Free Open Source Real Estate Agent Websites
Posted by pete quinlan on Aug 30, 2007
Incredible Agent has released a free open source real estate agent website solution. If you are unfamiliar with the term, open source allows users/programmers to view the source code and make changes to fit their needs. Once the code changes are validated by incredible agent engineers the new code, or plug in, will be placed in a library on the Incredible Agent web site for everyone to use. Incredible Agent seems to have thought most of this through pretty well, and with the aid of users should get this software to a good place. The IDX search portion and design themes need a bit of work, but they have integrated blogs, video and maps quite well. The backend is really easy to use and the pay version offers a pretty nice CRM solution. If you are willing to part with $75 a month you get quite a bit more in the way of IDX, lead management and drip campaigns. If you are looking for just the basics, the free version should do the trick, and with open source there should be many upgrades to come.
[tags]Word Press, Technorati, SimpleTags[/tags]
10 Dont’s On Your Real Estate Agent Website
Posted by acehain on Aug 27, 2007
Recently the Geekestateblog posted about forty tips for your real estate website . I would make some additions or changes …but it’s excellent. I have tried to add things but I am having difficulty, it is really thorough and well thought out. Perhaps I can suggest 10 things not to do to your Real Estate Agent Website.
1. Don’t expect your site to generate traffic without any marketing. Having a website is like having a store. It’s one way for people to find you and see what products you are selling and is a way for them to see who you are as a service provider firsthand. You can have the most excellent and amazing store in the world but if you don’t have anyone coming in — guess what, you’re not going to sell anything — not even yourself. A website is there to provide the information and to represent your business and you’ve got to complete the circle by marketing it and drawing people to it.
2. Don’t waste your money on an elaborate flash intro, or any intro. Flash can take a long time to load depending on your internet connection and can severely damper the experience of someone browsing your site. Don’t get me wrong, having nice big photos fade in and out and seeing pictures move around is great — but not if I have to wait for it. Also remember that if you’ve got a flash intro that’s more than 5 seconds long, NOBODY is going to stick around and watch the entire thing… well maybe they will — once. After that, they’re going to want to jump straight into the goods — your listings, your MLS and your services. If you do decide to have an intro, keep it short, clean and small enough that you leave room enough for other information to be seen on your site. One tip is to also make sure that the navigation links on your homepage is visible even if your screen is set to 600 x 800 resolution. You’re going to want people to be able to access the other pages of the site straight away.
3. Don’t copy content form another webiste, unless it’s aquote or a link and you give them credit. First of all it’s illegal. It makes you look like a fool if you don’t give credit to where it’s due. Second, search engines can find this stuff, very easily. If they spot that you’ve copied from another site — the punishment’s pretty severe. Sort of like being caned, in a search engine kind of way.
4. Don’t use frames. A frame is essentially another website that is ‘framed’ within yours. One way to know whether a webpage has framed content or not is the presence and location of a scrollbar. If the only scrollbar is at the very edge of your browser window and, as you scroll down the top part of the web page is left at the top of the browser window — then your page is not framed. If you find more than one scrollbar in the window, then you might have a framed page. There are a couple of ways to frame in a website. You can add the frame below the banner area of the page such that, as you scroll down, the banner remains visible at the top of the window even if you’re at the bottom of the page. You can also frame in the left navigation of the website (if applicable) such that, as you scroll down the page, the left navigation remains constant and unmoving. The problem with framing is that spiders and bots do not crawl the data within the frame.
5. Don’t embed music. First off, it bogs down the load time of the page as your browser first has to load all the elements of the page, the photos, borders, backgrounds, text, etc — as well as the music. If you’ve got a big music file in there, you may have issues with page load times. Also, musical tastes vary and what works for one type of client may serve to insult or bore another. One of the problems that I had noticed with a lot of my previous clients is that they often chose music that was slow and somewhat dramatic. As a consumer browsing their website, that annoyed me. Also, when you embed music to a certain page on the site, remember that it reloads every time you visit and re-visit that page. What that means is that at some point, it will get annoying. If you must insist on having music, make sure that there are controls to stop or decrease the volume of the music.
