Perspective Matters This was my 11th year attending the ULI Fall Meeting, and I enjoyed many of the conversations including artists, designers, investors, bankers, real estate developers, economic development leaders, architects, professors, and students. The range of perspectives is interesting and valuable. Creative Symbolism at Google’s Bay View Office I also toured my third Google office,… View Article

Google’s Marketing Focus Every year Google has a conference focused on the latest product developments and innovations for marketers to use in the Google ecosystem. This year was, to no surprise, heavily focused on AI driven initiatives. Search, Video, Creative, Measurement and Agentic are continuing to develop at Google. Key Google Marketing Updates Ads are… View Article

The Raleigh real estate market has been hot for several years, and it’s currently the #2 market in the country, according to a December 2023 ranking from the US News & World Report. This is due to high consumer demand, thriving job market, and relative affordability. We’ve worked in the Raleigh market for years with… View Article

Once again, Google did a great job highlighting new products and innovations that have and will be rolling out. We had the opportunity to follow along through Google I/O this year and engage with these new updates. AI in general has been so hyped up. We have seen missteps along the way such as non-sourced… View Article

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have come a long way in the past 10 years. For a time, the ad platforms were pushing clients to use their AI, however, the results were sub-par compared to human managed campaigns with manual bidding. Eventually several of the largest platforms weaved AI into their core products… View Article

As a niche digital marketing agency working exclusively within the real estate industry, we get to partner with a diverse group of builders, brokerages, and communities. Whether they’re offering primary residences or second homes, each community has their own unique audience. We wanted to take a minute to spotlight some of our newest community clients… View Article

We are in a time when Facebook’s shares are plummeting in value due to iOS privacy updates, blocking Facebook’s tracking. Meanwhile, Google continues to outperform the social media giant when measured by revenue growth. The following highlights and insights are based on reporting directly from Google during their earning call for Q4, 2021. Search revenues… View Article

We find Vail Resorts investor calls very insightful on many levels as digital marketers helping market destination real estate. We often listen to many of the earnings calls for the largest publicly traded residential and resort developers and tech companies to gain knowledge. Most recently, we listened to Vail’s most recent call to get an… View Article

ULI recently released its first-ever outlook on issues that are specific to environmental, social, and governance (ESG), focusing on the priorities of sustainability and resilience. By asking the questions: “What sustainability topics and issues are on the rise, why do they matter, and what should the industry do about it?”, the institute’s Greenprint Center for… View Article

ULI Carolinas Conference is about highlighting the latest in real estate develop trends and happens every year in a different city. This year it was focused on Asheville. Our audience is composed of builders, developers, banker, lawyers, architects, planners, public service and brokerages all based in our region. This years trends highlighted new trends and… View Article

As local economies begin to open, we are excited to hear about the progress happening at several new communities. We are also excited about the new home communities with which we will be working and wanted to highlight these new partnerships. Point Hope  This 9,000-acre Lowcountry estate once acted as a safe-haven for the Googemheim… View Article

New Yorkers continue searching for South Florida getaways while Californians increase searches for New York Real Estate terms. As we progress through the Covid-19 pandemic, we expect to see migration patterns emerge.  To help identify these patterns, we created a dashboard to measure the change in search volume over time from the states most affected. … View Article

Using Google Trends data, we analyzed changes in search volume for people who might be in market for New Homes, MPCs or General Real Estate. Our analysis showed a slight decrease since the begin of the market decline (Feb 21 – Mar 17) in most variations of real estate searches, including new homes, home builders,… View Article

Main Takeaways from the Conference: There is a missed opportunity in new home sales in MPCs. 52% of people surveyed indicated they’d like to live in an MPC, but they’re not capturing that market. People are looking for a smaller product (>2000sq ft) under $300k in a walkable community Demand/Opportunity: Smaller, attainable, walkable, different Fitness… View Article

Thursday, September 19, 2019 Washington, DC Emerging Trends Wage growth is one of the top major factor you need to look at by geography to identify market opportunities at this stage of the market cycle. Occupations driving wage growth are an additional factor you need look at when targeting markets during this stage of the… View Article

You never know where you’re going to find inspiration At the ULI Spring Meeting, I had the opportunity to tour the downtown Nashville riverfront redevelopment area. It was highlighted by the historic “bridge building” which goes high up and connects to a bridge that connects over the Columbia River to downtown Nashville. So, we kicked… View Article

