More home buyers and sellers are finding homes and agents from real estate websites. The latest figures from the California Association of Realtors (CAR) found 84 percent of buyers did serious shopping on websites, both to find homes and agents.

Looking into the statistics, online marketing of real estate services with a website is building your future client base today. Many Realtors report to the national Realtor survey that most of their clients come from referrals, which may lead people to believe working on referrals is the highest priority. It is a high priority, of course. However, looking at referrals from the consumer side, CAR found that only 18% of traditional buyers used agents from referral and only 2% of Internet-using homebuyers used referrals.

85% of Internet buyers found their agents online, either through a real estate broker website or the agent’s personal online real estate marketing site.

In fact, over 50% reported going online to find a brokerage firm and 67% to find an agent. This works out to somewhere between 67 to 72% of Internet buyers are not just looking for homes online – they are looking for a real estate agent.

Another difference between Internet and traditional buyers: None of the Internet buyers picked their agent from previous transactions versus 27% of traditional buyers. Given the large difference in these two figures, it is more likely that most Internet buyers are first-time home buyers, not that they are in a area or mood that called for a different agent.

This means three things for your real estate website:

1. Get one if you don’t have one or work to get your website up in the search engine rankings if you do have a Realtor website.
2. Your home page and “About Us” page is one of your most important selling tools, and
3. Providing “walk you through the process” real estate information is a valuable online marketing tool for the current online market.

IMCD Web Design has been creating top-selling real estate websites for agents across the US – websites that have a high ROI due to their ability to rank high in the search engines, provide home selling and home buying guides, multiple contact points and the ability to integrate blogs, article managers, list managers and IDX listings into the site. Contact us to make sure you are reaching the real estate market where it is looking – online!

Survey your real estate website to make sure your web content is reinforcing your sales skills in the key areas of: prospecting, lead follow-up, presentations, and closing.

Prospecting
Sales lead generation is the primary role of a real estate website – whether to gain new listings or clients looking for homes to buy for primary residence or investment purposes. Does your homepage content convey the benefits of using your real estate agent services? Do you have contact forms that ask enough questions to pre-qualify your lead, but not so intrusive that they turn visitors away?

Lead follow-up
A problem many agents and brokers have with their online prospecting is failing to institute a follow-up program, either by phone or just auto responder emails. If you have created a special email address to collect your online leads, make sure it is checked often, just as in all marketing lead gathering campaigns, speed of response boosts your image to the buyer.

Presentations
Does your real estate website allow you to easily post videos or slide shows of your property? IMCD Web Design (IMCD) offers custom and template real estate web designs that include blogs for ease of posting videos of your feature listing properties. IMC also offers a listings manager online software program that has a user-friendly front-end that allows agents to post and edit their property slide shows! Virtual tours allow a 24/7 online marketing presentation of properties in their staged condition.

Closing
A real estate library or home buyer and seller guides allows your clients and real estate website visitors to educate themselves on the areas of buying or selling a house. By having this guides on your Realtor website, you can include links to specific reports or articles in reply emails to your clients. This both drives traffic to your site and leverages your online reports built on agents’ real estate experience and insight.

If your real estate online marketing are not meeting all your objectives in these four key areas, it may be time to talk over upgrading your online presence with an IMCD real estate website. IMCD’s semi-custom  websites put the agent in the driver’s seat, controlling the frequency and quality of their ongoing web content building strategy with intuitive and integrated blog. The search engine optimization built into every custom and semi-custom real estate web design increase your prospecting leads through better search engine ranking. Contact us today to see how your sales skills can be better conveyed in the active world of online real estate marketing.

Why cater to the online real estate market with a real estate website? 2009 surveys by the California Association of Realtors (CAR) turned up an interesting profile of the online home buyer versus a traditional buyer – and a good reason to target this growing market.

On the average, online home buyers visit real estate websites to research and educate themselves on the available homes almost twice as long as the traditional buyer – almost two months versus one month. Most of the survey respondents used real estate websites to find out as much information on properties through images, virtual tours and maps and used that information to narrow the field of homes they want an agent to show them. Though they spend almost the same amount of time with a real estate agent, because of their online research, they visit half as many homes before making their home buying decision.

