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The Big 10: What to Look for
in a Real Estate Website
Choosing the right real estate website is a key step in making sure you have an effective Internet presence. In no particular order, here are the features we think are most important in a real estate website:
- Customizable Design - You don’t want your site to look like everyone else’s!
- Customizable Content - You should be able to add your own content and images in as unstructured an approach as possible. Other things to look for:
- Visitors will tend to stay on your site longer and visit more often if you have valuable information for them. Search engines like content, too. You should be able to add more pages than you ever think you’ll need.
- At some level, it should be possible to access, add to and change the HTML code for individual pages. You may not be an HTML expert, but there will be times when you want to add a bit of HTML code that is supplied to you. Examples would be adding links to “Add to Favorites”, “Tell a Friend”, and sometimes website statistics.
- Access to Individual Page Titles and Meta Tags - The ability to fine-tune this information is a necessity in order to optimize your website for search engine ranking.
- Search Engine Friendly - Websites should use “clean” code that meets HTML code standards. However, analyzing a vendor’s HTML code is often beyond many people’s expertise. There are a couple of other issues you can review:
- Determine if the website uses frames on the internal pages. In general, using frames makes it more difficult for the search engines to read web pages, which can have an impact on your chance to achieve high search engine rankings. To an extent, how the frames are implemented will determine how much of a problem you’ll have. The best alternative is to choose a vendor that does not use frames.
- If a flash introduction page is offered, make sure it’s an option. Your home page is prime real estate and shouldn’t be given over to a flash presentation.
- IDX MLS Integration - The primary reason that visitors land on real estate websites is to search the local MLS listings. Make sure the website has an easy way to incorporate an IDX MLS search function.
- Featured Listings - Most MLS data does not include all the information that is necessary to do the most effective job of marketing your listings. Make sure your website lets you create your own “featured listings” to highlight your seller’s property.
- Contact Database - The overall objective for a real estate website is to generate leads. Your website should provide contact forms, and the information your visitors enter into those forms should be stored in a contact database. The more information that is tracked about your visitors, the better.
- Website Statistics - You’ll learn a great deal from the information provided by a website statistics program. You can determine which pages are most popular, how long visitors stay on your site, when search engines visit the site, which keywords are being used to find your site in the search engines, and a wealth of other information that will help you manage your website.
- Keep in mind that if your website of choice doesn’t provide a robust set of visitor statistics, you can use third-party programs by adding a bit of HTML code to your pages. Of course, that means you need the ability to add HTML to your pages.
- Content Management System - The Content Management System (CMS) allows you to access the website’s “back office” to edit pages, manage contacts, and so forth. Find out how you can try out the CMS for any website you are considering. If the vendor cannot provide access to a test website, ask why. Make sure the use of the CMS makes sense to you.
- Find out if there are any areas on the site where changes cannot be made. If you are prohibited from making specific changes, find out what the cost and turnaround will be to have the vendor make changes for you.
- Technical Support - It doesn’t matter what level of technical expertise you possess, there will always be questions to be answered. Make sure your vendor provides friendly, timely, accurate assistance. Training is a nice addition, too.
Those are the Top 10. There are lots of other features offered by real estate website vendors. Here are a few of the most popular:
- Drip E-Mail - This term refers to a feature that allows you to create pre-defined e-mails, to be sent at pre-determined times, to visitors who are added to your Contact Database. It’s definitely a time-saver.
- RSS Readers - There are many free RSS feeds that pertain to the real estate industry and probably your local neighborhoods, also. An integrated RSS reader lets you display the RSS feeds without doing any additional programming.
- Other Listing Features - It’s handy to have things like virtual tours and listing brochures created automatically.
- Lead Notification via Text Messaging - Immediate notification when someone has completed a lead form on your website will allow you to be the first to respond.
- Integrated Blog - Blogging is a great way to stay in touch with your marketplace, and maintaining a blog on your website will have a very positive impact on your search engine rankings.
- Listing Syndication - The number of places where you can promote your listings is growing almost daily. The ability to submit your listings to various portals is a great way to stay up with (or ahead of) the competition.
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