Website development
I’ve taken the liberty to do a little research for all the real estate agents out there taking advantage of online marketing. There’s paid online marketing and organic/natural online marketing, but both forms need to know what’s the best real estate keywords to target. “Real estate” is the highest searched term. Recent estimates say it’s searched over 500,000 times a month. So, competing for such a phrase would be almost impossible to win with the big budgets of the Move.com Network (owners of Realtor.com, Moving.com, WelcomeWagon.com & much more) or the new up and comers like Zillow.com and Trulia. (more…)
So, doing a search on “bellevue wa real estate”, I come up as #20 on a recent search. It fluctuates and so you may have to look on the 3rd page at times (results 21 through 30) and sometimes it climbs higher. When searching for “buyer’s agent condo bellevue”, I show up on the first page. On the most recent search, I’m #7 on the first page. The funny thing is that I’m not even practicing in the Real Estate world anymore minus helping out some Realtors who contact me occasionally. Which by the way, unfortunately due to time constraints, I can’t just help out anyone for free. However, if I do help you, you will see results better than I even imagined in my first year of real estate, I believe. The question is “if” I can help you though. (more…)
These may be “fightin words…”, but it’s relatively true. O.K., maybe z57, the real estate web site developer service isn’t a total joke, but maybe the agents who buy the service are a joke? Well, regardless, they’re selling very basic services packaged in what appears to be great products or at least they would like you to believe they are. They’ll even admit it if you get them to honestly tell you what they’re selling. Then again, maybe it’s the fault of the agents who don’t figure out what they did a while back…
So, when I was in the real estate business, I didn’t really know who could help me with my website. After I did all my homework, I thought I would have to pay a web developer that would cost me $1000 or more and probably pay some search engine marketing service thousands of dollars to get (more…)
With the realities in the marketplace, I leveraged my understanding with my website and other forms of online marketing.
My website
This was probably the most critical aspect of doing well in Real Estate. This was my online resume. This was the potential place for a client to learn everything and anything about me. It could also give them the tools to educate themself before speaking to me. It could also provide them knowledge in how to make an informed decision. It could also help them look to other markets and I would get paid from some of those referrals. It was a powerful tool.
I started by using my name as the domain. I would be creating a brand out of my name “Brandon Na” — which coincidentally had “brand” inside my name. There are a few approaches to creating the new website for the business. Agents could use their name, they could use their area they want to specialize in or they could create a niche that they hope to be good at. Well, I did all of them. Websites are cheap these days. It costs a whopping $5-10 a year to buy your domain name. The problem is that just like physical real estate, online real estate is going through the roof & names that people would use to search for their information are being bought by the thousands every day. Once gone, it’s really hard to get that domain without paying more than the annual fee.
There are domain names like diamond.com which went for $7.5 million. Seniors.com went for $1.8 million. In terms of the Real Estate business, RealEstate.net went for $300,000 in a private sale in February of this year. HotProperty.com went for $120k, (more…)
Before jumping into Real Estate, I worked at Doubleclick.net (acquired by Google), Amazon.com and Expedia.com in middle management technical positions. I was exposed to a decent amount of Large Business Search Engine Marketing (SEM), Affiliate Marketing and Online Marketing (in general) in some of the top Internet companies in the world.
During my stints at each organization, I didn’t examine or understand SEM or other online marketing tools/techniques fully since I never applied the things we were doing at those companies on a larger scale in my own business. However, after jumping into the business of Real Estate, I realized that I could use some of that experience in my own business - and I did.
The Internet has changed the world of Real Estate in many ways.
Consumers are much more educated before they start working with their agents. They also do a bit of research on their agents with online recommendations or other tools & websites that may help them become more familiar with the person who is going to take a 3% cut out of their transaction. Consumers all over the world are more prepared and knowledgable about the experience they are about to encounter.
Prospective buyers use the Internet now to learn more about their markets. They want to make sure they are not being swindled into buying into a bad market like one of the “markets NOT to buy” according to Business 2.0 or other publications. They also want to know what sort of service they should expect in someone who may make thousands of dollars and for the elite, tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per transaction. It’s no longer easy for an agent to just help a client with their contracts and get the big check a few days after closing.
Sellers are wanting to make sure they are represented by agents that are NOT fresh out of Real Estate school. Sellers of homes and condominiums are wanting to make sure they get the most out of their homes and will look online for recent sales around their property. In general, most consumers are more ready before making the plunge into buying or selling their largest purchase in life.