Your website is the center of the universe for your online branding as a real estate agent, team or brokerage. All roads should lead to your website, a website that should be building an online history over time that will be recognized by the search engines.
While you may own your domain name, most real estate websites are rentals. Agents generally change rental sites every two years which effects your online history. Secondly, most rental sites do not SEO well because they are a part of a very large network of “like” designs with duplicate content.
Then you have buyer landing sites provided by PPC companies and other marketing systems that you will lose if you ever choose to leave that marketing system. It’s not to say you can’t have a Boomtown, Cinc or Kunversion site as a number of our clients have, but you still need a mothership that you own outright with 100% portability.
We mention “portability” because many agents think they own their WordPress website but if they move off that developer’s platform, they may lose functionality and find it hard to export existing content to the new site. Please read this post to learn more about this.
Though our clients host their sites with us, if at some point you want to transfer your site to another WordPress compatible hosting company, we can facilitate that transfer keep your dashboard, IDX, CRM and all content intact.
Some companies may lead you to believe you own your website and that it was built in WordPress, but if you leave their platform, you are not taking the backend of your site with you. Please see this article on whether you have full control of your WordPress website.
The search engines are not friendly to real estate agents. Most of the top 10 positions are held by big corporate. Your online history is very important. In fact, when you do see a real estate agent website in the top 10 for primary search terms, 95% of the time they have owned their domain with regular content growth for at least 15 years.
To get the attention of the search engines, it is important to add content through blogging and having a page with your sold properties that get regularly indexed.
If you are changing sites every few years, the search engines have to start all over with indexing your site and you could lose positioning. Having a site you own outright maintains that history.
Once the site is launched, with WordPress it is very easy to create and edit content, pages and blog posts. WordPress is also attractive to the search engines and most real estate marketing companies offer widgets and plugins that can be easily integrated into your website.
First you have to ask yourself, are you’re a Realtor or a web designer who understands IDX integration? I always equate DiY with FSBO. OK, so yes you can buy a template and learn how to build it out but that will take tens of hours to learn even the basics. Then you could integrate a third party IDX but 90% of the time, the styling of the search functionality and search results will not match the style of your template design. I have also seen instances where a Realtor hires a professional web developer to build them a site however that web developer has no experience integrating the IDX much less having any experience in the real estate industry. Just not a good idea overall.
Internet Data Exchange. The IDX buys data from your MLS and serves it up in a consumer-friendly format with calls to action to capture leads. We are a developer partner with IDX Broker, our chosen IDX. One of the best. We also provide custom integrations of the Displet IDX. In fact we can integrate most IDX’s into our sites, but we have our preferences based upon client experience.
There are two kinds of templates. The rubber stamped kind where all the websites look the same(usually rental sites or corporate agent sites provided by their brokerages). There are also a number of real estate formatted basic templates for the DiY crowd, but the customizations are limited.
And then you have foundational templates, which are essentially blank slates. A professional website developer can use these canvasses to build semi-custom websites. These literally have hundreds of thousands of limitless design scenarios which are 100% customizable.
With these foundational design platforms, the days of needing a full custom websites are gone. There was a time, before foundational platforms were developed, if you wanted anything unique, you would have to hire a designer to start from the ground up with only code. Those sites ranged in price from $5,000 to $50,000. There are a few clients that might need a full custom. Large brokerages, franchises, or sites with nationwide searches that require custom programming would be a few. We have teamed up with a major custom developer if that is your need.
Our RealAdvantage sites are based upon 8 structural advanced templated designs we have with limited customizations. I still call them semi-customs as no two have been exactly alike.
Our RealAdvantage Plus sites are built on a foundational platform that allows full customizations. We can’t actually call them Full Custom sites because we are not starting with raw code.
The fee you pay for our websites is not a “setup” fee. We are not setting anything up. The fee you pay us is for “site acquisition and build”.
Please note there are companies pitching they build full customs when in fact they are semi-customs.
No. All of our services are provided on a month-to-month agreement with a 30 day written notice of cancellation. We have such a high client retention rate, we do not have to lock up new clients in annual contracts.
We are very boutique-like. Once we get your agreement back, we send you two form links which allow us to get the IDX ordered and for you to send us your website content. Our project manager would reach out to you directly to provide any assistance in gathering the content we need. Once all the content is in, depending which website product you ordered, you would see a live link to your homepage within a week or two. The homepage review goes over the design, colors, aesthetics, images, the overall look to the site. Once you sign off on the homepage, our design team in Austin, TX will build out the site. When the site is completed, you will review the entire site prior to launch. Once you sign off on the entire website and we launch, you still have two weeks to submit corrections or edits.
Getty Images is lawsuit happy if their bot discovers copywritten images on your site. For this reason, all images we place on your website must be:
Images you own. Images you took. Images you have written permission to publish. Licensed images.
For this reason, we have a commercial account with a licensed image provider. You can choose images from this provider at no extra cost to you.
No. Our hosting includes the SSL certificate. Your domain will be preceded with “https”. All sites should be secure. Google like secure sites.
Yes. Our semi-custom sites can feature video headers and all of our sites have integration tools for YouTube and Vimeo.
We call it Responsive Web Design(RWD). Rather than the user going to a mobile version of the website or an app, the site will adjust its content to the size of the device. Makes for a wonderful consumer experience.
See “Why we use WordPress” above.
Yes. IDX Broker Platinum provides an interface that allows you to add “supplemental listings” which would include Solds, Coming Soons and Pocket Listings.