It goes without saying that pretty well every single Real Estate agency has their own website. However, it’s definitely not common for individual agents to have their own site, and that’s costing them a lot of money.
So, here are 10 major advantages to having your own website:
1) Your own website allows you to brand yourself rather than the agency you work for.
Let’s be honest, as an agent, you want people to remember YOU right?
Which agency you work for comes a distant second, because they list with you, not the logo on the sign out the front of the office!
Your own website lets people get to know you as more than just the selling agent’s name and face picture on the portal sites. You can share a little (or a lot) of your personality, your experiences in real estate (and life, where appropriate), and become known as the local market EXPERT.
That’s very difficult to do on your agency’s site unless your principal is VERY forward thinking and encourages his/her agents to do this.
2) Your own website helps get rid of “first date jitters” with new clients.
It allows you to act as a non-threatening 24/7 “sales person” by educating potential clients about you, the area you work in, the properties you list and sell, the attractions of the suburb, etc.
You can write reviews about popular restaurants, shops, schools, sporting clubs and so forth, so that people considering buying in your area know more about the suburb and its attractions.
Best of all, they can visit your site any time of the day or night to get this information, all without having to call and speak with you.
Remember, not everyone wants to speak with the sales person up front. Nowadays, doing their market research BEFORE meeting with an agent is how most people prefer to operate. So, give them what they want – helpful answers to their questions – and let them find those answers at their own pace with no pressure.
In the end, they’ll know, like, and trust you because your website did all the preliminary work of warming them up to YOU!
If you do a good job of this on your site, you will find prospective buyers and seller will be much more receptive to meeting with you when they are ready to get serious.
3) Real Estate Agents who have their own website will stand out from agents who rely on their employer’s site.
Sadly, some agency sites are pretty average in quality, look and usefulness. When they should be a powerful resource to help buyers & sellers consider doing business with you, there are plenty of examples that are little more than an uninspiring online brochure, which puts people off.
Whether agency owners like it or not, their website says a LOT about what kind of people they are to do business with, and if the site is unhelpful, looks out-of-date and isn’t even mobile friendly, then you’re off to a bad start as the agent trying to persuade a potential client to do business with you.
If you have your own modern, high-quality site with lots of useful information about buying and selling real estate, as well as in-depth listings of your vendors’ properties, client testimonials and 101 other helpful things people might like to see on your site, then you definitely put your best foot forward when compared to your average agency site.
Oh, and it would also be mobile friendly! Right? 🙂
4) Owning your own website allows you to dedicate much more space to explaining the benefits of a vendor’s home than using a (paid) listing on the big portal sites.
Even a Premiere Listing on realestate.com.au (which can be $3K-4K-5K or more) only really gives you 1 page to list a property.
Given the price of any house these days, just using 1 page is missing out on a GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY to really sell the advantages of the property.
With your own website, you can have as many high quality photos, videos, text and so forth listed on your site for prospective buyers to look at, and it doesn’t cost any extra money to offer this to any seller who lists with you.
In 2012, news.com.au published a story about a Melbourne man who built his own blog to promote and market his site online, and successfully sold it for more than $100K above reserve!
One of the keys to his success was the ability to being able to share a lot of great personal memories about the house (along with photos, videos and even tweets) and what made it so good.
You can’t do this with a realestate.com.au listing on 1 page, but if you are willing to offer extensive listings like this on your site to each and every vendor, you will definitely stand out from the crowd and offer something that your competition isn’t doing.
5) Another big advantage of having your own website is that you can get your vendor to link – via Facebook – to the listing of their property on your site.
This listing then shows up on their own Facebook wall where their friends, family and colleagues can see it. Your vendor can ask people to post a comment on the Facebook wall about their favourite memories of being in their (your vendor’s) house.
They can also like the vendor’s listing and share it with their own family, friends and colleagues, which means more and more people see the listing (for free, naturally!) and it gathers momentum and gets seen by still more people again.
Perhaps – very best of all – if anyone sees the post on Facebook and clicks on it, they will ultimately end up on YOUR website and get to see who you are, what other listings you have on the site, and get a sense of you as a professional agent. In other words, they are helping to not just promote their friend’s property but also you and your other buy/sell options.
That’s a win-win for you AND your vendor, because all that luscious free “word of mouth” advertising is provided for FREE by Facebook! 🙂
6) With your own website, you can “follow” site visitors around the web, showing them online ads that continue to promote you and your site.
Following on from #5 is a great additional tool to benefit you as the agent. There’s a very cool online advertising tool called remarketing (aka retargeting) available from Google, Facebook and many other online ad networks.
While you might never have heard of it before, I can guarantee you’ve seen it in action.
Have you ever noticed you seem to be being followed around the web by ads from a site after you visited and left it?
Well, that’s remarketing in action, and it’s a fantastic way to advertise to only those people who visited your own individual website.
7) If you have your own website, you can build an email database of prospective clients who want to stay in contact with you.
Following on from the power of using Remarketing to keep your name and listings in front of people who have visited your site before, the other great option to keep in contact with prospective buyers and sellers is to get them to sign-up for your email database.
