Ironically, real estate marketing companies have found the last real estate agents to aggressively pursue Internet marketing of their services are the successful agents. Assuming the reasoning is why change something that is working successfully, the answer is there is a major sea change in the way home buyers and sellers use real estate websites to search the real estate market. The move can be seen as a move from paper to electronic media. Let’s look at how successful agents can parlay their past success into greater future success.

Post cards are a way to contact a large audience with color photos and interest generating news. One problem is there is no way of knowing whether the recipient even looked at the card unless they call you. Today agents can send out HTML emails that contain photos of new properties on the market as well as have the print in the color and font they want. A benefit of the email postcard is two-fold, you can set it to alert you to who is opening the email and you can include links within the email to pages on your website. Of course, the best link to have is to your home page, but you can also connect them directly to recent entries in your real estate blog or Article Manager.

Newspaper advertising, though still capturing most of real estate marketing dollars, is only used by less than 15% of home buyers. Real estate websites provide the same information as newspaper ads, only the information is offered to the other 85% of the home buyers and sellers actively searching the market.

Agents feel safe with newspaper advertising since they know their ad will be seen by all of the 15% of the market checking the real estate ads. In the competitive online marketplace, how can they make sure their real estate website is seen by the other 85% of their market? IMCD has years of experience using their search engine optimization, online marketing and graphic design expertise to place real estate agents and brokers on the first page of Google for their markets.

Phone calls are a great way to touch base and keep your market alive. By adding a real estate blog to your IMC website, real estate agents can parlay their conversational tone into weekly entries that can be sent to their client list by RSS feed. This keeps your clients aware of your services and knowledge as well as the current housing market. Beneficially also is that your blog entries notify all the main search engines of new content, helping your online visibility.

Contact IMC today to match your successful professional real estate career to one of our successful professional online real estate marketing web design. Your public is waiting.

Real estate agents seeking a professional web design and online visibility can use sage wisdom from the battlefield. “If you have to walk through a mine field, follow someone who has been there before.” In establishing or improving an agent’s website, it seems that there is a seeming minefield of multiple web design and marketing decisions to thread their way through  in order to get there. IMCD has assisted everyone from new real estate agents to experienced brokers gain or greatly improve their online visibility.

Three primary decisions that will affect your success are:

1. Finding the right keywords to target your market,
2. Choosing a web designer or trying to create your real estate website with an off-the-shelf template, and
3. Presenting the best images for the best return.

One of the first areas that IMC helps agents is refining their keyword choice so that they are correctly targeting the home buyers or sellers in their market. A beginner’s mistake is looking only at how much traffic a keyword generates and not understanding the pitfall of choosing the wrong or too broad a high ranking keywords. By not choosing a less trafficked, more specific keyword, agents can find themselves competing in a huge market of which many of their website hits are from people uninterested in their services at all.

The second area is in the real estate web design itself. With 10 different proven successful real estate web design templates, each with its own color scheme variations, agents can narrow their focus to choosing the design that matches their corporate color scheme. Each web design has the graphic design that incorporates a Flash slide show so images of the area’s features and homes for sale will immediately capture the web visitors’ interest.

The graphic design is the third area of your professional online marketing where IMC’s experience in photography and layout serve real estate agents. IMC’s graphic artist uses software to correct lighting or color problems in your images so you and your slide show look natural and at your best. Your images are an important part of building your online credibility. Studies have shown that online buyers are willing to pay thousands of dollars more for property that had professional images versus amateur photos.

Contact IMC for your real estate web design and we make sure you avoid all the misfortunes of the Internet marketing mine field on your road to launching your successful real estate website.

Realtors have the benefit of the highly visible National Association of Realtors (NAR) selling the value of their services. The question then is, “Are Realtors using their real estate agent website to reflect the benefits of working with a Realtor?” IMCD has created real estate web designs that reinforce these benefits all our Realtor website clients.

IMC websites reinforce the reasons with which the NAR answers the question “Why use a Realtor?”:

IMCD real estate websites assist Realtors in helping their clients determine their buying power, understand different financing options, and locate lenders. Our section of real estate calculators helps your clients determine their buying power with various loan pre-qualification, mortgage payments, and rent vs. buy calculators. Our financing section has optional mortgage and financing pages that are used for further financing education and the ability for customization to extol the benefits of and link to your best mortgage provider.

