Born and raised in South Florida,
Beverly Shanahan
has been in residential real estate for more than 15 years. She is a
team leader with the prestigious Premium Properties Group, working with
home sellers and buyers as well as investors in Broward and Palm Beach
counties. Shanahan also is owner and publisher of
Coral Springs/Parkland Breaking News Network, placing her on the forefront of local market insight.
A graduate of Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in
finance and accounting, Shanahan and her husband have two young
children. She is active with the Coral Springs Tackle Football Club and
is its vice president of corporate sponsorships.
Email Beverly
You have one of the strongest lineup of online tools I have ever seen for an individual agent. Your Website is content-deep, you have an interesting blog and consistent Facebook posts, and of course there’s your Breaking News Network site. How is it working for you?
I feel that in this day and age, social media is the way to attract a new set of prospects. I’m really excited that after being on Facebook for a year, I just THIS WEEK got my first lead from Facebook from someone I didn’t already know. I know I need to be engaged, not just for branding, but no one has contacted me “out of the blue” until now. And we’re negotiating a contract today!
The key is being very consistent. Just like so many people start working out at the gym on January 1, many people do a prospecting and marketing plan. Then they do a couple of blog posts and it all fizzles like a gym membership. You have to be consistent to keep people engaged.
With all that work to keep everything posted, do you have someone who helps keep everything up-to-date?
I’m very good at organizing my day – I work on social media early in the morning and late in the day. I do have a blog company that helps with one new real-estate content item each day. I also pull from a number of RSS feeds.
Of course, I don’t want to post just real estate items all the time. Sometimes I’ll post trivia such as “how many hot dogs are sold at baseball games.” I actually had someone stop me and tell me they “loved that post!” People really like the change-up.
You use the Housing Trends eNewsletter. How does it fit with all the other tools you use?
HTEN solidifies that I’m an expert, that I know what I’m doing – not just in the local market, but also with the NAR statistics on the national level. It’s all right there, all my contact info; social media links, my clients love it, and I love that I can put a link to it on Facebook. I also use it in my Coldwell Banker e-newsletter I create twice a month.
I also love the HTEN glossary. In fact, I’ve been working on my Website for about six months and I plan to link to HTEN for that information.
One thing I notice is the extensive content on your Website as well as the quality of every single thing. It seems that a potential buyer or seller would realize that if you take so much care with the things you post online – such as listing photos – then you will take care with every detail having to do with a home sale or purchase.
Well to me, that image is everything – it sets me apart. I have a lot of trouble sending information on other agents’ listings to my buyers where they come back to me saying how the photos are too dark to really see what the rooms look like. I have a $1+ million listing in my neighborhood where the seller came to my open house asking me why it had not sold. I asked her some qualifying questions about her listing and pulled it up on my laptop. There were only five pictures online, and the picture of the backyard pool was taken when it was raining.
Image is so important. You know, in addition to my online content, I also feel strongly that direct mail is key to my success. A piece of paper still impacts someone when it reaches them directly. We have a lot of agents in our market and most of us continue to use direct mail.
You’ve been in real estate for more than 15 years; what was your career prior to that?
I have been in real estate and mortgages for a number of years. My husband and I actually had a multistate mortgage lending operation and a brokerage operation with a few agents. The mortgage loan industry has changed so much recently, we got out of that business. However, as a real estate agent, having a mortgage background has been very valuable.
