by One of the most powerful tools for your online real estate marketing is that of a website. With a website you have a great deal of control on the look and feel, content, and page layouts. Building up a powerful real estate website takes time and money. Most real estate agents stay with the same website vendor for years because it can be challenging to move all of the content you have created. Since you are going to be investing time, money, and it is challenging to move should your needs change, it’s important to take some time before committing to a specific vendor.
Every real estate agent has different needs and choosing the right company to help you with your website will take a combination of understanding your needs and what will give you the most success online. Here are some key features to consider before you make a switch or sign up with a new company.
- What kind of support is offered? – Technical support can vary wildly between companies. Take time to evaluate the operating hours to see if it will work within your schedule. If you only have time to work on your website in the evenings, then you may want to consider a company who has technical support open past 5pm. When you call the companies ask if you can speak to one of their tech support representatives and ask them questions you have had before to see how they would help you.
- How often are they updating their product? – Web technologies change and they change quickly. Ask them about how they update their product to maintain their competitive edge online. Some website vendors out there have been using outdated technology and only the real estate agents have suffered. Dig deeper and find out what new features they will be adding over the coming year so you can see who has their eyes on the changing marketplace.
- What is the startup program and costs? – The first few weeks of having your new website can make a huge impact on your long term success. When you consider that you will have this website for years it’s important to start off with a training program that will set you in the right direction. Find out if they give you someone to help you create your basic pages to start off and ask if there are any online tutorials that you can follow.
- What Integrations are Available? – Integrations of 3rd party applications with your website are essential to get the most out of any platform. Implementing reporting tools such as Google Analytics, texting ability from your site (i.e Twilio), Email optins, or even leveraging the power of social integrations such as Facebook, Instagram, and more can help you to generate more leads from your website.
- How fast do their sites load? – Now this is a “loaded” question that can be difficult to get an answer to. If you ask the pre-sales staff and they direct you to engineering they might say “it depends” and they would be correct as if you load up huge images then you could slow the site down, but that doesn’t give them a pass on sharing the performance of their baseline templates. Any website will have to load a certain amount of files to operate and you want to ensure that you won’t be victim to a poorly structured template. Ask them to run their basic template on PageSpeed insights (or rather you can run it) so you can see the performance metrics.
There are many different great real estate website vendors out there. Each one offers something unique and the real key is to find one that you feel comfortable you can work with and who will provide a good foundation for you to succeed with online.
No matter whom you choose your ultimate success will be determined by the plan of action you put in place to increase your rankings, get more traffic, get leads, and convert those leads into business. After getting down to your final selection take time to plan how you will be updating your website each and every month as that will help you generate business monthly. Remember, just like a car, a website won’t drive itself (ok cars are getting close to self driving) which means understanding the features available from your website vendor is just one step into your ultimate success online.