6. Don’t spend all of you budget on a site and leave nothing for marketing. I cannot begin to stress how much this happens — agents will spend every last penny of their marketing budget in order to have a top-of-the-line website… which nobody will find. If you are going to build a website, remember that your web provider should ALWAYS allow you to scale up or upgrade it down the road. This will enable you to build a modest website with the key features you need it to have, and still have enough of a budget left for people to find it and for it to generate more business for you. Once more business has come in, then you can start adding-on more bells and whistles. A website doesn’t sell people — it’s a properly marketed website that does.
7. Don’t, not have a blog??!!?. The key to getting ranked on search engines organically is by having unique and relevant content. Having a blog gives you the ability to add content to your site at any time. Just remember to use it. I have seen a lot of my former clients purchase blogs and expect it to magically increase their rankings automatically — but no dice. A blog is a tool to post relevant and unique info on your site… that means, YOU (or your assistant) has to do the work and write something unique and relevant.
8. Don’t have all of your title tags the same. Title tags are one of the most effective ways to optimize your website for search engines. They appear at the very top of your browser and tell you something about the webpage you’re viewing. The tag should describe your page and be in line with the content, description and theme for each page.
9. Don’t ignore your Communities Section. Most real estate websites have a section that allows you to post pages of information to talk about the areas they service. It’s a great place to provide a personal insight on the city as well as to show people that you are familiar with your neighborhood. While this involves a lot of work, it can be really fun and need not be done all in one go. I often recommend my clients to post at least one new page a week. They can break down the information on a city or neighborhood into the following: Demographics, School Information, Things to do in the area, Things for your kids to do in the area, Places to see, The local market — property values in the market (for investors), and Local Dining. I have always recommended to my clients that they should build their website such that a person who has just bought a house should want to come back to the site and be able to take more information from it as well as a person living in the are and not even looking to buy or sell a house. Build a site that is rich in content that people will use as a local resource. It will do wonders.
10. Don’t focus too much on the looks as opposed to the content. Function over fashion folks — a great looking site will definitely turn heads but once you get inside it, if it doesn’t have anything relevant then it’s just another pretty face. The key is to build a modestly-designed site, great looking enough to draw people in but more importantly, with enough features and content to continuously draw the attention of people and search engines. Have a blog, have a local events page, have a ton of community pages, have a lot of great information on your site about the market, the area and any relevant investment news.
What is the role of corporate real estate websites?
Posted by pete quinlan on Aug 23, 2007
What is the role of corporate real estate websites? That’s an interesting question. I bet you would get a different answers if you asked an agent and someone at the corporate office. I think agents have general mistrust or apprehension when discussing the corporate website. I know that John L Scott is doing everything they can to make the corporate site assist agents. I would guess that it is no different at other major real estate companies. In fact every time I make a suggestion as to how I think the site can be better, I am met with the same question…How will this benefit the agents? I fear that my company and other companies have similar philosophies but the agents either don’t believe it or don’t see that the site is working on their behalf. However, if I put myself in the role of the agent I can see how this view might be skewed. Agents are independent business owners for the most part and if a corporate website provides a lead for one agent, and not another than I can see how the corporate site my be regarded as useless. It seems that a majority of the agents don’t benefit directly from the corporate site with regards to leads. I spoke with an agent from a competing site recently and he asked for some advice in regards to his blog and how he could rank better in his specific area. I gave him some tips and in the end, he told me that he hoped my company kicked his company’s ass in rankings for top placement. I thought that was an odd thing to say about your company. Perhaps you would get a more positive response from an agent that is involved in internet programs with corporate. Maybe you should ask your company if they have some program for getting leads to agents and how you can get involved. It might take some time but you never know!
Overall, the company website is there:
1. To promote the company. To basically represent the company as a whole on the internet. This is the hub of operations for anything that has to do with the company — as for franchises… it serves as a representation of the branch.