Google announced the first core algorithm update of 2019 on March 13th. This update was broader than previous updates, meaning it affected more than just one portion of the algorithm and has no clear cause and effect. There was a flurry of unconfirmed algorithm updates leading up to the announcement that started in early February…. View Article

E360 had the opportunity to attend MozCon, an industry-leading 3-day SEO conference, in Seattle for the third time. The talent level of the speakers, networking opportunities, and content of the sessions is unmatched, in our opinion. Here are some next-level insights & takeaways from Day 1 of the conference: Organic search results get 20x the… View Article

A New Era Baby boomers and Gen X’ers have long been the focus of real estate marketing, given their buying power relative to Millennials. However, when shaping the marketing and market positioning strategy, real estate professionals should keep in mind that people aged 37 and younger are now the largest group of homebuyers in the… View Article

After our initial analysis of big box, hotel, and resort websites, we wanted to shift focus to the industry we know best: real estate. The goal was to analyze a sample set of 30 real estate websites – including brokerages, builders, and master-planned communities – to evaluate the industry’s standard for speed and performance. Why… View Article

Zillow recently conducted a data analysis for all properties listed in 2016 and 2017. The takeaway? Properties featuring “hot phrases” like steam shower in their listings ultimately earned sellers a 29% higher sales price than listings forgoing the mention. The commodity phrase “steam shower” ranked as one of the highest premiums in a list of… View Article

This week, Congress held a hearing with Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. Mark was requested to meet with Congress regarding the Cambridge Analytica data breach that compromised 87 million profiles from the Facebook platform. Many are concerned that the data could have potentially been sold to political fake news culprits. After watching the… View Article

It may be time to take a look at your website’s speed and performance for multiple reasons: User experience: People want fast experiences while browsing online. According to Google, 53% of mobile site visits leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. SEO: Google has been using speed as a ranking signal… View Article

One of our major focuses this year is encouraging our clients to secure their site with HTTPS and moving our own websites to HTTPS. This has implications for SEO and user experience. Google has specified that it is a ranking signal, so securing your site with HTTPS could improve rankings if implemented properly. So what… View Article

It should be no surprise when we say as marketers our roles have been redefined. The question is how do we maneuver through the technological data web and come out with the proverbial fly. According to Econsultancy one of the biggest differentiators between successful marketers and laggards in 2018 will lie in their ability to… View Article

Overview: CPMs increased over 2017 for Facebook ads (+96.13%) and Paid Search (+89.86%). Splash pages continue to produce high quality leads with increasing lead quality. Lead quality increased 66.17% for our Facebook ads and 9.98% for Paid Search clients utilizing our splash pages.  At the end of 2017, Paid search lead quality continued to outperform… View Article

At this year’s International Builder Show Element 360 had the opportunity to get an exclusive run down on all the buzz strategies, methodologies, and best practices from others for 2018. A reoccurring theme was the importance of online reputation and reviews. Living in a digital era the requirement to monitor your businesses reputation is stronger… View Article

Our team at Element-360 hold’s RCLCO in the highest regard as one of the top Real Estate Advisory companies in the country. Below is a link to their latest Q3 Real Estate Market report. Some of the highlights include the current and short-term market outlook and the real estate market cycle segmented by product type…. View Article

We had a great opportunity to participate in the National Association of Realtors Annual Convention this year located in Chicago Illinois. It was great to run into so many people we had not seen in a while and reconnect with them. We also got to meet a ton of new technology vendors and learn more… View Article

In July, two members of the E360 team went to the largest SEO community’s conference that focused on several aspects of digital marketing. Much of it was focused on search engine optimization, as Moz is one of the biggest players in the SEO space. Here are the highlights of some of the main topics covered:… View Article

This week we were super excited to personally host several ULI councils in Asheville, NC. Our topics of discussions included: The Biltmore Farms history (1897 – Present), core values and economic philosophies by Jack Cecil Economic Development in Asheville, a case study on how Asheville became the right fit for New Belgium, by Ben Teague… View Article

We had the privilege to visit Seattle last week and attend a local marketing workshop hosted by the largest online SEO community in the world, Moz.com. What was great about the event was how small it making conversations about local marketing with others that much easier, not to mention great music, venue and food! MozCon… View Article

Element-360 scours the planet looking for real estate marketers and internet marketers who are pushing the limits on lead generating strategies. Last week we performed our own internal performance analysis of all our campaigns combined across all communities and clients to see what outperformed. Additionally, we attended the International Builders Show last week and paneled… View Article

