Hi, I hope your December is full of new and exciting financial decisions for the next business year. Most of you know me from the group of Real Estate professionals called AgentLinkus. I think we are over 100,000 members strong of Real Estate Brokers in the United States. Brokers who are willing to share info with eachother, who collaborate, and who discuss business.
I RE-Evaluate my Real Estate Website EVERY year in December
As a Real Estate Broker, it is important to my business to evaluate the latest and greatest, and most cost effective technology that is specific to the Real Estate field. Huge advances can be made in available products in our industry, and I don’t want to overlook or ignore them. I have invested an enormous amount of time and money into my website and I thought I would just share my findings with fellow Real Estate Brokers.
Let me start by showing you my main business website. www.LandlineRealEstate.com Wordpress has made it possible for us to skip on the expense of paying a designer and a coder to make a VERY professional Real Estate website, I get a lot of compliments on my website, and I know most Real Estate Agents will opt for a more expensive, less functional website because they don’t want to be bothered with the seemingly impossible task of building their own. It is easy, and inexpensive, I promise!
Several of my broker friends have asked me to build their real estate websites for them, and my answer is a big-fat-NO! I love selling Real Estate for a living, not building websites. I am a Principal Broker, and my Brokers and clients keep me very busy.
Why build your own Real Estate Website?
- In my opinion, the most important reason is to have complete control. You control the look, the functionality, and the tools you use based on your target audience and the direction of the market.
- Affordability is the 2nd, yet more tangible advantage. All you HAVE to buy for a website is the hosting plan and the domain name (ie landlinerealestate.com).
Alternative to building your own Real Estate website
- Use a prebuilt Real Estate website for a monthly subscription cost, that includes a backend system for uploading new listings and managing prospects. I used Point2Agent and I think that cost me around $150 a month for the elite package.
- Buy a template. You can buy a nice template that was built by someone who does not sell Real Estate for a living and then what do you do with the template. I have purchased about 10 templates over the years for over $100 each and have never deployed any of them for use to the public. That is embarrassing to admit! (I hope my husband never reads this blog!)……if so, I am really sorry honey!
- Hire a website designer to help create a banded online presence. I have seen some incredible work from designers, but the cost for a reputable designer is $2500 and up and up! Then you have the cost of maintenance.
- Some have a page on a franchise website, dedicated to the Real Estate Broker. This to me should just be a bonus. Every single Real Estate Broker should have their own website. Otherwise, you are just driving traffic to your company website. I cannot think of a reason any independent Broker would want to drive traffic to their franchise site.
The expense you will have in following along with me is the cost of hosting, and the cost of a domain name.. I am going to introduce you to an extremely inexpensive way for hosting, which is adequate for a Real Estate website. I say that because a Real Estate website is not as sophisticated as your website host might like you to think! We are not collecting money over the net. I pay $3.85 a month witch totals $46.50 for a year of hosting and I get a free domain within that fee, which generally costs around $15.
If you are ready to take the next step, I will show you how to Buy an inexpensive Real Estate website hosting plan in 2018, get a domain name (free), then to install WordPress. You are going to love it!
