Archive for the ‘Real Estate Web Design’ Category

We at limeyboy are big BIG fans of the real estate agents we work with blogging. Why? Simple, search engines love them.

However we hear too often, and understand, that real estate agents simply don’t have the time to sit by their computer to write.

With a smart phone and a wordpress app installed you can now do it from anywhere. Like this is being done from my car now!

Real Estate Blogging Schedule.

Having been helping real estate agents with technology for the last 10 years, we know that if we suggest anything too time demanding it simply won’t get done. Actually this is something we are entirely in favor of. Your job is to sell real estate, not become a geek. That’s our job!

Therefore, our mantra to our blogging real estate agents is, write a little, and write often..

How little, look at this post. How long did it take. 5 minutes.

Bernice Ross, CEP of Real Estate Coach said it perfectly today in her article at Inman:

People who visit your Web site are searching for three primary categories of information. They want to know what is for sale, how much their home is worth, and what’s happening in their local market. Make sure these links are prominently displayed on your home page. You can add other data, but avoid cluttering your home page with too much irrelevant content.

We couldn’t agree more. We see many attempts to create real estate websites online, and the ‘everything but the kitchen sink’ method seldom creates an effect lead conversion tool.

Jill Southren has just launched her website, www.randolph-real-estate.com . Jill, an agent in Randolph NJ’s Weichert office, was determined to offer buyers and sellers the best, one stop website for their real estate needs online.

From Jill’s site, buyers can search every home listed for sale in Randolph, search new listings which are less that one week old, create their own custom searches and sign up to receive new listings by email.

Sellers can get an estimate value of their Randolph homes current market worth. Jill keeps residents up to date with real estate news in town with her blog and facebook page.

So you have your website, your blog, your twitter account all nicely focused on the day job, then there’s the facebook account.

Tagged photos of you tagged a hundred years ago at school, vacation photos, you name it. The only thing that links this disparate kernels of you-ness is that you can’t really control them. Scary!

This is where the facebook business page come in. It’s your chance for a do-over.

A facebook business page is the clean sheet if you like. You set one up, then select, carefully, from your ‘friends’ list who you want to be a ‘fan’ of this page. From there you can start again. You are in efffect the editor, the admin.

Until recently the facebook business page, and the regular ‘person?’ page were very similar. But recently facebook has enabled business pagers to add customized content. It’s in it’s infancy, and as a consequence fairly basic however, it’s is a great improvement on…er…nothing.

See an example of our custom facebook business page.

At www.limeyboy.com we can help you integrate the look and feel and some of the functionality of your existing website, blog and twitter feed into your business page with our facebook custom business page design service.

Contact us today

We look at countless pages of real estate search results. As soon as we speak with a new real estate agent about a website for their real estate business, we go straight to google. Once there, we type in the key search terms that the agent has expressed interest in being among, and see who’s showing up.

Normally, we see very few single agent websites on the first page of google. More common is page filled with 10 broker sites: trulia, zillow, homes.com, realtor.com, weichert etc etc.

However, we occasionally see what we would term as the “ubiquitous agent”…the agent that seems to show up endlessly, across many town based real estate searches. Interestingly we feedback our results to the agents we are working with in a particular town, and share the name of the ubiquitous agent, we invariably hear, “that agent sells nothing”, or “he hasn’t sold a home all year”.

Firstly, we would commend any agent who has independently got to the first page of google. We know, it’s a great achievement. However the truth of the matter is that they have become web-developers or addicted bloggers themselves. They generate huge amount of relevant local content that the search engines eat up. What they have forgotten to do, is sell real estate.

It’s certainly an easy trap to fall into…

Blogging about real estate, looks like work, feels like work, but doesn’t pay the bills.

As every successful real estate agent knows, you have to meet with people face to face, get them in your car and close them to make money.

Our real estate agent websites enable agents to get to the first page of the major search engines with minimal demands on their time. This means you can spend your time making money, and we’ll keep you up on the first page of google!

We seem to be spending a lot of time talking to Realtors in Starbucks about real estate websites. It certainly works for us, we get there early, fire up the Mac book Air, sign into our google docs and work away productively until our appointment arrives.

The agents we meet with have typically either found our sites online, or have been referred to us by our other clients, usually, but not always in a non competing town! It seems that results speak for themselves.

We start by explaining that showing up in search engines is something that was predetermined from the start.

You have to know where you want show up specifically, in order to get to achieve it. You also have to be realistic about which searches you have a likelihood of showing up in.

Being realistic at the beginning of a project is much more likely to yield positive results at the end of a project. An individual agent website can only realistically show up well in a limited geographical area. Deciding on that core geographical area at the start is key to showing up well in those search results.

We’ve been huge encouragers of our agents blogging. However we always think its imporant to get some level of commitment from the agent, that they will be able to post at least once per week. An empty blog is both an underwhelming experience and potentially undermining of the website that linked to it. 

 

More would be great, but only if something that merits posting comes up. Blogging, simply for the sake of it, is as painful to read as it is to write.

So we’ve been setting up our agents with blogs for some time now and then following up with both initial training, talking about what makes a good post, and then how to create content thats both compelling from a human and algorythmic perspective.

If the blog’s out of date, how do we know the sold listing data is current?

What we’ve always felt has been lacking somewhat is the visual and link between the blog and the website. This transition can all too often feel somewhat disconnected and clunky. Well, that’s recently changed as we’ve begun to develop our own real estate wordpress themes. Our latest can be seen here.

We spend a lot of time talking to real estate agents about either the website they want to build, or improving the website they have already. We expect that when we are having these conversations they will be cross referencing what we are say with what they have heard from other companies.

With an ever growing array of tools and gizmos available for inclusion in their real estate website we see that its tough for the agents to keep goal focussed during this period.

Our advice, which superceeds all other factors is that your website will show up in the search results you want it to show up in. Simple.

We see far too many ‘beautiful’ websites that can’t be found. We believe that being found is the most critical factor to a successful website. If your site, cannot be found, it doesnt matter how good it is, when you’re visitor are there… because they wont be!

When choosing a real estate website design company tell them, that at the top of your list is being found in which particular searches. You want to see examples of their work that have got their clients to the top of the search engines. You want to speak to those clients to hear that it is indeed happening.

From time to time we are asked by an agent to look at their exisitng website and give our opinion of it. This happened this morning. A day earlier we had been sent the website to take a look at. On face value it seemed to us to be the kind of standard fair. Namely, a lack of focus both in the content and structure of the website, lack of volume of content, and the only evidence of homes was the agents past sales and manually uploaded currently listings…oh yes, and no IDX.

However, we’ve seen this kind of thing many times before. Also the website wasnt bad looking. It wasnt great, but we’ve seen a lot worse…many times. So the agent called and said that they had the website for ‘a while’ and was getting frustrated. So they had called the vendor, and asked if they could start to work on improving its position.

To which they were told it would be very difficult to do as its very competitive, and time would be charged at $195/hr. That figure caught our attention, we asked what other fees are associated with the website? The agent was paying, just for hosting almost $2000/year, a simply astounding figure for a website who’s primary short-coming was a lack of content. They were shocked by our shock. We suggested they check out the basic hosting plan from godaddy, $4.99/month. We asked the agent how the figure was being justified, as the agent had to pay for any monthly edits or changes at the same $195/hr rate in addition. The vendor told them that there website was being hosted on it’s ‘own server’.

So, with a degree of trepidation, we inquired what they paid for their 12 pages. $20,000.

$20,000 for a website that is invisible to search engines.