In a competitive real estate market, control of your Internet marketing means directing how you appear to 90% of the potential home buyers searching your market. The National Association of Realtors (NAR) reported earlier in 2008 that the number of home buyers using an Internet search to check the latest listings of homes for sale increased almost 10% from 2007 to 90%. Yet, according to a report released May 14th, only 60% of real estate agents have a personal real estate website. The remaining 40% depend on their real estate firm’s website for Internet visibility or work for a real estate company that has no Internet marketing.

This is a boon for real estate agents who have secured their domain names and personal agent websites, and even more so for agents who invested in a professional real estate website design that has brought them attention, traffic and leads.

The benefit of having your own real estate website is that it builds credibility to you as a professional Realtor and drives leads to your phone or email inbox. From IMCD Web Design’ research, one of the greatest points of leverage for an agent’s personal website is adding a real estate blog. You can research blog effectiveness for your real estate market – simply type in your market’s keywords and check the personal agent or local Realtor websites that rank and keep tabs on which ones consistently rank high. Of those ranking high, you can do some secondary research and see how many times a week or month posts are made to the blog.

Just in a quick search on May 15th, the number one real estate website for “Dallas real estate” has a blog with at least one entry a week. The number two position for “Cleveland real estate” also has a very active blog. In the very competitive market of Chicago, the first local real estate website ranking on the first page has a very active blog.

IMC has found blogs to help its clients Internet presence in several ways:

• the blog adds keyword-rich content to the site,
• it is the easiest way to add content and address real estate issues in your area, and
• the blog software “pings” the major search engines, telling them a post has just been made.

Search engines usually browse inactive websites every three weeks. Real estate websites that add material on a regular basis get be checked every week. With a blog entry, the website is checked every time the search engine receives a ping.

In a time when the majority of property searches occurs on the Internet, your professionally designed IMC real estate website is a key marketing asset where you can control the content and are in the driver’s seat to increase your visibility.

IMCD Web Design takes a systems approach to creating a seamless real estate Internet marketing strategy and website design. With the continued migration of real estate clients migrating to the Internet to do their real estate searches, effectiveness of a real estate website in attracting and landing leads is ever more important.

IMC integrates the eye-catching design and content as well as a website platform that allows real estate agents to react swiftly to changes in the markets tastes and direction.

In the ever-evolving world of the Internet, IMC’s marketers, writers and designers are always studying and implementing the latest website standards, content presentation and search engine optimization techniques. Yesterday’s successfully launched real estate website always improves the one to be created tomorrow.

In helping our clients establish a high return on investment Internet presence, part of IMC’s Internet marketing system includes:

1. Keyword research with agents to hone down market areas and discover under-served area niche markets;
2. Creation of fast loading, attention-grabbing Flash slide shows;
3. Setting up a website framework that allows agents to add content to the site easily and in a search engine friendly manner through feature listings, blogs and neighborhood news tools; and
4. Linking busy real estate agents with professional writers to provide excellent real estate market material for the website.

If your real estate website investment has not brought you the warm leads that other successful agents are enjoying, then it may be time to boost your image and Internet presence by contacting IMCD Web Design at (303) 688-1331 and we can go over the first step in improving your financial picture.

It is our mission to help our clients Win on the Web!

We take a holistic, synergistic approach to internet marketing. We realize that the sum of a truly effective web presence is greater than the sum of its parts. Let us help you take your internet marketing to the next level.

The National Association of Realtors released their latest real estate marketing findings at the end of March. The recent surveys showed that the marketing shift continues towards Internet marketing and away from traditional newspaper marketing.

Using real estate websites to view listings of homes for sale increased 10% from the last NAR survey. Now only 10% of home buyers don’t use the Internet to do their home search. Newspaper advertising and magazine ads only attract 12% of the surveyed new home searchers.

