Archive for the ‘Real Estate Web Design’ Category

With the sluggishness of the economy dragging on, the opportunity that the real estate rental market offers is being taken up by real estate agents.

It is estimated that by 2015 home ownership will drop to the level that it was towards the end of the 1960′s. In this time 10,000,000 homeowners will become real estate renters.

This represents both a loss of units in real estate sales inventory but also an increase in the number of rental transactions.

Getting into the rental real estate market has been seen in the past as being an opportunity to catch the first time home buyer while they are still tennants and also as a way to engage landlords with their services both in finding tennants and assisting in purchasing rental properties.

The real estate websites for real estate agent we are building are increasingly featuring rental sections or even dedicated rental real estate websites such as rentals in Princeton NJ and Westfield rentals.

 

 

We love WordPress. We’ve been integrating WordPress blogs into our niche focused community websites for a few years now. We’ve been able to style the blogs to match our websites design and we’ve just taken this to the next level.

We have now replicated the design and functionality of our hand coded sites and created a version of it using the WordPress platform. What you get is the the same customization, style, and functionality but now at a fraction of the cost of our hand coded sites.

We can still theme each site to suit your individuality. We create a custom tailored banner image, (which we give you to use in your offline marketing), if you can think of a color scheme you can have it and we’ll train you how to add all your content.

Our IDX feed integrates seamlessly into your site as well your niche focused jump searches.

The WordPress open framework allows you to add new sections, pages and posts whenever you are ready. If you get stuck, are are unsure of anything were are here with our ongoing support.

 

[Check out our live demo here ]

[Read more about it here]

(This is a post we meant to write a few months ago. )

.CO is a new domain name suffix. And it’s a good one, it may become a great one. There are many countries that use .co to denote business online. .co.uk for example is used in the UK for business websites.

We are not sure how readily .co’s will be used. Many are just being snapped up to add to the list of other ending versions people may already have, .net, .info etc . In those instances they may not ever really be used, choosing instead to promote their .com. However with any new suffix, the potential for new sites being built using them increases.

In those cases, the question really is, will it be regarded in a better light than .net, which has always been the poor cousin of .com

If your .com had gone, .net was the next best thing, or least worse, which of course is .biz

Today .com still holds top spot, but in 5 years who knows…

It may be that .co becomes widely used and adopted. If that’s the case you might want to pop along to your domain registrar and pick up the .co version of your domain names before your competition or a speculator does!

Buy the .co version of your domain today!!!

Ok, so first off. What is google analytics? Remember a website stats counter? That small line text on the bottom of webpages showing you how many visitors your site has had? Well it’s like that,…but on steroids!

Google analytics offers you an invaluable insight into your website’s performance. For example, when you send out a mailer, you can count the number of calls you get on your phone. But did it bring any more visitors to your website?

Which are your most popular pages on your website? Which are the least popular?
Which pages are the most common entrances to your site, which pages are the most common exit pages. Can you improve those?
Do you get more hits on your site from a postcard than a local newspaper ad?
Where did your visitors come from?
What keywords did they type in to find your site?

Google analytics answers these questions for you, and more.

Real estate website as a tool for your business

By tracking and analyzing this information, your website becomes a tool for understanding the effectiveness of your offline and online strategies.

If you can measure where and when you leads arrive you can begin to figure out where best your marketing $$$ are being spent. Say for example you were thinking about doing a series of offline marketing pieces. You where going to a regular postcard mailer, and an ad in a newspaper. By staggering the launch of each campaign, say by two weeks, and following the spike, or not, of hit on your site, you can compare the effectiveness of both methods.

Where are your are you visitors coming from?

Google analytics has this really nice pie chart that shows where visitors to your real estate website came from. They are all grouped into 3 categories: direct, referral, search engines.

Direct hits: these people came to your site by typing in it’s full domain into a browser. We can assume that they probably received an offline marketing piece, a post card, a mailer, a market update flier, a business card.
Referrals: these show the which websites feature a link to your website. These maybe self generated from your blogging, facebook, twitter account etc. Ideally they would be from other sites that link to you and your real estate website because they think you are fabulous!
Search engines: these show which hits came from search engines.

Ideally we like to see an even distribution between these 3 main sources.

Look out for the up coming “HOW TO…” on setting up analytics on your website.

The National Association of Realtors 2010 member survey suggest that their agents are becoming more tech savvy, and for those who are increasing their spend on their websites are getting returns!

56% of agents are now using a smart phone daily compared to 42% in 2009,  of which 66% were agents who had been in the business 2 years or less, compared with 48% usage for those with careers 16 years or more.

Social media, (twitter, facebook, etc) and  personal networking in general rocketed up to 51% in 2010 compared with 35% from 2009.

10% of agents reported having a blog (i wondering what % are actively blogging , 63% reported having a website, with a median of 3% of their business being reported coming from it.