2. To promote the agents. Typically an office website should have an agents roster that showcases the agents in the company — a short bio and most importantly, contact information for all the agents. One key thing to remember here is that the typical company will provide equal coverage for each agent, though there are companies who may give top billing to their best-of-the-best.
3. To enable users to search for properties. The company site is also a depot of all the property listings of all the agents within the company.
Keeping those 3 things in mind, it’s quite understandable why the typical corporate website is viewed as somewhat useless to the agent — it’s there to promote everyone and not the agent personally above all else. That’s why, as an agent — you should never just rely on your corporate website and not do your own marketing. It’s always advisable, especially in this competitive day and age — to market yourself at every opportunity you can get. Which is why agents need their own websites. It not only allows the agents to distinguish themselves from the pack — but also provides the opportunity to provide more personalized service and a more ‘human/personal’ touch to their clients. It gives you a look at how and what you’d expect with working with that agent.
Going back to the role of corporate sites though — as mentioned above, it’s still important for corporate to help the agents. But how to do it is the question. Not everyone has the budget of John L. Scott for their website and may not have the resources to develop add-ons or plug-ins for their agents’ websites. Still, the corporate site should serve to help funnel traffic to the agents where possible. Some of the better corporate sites I’ve seen allow you to search a geographic area for a property then provide you with the list of agents who serve that area — very well timed so that you don’t get to the agents yet and are able to look at the area first.
One project I was working on last year involved building about 9 websites total: 1 Corporate website and 8 branch/office websites. It was a pretty big yet simple project (over $30k) that was a combination of lead generation and targeted marketing that was set up in the following manner:
CORPORATE WEBSITE - this was geared to showcase the offices, property listings and agents in the company (totalling about 120 agents). Marketing for this site was to be done on a global scale — basically driving traffic to the region where they did business and then funneling those down to the offices. It would basically target anyone wanting to move to maybe California, Nevada, or Oregon then the leads would be distributed to the specific branches - - L.A., San Francisco, Las Vegas, Portland, etc…
OFFICE/BRANCH WEBSITE - this was geared more for marketing the community or area where the branch was as well as the agents in that office. Marketing was geared more towards the area — for people who wanted to relocate to that specific city. For example, the Los Angeles branch website would be all about L.A. and would specifically target relocation to L.A. It had its own marketing and lead generation that was then divvied up among the agents in the office.
For each agent, we also recommended that they not rely on just this but were also encouraged to do their own marketing via their own websites.
In closing, corporate websites are there to represent the company. It rarely revolves around the agents except for the smaller companies or brokerages because it has to weather the coming-and-going of agents within the company. For the bigger and more resource-laden companies, they will usually devote a bigger budget towards marketing and providing tools for their agents. One thing remains constant however — and that is that the corporate website should also be there to market and provide leads and business to its agents.
Coolest Guy in Washington
Posted by pete quinlan on Aug 23, 2007
Coolest Guy in Washington
Every once in a while SEOs have contests to see who can rank the highest quickest for certain keywords. I have a had a lot of success ranking established sites but have never started something from scratch….so I thought I would try and rank for the keywords “Coolest Guy in Washington”. I will basically optimize this page and get some links to this page and see how quickly I can rank. Currently the site is just a few days old and I am probably not even ranking for the domain yet, but let’s see what happens to the Coolest Guy in Washington. The mere fact that I am doing this should be proof that I am not the coolest guy in Washington!
Tricks to get your website on the first page of Google
Posted by pete quinlan on Aug 23, 2007
There are none….not now, not ever. The only way to get to the top ranking on the search engines is by optimizing your website properly, researching your competition and understanding your market. You can figure it out yourself or hire someone to do it. If you hire someone, that opens another can of worms. Make sure they are reputable and give you realistic expectations. Best bet is to research and understand what is involved, then hire someone or do it your self if you are so inclined. There are several reputable companies out there so make sure you do your research. If someone tries to tell you that you can buy a keyword for Google’s top listings, but you have to hurry before someone else buys it…Run! They may even show you how it works, don’t be fooled.