Assisting home buyers in their home search is easily accomplished by an IMC real estate website integrating with the Realtor’s local IDX or MLS service. IMC also offers a Listing Manager option that provides an intuitive and easy way for Realtors to manage their Featured Listings on their own website. The Featured Listings manager also allows real estate agents a way to provide objective information on each property they list. Our Community info pages are customized for each agent’s market providing information on local schools, business environment and contact information and city and county website links.

Your IMC real estate web design helps your home sellers market their property in other ways besides the tremendous potential of your online listings. IMC has worked with professionals to create home seller guides for your site that help clients prepare their homes to obtain the best sale price as well as create favorable impressions during home tours.

Both buyers and sellers benefit from information you provide on neighborhoods, recent market activity analysis, and real estate tips in your IMC real estate blog. Blogs have evolved in both design and ease of use to become one of the favorite ways for real estate agents to maximize the use of the Internet for finding and educating new clients as well as keeping their current and past clients well informed.

Contact IMC real estate web designs to reinforce your professional Realtor presence on the Internet. We have just the package to fit your online marketing needs and budget and appeal to your market.

Real estate websites serving the business market are finding new purchasers for commercial buildings for sale. Commercial real estate has experienced a boon in urban markets of New York, Chicago, New Jersey and California from the recent economic turns. As old technologies fade, laid off workers are returning to school to get educated for new jobs. As a result, educational institutions are taking advantage of today’s low prices to scoop up commercial real estate to handle their influx of students.

Since colleges utilize commercial real estate differently than businesses with classes running until 10:00 PM, utilizing more HVAC resources, and causing higher traffic surges on elevators and parking lots, co-locating with businesses is not often feasible. Colleges and universities usually find themselves forced to purchase or lease an entire building to meet their needs. Recent commercial real estate sales of closed theaters to colleges in New York provided the colleges with new classroom space. The sales also created a new revenue source as the schools gained an opportunity to rent the auditoriums for speakers and musical events.

In rural towns experiencing the trend of schools closing due to fewer students, grade schools have been turned into commercial real estate and used as artist venues. Classrooms adapt well for use as studios and small galleries. The auditoriums with nearby storage space and public restrooms have created space for new community theaters. The cafeterias are easily turned into small business properties as cafes serving tasty food and drinks that we wish we had in school!

As the dynamics of the market places change and different uses for business real estate emerges, real estate websites remain one of the best marketing avenues. Real estate agent websites have the ability to respond quickly with new information and pictures. The benefit of having a website with a  content management systems (CMS), such as online featured listing manager, article manager or a very user-friendly blog, quickly becomes apparent since they provide real estate agents instantaneous ways to react to and take advantage of changes and opportunities in the commercial real estate market.

IMCD has real estate web designs with different color theme variants as well as four optional CMS that allow real estate agents to keep their online marketing offering up-to-date and responsive to market trends. Contact IMC’s web design specialist to see how you can connect with your clients better and faster with a intuitive CMS integrated into your real estate website.

Real estate blogs continue to grow in the search engine results for all the different real estate website keywords, improving the Internet marketing ROI for agents targeting the 80-plus percent of home buyers using the web to find property. It is a market that is still wide open with early adopters and agents with the discipline to add at least an article a week gaining most of the limelight.

Real estate agents with blogs incorporated into their real estate websites have positioned themselves to keep their clients informed on the latest market news, tax incentives, local housing inventory levels, pricing direction as well as their latest featured listings. Internet Marketing Consultant’s real estate web design integrates real estate blogs in your IMC website so your blog carries your brand – not the brand of a national blog site. It also drives traffic and search engines to your website to view your properties – which is the desired result of your Internet marketing investment.

IMC is sometimes asked, “How important is it to have a blog?”

