The Real Kate McCoy

The Real Kate McCoy

Hello, RTV providers!  My name is Kate McCoy.  I’m the owner of Just Kate real estate marketing located in the Dallas Ft. Worth Metroplex.  I decided to call it “Just Kate” because from my personal experiences.

I’ve seen quite a few real estate agents’ desks.  I could just picture them frantically trying to remember some off the wall company name I would have come up with while digging through that hot mess of an office and saying out loud, “I’ve got to call Kate” or telling someone, “You just need to call Kate and she will help you.”  Thus, a virtual tour company name was born.  I’ve now been in the virtual tour business a little over a year.  I’m an active, licensed TX residential REALTOR who also shoots Dallas Virtual Tours.  I specialize in putting homes on the market and getting them sold as quickly as possible for as high a price as possible.

Besides in house training from my broker I received my listing specialization certification from Howard Britton’s Star Power University.  During my hey-day of real estate, I quickly learned that I could easily spend all day every day in my office working on anything from creating a property flyer to posting the property for sale on various web outlets or I could make a break from my office to go measure and photograph a house.

It’s a vicious cycle that doesn’t really allow a REALTOR the time to truly be successful.  If they are in the office working on marketing their properties or out photographing properties, they are not out shaking hands and kissing babies to cultivate and get that brand new business.  The other thing that floated to the surface were all the companies with the loads of qualified people getting paid quite well to handle the aspects of marketing properties like flyer creation, search engine optimization and as we all know, virtual tour creation.

The day I was sitting in my office working on marketing for one particular agent and was asked simultaneously to help out two other agents each with their individual properties out of the goodness of my heart and all my spare time, I decided to bite the bullet and go into the virtual tour and property marketing business offering myself as a virtual assistant.

I can be any listing agent’s “Mini-Me.”  I’ve got a large brokerage that wants me to do it all so their process is streamlined and a new agents that want me to do everything because they just got their first listing and they have no idea where to start, but they know they want it sold fast and to look like they are an old pro at this real estate game.

Now I’ve got a new market I’m breaking into that I think you all could do well with, Accredited Home Staging Professionals.  You can find Accredited Home Staging Professionals all over the world by going to the Staged Homes website www.stagedhomes.com and looking for the IAHSP link, which stands for International Association of Home Staging Professionals.   In certain areas, there are also local chapters of these home stagers that have monthly meetings.  I personally took the course in 2007 and received my Accredited Staging Professional certification.  To keep my membership current, I pay both national and international dues as well as attend monthly education meetings and pay membership dues to my local chapter.  Within these local chapters, you will find the experience level of these women and men range from having never staged one home or business to staging a few to a staging a multitude.

One thing for sure is they are looking for a way to display their before and after photos and they are looking for a way to dominate the web.  Before I hit the scene, my group was primarily using Kodak gallery to promote their work.  As of Monday, our local chapter members are changing and we will be using RTV virtual tours to set up a single property website site directed to their gallery page.  What I put out there for these home stagers was to purchase a virtual tour comprised of a set of 10 before and after photos they provide.  Then they have a few properties under their name and their property gallery is well under way.

One big selling factor is that these home stagers can use our HTML deliverables and post their before & after photos right into their individual promotional page found on the StagedHomes.com website!  It’s uniform, it looks great and the number one selling factor is it is affordable.  Several members told me this took a lot of pressure off having to purchase a website to promote their work.  There is now even a week dedicated to home staging to make a difference in service centers of charitable organizations called World Wide Staging Week http://www.iahsp.com/worldwidestaging/.  Volunteering your time within these groups to help promote their cause through photography is a way you may be able to get your foot in the door and you will feel good about yourself when you see the positive impact a home staging facelift on these service centers makes.

Hopefully, this will be an easy sell for you all and open up some new virtual tour business and possibly some new opportunities for you to extend your skills for the greater good.  I’m happy to answer any questions I’m able to about the organization of Accredited Home Staging Professionals and Staged Homes.com you send my way.  Shoot me an email anytime:  kate(at)just-kate.com.  All my best –

Kate McCoy

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