Essential Items Your (Real Estate) Website Should Have

I've been asked often by colleagues (mostly the older ones) from the industry on what essential things their websites (or planned websites) should have in order to be successful in getting buyers interested with their listings. I always get surprised by these queries as I am not exactly the techie type though I do have several years experience with using the internet to sell properties than most of them. In any case, I share few useful pointers even if I ended explaining to them what those meant as a huge majority of them don't even know what SEO means.

So here's my short list of tips which is not really everything (to be more accurate about it, there tons of very useful and free stuff & tutorials out there on the web) but at least will give them the proper mindset:


1. Search Engine Friendly / Easy To Search - make your site easy for search engines to index. More than 90% of all property searches starts with search engines and unless google or yahoo or bing can easily find your site and make it to a searcher's query, your site might as well be considered as non existent.


2.) Photos - People who visit a site are looking for listings, properties, reviews. Unless you have relevant & nice photos, don't ever expect people to get excited about your listings. You can load pictures directly to your site or have them hosted on a photo sharing sites such as Flickr, Picasa & Multiply and free real estate advert sites just use the photo links to have them appear on your site or blog (see sample below from Ahyer.com):

3.) Complete Property Information - At the very least your site must have basic information of the house or property such as: exact location or address, no. of bedrooms, T&B, Lot & floor area, date constructed (for house), price (if possible), etc.

4.) Information / Inquiry Capture Mechanism - Whats the point of getting people pumped up with your hot offer when they don't have the means to contact you. Email address, telephone numbers, office address (if any) are very vital. You can easily get contact data by inserting a web form either for your newsletters or property inquiries. Just be sure to tell your visitors that you will not under any circumstance, sell or rent out their email address. If you hate spam, so do your visitors.

5.) Analytics - How do you know your marketing is working or not? The only way to do that is to have stats so you can measure your marketing success or failure. You don't have to cough out serious money for this as awesome tools such as Google Analytics are free! All you have to do is create an account.

6.) Videos - Pictures are nice but videos can do much much more. Videos engage viewers more than still photos. It also presents the property in a more realistic light which can enhance your credibility as well confirm to out of town prospects that your listings are real .
 
If you don't have one or some of these features, I highly recommend you add these to your site as you may be missing out a lot of potential property buyers. As mentioned earlier, there are a lot free stuff out there in the internet and all you have to is to use your trusty search engine to find these tools.

Now if you want something serious, you can also consider investing powerful systems such as 1 Buiness System. I bought & using one myself. This website system has a great package that you may need to set up a powerful real estate site as it's a complete suite. It has:

• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system which allows you to management existing & new leads & customers. It tracks and even records all their interactions with your site. Pretty cool huh?
• A very easy to use Content Management System (CMS) which basically the ability to update your site with new content/information, photos, videos or new pages. You don't need to be a programmer or have code skills to do this. If you know how to use MS Word and other word processing application, you are good to go!
• Forums & Blogs - you can create as many blogs and forums as you want! Real estate clients have specific needs and wants & the key to success (as you have already known) in real estate is about communication, interaction and conversation. What could be more cool than to create a forum and blog for your clients so they can have a voice? :)
• Email Marketing Campaigns - You can launch highly targeted email campaigns to your existing clients & prospects on your email list!
• Search Engine Friendly features - I am no SEO expert but it has lots of stuff that you can tweak &  making it easy for the search engines to index your content and real estate listings
• Other features that you may or may not need: Ecommerce (sell stuff online such as real estate training ebooks), Analytics (you need this!), etc.

       To see if this system is for you, why not take this baby out for a spin at 1 Business System.com. Try out all the features (after all, its free so why not make good use of it) and see if it meets your needs. You can unleash your creativity here.


      If you have other ideas to grow this list of real estate website tips, please post a comment.

How To Build Your Own Online Real Estate Business Without Programming Knowledge Part 1

I'm trying out a free 30-day trial service from a site called ezprofitresults which allows me to create a fully functional web site for my real estate agency CNP Properties though from its features, it can be called a total online business as it not only creates a site but also other funcationalities needed conduct moden online business transactions such as blogs, forums, e-commerce and a host of other cool stuff.

What I really like about this service so far is that I was able to choose from a lot great templates they have on stock and build the site from ground up. And although I have yet to try the other features of the service, I am attracted to the ease of use, something similar to like creating posts for a blog.

Here's what the template I choose looked like:

Old School Web
I started to use the internet to promote real estate back in the 1990s using the Geocities.com free service. I named the site, Visayas Property Link. At that time I believe (correct me if I'm wrong) Geocities was already part of the Yahoo network which made it convenient for me to just sign in using my yahoo id, which btw I still use until now.

At that time, the purpose for that site was to post pictures, content and other data on Manville Royale and other Bacolod properties for sale. I didn't want to put up that site but I got so tired attaching those files to my client emails (it was all dial up then) which prompted me to post all the infos.

The one thing I really liked about geocities was that it was so easy to use. It was like using Word or Power Point where you just compose your message, add photos, links and you have a brochure-type site running in no time. If you want to add new pages, you just click add a new page and do the usual stuff and link it to the main page or index. Btw, the screen shot on the left shows that my geocities site looked like as I retrieved it from archives.org.

That site really helped & got me regular monthly streams of leads and sales. Back when everybody was trying to learn email and discover the internet, I was already spending hours and hours a day developing and posting content to the site so much as that it ranked high up in yahoo's search engines (no, google then in the late 90s and early 2000s). As time passed, I added more and more pages for Iloilo and Cebu properties which got me more sales from the leads generated. Many of those buyers who bought their propeties from me ended up being my life long friends who I still communicate to this very day

Of course, there are a lot of downsides. First, you cannot expect your site to be really professional looking  with just the simple functions and options unless you really take time (which I don't have as I am busy selling houses and other properties) to learn tricks and other neat stuff. Second, there are the usual problems with free sites. You remain at the mercy of the owner who might one day give up the service and bring down your entire internet business down crashing.

Which is what happened to geocities. When geocities decided to fold up, along with it my valuable data and as well as my steady stream of leads and property inquiries.

Although geocities made the announcement months before the scheduled closing, I hardly had time to prepare on what to do as I was already getting ready to move and strike out on my own.

To keep my online presence, I tried new property website advert sites starting to profilerate around the web and so far, the results have been fairly ok. I would personally recommend sites such as : Sulit.com.ph, Bahay.ph, iproperty.com and Ahyer.com.

New generation sites: web 2.0 for real estate

However, despite effectivity of these free advert sites, it doesn't change the fact that its about time I needed a real deal site and not just any website. With the presence of so many web services that allow people to share information and particpate in forming new information on real estate, I knew I have to come up with something that would allow me to:

1. access analytics data (no. of visitors, from where, etc.)
2. keep track of my leads that come in through my web site inquiry form
3. launch email marketing campaigns
4. create a blog
5. build a forum for discussions
6. manage and update my site easily without going to a webmaster or developer to do it for me.

Thus I scoured the web for services that allow me to do so and there are a lot of those available. You have applications such as Wix, google sites among others but again, what I needed was a more updated system that would allow me to converse with customers and house my daily selling activities such as emails, monitor my agents output and inputs, etc.

Ezprofitresults looks promising but I will still test it further and post more updates very soon.