An area not covered as much in the real estate marketing world is tracking and analysis for the purposes of improving your marketing. There are several areas right now where the complexity of either implementing tracking or using the reporting for analysis has become more difficult. Let’s start with the Facebook advertising platform. Currently, if you just… View Article

3D Virtual Tours are becoming more and more popular in the real estate internet marketing industry. From utilizing the 3D tour in email deployments, to using it as a teaser on a call to action in Google PPC Ads, Social PPC Ads, or even on a landing page, the excitement it rallies among prospective home… View Article

Google recently announced several new updates coming to AdWords and Analytics. With these updates, they continue their focus on Mobile-first design, improving consumer usability, and introduced some new integrations within their product line. For AdWords, they continue to focus on their marketing process while enabling advertisers to better reach consumers effectively with expanded text ads,… View Article

Potential Impact On Digital Advertising for the Real Estate Community Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Samsung are all investing heavily into virtual reality as the next big platform. As a result, there are several groups looking to capitalize on the advertising side. We’ve been following two of these companies closely: Immersv and Outlyer Technologies. Currently, they… View Article

Evolution of Call Tracking in the Mobile World Getting a customer on the phone increases the opportunity for them to convert. This one on one interaction also provides the business to compete against competitors through excellent customer service and personal interactions, in turn, making the customer feel more valued and the interaction will give them… View Article

Google AMP – Mobile (and User, and Publisher) First Google’s answer to Facebook Instant articles, Apple News, mobile ad blocking, and notoriously slow web publishers’ sites adds to its mission of cleaning up the web. AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, sloughs off third party scripts, external css and javascript, and even some html such as forms… View Article

Google Drops Organic Results Down a Spot We anticipate organic search will be hit the hardest by this change. For many users who use smaller monitors, organic results are now pushed down below the fold instead of having the first organic result above of the fold. From a user experience standpoint, the overall look and… View Article

How does Google work? I just got finished reading the book, “How Google Works” written by Google’s Executive Chairman and ex-CEO, Eric Schmidt and former SVP of Products, Johnathan Rosenberg. The book essentially boils down the foundation of how they have successfully grown over the last 10 years. There were several areas of the book… View Article

It is no surprise that the first billion internet users found the internet through desktop computers. These stationary machines are considered antiquated by most so it’s no surprise that Google suggests that the next billion internet users are going to take a different route to computing. Google rolled out noteworthy projects during their Google I/O Conference on… View Article

Google’s Quality Score report is a 1-10 ranking system reporting the estimated quality of your ads and landing pages. The quality of ads and landing pages are triggered by keywords and their ranking. By ranking highly on the scale, Google values your ads and landing pages as useful and relevant information to someone that views… View Article

Responsive design has become one of the more important elements for email design to increase and encourage stronger click through rates (CTR) and overall interaction with an email. Litmus reports that over 40% of emails are opened on either a tablet or smartphone and more than 60% of internet users conduct their searches on mobile… View Article

Everyone Knows Retargeting is Working, But How? Retargeting is a marketing tactic that tracks audience’s online behavior so your ads show up to the most relevant audience. A study by AdRoll says marketers who use retargeting generally have higher ROIs. In regards to real estate, we are seeing higher click through rates, higher conversion rates,… View Article

Analyzing Users By Desktops, Tablets, and Mobile Internet users in the US are searching items on one device, but that same search can often end on a different device. Analyzing cross-device behavior is not easy, nor is it easy to track or target this behavior. However, all marketers agree that improved methods for targeting multi-device… View Article

Speed Things Up to Generate Leads Choosing design over function is a common misstep in the world of internet marketing. We think that the great sites are only defined by; large images, videos, or slide shows will engage customers, but website visitors tend to care more about speed than these features. In addition to the… View Article

Conversion optimization is the method of creating an experience on a website or landing page that with the objective of increasing the percentage of visitors who convert into registrations.   At Element-360, we have recently implemented software to accurately track the effectiveness of variables that influence online lead generation. This is enabling our clients to… View Article

One way to improve your conversion rates is to use psychological principals for optimization. The age old marketing tool of applying psychology theory to campaign tactics has been used by greats like Albert Lasker and Edward Bernays, who manipulated Freud’s theories in famous campaigns for Marlboro and Ivory Soap during the 1930s and 1940s. While… View Article

