In the Dallas Texas housing market, agents and brokers are positioning their Realtor websites to take advantage of the ripple effect of uncertainty in the financial markets. The Dallas real estate market largely missed the quantum leaps in home values that hit other popular markets. Consequently the Dallas area has not experienced the home value declines hitting the Phoenix and Las Vegas markets. Though still a buyer’s market, the stability in home values overall make the Dallas market a healthy market for taking advantage of current market prices.

IMCD Web Design’ Realtor website clients in the Dallas market use their Article Manager content management system to help position their website for changing market conditions. With the Internet’s national sale platform, information on neighborhoods and housing developments help long distance home buyers educate themselves on available homes and narrow their choices of target neighborhoods before visiting Dallas.

Realtor websites fulfill their role of providing consumer information by helping with “branding” or positioning the real estate agent in the mind of the web visitor. In reviewing your positioning, check if the description of your real estate services can be summed up in one word. Just as Volvo evokes “safety”, and Porsche brings to mind “speed”, IMC can help you find your marketing keyword that may serve as a positioning element in your website. Real estate agents who can translate high visibility in the search engine results into a memorable brand achieve a coveted marketing goal. These Real Estate agents gain more clients and their business grows.

A second step in positioning is to view your Realtor website as a conversation with potential clients with you at the steering wheel. For each market (buyers, sellers, transplants and investors), introduce a problem common to the market and then show how your real estate company has solved that client’s problem. This is an opportunity to translate the one word branding into your home buyer’s or seller’s benefit. For example, if that one word is “straightforward”, then this can be reinforced with testimonials of smooth closings with no surprises or helpful assessment of current market conditions.

A final note, position your website to answer the questions that every home seller and buyer has internally. Stir their curiosity as to “Why” you are the most beneficial real estate agent to work with and then answer the question. Until your website visitor is satisfied with the “why”, you are still equal to all other Realtor websites they review.

Looking to stand out in your market? Contact IMC’s web development team that has helped Realtors position themselves, with website optimization, and their real estate websites, with search engine optimization. Capture more of your local market with greater visibility and branding.

Realtors with their own real estate websites are well positioned to capture a larger share of their market. The California Association of Realtors (CAR) released their “2008 Survey of California Home Buyers” that shows several trends continuing in the real estate market. These home sales trends favor agents who have successfully established their Internet marketing presence.

With the slow down in the economy, online home searchers took more time finding their property, however they averaged they found it two weeks faster than traditional home buyers. Of benefit to real estate agents, online clients viewed half as many homes with their agents as traditional buyers – 12.7 versus 23.3 – and spent more time looking online before contacting an agent.

CAR President William Brown noted, “Due to the high inventory of homes on the market, and uncertainty about the direction of home prices, buyers are more cautious and are moving at a slower pace during the home buying process than in previous years.”

Underlining the importance of having your real estate website show up high in the search engine rankings is the data:

• 90% of Internet searchers found their agents online;
• 33% (the largest group) found that a real estate agent’s website was the most useful;
• 72% found that use of the Internet helped them understand the real estate agent’s role in the property transaction; and
• 71% of the Internet market said they would use the same agent again versus only 27% of the traditional buyers.

Possibly in favor of computer savvy real estate agents, speed of the agent’s response figured very high in the satisfaction part of the survey. Agents who were not able to respond quickly fell out of favor. With online guest book and contact forms, agents can be instantly notified of potential clients and have the ability to connect quickly by cell phone or email.

Correlating with IMCD Web Design’ own research, the CAR survey found most Internet searchers used Google as the website they used to start their search. Only 8% started their search on Yahoo. IMC has found that optimizing for Google is the best way to get visibility in all the search engine rankings.

IMC’s real estate web designs are created to give agents maximum visibility on the Internet and generate sales leads. By skillfully merging captivating graphic design, multi-layered search engine optimization, and compelling web content, our web designs have helped many of our clients achieve front page ranking on Google and a consistent stream of sales leads. Contact IMC if you want to be positioned to be a dominant player in your online real estate market.

Real estate agents who successfully positioned their real estate websites to target foreign buyers did well in states targeted by foreign real estate investors. Though foreign investment in the US real estate  market is off its 2007 level according to a National Association of Realtors survey, foreign home buyers still target second homes in the sunny states of Florida, Texas, Arizona, Nevada and California. Though not one of the sunshine states, New York, ever a favorite national and international real estate market, enjoyed its share of overseas property investors. Possibly due to the increased buying power of the loonie, Canada replaced Mexico for the first time as the number one source of foreign real estate buyers, with twice as many buying in the May 2007 to 2008 window than in the prior period.

Realtors have found the international buyer a profitable niche market to target. Foreign buyers tend to buy more expensive homes, even for their vacation homes, than the local home buyers – usually buying a single family home close to $300,000. Almost 15% of the purchases were for properties over $750,000 – a nice property by any standard. Foreign buyers mostly purchased second homes with the buyers occupying their homes for just under 3 months of the year.

For either investment purposes or ease of completing the sale, forty percent of the buyers paid for their home purchases with cash. Many Realtors reported the tight availability of home loan financing, the 30% downpayment for loans to foreign nationals, and home prices to be an obstacle that halted some of the sales to foreign buyers.

Many real estate websites in the Arizona, Texas and California markets are already bilingual in order to address the needs a Mexican home buyers, which is the third highest population of cross border real estate buyers. Interestingly, most of the foreign sales of homes over $1 million went to buyers from China. Maybe this signals a need for real estate websites targeting the luxury home market to include pages in Chinese as well as English to attract these real estate investors.