Though Internet home buyers’ income averages about $40,000 less per year than the traditional buyer, they both purchase homes with a median price of $325,000. Similar commissions with half the legwork!

Real estate websites providing both home listings with maximum information – written and in images – as well as information on neighborhoods are the sites best serving up information the Internet market is researching. Blogs are proving to be one of the best way to maintaining up-to-date neighborhood news.

The other aspect of catering to the online real estate market is response time. Internet home buyers are used to finding information within seconds and 89% said that response time was either “very important” or “extremely important”. 73% gave the top reason that they were satisfied with their agent as quickness in responding. This translates into the online home buyer expecting a return call or email in less than half hour. Most agents are responding between one hour to one day later.

With the advent of the iPhone and similar devices, providing instant information to mobile devices is the future. Many real estate agents are responding to the market demand by staying current with the latest smart phones, not so much to “keep up with the Jones” as to keep up with what their customers are using.

IMCD Web Design has continually adapted their real estate websites to meet agents’ needs in providing the best online service. IMCD Realtor websites provide agents the ability to add maximum property description and images, neighborhood information as well as video or slide virtual tours. Contact IMCD about a real estate agent website that will connect you to the growing online market.

Improve your real estate website with case studies – reinforce your expert professional public image and increase the trustworthiness or your site. A well written case study defines who you are as a real estate agent by showing in story form your perceptiveness of your client’s problem, your ability to show your client the solution that is in their best interest and cap it off with a testimonial from that client.

As a start, outline all the categories of case studies you can create, defining them by each of your main real estate markets, such as the home seller, home buyer, investor, commercial real estate and renter markets. For each of these markets, list the problems you have helped your real estate clients overcome. Prioritize writing the case studies giving highest priority to the most popular stumbling blocks and those for which you have great testimonials.

The simple outline for your real estate case study is define the problem as stated by your clients, then go through your problem-solving process in general terms (not to give away your trade secrets). Finally, give a level of co-measurement to the results of using your real estate services by giving a benchmark to your successes. A benchmark may be simply showing your listings’ average days on the market versus the FSBO or your area’s real estate market’s average days on the market.

Case studies help bridge the gap between selling your real estate services on what your client thinks you do to sell their home or find their next home versus educating them to all the hard work and marketing services you do perform so they think they are getting a steal of a deal working with you.

Case studies are part of your online real estate marketing strategy that answers your website visitors’ primary question, “Can this Realtor help me?” Even though writing content for your real estate website lacks the immediacy and feedback of talking to a client, it draws on all your conversations to answer questions you know from experience home buyers and home sellers have. Realtors who successfully put the desired information into their case studies build an invaluable online resource for their clients – and a body of content that improves their standing in search engine rankings.

If your online marketing needs a real estate website that allows you the freedom to add case studies and real estate marketing information easily and quickly, contact the real estate website experts at IMCD Web Design. Our semi-custom template real estate websites are created to give online market advantage to Realtors pursuing the 80% of the real estate market that starts their shopping online.

Real estate websites can respond to home buyer demands and adapt to the changing needs of the market.

Most home buyers reported getting financing as the hardest part of buying their homes and offered real estate agents key ways to improve their marketing. In general, improved speed of communication was suggested.

For the real estate website improvement the top suggestions were:

1. References to lender who agents have found deliver results,
2. References to lenders who can explain and recommend the best home loan product for the buyer, and
3. Information on dealing with banks for REOs, short sales and distressed properties.

With areas like California, Las Vegas and Phoenix reporting over half of home sales are distressed property sales coupled with the tight credit markets, these website additions are timely niche areas to your target with your online real estate marketing.

There are several ways to adapt real estate websites to changing market conditions – the most user-friendly for real estate agents is an Article Manager or a blog. Both provide Microsoft Word-type interfaces for adding content. This means you do not need software for creating web pages or learning HTML commands.

An additional benefit to Article Managers and blogs are hosted on your real estate website’s server, any computer connected to the Internet can be used to upload your article or blog entries. You can add information from the road – which, if you are attending a seminar on mortgages or REO sales, allows you to add information when it is hot and fresh in your mind.

