Have You Been Threatening to Start a Neighborhood Community Online?
I’ve talked to a number of real estate professionals who would like to build an online neighborhood community, but they just haven’t found a great way to do it.
You can build pages on Facebook, but that doesn’t completely fit the bill of a truly interactive community meeting place. And, many agents don’t have the time or inclination to get a hosting account, and learn how to start up a neighborhood forum using software oriented to the computer geek skill set.
Here’s a Service You Need to Evaluate
If you’ve been in that situation, there’s an online service you might want to take a look at. It’s called Groupsite, and it’s designed to combine a number of interactive web applications into a user-friendly package. Here are the main components:
- Group blog
- Discussion forums
- Shared calendar
- Member profiles
- Photo gallery
- File storage
Starting a Groupsite is free. The pricing for additional capabilities is nicely divided between a la carte options, where you can add just the couple things you really want, all the way up to a premium package that provides a significant discount on going with the entire package.
For example, when you’re just starting to build the community, you might want to spend $9/month to add a custom header. Later on, you might want to upgrade to your own custom domain name, more storage, and so forth.
I took advantage of the free startup to play with the system a bit. Take a look at the result: http://RealEstateMarketing.Groupsite.com/ You can cruise around through the various components, and there is a link to the pricing page on the Groupsite website for your reference.
I can see many uses for a site like this in the real estate industry. You could use it to keep the agents in your office connected, you could use it for the Association of a neighborhood you farm, or recruit leaders in your part of town and use it as a community news forum.
Just keep in mind that any site like this requires administration. Someone needs to keep the information and discussion flowing. Someone has to review new member applications(you don’t want a bunch of spammers joining up to post weird things on your forum), and maintain some control over the membership participation areas (for those times when someone who is actually an Association member loses their cool online).
But, if you can commit the time and energy to get a site like this started, along with the ongoing maintenance, then I think Groupsite is definitely a platform to consider.