The Google Panda algorithm is designed to keep sites with poor quality content from making it to the top of the search results. Experts speculated on May 20th that Google has made changes to how Panda identifies sites and Google confirmed it on May 21st.   This was more than a refresh to the algorithm… View Article

As many of you know, we pride ourselves on sharing the latest marketing intelligence trends. In this update, we want to shed some light on some different things and an inside look into our company. This will give you a better idea of where we are and where we are headed. Element-360 has been a… View Article

Stop Fighting the TV vs. Digital Marketing Battle: Why A Holistic Campaign is Best TV advertising and digital marketing are no longer competing for attention. Rather, new studies show that successful marketing campaigns utilize the benefits of both media outlets in an integrative approach to reaching consumers. E360 Lab Research Shows Digital Marketing Projected to… View Article

As a self-admitted real estate research geek, I thoroughly enjoy figuring out what makes different markets tick. What fundamentals drive development in different destinations? How do land use policies and planning impact siting, density, and design? Which types of buyers are active? Why are certain projects successful while others never make it past the drawing… View Article

Every year we like to reflect back on factors impacting real estate performance and how that may influence 2014. This is the third year in a row we have performed this trending forecast. We had a large amount of data to review along with an additional seven successful communities as case studies to consider. Top… View Article

Google has integrated bid adjustments from Adwords directly into Analytics. This adjustment allows for further optimization and better analysis between Adwords and Analytics. Google implemented this change at the end of July. The change will also allow analysis on bid adjustments by: time of day, device, and locations. The bid adjustments tab is easy to… View Article

According to one online marketer’s definition, the Attribution Modeling Tool is used to determine the value of each visitor’s lead source path to conversion. It is meant to help you gauge the performance of multiple marketing campaigns and improve conversions with better budget allocation strategies. These are the facts you should understand before using the… View Article

Search engine optimization, or better known as SEO, is a core area of internet marketing that seems to evolve just about every single day. On the web, there is definitely no shortage of tips and recommendation on how one should go about “optimizing” a website and promoting its presence on search engine results. However, what… View Article

According to the latest Google data, the percentage of baby boomers and seniors that are using the internet is growing steadily each year. So far in 2013, 78% of baby boomers and 52% of seniors are actively online and embracing the internet as a resource. Google findings indicate that both television and online media are… View Article

Much attention has been given to the real estate sector of the economy during and following the financial Crisis. This blog post looks at real estate sector with specific emphasis on foreclosure activity. Real estate markets continue to gain ground. U.S. Foreclosure activity has interesting figures that also show improvements regarding housing markets. According to… View Article

With nearly 50 million users and 20 million visitors per month, Tumblr, the insanely popular microblogging social network platform, is a force to be reckoned with on the Interweb. Commonly regarded as a combination of Twitter, Pinterest, and a regular blog, this site attracts millions of visitors through providing a user-friendly way for people to… View Article

It is possible that search engines may have the largest influence on destination marketing. Google provides valuable data, trends and insight into how and where people search from.  In many emerging destination markets, the first destination marketing research step is to determine what search interest, assets and strengths the subject destination has. In order to… View Article

By Wendy Yang Although guest blogging remains a key creative marketing strategy for many who are looking to enhance their company website’s exposure or gain necessary credibility for it on the Internet, Google has begun to notice the increasing tendency for some bloggers to over-focus on creating irrelevant content only for the sake of implementing… View Article

While there are several areas of impact by Penguin, we had some specific interest about the impact on internal link structure strategies. Google historically does not comment in detail about how exactly Penguin or Panda work. After delving into the world of internal links and the effect this can have on sites, we are receiving… View Article

Google’s head of search spam, Matt Cutts, pre-announces the expected changes at Google affecting SEO. The changes to the ranking and indexing algorithms are expected to take effect in the next few months. Matt proposes a strong disclaimer that timelines and shifting resources may influence the release of the changes described in the video. As… View Article

New Year, New Offices Here’s our address and a sneak peak at our offices. 22 S. Pack Square 5th Floor Asheville North Carolina 28801 We are excited to announce that our real estate internet marketing team has moved to a new location in the heart of Downtown Asheville. We feel very privileged to be in… View Article

Search Engine Marketing in Real Estate is beginning to be considered a ‘must-have’.  With the NAR reports consistently reporting numbers in around 90% of new buyers looking online for real estate, we know that if you are not there, you are missing out.   But our clients often ask us what the science is behind SEO. … View Article

