I got an email from my friend Lisa Hammerstein of Re/Max this morning.

She’d looked at my profile on Active Rain and noticed I had a link that said, “Click here for more information on how our team works.” Lisa clicked and loved the idea! I had used a Real Estate Show to give a little presentation right from my blog. (The same link is also on my website.) People who are looking at my sites are likely to be looking for an agent or thinking about a move. Best to get to them right then, isn’t it?

In my Show, I mentioned how my partner and I work, he’s old school sales and I’m creative and techy. Together, we cover all bases — and our clients get two agents for the price of one.

Lisa and her husband Robert also work as a team. Their Show explains why they’re the ones to choose in their market.

There is something special that you have to offer, something that sets you apart from the agents around you. How could you use your Real Estate Shows to get that across to the people that find you online?

I’m currently working on setting up a new blog, and once again I am so thankful for my Real Estate Shows!

You see, we internet readers are a whole different breed. You’re here, so I’m sure you understand.

• We’re demanding. If a page takes too long to load, we’ll click right out of it.

• Can’t find what we want right away? NEXT!

• Too much scrolling? I’ll go somewhere else.

I want it all and I want it NOW. And I don’t want to be stuck looking at what I don’t want.

Which makes embedded Real Estate Shows PERFECT for blogs and websites.

If you want to see more about a particular house, you can. Without a pop-up or new page, BOOM, there’s the pictures of the house. I have nine pictures in the space of one, with an inviting little “clickable” arrow to start me off. (In this case, less really IS more — less space taken on your page, more bang for the reader’s buck!)

The music and titles set a tone, your focus is drawn in through the movement of the pictures and AHA, you’ve just found a beautiful home that you might have scrolled right over if the pictures had just been thrown out there in front of you. It’s like the thrill of discovery! And there’s always room for more — pictures, video, panoramas … don’t we also love “more”? :o)

You don’t see what you’re looking for? There’s not a lot of scrolling and clicking to get to what you are looking for.

You’ve got everything right there in one neat little package — what’s not to like?

Consumer confidence is down. Home sales are declining. Inventories of unsold homes are at record highs. Realtors are depressed and so are their earnings.

This makes no sense to me.

Here’s why. The forecasts that I have seen for home sales say that roughly 5.9 million homes will be sold this year. It’s down from 6.4 million homes last year. So the real estate world is going to hell in a hand basket because only 5.9 million homes will be sold? I don’t think so.

The strategic challenges for you are these:

1. To develop an effective marketing plan to make sure you get your share of listings.
2. To educate your sellers to bring their expectations in line with the current reality of the market (that applies to pricing and time on market).
3. And to strengthen and broaden your marketing approaches to selling listings – especially everything having to do with the Internet.

As a Realtor® it is critically important that you understand that you must live and thrive in two worlds, the age 45 and under world and the world of people over age 45. The under 45 world is where the Internet dominates. By ignoring that world (not having a strong, impactful Internet marketing presence) you are cutting yourself off from a huge share of your market. Your listings will remain unsold for a longer period of time. Your sellers will become dissatisfied with your performance. Your income will suffer. So will your morale. It becomes a downward spiral.

The highest achievers in every industry market harder and more creatively in lean times. Adversity is the birth place of the next wave of success. Real Estate is no exception.

Independence day is fast approaching.

It’s time to get your July 4th greetings together. We thought we’d help by providing a demo for you to emulate. This year we thought we’d pay tribute to all of those on Flickr who willingly contribute their content via Creative Commons license.

If you’d like to use the same photos we used in this demo show, click here. This will download the folder of images in a zip file. Unzip that file and upload the photos inside the folder to your own Show.

These photos are licensed for commercial use, but ONLY if you give proper attribution to the photographers. You can do that by including reference to their names in your own Show. Copy and paste the “Flickr photography by” line below at the end of your own message in the description field of your Show.

Flickr photographs by: thedamian, longhorndave, gregt, fredoalvarez and niels_olson.

Have a safe and happy 4th of July!

The panoramic viewer has been part of RealEstateShows.com for some time now.

We are regularly asked, can you recommend a photo stitching program? I have been hesitant to do so. We pride ourselves on having the easiest to use tour product on the market. There is no way we’ll recommend a difficult to use product. And every photo stitching program I tested seemed too difficult for the average computer user to handle without frustration.

And then there is Autostitch.

I’ve known about the technology for a long time. But I lost track of it. It was in early development stages the first time I saw it.

A few weeks ago I looked at their site again and notice they had a free downloadable demo version for Windows, but more importantly, I saw that several very inexpensive applications had been built on their code. Autopano Pro ($119, Windows, Mac), Serif Panorama Plus ($49.99, Windows), and Calico ($39, Mac). I tested all three applications and the free demo version as well (which is fully functional with no watermarking). Except for a few bells and whistles, they all work on the exact same base code. They’re all brain dead simple. And they all yielded the exact same result. I chose Calico for my own personal use, because it was the least expensive of the three.

There is a more complete review of Autostitch on ActiveRain, but here are a few samples for you to view.

Here’s a shot with some tough tile floor lines. No manual involvement at all.

I don’t want to spend my time doing anything I don’t have to do. Every other stitching program I’ve tested has required some level of manual intervention in the process to get decent results. Not these three. The programs built on the Autostitch technology are truly automatic. There’s really only one step - click the stitch button.

Here is an example to show how it deals with wood flooring. I thought this would be a tough test, since there are lots of straight lines and I was, again, not shooting with a tripod. But as you can see, it nailed the myriad of straight lines in the wood floor.

And here is the detail on the floor. The program connected all of the straight lines with no input from me at all.

If you want to take advantage of our panoramic viewer and don’t currently have the ability to stitch photos, it wont’ get any simpler and it can’t get much cheaper.

The demo is free and whether it’s Windows for $49 or Mac for $39… it’s a no brainer. There’s nothing to learn. Upoad photos. It does the rest. And if you’re using a stitching software that isn’t this simple, you may want to give this more than a casual glance.