Blogs serve the two-fold purpose of increasing the SEO clout of a website. First by contacting the search engines when you post an entry. Second, by building up a list of clients getting an RSS feed from your site, you have your own real estate magazine with a ready audience. By building your RSS audience, you add to your website’s traffic – something the search engine’s notice also.

“How hard is it to use a blog?”

No harder than writing a Microsoft Word document. Today’s blogging software has text editing tools that make it intuitive and easy to add pictures, links and text enhancements such as adding bold or italics. Logging in is a similar experience to logging in to get Gmail or any online service that needs a user name and password. Part of the reason blogging took off so fast is that novice Internet users could quickly populate their blog with information and pictures that made it interesting for others.

“How hard is it to get a blog?”

Contact IMCD to get your professional blog website that is customized to your personal and business brand. You don’t need to learn any HTML, CSS or PHP coding language – we take care of all the groundwork and getting your blog online on your website. We can show you how quickly and easily you can be updating your website with real estate news – keeping your clients in the know!

IMCD has debuted its Version 10 real estate web design. As with its other customized real estate websites, Version 10 has the ability to integrate a real estate blog, feature listings manager, IDX and MLS search pages, article manager and many brand-enhancing market-specific sales pages that are hallmark on IMC’s designs.

Version 10 has a wider area for content than many real estate websites, allowing real estate agents to capitalize on the abundance of wider screens used by many online home buyers today. Flat screen monitors for desktops and laptops have substantially decreased in price over the last few years leading to a larger average screen size that web designers can use without worrying that the scroll bar will be needed to see the entire web page.

IMC’s Version 10 real estate web design offers 20% more width than most standard websites. In online marketing terms, this allows agents to have more content “above the fold” on their website. The area “above the fold” is the area of the web page that is visible without any vertical scrolling – the most important area for grabbing attention of the viewer and placing content for the search engines.

The increase in web page size also allows agents to show a larger slide show of real estate properties and area features on the home page and, at the same time, increases the content area. Just like in magazines and newspapers, the web page items that first meet the eye are your best – and sometimes only – shot at capturing your potential clients’ attention. Older web designs often are limited to 750 to 800 pixel width to accommodate the 13 and 14 inch screens. However, IMC’s new Version 10 design takes advantage of the fact that computer hardware competition has moved many consumers into ownership of 15 to 17 inch screen laptops and desktops with 17 to 22 inch screens.

IMC’s real estate web designs have been customized for agents serving the luxury, ski resort, ranch, horse property, residential and commercial real estate markets across the United States. If you are ready to move up in the search engine rankings and improve your online marketing visibility, join our growing ranks of satisfied real estate clients. Contact IMC’s real estate web design specialist today and view all our real estate web designs to see which one will best meet your online marketing strategy.

Commercial real estate resembles luxury real estate in that the Internet marketing net has to be thrown wide to capture a very narrow market niche. Real estate websites have proven to be one of the best investments for global marketing of niche products sold with a specific message.

Niche markets are actually one of the best markets to sell to over the Internet. By strategically using basic and long tail keywords as well as optimizing other elements of your commercial real estate web design, IMCD helps agents draw high quality traffic to their site. With any market, the financial return flows from the quality of the web traffic (people looking to specifically buy what you are situated to sell) rather than the quantity.

Selling Denver commercial real estate is selling to one such niche market. Even though Denver itself has an active real estate investment community, a look at recent sales shows that millions of dollars worth of Denver area commercial properties were sold to investors from Washington State, Dallas, and Minneapolis.

IMCD has years of experience helping Denver real estate agents position themselves to capture part of the online urban commercial real estate market. In a market where maximum exposure leads to maximum financial returns, why settle for a page on a large real estate website when you can easily add your personal real estate website prominently featuring your contact information and your listings?

In the search engine results, just like in real estate, location – location – location is important. The quality of your real estate website helps determine how good your location is in the search engines. Contact our Denver web design online marketing specialist to see how you can capture a greater part of the area’s commercial real estate market.

IMC has the customizable real estate templates that meet your needs. Each website includes a custom home page slide show that shows off your region – area landmarks, parks, and styles of real estate. Since our websites are template-based, we can quickly get you online with a custom look and a custom real estate message directed to your commercial real estate market.