A Real Estate Web Site is Only For Image and Listing Ads,:
This is true for many agents/brokers, but not because it has to be. There's an agent is a town of 7500 population, working 20 or so hours a week, and making a six figure income working only with prospects generated by his web site. The right content, plus offerings to capture visitor contact information, will generate prospects and commissions.
Make Site Visitors Sign In to Search Listings:
The theory here is that forced registration will get more leads. Agents have turned off required registration and found that their prospects dropped immediately. However, some of those prospects give email addresses like donald@duck.com. If they can get around it with fake info or find another site without registration, they will.
The sites that gather the most leads do so with valuable rich content and special report/info offerings that require their email to get them.
Web Site Leads are Not as Good as a Walk-in or an Ad Phone Call:
Real estate web site leads are only as good or as bad as the site and content that gathered them. Forced registration may get their email address, but if they didn't like giving it up to search, they may not want to do more with you. Another killer of web site leads is not responding quickly, and we mean quickly. Let that lead sit a week, and you'll lose it to a better agent who did respond. Responding with canned sales pitches instead of good info will also lose prospects.
Concentrate Most and First on Me and My Qualifications:
Sorry, but put your ego in a box. Ask 100 internet real estate shoppers what they want when they get to a web site, and 98 of them will say "a fast way to search all the listings". And the other 2 won't say they want to know about you. At some point, all that good info about you will become of interest, but not the first visit. And if you want a second visit, give them that "fast way to search all listings".
There's a Guru that Can Guarantee My Site Top Search Engine Positions:
There are definitely many out there that will tell you this. The facts are that Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major engines are all way ahead of the so-called "gurus". Some can get you good placement for a while, but it's usually due to tricks that are discovered and then you're busted down in placement overnight. Some basic search engine optimization strategies, coupled with relevant and valuable content, will get you better placement over time.
Template Real Estate Web Sites are Banned by Search Engines:
The type of site to which this remark usually refers is one of the pre-designed real estate site templates that allow you to do most of the customization work yourself, while the vendor provides the hosting and design tools you need. They may also provide drip email, national site exposure and search engine strategies. It's rare that an entire vendor's customer base gets banned. However, leaving the base content without customizing it can get your site penalized for duplicate content.
Take Advantage of Your Brokerage's Site Pages Created for You:
Build your own internet identity and presence. Said again, get your own site name and site that is yours. Though it is a free way to get yourself up on the web, it's your broker's site, the company name that's promoted and you can't take it with you if you leave. A consultant named Sam Smith doesn't call himself Chrysler Consulting because he has an office in the Chrysler building.