As we reflect on our experience in 2012 We can’t help but observe real estate internet marketing statistics from the latest National Association of Realtors profile of Homebuyers and Sellers Survey. According to the report, “use of the internet in the home search rose slightly to 90% and for buyers under the age of 44… View Article

We have all heard the phrase…but what is Search Engine Marketing exactly? Marketers these days toss around acronyms like SERPS, SEO, PPC, and it can be confusing. We checked online for a simple definition. Wikipedia: Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility… View Article

Tablets are gaining momentum in the market and according to a new report from comScore, tablets have reached a “critical mass” in the U.S.  What this means to you is that you can’t ignore the presence of a tablet user and their demographics.   A comScore demographic analysis of U.S. tablet users yielded the following insightful… View Article

There are a number of interesting trends within paid searches over the last quarter. Google saw greater growth in impressions and clicks – due and to its large market, this growth did not translate into an increase in market share for Bing and Yahoo. Google’s nearest competitor Bing still remains far behind Google, despite seeing… View Article

Here is the official youtube announce from Google on Knowledge Graph.   Google is improving the search experience with the new Knowledge Graph. This means any search you perform rooted in Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook will be highlighted on the right hand side. Then the knowledge graph is augmented against 500 million… View Article

E360 attended our first Fiabci USA meeting in April 2012. Fiabci is the International Real Estate Federation. We received a warm welcome being hosted in Miami, Florida. The agenda for this meeting was focused on the real estate development frontier. E360 has a particular interest and coverage in frontier markets highlighted in our blog back… View Article

It is important to make sure your Facebook page is easy to find on mobile devices. People just do not look at the 2nd page on search engines. You at least need to be on page 1 for brand queries. Here are some tactics to support this objective. – Anchor your brand name back link… View Article

The Pew Research center just released a report on high growth in amount of tablets adult internet users for January. The number of owners grew from 10% of the population in December 2011 to 19% in January 2012. Pew is reporting a 2± margin of error on this survey. Who owns tablets? The survey results… View Article

Predicting how people will find you by targeting the right keywords can be a challenging exercise. It’s a big deal because buyers are spending more time than ever researching the market before making such large purchase decisions. According to Google in 2011, 90% of all consumers go online to research products prior to making large… View Article

Goldman Sachs launched it’s “Next 11” fund investing in developing countries such as Pakistan, Turkey, Bangladesh, Egypt, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea and Vietnam. The success that BRIC’s have sustained and concerns about their ability to maintain similar future growth has some fund managers looking further into frontier markets. Castlestone Management launched… View Article

E360 is excited to be on two panel’s for this years Mexico Real Estate Forum. The date is set for May 4-6 at The Westin Resort & Spa, Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. The first panel topic is a, “Regional Analysis of the Major Tourism development Markets in Mexico”. We will be discussing the latest market trends across Mexico… View Article

Viviun is a property portal used in property development marketing all over the globe. In the spirit of transparency, we have no relationship with Viviun. There are many different resources to educate yourself on how to use property portals such as internationalrealestatereview.com. What’s interesting about Viviun is they receive over 93,000 unique visitors a month according to… View Article

E360 is immersed in global real estate research and market trends; trends in emerging markets, saturated markets and markets that no one has ever or will ever hear of.  We sometimes can know more about a specific region, development and consumer than is often necessary and we have to remind ourselves to step out of… View Article

Our 2011 foreign real estate forecast is focused on residential international property located in the Latin America and the Caribbean. Our real estate forecast is based upon consumer demand trends we have been tracking through our existing second home owner survey and syndicated consumer research. We expect foreign real estate purchase motivation will shift from… View Article

In our industry, we talk about expats all the time.  Specially, in International real estate, the expat community is highly coveted. There are thousands of websites dedicated to expat communities, adjusting to foreign ways of life, new trends in expat dining and shopping, how to change currency, pay your taxes and just general places to… View Article

Cielo Paraiso will open the first 18 hole championship level golf course in Boquete, Panama in January 2011. The course marks the completion of the first phase of Gladstone Development’s new residential resort development, Cielo Paraiso, which also includes 14 completed homes and 30 homesites for purchase.  Located in the scenic mountains of Boquete, Panama,… View Article

The 2010 Second Home Trend Report indicates 45% of existing second home owners believe that now is a good time to buy an additional second home. E360’s Second Home Trend Report, surveys existing second home buyers on the preferences of timing, attributes, location, and pricing of an additional second home purchase. Global real estate management… View Article