« Buyers and Sellers are Not Even Close - Agents to Blame? | Main | Foreclosures in Alpharetta, Milton, Roswell, Sandy Springs and John’s Creek »
Turbo Charge Your Listings With Single Property Websites
By Ryan Ward | June 12, 2008
Sellers Love Them and Done Right, They Can Give Your Listings a Real Edge over Similar Homes
The truth is that your average run-of-the-mill single property website won’t do much to help you sell a listing. But a well thought out website, optimized for consumers and the search engines, can give your listings more exposure than any other additional form of exposure.  I have been adding them now for about 2 months and the results have been tremendous. But, how do you even know if people are viewing your tour and where those views are coming from? Instead of making up answers and excuses for my sellers that I couldn’t back up, I sought out real answers to these questions to determine if you could make a virtual tour worthy of being a real part of a marketing campaign rather than just something we do to appease a seller. The statistics may surprise you.
Since buyers and agents can view virtual tours, it’s possible to track how many visits you get and where those visits are coming from simply by adding a tracking code like Google offers for analyzing your own website. I have been testing 4 listings by using single property websites. With over one month’s worth of data accumulated between all 4 listings, the total number of view to the virtual tours by agents and buyers from every real estate website where these homes are listed has returned a grand total of 15 visits, but, I was able to generate over 500 visits by making the virtual tour double as the single property website as well. The vast majority (97%) of views to my “Virtual Tours†were referred by way of my website, through blog posts about the property and direct organic search results.
Certainly you could explain to a client that 3 or 4 views in a month for one property would not justify a virtual tour, but, how about 100 – 250 visits? I think that would not only help you sell a house, but also help you shine and get listings where you might be competing against other agents who cannot produce that many potential buyers to a property. I have had several people ask me if they could use the website I created for the listings and I have finally made it available for download for free to use. The trick is in the configuration of the plugins so you need to read the readme file that I made for the website theme. I will probably offer it in more than one color, but, for now, it will look like this one that I am in the process of putting together for a new listing in Milton. You can see a completed live version I have for a listing in John’s Creek.
The WordPress theme and everything that you need is available for download over at my test blog so if you have any specific questions about getting it to work, please respond there. Here is the location. Depending on when you look at the other site, it may or may not look in the best shape. It’s not called the real estate test blog for nothing. I test things out there before going live on anything.
Topics: Marketing |
June 14th, 2008 at 5:23 pm
I can see a need to turbo charge these in the search engines as well. If the listing is one that may take some time to sell I could see it showing up in the natural search like yahoo with out a problem. I can see the real potential for these as an information tool as you say for you clients.
June 16th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Plus you can reuse them for future listings and they show up in Google as well. the one in the example comes up for the neighborhhod, neighborohood homes, neighborhood homes for sale, homes for sale in the neighborhood and many more. These searches result in direct clicks to the one home. It’s next to impossible to get that kind of targeted visitor any other way while giving them so much information.
June 17th, 2008 at 12:42 am
This is a really neat way to keep sellers at ease. If you do however place a link on your well optimized websites then you could drive some traffic to it, so it can keep a seller happy and help sell it at the same time. Great idea.
June 19th, 2008 at 2:31 pm
Ryan great job in your marketing efforts with the single property websites. I think this is the 1st time I have visited you blog…it looks great!
June 24th, 2008 at 9:42 pm
Hi Ryan,
I like the idea of having a sps for properties for sale. I was thinking about adding something like this to my site to see how it would work, but i couldn’t figure out how to get the listings on google and yahoo.
I will stay posted to get a better understandint on how to accomplish this.
June 25th, 2008 at 7:19 pm
Single property websites do well if they are advertised in local classifieds. This way people get more information and can watch videos and see pictures of the property.
June 27th, 2008 at 8:41 am
You managed to achieve some really good results by the look of it. Well done and thanks for the heads up for the rest of us.
June 30th, 2008 at 5:43 pm
Wow, with traffic like this to the virtual tours of their homes surely the sellers you list for are happy with the interest you are getting.
July 10th, 2008 at 1:10 pm
We were contemplating setting up individual domains for each listing we have but we found the logisitcs to be a hastle with 35 agents and hundreds of properties.
Might be an interesting test project. (first time here great blog by the way).
July 12th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
Ryan,
A friend forwarded me the link to this post. Thanks for the heads-up on this sweet little theme. BTW, I’ve been perusing through your site and I love the overall direction and layout.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Great Idea! But when you have multiple can get costlyand you could forget to maintain them all. Cheers
August 7th, 2008 at 11:58 pm
very good Ryan. I have been getting as many as 500 views on my stand alone property websites and at least one of them was sold to the buyer who found the home that way. All I can say is Nice Nice Nice.