Property Ad Guru » Build & Host Agency Websites

Website Spotlight: remax-newengland.com

Alice Allan — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 22:45:31 +0000

remax-newengland.com has just renovated its blog, promising “a wealth of consumer and agent information.” Let’s take a look at what this blog does well, and what improvements could be made.

What works

- The blog offers a good balance of content, with local market information mixed in with “agent spotlight” features and recent news. There is also space for restaurant reviews and even a book club, however these are not yet populated with posts.

- It also highlights the agency’s YouTube videos right at the top, which is a great way to get users to stick around even if they don’t see any blog posts that interest them.

- Another plus for this blog is that it is well integrated into the rest of the website. Users can easily navigate to the listing search, “about us” page or any other section without having to go hunting or return to the main homepage.

Suggestions

- When next updating their blog, remax-newengland.com could tweak the layout to show more content immediately. A long list of recent posts, along with the strategy of showing a grab of the latest entry with a “read more” option, would ensure users have a reason to stay even if the first few entries don’t interest them.

- The “balloon schedule,” showing where the RE/MAX hot air balloons are going to appear next, is a great inclusion, but people may not understand exactly what it is from the title. Tweaking the wording to “follow the RE/MAX balloons,” for example, could encourage more people to click through.

- Another strategy remax-newengland.com could use is breaking up each blog post with lists and bold headings. This has already been done in some posts – the challenge is in applying it to longer, more detailed information to make sure readers stay engaged.

Keen for propertyadguru.com’s website spotlight to fall on your blog or website? Get in touch with us directly by emailing editor@propertyadguru.com.

Website Spotlight: Florida Agent Tries Live Chat

Alice Allan — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 22:38:13 +0000

“I don’t believe in high pressure sales,” says Florida real estate agent Christina Miller. “I think people have had enough of the hard sell.”

Miller, who runs Sarasota Real Estate Services, is attempting to avoid the “hard sell” by adding the ability for prospective buyers to ask her questions without giving out personal details. She’s achieving this with the addition of a live, anonymous chat option on her website, mysarasotafloridahomes.com.

“Internet marketing is about building trust,” Miller says in a press release. “There are a lot of shady agents out there who don’t do a very good job and give the rest of us professionals a bad reputation. I have added an anonymous way for home buyers to interview me online or get any questions answered that they may have without fear of a sales pitch.”

There’s something to be said for the immediacy of the tool, with at least one study showing lead response times over even five minutes cause the value of the lead to drop dramatically.

One the other hand, knowing people only as “visitor” via the chat system could mean Miller loses the chance to collect contact details she could potentially use later on.

We’d love to hear readers’ take on this tactic. Have you tried this kind of tool on your own website? What were the results? If you haven’t tried it, do you think it could work to bring in more leads?

Copy right: using photos on your website – legally!

Alice Allan — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:44:25 +0000

This week’s guest post from Sobox editorial consultant Richard Fellner looks at ways to make your real estate website visually appealing without over-stepping the bounds of copyright:

There’s no doubt that a good photo or image on a blog post makes it more interesting to read. But before you do a quick Google search for an image to match your text, beware: just because an image is on the Internet doesn’t mean that you can use it for free.

In fact, a seemingly benign “copy/paste” action could potentially lead to a very expensive lawsuit.

It all centres around copyright infringement. Photos (and other creative works) are generally protected by copyright laws. If you use a piece of work without permission, you are violating the artist’s copyright, and they can, in turn, file a lawsuit against you. And they will likely win.

And even though the Internet is a big, BIG place — and you may think that there is no way that the photographer will find their photo or your little website or blog — take note: many photographs have embedded metadata within them (usually with captions, descriptions and the artist’s details). And it is a simple matter of the artist doing a websearch to see where their photos are being used.

So where can you get free photos for your website or blog? Well, there are actually some very good photographers out there who are happy to share their photos or images with you, if you follow their simple rules.

