What Top Achieving Real Estate Professionals Have On Their Websites Part 5

March 29, 2010

Market Evaluation – obviously any real estate professional gladly offers appraisals to anyone at no charge, but you can use your website to allow people to get this evaluation relatively anonymously and therefore encourage more appraisals.  Many people are not yet at the home buying or selling stage and so aren’t really interested in talking to any sales people yet (much less listening to your listing presentation).  But these people are still definitely interested in what their home is currently worth.  I saw one site whose home evaluation form asked all the usual questions, but none of the fields (including telephone number) were mandatory.  Someone could fill out all the info necessary to appraise the house yet ask the sales rep to only email them a market analysis.  At the very least it gives you an opportunity to add another person to your mailing list.

Properties Wanted – a real estate website need not be all about showcasing your listings.  One innovative sales rep has a section where they put details about the specific types of properties their current buyers and regular investor clients are looking for.  They include city, neighborhood, type of house, # of bedrooms, etc. along with price range.  This sales rep has a form where buyers can submit what they’re looking for, and it gets posted here.

Twitter – one top achieving Toronto rep has his Twitter postings relayed to his website’s home page.  He posts updates on what he’s doing, where he’s traveling, projects he’s involved in, thoughts on his mind about real estate, and so forth.  As with Activity Reports given to your sellers, Twitter postings are a great way of showing people how active you are.

Real Estate Terminology Glossary – many people in a given industry use words, acronyms and terms whose meaning is lost on people not from that industry.  One real estate professional put together a glossary of commonly used real estate and mortgage terms and their definitions on their site.  Not only is this a sorely needed resource for first time buyers, using these words will also be a great benefit for getting your website Search Engine Optimized (SEO) for real estate and mortgage searches.  For your newsletters you could offer a single commonly misunderstood term and its definition in each edition.

Filed under: Realtor Websites - Best Practices,SEO For Realtor Websites

Tags: branding, closing, email inquiries, email newsletter, email prospects, email subject line, email training tips, prospect, prospecting, real estate website, real estate website templates, real estate websites