Just as in building in the social network arena, expanding your website to include a network of home loan specialists with track records of getting your home sales to close with a minimum of obstacles (there is always something) improves your clients’ home buying experience. This also follows the old marketing axiom “If you can take any steps your client has to take in order to purchase your product or benefit from using your services, take it. You’re most likely going into the area your competition does not think to go.”

Contact IMCD Web Design’s award-winning real estate web design experts to obtain your Realtor website with and integrated blog or Article Manager and improve your customer service as well as your sales lead generation.

Using mapping technology on real estate websites is increasing with the National Association of Realtors (NAR) finding that 42% of the agents use mapping more than 6 times per week. The most common usage is to provide directions to properties (71%) with aerial or satellite photos (53%) showing up as the second most popular feature.

87% of the agents using mapping features on their real estate websites find that the map-based searches provided “a more effective search utility”.

Google and MapQuest are two of the main sources of maps, however Microsoft’s Bing is still an active competitor. Bing recently announced the addition of the ability to embed a Bing Map on websites and they offer an aerial “bird’s eye” view of properties. This is currently limited to the major metropolitan areas, but it gives a more 3D view of a neighborhood over the straight-down images provided by satellites.

IMCD Web Design (IMCD) has many options in both the custom real estate websites and the semi-custom real estate web designs that allow real estate agents and brokers to integrate mapping features and IDX links into their personal sites. These allow website visitors to check listings and find them on a map without leaving the agent’s website. By providing information usually found on major listing or MLS websites in an agent real estate website, agents build their brand, keep their clientele and provide an appreciated service on their site.

The mapping feature enhances the resource information that 70% of the real estate websites offer, with schools topping the list of places searched for on the maps.

From the NAR’s research, of the 30% of agents or brokers who do not integrate mapping into their websites in any way, most of them want that feature and would add it if they had the technical know-how. IMCD realizes that agents are as pressed for time as are most small business entrepreneurs. We specialize in providing effective real estate websites with our experienced and technically savvy real estate web designers finding and providing the best solutions to your online real estate marketing needs – whether it is mapping integration, IDX solutions or improving the resources you offer your clients online.

Real estate is always a micro economic situation. Texas real estate websites are able to capitalize on that since approximately a thousand people a day are heading to Texas to find jobs with the energy industry faring better than other economic sectors, Texas towns are nine of the top 16 target cities in the recent Milken Institute/Greenstreet Real Estate Partners Best-Performing Cities Index.

Austin moved from its 2008 fourth position place to capture the top spot. Sales of MLS properties have enjoyed four straight months of sales figures higher than the 2008 sales with better sales prices also. It looks as if the Austin real estate market turned the corner in the spring of 2009. Real estate websites targeting the downtown resale market are poised to take advantage of Austin’s most active real estate area. In 2008, Austin made homes for 60,000 new residents – creating a better economy than towns in states that are suffering a population exodus.

Helping Texas real estate is its tax structure. In a time when California and New York are increasing state personal income taxes, states like Texas and Florida a benefiting from the homeowners moving to better tax states as part of their wealth protection measures.

Houston, always an oil industry center and international port, made a big jump from its 2008 16th place position to 5th place. Internet Marketing Consultants’ (IMC) has designed Houston real estate websites for agents who are successfully selling to incoming jobseekers, first-time homebuyers as well as the second home and lake-front home markets. Housing prices are holding steady overall and starting to move up in the more sought-after Houston neighborhoods.

The San Antonio’s real estate market, benefiting from the city’s low cost of living and warm climate, is the number one real estate market military retirees chose to find their post-active duty home. As for “creating and sustaining jobs and economic growth”, the Milken Institute 2009 Best Performing Cities Report ranked it #11, up four places from 2008.

With many of Texas home buyers searching for homes from out of state, having a well-designed and optimized real estate website is a must. To see how quickly you can improve or start your online real estate marketing campaign, contact the real estate web design pros at IMCD Web Design – we know how to give you a Texas-sized Internet presence!