Why should your real estate website tell a compelling story? Simple, home buyers and sellers, like most people are intrigued by stories. Your real estate website is your bully pulpit for creating your personal brand and brands are always made more memorable by having a story. Recitation of dry facts is as ineffective in real estate markets as it is in schools. Research has found that students retain 10% of what they learn in lectures after one year, whereas students not only retain all they know when learning in environments where there is a multi-dimensional story, they often know more since their curiosity is piqued and they continued learning.

Marketers know this and use it to imprint brands into part of the culture. The biggest brand in the world, Coke, has its story: originally getting brewed in someone’s backyard in Atlanta. Microsoft’s story? A college dropout becomes a billionaire and helps his early employees become wealthy.

Real estate websites have two main areas and ways agents can present their stories. The most obvious one is the  home page and the “About Us” page. Stories told from the “client’s benefit” point of view generate the most sales leads. Why? Because people love to read autobiographies. When website visitors can identify with a problem you helped someone solve in buying or selling their house, they then see you as the real estate expert that can eliminate a pain point in their life.

Testimonials can serve as very powerful mini-stories on your real estate website that reinforce your brand. Third party tales of benefits received are the most sought after marketing devices. These stories not only reveal benefits received, but by the nature of their objectiveness in the mind of the web visitor, they reinforce the credibility of your story and market positioning.

IMCD’s websites provides several optional add-on web page to our real estate websites that agents can use to craft their stories toward the buyer, seller or investor markets. Each market has different needs and different benchmarks for success. Trying to appeal to all markets on one page alone, such as the homepage, divests agents of the opportunity to add keyword-rich content that matches specific real estate keyword searches. Hitwise.com found that on many sites, the preponderance of visits came from these “long tail” searches. By adding web pages with different compelling stories, agents build a wider sales funnel and reap better lead generation rewards.

As south Florida’s condominium and vacation properties take a big hit in the real estate down cycle, Florida real estate websites with high search engine rankings are situated to capture the growing interest of European investors and second home buyers. Real estate agents in south Florida have found that the bottoming prices in condominiums have found their selling point with European buyers looking for warm havens for body, soul and cash.

The Florida and New York real estate markets have an advantage over the sunny vacation properties in California and Arizona in their relative proximity to the European market. Continental travelers have one less travel day each way in reaching their destination and the time difference is three hours better. Florida Realtors are reporting that European investors are not only looking for individual condos, but are looking for entire buildings in which to invest.

With Google’s international dominance for search engine real estate browsing, a Florida real estate website is a must for reaching the European market as well as the perennial retiring baby boomer markets of the Northeast and Midwestern states. IMCD Web Design’ real estate web designs for Florida real estate agents has helped opened their Internet marketing doors to generating sales leads from property buyers far beyond Florida’s borders. IMC websites have successfully positioned real estate agents and brokers to capture sales leads for both the residential and investor markets.

Instead of taking a shotgun marketing approach, IMC real estate web designs use ongoing web content management systems, such as real estate blogs and property listing tools, as well as effective search engine optimization and award-winning graphic design to propel our clients’ websites to high natural placement in the search engine ranking. Our time tested market-specific web designs draw web traffic on both the main and long tail keywords, giving clients a wide spectrum of potential leads.

Contact our Internet marketing specialist to find which real estate web design best fits your needs for capturing a greater slice of your areas real estate market, be it in Florida, New York, Arizona or California. Our pre-market research will help you position your website for consistent leads and return on your Internet marketing investment.

Successful real estate web design trends have followed the marketing trends that are breaking away form the pack in the current economic slowdown. With visibility as a key to the widest funnel for sales lead generation, real estate agents are turning to custom real estate website designs.

This may seem counter-intuitive to the idea of cutting expenses in a slow real estate market. However, custom real estate websites offer many assets for gaining agents visibility. Two key ingredients to custom websites are the graphic design and the high level of search engine optimization.

Graphic design serves several purposes, attracting and retaining web visitors and, just as important, visually branding the Realtor. The more professional a web design is, the more the visitor interested in buying or selling a home accepts the trustworthiness of the agent or the real estate brokerage firm.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a powerful online marketing tool for getting a real estate website ranked high on the Google and Yahoo search engines. Using a professional real estate web design company, such as IMCD Web Design, is necessary step in order to benefit from “white hat” SEO. Companies advertising 100% guarantees of first page ranking may well be telling the truth…but only for the initial splash. Historically this web design companies utilize “black hat” SEO techniques that fool the search engines for a short time. Sadder but wiser real estate agents who have been taken advantage of in this way witness their websites meteoric rise followed by a meteoric fall into Google’s mythical sandbox – the closest the cyber world has come to limbo – your website exists, but no one knows where it is.

Each real estate company has its unique benefits to home buyers and sellers. Custom SEO matches those benefits to the popular keywords potential clients use to query the search engines. Keyword choice is customizing your real estate web design’s SEO to the language your market is using to find you on the Internet. In choosing keywords, nuances can make the difference in emphasizing a keyword 6600 people in your market use to search for real estate agents and homes or 24,000. Many times the difference may be simply word order or “house for sale” versus “homes for sale”. IMC makes sure that the key words used on your custom real estate web design are the ones that will bring you the most qualified leads.

If you are looking for the highest return on your real estate online marketing investment, IMC custom web designs are a tried and true way to establish your professional web presence and enhance you visibility in the market.

Real estate websites for agents are a great match for the moving patterns of the real estate market demographic that is buying many of the homes on the market. According to the recent figures released by the Census Bureau and analysis and research by the National Association of Realtors®, most movers are buying new homes and selling their old homes in the same area. Real estate websites are targeted to, and getting sales leads from, the active online real estate markets.