Interestingly, agents who spent  $1000 or more to build & maintain on their site said that it generated 19% of their business.

Suggesting that simply ‘having  a website’ misses the mark by a long way. Agents who embrace the web and create a substantial and effective website site get significant returns.

This week marks the 25 anniversary of the first registered domain name, or dotcom, for mere mortals. Before then, the domain names were for government or educational use.  Since then, many, if not most domain names have been bought, sold, and expired a few times.

Anyone looking for that great domain name a few years ago would have had a hard time finding what they were looking for. Back in 2005 when the $$$ was flowing in real estate, there was a domain name land-grab.

Agents who were looking for a new domain name wouldn’t just buy one, they would buy 10.

Roll forward a few years, and when those bills from their domain name registrar each year, people are being more selective over the domain names they are actually using, versus the ones they meant to use, but didn’t really do anything with after all.

Were agents going to re-up their 10 domains for $100, or pay the cell phone bill?

They paid the phone bill.

What we are seeing now is opportunity. Whereas finding a great domain for your real estate website was a frustrating task a few years ago, it’s now fun again. There are some great domain names out there again.

Still not blogging? Well, we’re not going to rest until you are. Are you blogging, but not really sure why?

Here’s yet another reason why it is such a good thing. It might get a little geeky here, but we’ll insulate you from the worst of it.

Ok, on a fundamental level websites and blogs are typically constructed using different frameworks. This is essentially because historically speaking they have been built of different purposes.

The Typical Website Model

Generally speaking websites, at worst, are rather like pretty fleshed out yellow pages ads. A series of pages who’s content seldom changes, (disclaimer: this is not the approach we approve of ), how many times does a Contact Us, or About Us page really have to change. So whenever a page changes or new pages are added, its wise to update your sitemap.

In short, a sitemap is a file that features all the links to pages on your website. When you have an updated site map, you notify the search engines that it’s updated and at some point they’ll pop over to take a look.

There is often a delay, of days if not weeks for search engines to come by and check out the changes. Frustratingly there’s not much that can be done to encourage them to by any sooner.

The Blog Model

Blogs are about being current, what’s happening now, or what’s just happened. Their MO is to get news out there.

The whole point of news is that it’s…that’s right, NEW.

When you write a new blog post and hit ‘publish’ something amazing (you might have to be a geek to use ‘amazing’ in this context) happens. Hitting publish, not only publishes your content to your blog but, importantly it sends out a ‘ping’ to the search engines to notify them that some news has just been reported.

Newness is what search engines crave.

By writing content on your blog you are giving search engines what they are looking for. Is it starting to become clear?

The Difference is Remarkable

Whereas it can be days if not weeks for search engines to find your new page on your website, you can get them to see (or index) your new blog post in minutes, which is frankly, astounding. Simply give search engines what they want and be rewarded.

See For Yourself

The blog post you are reading was published to the web at 9.15am this morning. It’s now 9.25am and google has already indexed or seen the post and this can only help our relevance in search results… That took 7 minutes.

Most Realtors call us to complain that they can’t be found at search engines. I think we both know what you can do to change that.

We can help you design and configure your real estate blog and coach you in your blog-craft.

Inman news this morning reported that Move Inc, the operator of Realtor.com expects further revenue declines, and I for one am not surprised.

Of course, in this climate one could argue that revenue declines are hardly news, however perhaps this indicates something larger.

Having worked with real estate agents for the last 10 years we’re often asked our opinion of certain websites, or services that the our agents are being sold.

A year or so ago a company was seemingly going through the roster of every real estate office saying they could help agents lock down the keywords for the sponsored ads at google for a few hundred dollars a month. The odd thing was that company who was selling these things wasn’t google, which was a major red flag, and secondly they didn’t offer any transparency regarding hits, cost/click etc.

We received many calls from agents who felt if they missed this they were missing a once in a lifetime opportunity, (despite the fact that no one can lock down keywords, you just pay more than the other people are prepared to pay for the same keyword and you can always be at the top_.

We’ve also fielded many calls from agents thinking about Realtor.com, should they upgrade to such and such a product, should they join, they’d like us to design them a banner ad for their zip, etc.

Now, we wholeheartedly agree with the mantra that every small business should try new things if common sense suggests their might be some gain in doing so. However, we don’t know a single agent who subscribed for more than one billing round of an extended/or add on product. That’s not to say they don’t exist, as I am sure they do, but we haven’t talked to them, and the numbers coming out of the company suggest that may not be far from a wider truth.

My Dad Always Said, “You Can’t Go Wrong With (virtual) Bricks & Mortar”

Ok, so i added the word ‘virtual’ there, but this what i mean. You can conceivably spend a few thousand dollars on a banner ad campaign for a zip or two which runs for 6 months or a year or whatever.

Ask, yourself this, how many times have you clicked on a banner ad? And, if you did, did you buy the service or product?

