Real Estate Web Site Alternatives
There are generally three types of real estate websites available to real estate professionals: a web page or web site provided by a broker, template websites, and custom websites. Each alternative has advantages and disadvantages. Here’s some information to consider:
Real Estate Broker Websites
Some large brokerages provide a real estate web site for their agents. This could work well for you if you have enough control over the website. You need to be able to customize content, fine-tune page titles and meta tags, add pages containing content that is useful for your visitors, and have some flexibility with contact forms.
You also need to be able to maintain your own domain name, and point it directly at the site without any funny redirects. If you can’t direct your domain name to your broker website, keep in mind that for a very small fee you can host a website for your domain name, and use files uploaded to that site to do a permanent redirect to your broker website.
Template Websites
The largest controversy about template websites is whether or not they are search engine friendly. There is no doubt that a leading-edge designer can produce a custom website with cleaner code. However, in our experience template sites make a lot of sense for a great number of real estate professionals, and they can achieve excellent positions in the search engine result pages.
There are many reputable companies who provide template sites for the real estate industry. There are also many companies who market themselves as experts in real estate web site design, and fail miserably. Your best option is to stay with the nationally-known firms.
Among the reputable firms, there are two that we see most often: Point2 Agent and Advanced Access. Both of these firms provide easy-to-use content management systems that let you manage your site with a relatively short learning curve. They also provide an excellent level of customer support.
Making a decision among real estate website vendors is fairly easy depending on your marketing objectives and budget.
Custom Websites
Naturally, custom websites are the most expensive alternative. The advantage is that your site can have a more customized look and feel, and cleaner code. A common disadvantage is that you will need more technical knowledge to manage the site, and you may have to rely on the designer to make some types of changes.
The key issue to address if you build a custom site is to make sure that the site is search engine friendly. Make sure you’re working with a firm that understands search engines and SEO, not just design. The biggest problem you can get yourself into is to pay the freight for a custom site, then discover that the cute flash introduction will eliminate your chances in the search engines. Or, that the pretty graphic menu is all flash and cannot be read by the search engines. Or, even worse, that the entire site is flash or designed in frames -- the search engines can’t read those types of pages, either!
When reviewing custom offerings, make sure you are comfortable that you have all the capabilities you will need, such as an easy way to enter information on your featured listings, contact management capability, IDX search integration, etc. You’ll also need to be able to add pages and edit the page titles, and meta tags. (See How to Choose a Real Estate Website)
Spend some time using the content management system to ensure that the system is easy to use. If you don’t know HTML, and don’t want to take time away from your business to learn HTML, make sure you can do what you need to without knowing HTML coding. If there is a limit on the changes you can make yourself, be sure to find out what the cost and turnaround will be if you want the vendor to make changes later on.
For more information, or if you have questions about real estate website alternatives, feel free to contact us.
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