One site that is very popular is Flickr, a photo-sharing site that allows you to use photos that have special usage rights attached to them under what is known as the Creative Commons License. Each photo under the CCL has different usage rights (according to the wishes of the photographer). Some photographers allow usage of their work if you give proper attribution. Others require that you ask for permission. And many require that the photo is for non-commercial use. Read more at Flickr’s “Creative Commons” page.

Another good source is the Wikimedia commons, which is the photographic database of Wikipedia. Like Flickr’s Creative Commons, the photos in Wikimedia are all freely usable, provided that you follow the simple rules.

Finally, a third source is Stock.XCHNG – a photographic database (owned by Getty Images). There are many different options here, with many of the photographers simply requiring that you notify them when you use their image (The photo above was sourced from Stock.XCHNG under that requirement)

Of course, there are many more free image databases out there. So have a look!

Real Estate Website Tips from propertypal.com

Alice Allan — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 22:43:42 +0000

Paul Anthony, internet marketing manager at Northern Irish portal propertypal.com, has got in touch with a guest post on what makes a great real estate website. propertypal.com’s employees have spent quite a bit of time thinking about that question recently, as they’ve been putting together a free WordPress theme built specifically for real estate professionals. Check out the theme here.

It stands to reason that if you want to begin marketing online, your website needs to be in tip top shape. There’s absolutely no point in working hard building website traffic if your website doesn’t deliver.

So what makes a good estate agency website?

Look and Feel

A great design inspires confidence and trust in a brand, as consumers make decisions on your business in extremely small amounts of time. Studies have shown time and time again that trust is an underlying factor in delivering sales online. Your website design should reflect your brand and be aesthetically pleasing to the eye.

If it isn’t, visitors could land on your website and “bounce” – a term used to describe what happens when someone visits, then immediately leaves. If you aren’t already monitoring Google Analytics or similar tools, now is the time to get your head around understanding what is happening on your site. Savvy agents are asking their web vendor for access to statistics so they can work out what needs work.

Property Listings

All too often estate agents think they can get away with a one page website with a telephone number and contact form. Visitors have told us time and time again they will search for property online, and enquire online. A good property listing will showcase the interior and exterior of the property, and give the consumers an overview of the property itself.

It’s also important to keep your website fresh, and up to date. No one is going to enquire on a site which stays static, doesn’t change and shows a lack of online activity. No movement online is generally a reflection of no movement offline.

Photos and Imagery

Photos are an essential part of building that trust we’ve talked about. Invest in a decent digital camera, and if you aren’t sure how to use it, consider taking a night class in doing so. Photos are one of the main ways to promote a property, and crisp clean images are essential to get results.

Many agents get this wrong by failing to ensure properties are clean prior to taking photos, or sending an inexperienced camera user to take photos. Think about photography as inspirational and aspirational – no one wants to look at a picture of a vast expanse of grass, yet a scenery shot can do wonders for enquiry levels. It’s all in the composition.

Video

Video, in a similar vein to images, can help encourage visitors to respond and increase conversion rates by as much as 25 percent in some instances. It also can result in more traffic to your site, by syndicating to video sites such as YouTube that are already getting traffic.

This traffic can then be redirected back to your own estate agency website. Video tours and 360 degree panoramas are going to be big as people look for more interactive experiences online.

Content

The more content you put on your website, the better. Smart agents are now blogging for business, attempting to attract traffic and links from other websites. As Google revisits websites that update regularly more often, this can often result in more traffic.

This is one of the primary ways on the web to grow online. Unlike a brochure, a website should be continually refined, and enhanced over time to create a presence that wows visitors and keeps them on your site longer.

Ease consumer concerns through FAQs

Firstly, your website should focus on delivering goals for the consumer. So ask yourself: “What questions do I answer in my everyday business?” Your website should answer those questions, which reinforce trust, and encourage contact with you. It also saves time with staff being able to refer customers back to the website, and exposing your brand (and properties) to them.