Once you have paid for this, and perhaps didn’t get the return on your investment what do you have to show for it, other than a piece of artwork shaped like a bookmark in your ‘My Pictures” file. And that’s just it, agents are spending thousands for try out, once they don’t want it, they have nothing to show for it.

If those thousands of dollars had been used to create a niche focussed real estate website it remains. Your next advertising spend continues to promote your storefront.

Buyers Are So…Promiscuous…

On a more fundamental level the problem with Realtor.com is that of buyer promiscuity. Once they have seen your listing, they are off to the next, and then the next. If you have more than one listing where they are looking the odds are, at best marginally better, but not much. The main issue is that at Realtor.com you do not control the inventory.

We were talking with an agent this week about a proposed website and they were eager for us to link to Realtor.com . This is the last thing you want to do. It’s like sending them to the homepage of your local MLS in the public section and say, “Go find a home, ooh and when you find one, don’t call that agent who’s name is on the listing, call me”…good luck with that.

Controlling The Inventory

Sounds hard huh? How do you control the inventory? Easy, IDX.

Let’s face it no one cares about your listings, well a few people do, the home owner, you do, your manager does, …who am I missing? I think that’s it… So once buyers see it, rejects it you better have everyone else’s listing displayed on your site for them, which of course you do through IDX.

At Realtor.com it’s always been about your listings, and of course how nice to sell ones own, however normally…

your listings probably don’t comprehensively represent the real estate market in your town…oh, and that reminds me, that’s what people are looking for.

Make sure your IDX website does.

As we trawl the ever expanding sea of real estate marketing information we often see statements such as the title above.

We think this is to misunderstand marketing on a number of levels.

Firstly this statement is simply too adversarial. As if it’s binary, either, or.

Once you have your real estate website, and it has arrived at the first page of a search engine for key words it was designed for, (you did remember to do that bit right?), it can be easy for agents to think that they simply need to sit back and wait for the leads to come in. Hopefully that will happen.

However, these leads will only come in from those people who THINK to go to a search engine to look for this type of information online. We all know people who would not think of doing this as the informational-gathering-starting point. If you visit a home and they still have yellow-pages lying around, that may tell you something about where they look for information.

For those ‘offline people’, (hello  mum), they require offline marketing to tell them that this resource exists. Don’t ignore them.

Vanessa Fox, formerly of google and Zillow says that perhaps as much as 67% of all search comes from offline channels. That means the hard copy you are sending out.

The best results we see are when both offline and online marketing are engaged in an innovative, harmonious and collaborative way. I think if the question is rephrased to:

Traditional offline and online marketing

VS

Innovative offline and online marketing

I think the distinction is clearer.

So what is, Innovative Offline Real Estate Marketing? Our friend Josh Wilton, Manager of Weichert Princeton, is really leading the charge in helping his agents re-imagine what offline marketing should be.

The age of the ‘static’ one dimensional direct mail piece is dead and never to return. By the time your ‘Just Listed’ card or ‘Just Sold’ card hits the neighborhood it is old news. The customer has already received 10 different auto-emails from competing agents and your card is an antique. Instead think of your direct mail as a commercial for your website. If you sending a ‘Just Listed’ card, have your website promoted more heavily than the house itself. For example one 1000 piece mailing that promoted a website generated 4100 ‘requests’ on that website within 10 days! You basically double the impact of your direct mail campaign. Josh Wilton, Weichert Princeton.

We couldn’t agree more.

The “Just Listed” is useful to two people, the agent, who is promoting themselves, and the seller who sees a glossy picture of their home, and doesn’t realize the agent is promoting themselves.

The problem is for other 998 recipients, they could care less about either. They are interested in

1. what’s currently for sale in their town
2. what sold
3. their home’s value,

If your mailing doesn’t address what your audience wants to read you might be better off not simply going through the motions.

Much like home ownership and the seemingly never ending list of projects, websites as well, are never really finished. There’s always another room to paint, something to tweak, or an addition to ponder.

Sure, at some point the initial build out of a website is completed but really that can just be the end of the beginning. Why, well search results are living, moving organism. There are always new sites coming along nipping at your toes.

This also makes your real estate website’s relative position within those results contextual.

What on earth does that mean? We’ll, the relevance of your website’s when matched against keywords typed into search engines is only part of the picture. Search engines also look at the other sites, and their respective contents to see where you site appears among them.

This means that things can change. Hopefully the changes are in the upward direction! Our feeling at limeyboy is to try and keep our agents ahead of these changes, rather than trying to respond to them after the fact.

One example of working with content to create improvement would be on Victor Dedvukaj’s site for Rye NY real estate. We were spending sometime doing our rounds of SEO, and saw that there was a trend of searches for waterfront homes.

We suggested to Victor that we cater for this demand on his website and now his site is on the first page of google for this niche market.