What is interesting is that $5 billion was spent chasing 12% of the market and $3 billion was spent chasing 90% of the market. Hmmmmm. What is strange about that picture? One wonders if the newspaper advertising is done to please the seller that all marketing efforts are being made and the real estate website advertising is done to really find the active buyers. 17% of Realtors apparently had the same thought, according to a Classified  Intelligence survey, and don’t spend on newspaper advertising.

From an Inman survey 18% of the Realtors surveyed plan to invest over $10,000 over the year in real estate Internet marketing. On the other end of the spectrum, 20% plan to spend less than $1000. What would be interesting is if we could correlate these figures to the agents’ success ratio, full-time versus part-time real estate agent, and the volume of leads they get from agent websites. In short, which camp more describes the real estate agents and brokers that are deriving copious leads from their realty and agent websites?

As the advertising venue shifts from print to Internet, real estate websites, if they aren’t already, will become the prime avenue for home buying market leads. A foreseen benefit to web savvy real estate agents is that this continued marketing shift will lead to the creation of new technologies and gadgets to help Internet marketers.

In the evolving world of real estate Internet marketing, a new and successful real estate website strategy has evolved called “hyper local” marketing. This strategy has been driven by three elements: Google (the usual given), home buyers search techniques and real estate agents’ ability to build great website content base with neighborhood news tools and blogs.

Google decided to steer search terms “yourcity real estate” to larger real estate firms and directory style websites. Theoretically these websites are authoritative lists that give home buyers and sellers more options from which to choose. The algorithm will most likely get tweaked some more as time goes on. When Weather Underground shows up on the first page for real estate keywords, one has to wonder… What this means is that the Google front page competition shifts to the neighborhood, suburb and smaller real estate market areas’ keywords.

Home buyers’ search techniques are migrating to niche markets since A) the Internet can zoom in to any level of search granularity and B) using the broad search term “yourcity real estate” tends to turn up out of state, national websites. To find local Realtors and Realtors with specific areas of expertise, real estate searchers are using keywords that are becoming more market specific, such as “residential single family detached yoursuburb”.

With real estate agents able to research and add niche market specific blog entries to their websites, website visitors are able to find agents by their niche markets. Neighborhood news tools allow agents to post large articles that can encompass an areas history, scenic and cultural attractions, school data and general neighborhood descriptions.

The traffic that hyper marketing attracts is smaller in volume, but higher in quality. The real estate Internet marketplace is ripe for real estate agents to add their neighborhood or niche market content to their websites.

The nature of real estate marketing today is akin to the ocean before the storm clouds appear. To the tourist the water looks great, to the old salt, the wave patterns portend a big storm over the horizon. Much of real estate marketing has not changed, the post cards, the continual meeting people live and developing and expanding the referral network, and the newspaper and magazine advertising.

But as real estate agent Burke Smith said back in 2007, “Technology won’t replace agents; agents with technology will replace agents.” What is masking this real estate marketing sea change is real estate agents’ natural propensity to not fix something that does not appear to be broken. The most successful real estate agents of today are the ones with the least impetus to embrace real estate Internet marketing or to treat is as an auxiliary marketing tool.

The nature of a market’s change is that the new idea starts small and, even at 100% growth, does not significantly change the market’s dynamics. Then when the 10% market share doubles to 20% the major players in the market take notice, but they are too late to adapt. Detroit ignored the Japanese imports and the customers’ desire for small, trouble-free cars driving that market. Similarly real estate websites were once thought of as the small world of technology freaks selling to computer geeks. But consumer’s buying habits have changed tremendously from 1998 to 2008. The luxury of shopping from home at all hours of the day caused many computer-averse shoppers to master their computer’s Internet browser.

The National Association of Realtors figure on the percentage of buyers who search for houses online is almost 80%. Clouding the picture perhaps is the inability to draw a line from the Internet listings searches to the final sales. The agents with the technology, with their one, two, three or more real estate websites, are not waiting for the dust to clear. They have detected the number of real estate website leads that turn into sales increase dramatically year over year and know which way the home selling market is heading. Real estate brokerages that are hiring agents to handle their overflow of leads from their real estate websites are also aware of the marketing shift.