Promote personal touch

Don’t be scared of showcasing your staff, and their qualifications, as this can help build trust. The benefits of estate agency are in large personal contact, and the looking after of clients. A good estate agent builds his reputation by being a people person and by delivering on promises – your website should do the same.

Website Spotlight: jimolenbush.com

Alice Allan — Thu, 13 May 2010 00:01:57 +0000

When website designers Vandelay Design put up their 27 of the best real estate websites list last week, we had to take a look at who made the cut. One website that stood out was jimolenbush.com - perhaps better known as Cantera Real Estate – which represents a boutique real estate company based in Austin, Texas.

Just as we saw with nestrealtygroup.com, this website immediately puts the emphasis on place with an enticing photo and details on Austin’s communities. At the same time, home hunters keen to get straight to the listings are catered for with a “quick search” box in prime position on the homepage.

The way jimolenbush.com presents its listings might well be the website’s best feature. Along with the quick search, home hunters can find listings by zip code, MLS number, and Google Maps. A menu down the left-hand side of the website also divides listings into three categories: luxury homes, downtown condos, and new home builds. With so many bases covered, jimolenbush.com is bound to please a large percentage of its user base.

Along with listings, jimolenbush.com provides a information on local schools, and its blog is regularly updated by each member of the agency’s team. The blog follows a formula we’ve been advocating for a while now – a mix of market information, listing highlights, and community news.

Finally, jimolenbush.com isn’t shy with its calls to action. The office phone numbers are listed twice on the homepage, and again on the contact page, which also presents a lead capture form. Just to be sure, these numbers are repeated at the top of each listing page. This might sound like overkill, but better that than miss out on a lead.

New Options for UK, Aussie Agents

Alice Allan — Thu, 06 May 2010 03:30:50 +0000

Here at Property Ad Guru, we have plenty of advice on how to make your website the best it can possibly be. There’s a lot you can do on your own, but for UK agents still looking for an out-of-the-box solution, UltraIT could be worth checking out.

UltraIT is a European company that has just set up shop in the UK. They offer website packages for agents working in both sales and rentals, along with an SEO service. While their service isn’t free – package prices start from £1395 – UltraIT promises extras such as its “Application Match” feature, which automatically matches listings to customer requirements, make it worth the investment.

Meanwhile, Australian property data supplier PriceFinder is about to launch “Share” – a service that allows agents to give their clients access to information from PriceFinder’s database for free.

PriceFinder says the information available through Share includes property price history, estimated sales price, a map searching tool, property photos, and the potential yield of a property within the current market or any time in recent history.

At this stage, Share is only available to PriceFinder’s “pro” subscribers, who pay AUD$255 per month.

They Came, They Saw, But Did They Act?

Alice Allan — Sun, 02 May 2010 23:16:00 +0000

Your website’s looking great, so why isn’t it generating any leads? Perhaps it’s your “call to action” – the section of your website that prompts browsers to subscribe, follow, or contact you. Let’s take a look at some examples to find out what the options are.

Recently we checked out nestrealtygroup.com, the winner of Inman’s Innovator Award for 2009. They’ve taken a subtle approach to their calls to action, placing the suggestions to “get email alerts” and “contact us” in tiny print in the top right of the website. Scroll down to the bottom of the homepage and you’ll find a miniature RSS feed subscription button, along with small versions of the Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube icons under the words “find us on”.

Over in Australia, we can see two very different examples. cbrealestate.com.au hasn’t decided to engage with its customers via social media just yet, but they do know plenty of people want to contact them by phone. So their number is displayed in large print in that all-important top right corner.

Meanwhile, firstnational.com.au seem very comfortable with social media, presenting home hunters with large links to its Facebook and Twitter accounts halfway down its homepage.

In the UK, we have London agents Foxtons. Like cbrealestate.com.au, their homepage reserves the top right corner for large text with their phone number. Beyond that, Foxtons has not just one, but four calls to action for their home valuation service.

