Custom design for real estate website February 2, 2006
John Vanhara
I really like to have custom design for some of our premium real estate websites. Having template based design is not bad, but having something unique is sometimes worth it to spend couple of hundreds more than usual.
I am just working on new makeover for our Las Vegas Luxury Homes website. We want to get the feel of luxury magazine, we want to give maximum value to our clients (sellers) when promoting their listings. We want to have automatic updates using our FEATURED HOMES IDX feature and we also want the the website work with our Wordpress blog.
Here is the first draft I got from my designers. I just cannot help myself and I really like it.
I always give advice how to do something for less than $50. This is and exemption. I really like to spend couple of hundreds of new design like that.
Number of leads you need to make $100,000 January 23, 2006
John Vanhara
How many leads are you getting from your website? And how many visitors do you have? Did you every try count these numbers. Do you know how many people do you need to make $100,000 or $200,000 in commissions?
If you have number of unique daily visitors in hundreds (200-600) you should be in the range to make at least $100,000-$500,000 in commissions from closed deals. These are very realistic numbers and I know examples of websites and agents who made for example $400,000 on web with only 180-250 unique daily visitors.
The least expensive real estate website January 20, 2006
John Vanhara
If you are not search engine optimization expert and don’t want to spend thousands for pay per click advertising then don’t spend hundreds or thousands for building custom made website! Why? Because no one will ever find it.
Spending so much for the web will totally miss the point. The reason you need a website is to get more buyers and sellers, but if no one will ever come to it you will not get either. The other reason for having website is to place listings. Once you get listing you have to show to your seller what marketing you do and one of the marketing tools is to post listing on your website. But do you need something fancy and custom made for this purpose? What if you get just couple of listings per year? Do you want to spend most of the money on new website? No!!!!
Here is a great option. Nice, clean website for just $35 per year. That is $2.91 per month!
See real life example of one of our agents here.
- Easy editing and set up
- No complicated functions
- Upload listings
- Print flyers, send emails from listings
- Viewer Counter Statistics for each listing
Featured homes through IDX January 16, 2006
John Vanhara
This is one of the nice features we developed in our own (in-house) IDX solution. We didn’t want to give users only option to search for homes. We wanted them to be able to look at our web pages about different communities and see immediately homes for sale.
For example we can create page about the most expensive homes in Las Vegas. We go to our IDX, get the HTML code for the most expensive homes and paste it to any HTML page. We can specify many criteria, like number of homes, number of rows, columns, areas, communities, view, pool, golf amenities, etc. And it will show homes like that:
Example of the most expensive homes in Las Vegas.
Do you type WWW in front of your domain name? January 13, 2006
John Vanhara
When accessing different websites do you type just domain name (iloverealestate.biz) or do you type www in front of the domain name (www.iloverealestate.biz). Everybody is different and people are using both options. But the important issue is how your own website works.
When you type just domain name will your website show in the address bar: www.iloverealestate.biz (automatically add www)? It is very important to use just version and set up your web server so whatever option users type it will show just one option.
The set up is done through function called mod_rewrite and what you have to do is to place small piece of code to your .htaccess file.
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^iloverealestate\.biz [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.iloverealestate.biz/$1 [R=301,L]
Why is it so important? Because otherwise search engines like Google might think that there are multiple versions of your website. We can help you fix small things like that for less than $25 fee. It takes few minutes, but can make long term and substantial effect on your search engine rankings.
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