The Internet has turned shopping for homes for sale into a virtual journey. MLS listings are evolving online from static images to walk through slide shows or videos. Google Earth has made checking the neighborhood something anyone can do from satellite photos. While the shoppers are on virtual house shopping trips, it pays to have a virtual real estate storefront.

As part of your grand real estate marketing campaign, you write an informative entry on your real estate blog detailing the changes in your local market of homes for sale…but no readers contact you. One small step can make your time blogging time well spent. In fact, there may be several areas in your marketing where one small step will increase your leads and your Internet exposure.

After you have written your blog entry (and checked the grammar and spelling) you upload it to your site. In your blog editor, look for an icon that looks like chain links. This is for adding hyperlinks – a coded link to another page on the Internet. By highlighting words in your article, such as your city’s name, your real estate agency’s name or the words “please contact me”, and clicking on the hyperlink icon you can link these words to your real estate website’s Contact Us page. In marketing, this is anticipating needs and shortening the steps. If your article triggers a website visitor’s interest, make the path to turning them into a lead easy – provide a link to your contact information. Use this technique when you add articles to your neighborhood news tool also.

Similarly, never send out an email without including your real estate website’s address in the signature. There are several reasons:

1. Reinforce your brand (as reflected in your domain name), and
2. Use every avenue to drive traffic to your website (how many of your emails get forwarded? OK, so sending really good jokes is now marketing!).

One of the ways Google measures your real estate website is by the traffic it generates. So while search engines lead traffic to your site, conversely, when the search engines detect your website getting a lot of traffic (directed from business cards, print ads, etc.) it benefits your real estate website’s search engine ranking.

Another underused area is answering machine messages. Include an invitation on your business answering machine to visit your website to search your listings, blog entries, and buyer and seller guides.

These are just a few ideas to examine the real estate marketing steps you are already taking and tweaking them to make the most of the opportunities.

2008 is the year real estate marketing dollars pour more into Internet marketing and less into newspapers. It almost happened in 2007 with newspapers retaining about 36% of the marketing budget (yet declining) and real estate Internet marketing increasing to 33%.

This trend reflects the increase in real estate clients reached through the Internet. Real estate Internet marketing has already eclipsed the walk-in market. As the National Association of Realtors reported, almost 80% of homebuyers start their search on the Internet. Part of the equation is that newspapers get updated once a day, real estate websites can be updated quickly as new property becomes available. Home buyers and sellers are always interested in the most up-to-date market information.

As Stefan Swanepoel points out in his research on the 2008 real estate trends, this marketing shift means that “as a very general rule, agents need to ensure that their websites are ‘sticky.’ In short that means that real estate websites need to be:

• Unique, local, relevant – content that makes buyers and sellers want to stay on your site.
• Constantly changing content – at least daily.
• Visual content – images, podcasts and multimedia.
• Viral content – content that people can share with others.”

From a look at Swanepoel’s short list, two strategic steps stand out:

1. Dive into learning the latest technology. It is part of staying at the forefront of effective real estate marketing. Indeed, virtual tours – video or slide picture tours – of homes and properties are a marketing tool that only an real estate Internet website can cost-effectively provide. Virtual tours on television are costly and usually a one-shot exposure. On a real estate website, the tour runs whenever the website visitor clicks on it. Very customer-centric.
2. Make sure you are working on your real estate website – either adding articles, blog entries, property listing updates. Ranking high on Google is worth the investment of time and money to attract leads. Just remember, even if you don’t think so, all your successful competitors believe it is so.

When entering or seeking to be competitive in the Internet marketing arena with your real estate website, rely on a website design professional such as IMCD Web Design. Just like it is wise for home buyers and sellers to rely on a real estate professional such as you.