What these examples show is that there’s certainly more than one way to prompt website visitors to act. Now that you’re thinking about what constitutes an effective call to action, and what changes – if any – you need to make back at your website, consider these points:

Highlight it: Make sure users don’t have to go hunting if they want to sign up for alerts or find your contact details. As a general rule, the top right corner is where people go looking when they want to get in touch.

Simplify it: Keep the word count down and the message clear. Confusing a potential customer is an extremely effective way to make sure they don’t do business with you.

Monitor it: Any change you make should prompt you to track whether it’s turning visitors off or bringing in more leads. This doesn’t have to be a tiresome process – a simple count before the change, and a check a month or so later, should tell you whether you’re on the right track.

If you’re still stuck for ideas on how to make the most of your calls to action, spend a few minutes revisiting websites you subscribed to. What did they do right to capture your email address?

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Website Spotlight: nestrealtygroup.com

Alice Allan — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 00:14:04 +0000

In a recent blog post, Inman News marketing manager Katie Lance pointed to nestrealtygroup.com as one of her favourite websites. Always on the lookout for good examples, we decided to look into what’s working for nestrealtygroup.com, with the aim of giving you some inspiration.

What’s immediately obvious when you open nestrealty.com is its emphasis on place rather than real estate agents. After a few seconds scrolling over the “Charlottesville area guides” links, users already have a sense of what the city is like.

Out-of-town house hunters can then follow the “life in Charlottesville” link to find out more about what the city has to offer. With a simple mix of photos, video, and well-written copy, nestrealtygroup.com does a great job of communicating Charlottesville and positioning themselves as the local experts.

The website’s blog only adds to the sense that Nest Realty know their area, promising information on “all of the great things Charlottesville, Albemarle County, and Central Virginia have to offer.” It seems they’ve also taken a leaf from clarkcountryrealestateguide.com with their own “365 things to do” series. These posts are interspersed with market information, reinforcing the brokerage’s authority on the area.

Of course, the website also offers a listing search that invites users to “search for your nest”. House hunters who know what they want can search either by criteria or via the map, while those looking for more inspiration can scroll down to find out more about popular neighbourhoods, where they also see featured listings. Nothing too fancy here, and nothing that will overwhelm users.

There are two more things this website does well throughout: colour scheme and fonts. These might sound like afterthoughts, but it’s clear a lot of effort has gone into choosing the muted tones and classical typeface nestrealty.com uses. The result is a relaxing user experience.

Remember, you don’t have to have a huge budget, or be the winner of Inman’s most innovative brokerage award, to put these principles into practice on your own website. The nestrealtygroup.com formula boils down to:

- An emphasis on place,
- Proof they know their area,
- Simplicity in design and search.

Of course, we’re keen to hear your take on nestrealtygroup.com, along with any other agent websites you think are working well. Let us know your thoughts in our comments.

Essential Inclusions For Your Website

Alice Allan — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 00:13:19 +0000

Today we’re going back to basics with a look at the essential elements for all good agency websites. Everyone knows you need a website for your agency, but it’s no longer good enough to have just any old website. It needs to be fabulous with the latest gizmos and tricks. Or does it? Here’s our list of the most important things to include in – and leave out of – your agency website.

Must Haves:

Good domain name. The name of the website should accurately reflect your business name so it will be more easily found by those using search engines. It is also simply good practice to have the domain mirror your business name – an obscure domain name just raises questions.

Email addresses. Your email addresses should be reflective of your website’s domain name, eg: www.abc.com as the domain name and mary@abc.com as the email address. These email addresses should be used on the website as contact details.

SEO ready. The website should be built with SEO in mind. That is, meta data, keywords, heading tags and content should all be optimised so that the site can be easily indexed by search engines and therefore found by users. For more information on SEO, see our guest series here.

Content management system. Your site should be easily editable via some sort of back-end system that only certain users can access. Your designer should provide a way to update and add content on certain parts of your website so that you can alter things as your business changes.