The international real estate investor is a financially rewarding niche market to capture due to their tendency to buy property that is 36% more than the average US home buyer. Indeed, 8% of the 4,000 Realtors surveyed derive at least 50% of their home sales transactions from foreign buyers.

Improve your real estate website’s ability to target foreign real estate investors by adding specific pages to your website that educate the foreign buyer. Contact IMCD Web Design if you need to improve your Internet marketing presence with an IMC real estate web design. Your Internet marketing to a niche market is only effective if your potential real estate home buyers can find your website!

When honing your real estate website on a target real estate market, take into account Generation Y. Generation Y is the 18 to 30 year olds who pose a doubly potent market for real estate agents utilizing real estate websites to garner greater market share. National Association of Realtor’s Senior Research Analyst Jessica Lautz recently checked the home buying statistics on this age group and found why they are such a potent target market.

More than any other age group, 82% of Gen Y home buyers used a real estate agent in their purchase. Most of them were first-time home buyers. Interestingly, most of them viewed their home as a better store of wealth than the stock market and paid attention to both the quality of the house and the quality of the neighborhood.

What is best for real estate agents with websites is that 36% found their home on the Internet and another 35% found their home through their local Realtor. Jessica Lautz points out “These unique home buyers are the youngest of the home buying segment, and are the most likely to purchase a home in the next two years in comparison to any other age group.”

Oh yes, the average income for these first-time home buyers is $61,000. They get most of their information through the Internet, want to use a real estate agent and are ready to invest in their own home. Is your real estate website targeting this potential market?

Keep tabs on the future of the real estate market so your marketing and real estate website are positioned for buyers’ and sellers’ current and future real estate needs. The National Association of REALTORS® has found several trends in real estate trends that may well be determining the future buying trends. Here are a few of their insights:

Top Nine Methods Veteran Home Buyers Look for Property:

1. Real estate agent – 85%
2. Internet/real estate websites – 80%
3. Yard sign – 63%
4. Newspaper – 55%
5. Open house – 47%
6. Homes for sale book or magazine – 34%
7. Home builders – 26%
8. Television ads – 11%
9. Relocation company – 5%

When these real estate veterans contact you, they are looking for specific help from their real estate agents:

• 53% are looking for help finding the next real estate property,
• 13% need help with negotiating price,
• 11% are buyers needing help determining how much of a home they can afford or sellers looking for what market comparables are, and
• Less than 10% still need help with the paperwork or help in finding financing with a mortgage institution.

The top nine methods of property location help with finding material to add to your real estate website. Make sure your neighborhood news tool is announcing your open houses well in advance. On your community links page, adding links to three local builders you have found trustworthy can help you get positioned with home builder who recommend real estate agents to their clients.

Your real estate website covers the number one reason people contact a real estate agent – looking for real estate. But does your biography cover the benefits of your negotiating skills, which more than 10% of your website visitors are looking for?

The baby boomers have been a force in real estate market for decades and they will continue to affect the market, only now they are predicted to influence it in new ways. The over-building in the Sun Belt was partially in anticipation of the wholesale movement of retiring baby boomers heading to warmer climes. But the effect foreseen in local real estate markets is the increased popularity of single level 2 to 3 bedroom homes. What remains to be seen is if this generations’ wanderlust parlays into an increase in popularity of vacation timeshares.

Using the NAR’s research to round out your own experience in the market can give you insights that are great material to add content to your real estate website and blog. And by anticipating trends, you can spot them earlier when they arrive.

The luxury residential real estate prices continue to rise, contrary to the general market contraction. According to the recent report on luxury and high-end homes from Christie’s Great Estates, luxury homes selling around the country at record setting prices.

In the Colorado real estate market, luxury real estate in mountain communities such as Bachelor Gulch, Beaver Creek, and Vail have seen homes for sale keep pace with national luxury home price trend and sell for record amounts. In Telluride Mountain Village, 2007 prices were over 10% higher than the 2006 prices. Boulder County has also seen real estate values increase on the high-end properties.

The Florida real estate market’s Gulf Coast and Atlantic Coast have seen increases in both demand and prices for high-end homes. Hawaii, which overall saw a 10% decline in home sales in 2007, enjoyed a 14% increase in sales of high-end properties in the same period. On the East Coast, Europeans, Mid-easterners and a growing number of South Americans form the majority of the foreign buyers. In the West Coast and Hawaii markets, Australia and the Asian Pacific countries dominate. With expected changes easing the ability to obtain visas, China and South Korea are poised to become a larger part of the market. Both markets enjoy a resurgence of Canadian buyers now that the Canadian dollar is on par with the American dollar.

In the competitive world of Internet real estate marketing, blogs, neighborhood news tools and email “new property” notifications are standard. In order to stand out, websites are putting more emphasis on editorial content. To take advantage of the international interest in American luxury properties, real estate websites have adapted by adding more information on their niche market through very informative area luxury lifestyle guides and currency converters.

The market appeal to the luxury home buyer is not based so much on school locations, value and price, as on the lifestyle the home affords. Price is part of the picture, of course, but with 28% of foreign buyers purchasing their luxury property for cash (20% more than US buyers), price is not a hurdle. Real estate websites that add content on an area’s high-end life style amenities help create the market through their attractive and educational presentation.

Successful real estate agents in the luxury market know the power of Internet marketing as a foundation to their traditional marketing methods of colorful flyers and networking with associates. Starting with their own real estate website, designed to appeal to high-end buyers, they also utilize high visibility websites such as the Wall Street Journal’s website and the NAR’s website to steer traffic to their website. With many luxury home buyers leading “movable feast” lifestyles, the Internet is one stable real estate information source for the luxury market, where ever it may be.