By including a simple sign-up form on your site, people can choose to give you permission to keep them up to date on YOUR listings and useful/interesting news, blog posts, etc.
Starting from as little as $9/month, you could have your own email marketing system in place, designed to maintain regular contact with prospective clients.
Even better, with that same $9/month email system, you can even pre-load emails (in advance) to go out AUTOMATICALLY for as long as you want. This means you can be warming up – sometimes called “nurturing” – your email list on autopilot, regardless of whether you have time to write and send emails to them manually or not.
The ability to automate the sending of “nurturing” emails is perhaps one of the most powerful marketing tools that MOST agents are not taking advantage of.
8) With your own website, you can leverage ALL forms of marketing – online AND offline.
Whether you do flyer/brochure drops in your area, send direct mail, advertise in print, on TV, Radio or even billboards, when you have your own website you can invite people to visit your site to get more information.
Whether they sign up for your free email newsletter, look at properties profiled on your site, watch your videos or read your blog posts, by getting them to your site you can achieve multiple positive outcomes:
(i) Automatically add any visitor to your site to your remarketing list, which means you can show them ads all over the net for days, weeks or even months afterwards.
(ii) Your email subscription form is always on duty, inviting site visitors to subscribe for ongoing information from you.
(iii) Naturally, having them on your website means they can find your contact details if they want to speak with you about a property they’re considering buying, or discuss listing their property with you.
(iv) Lastly, a visitor to your website can always send the link to someone else they know, which means it makes it very easy to generate referrals, even if the original visitor doesn’t ultimately buy or sell with you.
9) One other HUGE advantage to having your own agent’s website is that it is distraction-free for potential clients vs the portal sites they normally frequent.
When a visitor is on your site there are NO distractions to take them away from your listings &/or from learning about why YOU are the best agent to list their property with!
For example, when they are on realestate.com.au, there are heaps of listings from other agents & agencies that could take your potential client away from your property.
There’s also banner advertising for all sorts of different products & services to distract them from YOUR listings. Heck, I even saw ads for Kleenex tissues on their site one day, which is about as far as you can get from real estate as possible!
Ask yourself one simple question: Would you like a prospective buyer or seller to be distracted (to the max) on a portal site or totally focussed on you, your properties and your great information on your own website?
10) Having your own website can bring plenty of Google Love
When you have your own website, you can get free traffic from people doing google searches for topics you write about. Especially when you are focussed on a geographic area (farm), it’s not hard to rank well for terms related to living, buying or selling real estate in a specific suburb or town.
If you are blogging about a specific LOCAL suburb or area, it’s much easier to get on page 1 of Google than it is for your major city name. So, for example, if I blog about ‘real estate for sale in Duncraig’ (a suburb in Northern Perth), I will find it HEAPS easier to rank highly than for ‘real estate for sale in Perth’ which has a HEAP more competition.
Free Real Estate Client Attraction Blueprint
If you’re spending $500+/month on real estate advertising (this can include your portal listings, letterbox drops, etc.) and you’d like to dramatically increase your leads, sales & ROI, then you’ll want to take advantage of one of my FREE 30-minute strategy sessions to help you improve the results from your marketing.
Whether you’re an agent or principal, I’ll work with you to design a custom Client Attraction blueprint, help you identify the perfect target market for prospective buyers, and show you how to maximise your marketing results.
My promise to you is that by the time we get done with this fast-paced session, you will walk away with 3 actionable strategies for you to get more listings and more buyers… without the need to spend a fortune on wasteful advertising.
There are two ways to success in the real estate market. Outspend the competition or be smarter than the competition. In this call, I will share with you how to be smarter.
Plus, if you’re not thoroughly convinced the custom marketing blueprint I’ll provide will significantly improve your current advertising results – even if you NEVER choose to work with me to implement it – just let me know before we finish our call and I’ll happily donate $30 to the charity of your choice! (Of course, you’ll get a copy of the receipt)
By the way, there’s no cost to you for this strategy call.
Obviously I provide online Marketing services for real estate businesses, and if you see some value in the free help I give you, there’s a good possibility you might want to work with me to improve your lead generation results. And if you choose not to, that’s equally fine.
But… before you go any further, you need to know that I can’t help everybody.
I can only be of benefit to agents or agencies that currently advertise or market online or offline. You need to already be spending at least $500+ a month in advertising costs and – ideally – have your own operational website that can be updated with new content as needed.
If you don’t do much or any advertising, I won’t be able to help you.
So, if you meet my criteria AND would like to take advantage of a free 30 minute Strategy Call, simply click the link below. You’ll see a form with a few questions about your current marketing program and what you are looking to accomplish, as well as some contact details. Choose a day and time from my calendar to speak with me, and we’ll get together on a skype call to go over your situation and goals.
Lastly, when my schedule fills up, that’s it! So, if you meet the criteria AND are serious about wanting to take what you’ve learned from my blog post and develop a blueprint to increase the effectiveness of your advertising and marketing, then get started by clicking the link below.
Click here to request a FREE 30 Minute Marketing Strategy Call