Clear contact information. A user should not have to go searching for ways to contact your business. After all, the idea is that you entice people to contact you! Make sure you have email addresses and phone numbers clearly visible on multiple pages of the site and that someone actually monitors these contact requests.

Clear navigation. Don’t force people to guess where information is found on your site. Make it easy for them with clearly and sensibly labelled sections. Have the most important information and functions (ie. the search functionality) available up front so users are not having to navigate through multiple pages to get to it.

Search functionality. This should be available from the home page as well as in a For Sale or For Lease section. Most users going to an agency website are there to look at the listings. Make it easy for them.

Additional relevant content. It is a good idea to included relevant local content on your site for buyers, sellers, renters, landlords and those interested in the property market. Things such as buying guides, government grants, legal and financial information as well as local services are all positive inclusions. This sort of content is good for SEO purposes and also helps engage and re-engage users with your website. To be able to provide more than just listings is a great service for those interested in property, particularly if it is local news or market commentary that changes regularly.

Good photos. Your listings should all contain multiple high-quality images. The web is a visual medium and browsers like nothing more than to look at lots of pictures of their new potential home. Other images on the site should likewise be of high quality and well positioned to capture attention and be relevant to surrounding content.

Portal feeds. The website’s content management system should allow for multiple uploads to other sites, namely portal websites that your agency advertises on. You don’t want to have to load up listings on to your own website and then do it again for the portals.

Maps. Mapping tools have become faster and more intelligent in recent times and provide a great service to those searching for property. In an industry where it’s all about location, having a map to plot properties on, and even one that includes local services and relative distances, is an integral part of modern property searching.

Sold properties. A list of recently sold properties with sale prices and asking prices is a great tool for both buyers and sellers considering using your agency. Results speak volumes and if you are proud of your efforts you have nothing to lose by publishing these results.

Don’t Need:

Picture of the principal/owner on the home page. This was once the mainstay of all agency websites, but is now considered a real no-no. It is unnecessary and can be seen as narcissistic! The About Us section is the perfect place to include photos and bios of the staff that make the agency so great.

Reams of information about the business. Whilst some information about the business is essential for selling the services and benefits, you don’t need to go overboard here. Most users know what an estate agency offers. Some select testimonials and a succinct list of services offered will suffice. The best way to differentiate yourself from your competitors is to offer market intelligence or commentary and provide regular updates to your readers in a news-style section.

May Want:

You may want to include some other widgets on your site such as currency converters, language converters, short-term rental calendars, and hotlist management tools.

Rev Up Your Website

Alice Allan — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 00:49:58 +0000

It’s now official: website speed matters, particularly if you’re concerned with where you rank in Google’s search results.

In a blog post last Friday, Google Fellow Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer of Google’s Search Quality Team, explained that website speed is now included in Google’s search ranking algorithms.

“Speeding up websites is important — not just to site owners, but to all Internet users,” the post explains. “Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”

This research, which looked at how users responded to delays on Google itself, shows just how easily potential customers can be thrown off by a slow website. Google explains:

“All other things being equal, more usage, as measured by number of searches, reflects more satisfied users. Our experiments demonstrate that slowing down the search results page by 100 to 400 milliseconds has a measurable impact on the number of searches per user of -0.2% to -0.6% (averaged over four or six weeks depending on the experiment). That’s 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches for changes under half a second!”

So even if you’re not particularly worried about where you rank in Google search results, this new emphasis on speed might prompt you to double check how your website is performing. But how do you go about doing this?

Anticipating this question, Google have come up with suggestions of free tools you can use to evaluate and improve your website’s speed, including their own Page Speed, YSlow from Yahoo!, and WebPagetest.

Most web users would agree that website speed is important, but if you’re worried that this new addition to Google’s algorithms is going to relegate your website to page 10, don’t be. Google’s blog post emphasises that less than 1 percent of search queries are affected by the site speed signal, and that it only applies for visitors searching in English on google.com at the moment. “If you haven’t seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site,” Google says.