Episode 297 – Alex Montalenti, Co-founder and CRO, Real Grader

Episode Summary:

I am thrilled to introduce today's guest, Alex Montalenti, the Co-Founder and CRO of Real Grader, a tool that helps agents with their social presence online.

In this episode, I sit with Alex, a native of Long Island, and he emphasizes the importance and roles of having a substantial online social presence in Real Estate today. He also shares different modalities to achieve this and the work his company does for agents and brokers to achieve the same result.

Top Takeaways:

"If you go deep on the content, you can win."

- [Alex Montalenti]

"Most Realtors don't realize that just optimizing your team name isn't going to do the trick because I don't know your team until I meet you; I know you, so I'll google you."

- [Alex Montalenti]

"70% of realtors are not on Google business."

- [Alex Montalenti]

Episode Highlights:

[00:21] Intro

[00:51] Meet today's guest, Alex Montalenti.

[02:04] About Alex's backstory.

[04:18] How Alex got into Real Estate

[10:50] Alex talks about his time working with SEO.

[12:35] About Real Grader

[18:34] What are the basic things that a realtor with technology should get done?

[20:56] Why Tik-Tok is an excellent tool for realtors.

[23:18] What should we anticipate on the horizon?

[27:05] Alex's advice to new agents

[28:18] Outro

Episode Notes:

Long Island is quite a long island but still a lovely place to live with a name that fits the description. Although Alex's mum came from Romania while his Dad came from Italy, they settled in the US, with Alex going into a career that combines his parents' jobs, who were into technology/website design and Real Estate.

Alex had started as a model in childhood but also had an immense sense of entrepreneurship, with no plans to work a typical "9-5" job. After a few classes at the University of Vermont with hopes to become a doctor, Alex changed his mind and moved to business school instead. He later got innovative, building websites and an online food delivery system for students. However, Alex notes that this innovation might have been too early for the world at the time. He had started helping his mom, who was into real estate, with closing big commercial deals and realized he could help others and brokers. He then moved on to using websites to automate the process through Website and Marketing.

A key strategy for being on page one in SEO is going very deep into the website's content.

About Real Grader: The initial idea was to create a scoring platform to give an online score to agents and brokers on how well they are doing with their online social presence, with recommendations on improving techniques. However, with the poor performance of most brokers who preferred to have the work on improvement done for them, the idea evolved into a digital optimization service to optimize these websites on all platforms. Particular platforms real estate agents need to be well represented on, including Google, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Zillow, Homes.com, and Realtor.com. Notably, the importance of Google as it has evolved over the years cannot be overemphasized.

Realtors need to do basic things with technology: Realtors need to have their Google business page created, with names of all team leaders and the sole properties. Also, the bio and reviews on that page are essential. YouTube is another grossly underused website for real estate agents.

Alex explains that Tik-Tok is a unique platform because of the wide range of video editing tools. It is also the fastest-growing platform and can quickly get more views or grow accounts on other media. Realtors can leverage the trends on Tik-Tok by using trending songs as a background to showcase a listing that will get more views. Other tools that can be used include Canva and Go Pro Quik.

Something we need to think about is where Google is going. An example is Google Local, where listed businesses get favored by the main Google algorithm. There is also a new Google phone service to track leads and responses of realtors or companies in general, which helps rank higher on Google local. If Google is trying to provide reliable results, they would instead bring up agents that have shown reliability and good response time.

Get yourself set up online for new agents because that's the first place people will check you out. You can even get ahead of experienced agents who haven't taken care of their online presence. Contact Alex via email. Instagram.

Resources Mentioned:

Connect:

Find | THE REAL ESTATE SESSIONS

At TheRealEstateSessions.com

Find | Bill Risser

At bill.risser@ratemyagent.com

On Twitter

On Facebook

On YouTube

Find | Alex Montalenti

At hello@realgrader.com

On Instagram - @alex.montalenti