Digging deeper into the data, the demographic that does the most moving (over 25%) is young adults from 20 to 29. This is the same demographic that is very Internet savvy and more apt to use social networking websites (where you can create a profile) and the Internet for product and services searches. This is also a demographic that has fewer investors and far more owner occupied buyers.

Overall, most home buyers and sellers are moving within 25 miles of their old residences. If moving to another county, home buyers are usually moving in-state and still within 50 miles of the old homestead.

The demographics and moving patterns statistics indicate that Realtors® with their personal real estate agent websites are creating the best real estate marketing campaign for the largest part of the home buying and selling markets. IMCD Web Design’ custom real estate web design services and customized real estate web templates offer agents an online marketing opportunity. With the most mobile part of the market acclimated to using the Internet to shop and find information, real estate Internet marketing is the key ingredient, along with referrals, for reaching the twenty-something home buyers and sellers.

If your Internet marketing campaign is not reaching this active market, contact IMC’s real estate web design sales team about improving your online sales lead generation.

Denver real estate websites have an interesting challenge: what is the best marketing for so diverse a home buying and selling population. Denver is well situated in the center of Colorado’s Front Range with several top-notch universities, large corporate employment opportunities, an international airport and one of the biggest all season playgrounds out the back door.

Denver’s real estate market, with its many property acquisition drivers – need to be close to work, near a particular school, in a condo near downtown, in an upscale luxury home, or close to a road that heads out to a second home at a ski resort – demands multiple online marketing messages.

IMCD Web Design has helped several Denver real estate agents stake a claim on the gold rush of Google’s first page results for Denver homes for sale and property searches. Without the need for pay-per-click advertising. Behind each successful real estate Internet marketing strategy was a thorough research of the current market and an analysis of what was necessary to be competitive. The rewards of successfully marketing with a Denver real estate website are profitability in this active Colorado market.

IMCD utilizes its array of real estate marketing tools, sales web pages marketing specific market niches, to help Denver Realtors attract and prequalify their sales contacts. By targeting several markets as once, Denver real estate websites cast a wide, yet specific, net that will address whatever part of the market is active at a given time.

From Broomfield down to Highlands Ranch, real estate agents have depended on IMCD’s Denver real estate web designs to consistently bring leads and a return on their online marketing investment. Call our Colorado sales team if your Internet marketing campaign is not positioning you for the best results in Denver’s diverse real estate market.

Boulder, as a university town with a rich heritage, is a market whose real estate websites have an interesting challenge of identifying markets and diversifying their online marketing offering. IMCD Web Design has a history of assisting top Boulder real estate agents keep their brokerage firms active in the market with comprehensive online marketing exposure.

Boulder’s real estate market is markedly different than many in the Front Range with its strict growth limitation. The saying that “Land isn’t being made anymore” is very true in Boulder. The median age of homes is 32 years. The different markets in Boulder are largely defined by distance from the university, from shopping areas like Pearl Street, or proximity to a main artery leading to the tech parks outside the city limits.

With national exposure from different newsletters and magazines awarding Boulder as a top cycling city, a top place to retire and a green city, Boulder real estate websites are regularly used by out-of-state buyers to search the available condominiums and homes for sale. With its environmental emphasis, brokers focused on energy-efficient homes have a definite market.

Boulder neighborhoods with classic Victorian and Queen Anne architecture are an eclectic market niche that Realtors have seen draw many families who also enjoy the neighborhood’s proximity to Boulder’s hiking paths.
Boulder real estate websites using either their real estate blog or article manager are in demand by home buyers using the Internet to research homes for sale and the surrounding neighborhood’s amenities.

Boulder real estate websites are also in an interesting position of selling homes in one of Colorado’s only areas that has low foreclosure rates and a slight increase in home value when nearby towns are experiencing lower valuations, though not the extremes felt in sections of the Arizona, Nevada and California real estate markets.

For that Boulder real estate website that provides maximum ability to show area homes and your featured listings as well as top-of-the-line content management systems for blogging or adding area news, contact Boulder web design specialists at IMC. Our goal is to find your website great real estate in the Internet marketing neighborhood.

Serving one of America’s largest property markets, successful California real estate web designs have an appeal to the West Coast lifestyle. IMCD Web Design has worked with Realtors whose sales territories have encompassed the dry desert neighborhoods with wide open vistas to the lush wine country with their rolling fog banks. Every area has the challenge of finding and meeting the needs of the areas home buyers and sellers.

In a state so large, with so many areas, one of the initial challenges in the real estate web design is defining the market. Even within one town, such as San Diego, home buyers may be searching for a home with an emphasis on proximity to one of the areas research centers, or military families looking for communities with great schools close to the bases, to retirees searching for condominiums down by the active Gaslight District. In targeting just the home buyer market, effective California real estate web designs create separate guest book or landing pages for each market, guiding each online home buyer to the information on schools, area amenities or featured listings that meet their buying criteria.

With the current “market corrections” in different California markets, Realtors with specialties in home selling and foreclosure sales are in demand. However, Realtors are finding two types of clients emerging as the most active, both looking for the best value, families that have held off moving waiting for prices to stabilize and investors with long-term plans for property valuations to reverse their downward trends. Each of these markets responds to different neighborhood information. For investors, 1031 exchange information is helpful, but modifying feature listings fields to include more economic information on the properties hastens the property selection process.

While taking time to assess your local markets direction and greatest source of transaction activity, measure whether your real estate web design is getting you the traffic is should be from your local California market. Contact IMC if you need one of our California real estate web designs to improve your lead attraction and capture in these interesting economic times.