstrate a good local knowledge for the market being sold”. Making unsolicited sales posts on the site is the biggest no-no which creates distrust. “If you can help people, you can build trust, generate leads and ultimately make sales,” he says.
Impressive figures
Although there are lots of property forums on the internet and TotallyProperty.com wins
no prizes for aesthetics, it’s one of the most visible and actively used in the market. Nearly all of the topics are less than a day old and their
analytics figures show an audience of over 50,000 uniques per month. It’s certainly one of the better investor forums on the market and arguably the largest one that focuses exclusively on overseas property.
Sheth says his audience is 50% UK based, with the rest made up predominantly of English-speaking expat investors from all over the globe. The vast majority are first- and second-time investors but he has a minority of hardcore professionals who help him moderate the forum.
Tapping into investment trends
One of the other advantages of spending time on investor forums is tapping into market trends which can help with product sourcing and marketing. For example, Sheth says, “there has been a very big, marked increase in holiday home buyers buying in developing markets with cash. On both TotallyProperty and
Expat Forum we are noticing a large population of younger investors moving away from the UK into emerging markets…There also seems to be a growing trend in finding local recommended lawyers to handle contractual negotiations with the developer, as opposed to using the developer’s recommended solicitors”. Brazil, Egypt and Morocco are the most favoured destinations currently, overtaking Dubai in popularity in recent months.
Making forum marketing work
Investment forums are clearly not for everyone. To make them work requires a commitment to genuinely help investors with their search and some local knowledge of the areas where they are looking to buy. There are a number of good forums on the internet, like
Property Showrooms,
Singing Pig,
House Price Crash and
Property Secrets, but if you are new to it, TotallyProperty.com is probably the best place to start because of its large audience and commitment to helping trade users make sales.