What to Do in the First 6 Months

Build an Effective Web Site

BY MICHAEL ANTONIAK

If you’re serious about a career in real estate, you need a Web site. That’s beyond debate.

The Internet may be the most cost-effective way to promote yourself, your company, and your listings. Many consumers now search the Web first for available properties before they engage a real estate professional. Whether considering relocating to a new area or mulling a move across town, prospective buyers use the Web with the same ease to investigate a community, neighborhoods, schools, and resources. Often, the person who provides or points them to that information is the first one they contact.

For the new practitioner, the need for a Web site is likely tempered by cost considerations. And, when starting out, you don’t know yet where you’ll focus your efforts or the best way to differentiate yourself from other real estate practitioners. At this early juncture, you want the most bang for your available buck for a Web site you can revise and expand as you gain a better understanding of how it can serve your professional goals.

Three months from now, you’ll have a better idea of just what you want to accomplish with your Web site. The immediate challenge is to get yourself online, with an e-mail address that buyers and sellers can use to correspond with you. If you’re joining a company that already has a Web site, the easiest and most inexpensive solution may be to add a page about yourself to its Web site with a corresponding e-mail account.

What’s easiest and most affordable may not be in your best interest in the long term, however. A Web site is an effective marketing tool but one that must be promoted to attract visitors. You’ll want to feature the URL, or Web address, of your page or Web site, and your e-mail address in all advertising, promotion, and correspondence. Both should be prominently featured on your business card and letterhead.

It’s prudent to purchase your own domain name to make it memorable and help reinforce your brand with potential customers. For as little as $50 a year, your Web site can have its own easily remembered URL (www.yourname.com or www.HomesHere.com for example) and an e-mail account (e.g., yourname@homeshere.com). Use and promote those addresses from Day 1.

First, though, you need to set up an account with an Internet service provider (ISP). Today you’ll be best served with a broadband connection: either DSL or cable modem. As part of the basic service to subscribers, most ISPs will host a Web site for free or charge a modest fee if it’s a commercial Web site. Expect to pay a monthly hosting fee, which can be as low as $15 for a small Web site.

You can find other potential site hosts with a keyword search on a search engine, such as Google. Search engines, in fact, are useful sources of information on all aspects of building a Web site, from identifying online tools to help you build your own site to the finding specialists who can build the site for you.

Use the search engines to find other real estate Web sites, too. You should visit a number of Web sites for real estate professionals locally and nationally. The exercise will help you to identify the features and content you should include, ways to organize your site content, and the “look” you want. Often at the bottom of a Web site, you’ll find the name of the products used or company that developed the site.

Most good real estate Web sites include the following features:

• A home page with general information about the sponsoring real estate professional’s experience, services, and affiliated company, as well as a small picture of the practitioner and a company logo. Contact information, with phone numbers and an e-mail address, should appear on every page of the site.
  
• Area information on the community, neighborhoods, demographics, schools, places of worship, shopping, and so on. This can be offered as content you provide or as links to other Web sites.
  
• Listing information on all property currently available and the price. This should be accompanied with one or more photos for each listing or a virtual tour highlighting the most appealing features of a listing. Adding a small map or link to a map lets visitors find out where the property is located.
  
• An electronic form that customers can submit to you with a profile of what they’re looking for, in terms of price range and neighborhood.
  
• Site traffic tracking tools, invisible to visitors, tally how many visit the site and how much time they spend in different areas.
  
• Extras,such asmortgage and loan calculators, buyer’s and seller’s checklists, a tip of the day, or a monthly e-mail newsletter or market report. Although not absolutely necessary, these are the kinds of offerings that can encourage visitors to return.
  
  How to Create an Effective Web Site
  
  To create an effective online presence, you have two options: do it yourself or hire a pro. What’s best for you depends on your available time, technology skills, budget, and expectations, both long and short term.
  
  Option 1: Do It Yourself
  
  

• Why? Creating your Web site yourself minimizes the expense. For relatively little or no investment, you can start slow and add content as you become more knowledgeable about the process and experienced in your career.
  
  
• How? You can start from scratch with a simple program such as Microsoft’s FrontPage, which costs less than $150. It provides all the basics for building a Web site and the additional pages and creating links and basic forms. Also check out the features of your favorite word processing or graphics software. Many applications now include the option of formatting documents in HTML for posting to the Web.
  
  
  There also are free software tools and utilities you can use to design and fill a Web site. Search the Web or contact customer service at your ISP for advice on what’s available.
  
  
  An even easier solution: purchase a real estate template set. Templates are preformatted Web pages with the background, color borders, and boxes for images and text already in place. Add your content and pictures, and you’re ready to go. You’ll find companies offering them by searching by the keywords “real estate templates” at your favorite search engine. Prices start around $30 a set.
  
  
  After you’ve built your site, your ISP or site host can explain how to load the files from your desktop to its server. It can be surprisingly simple, requiring little more than selecting the file names from a menu or dragging and dropping the file icons.
  
  
• Pros: Building your own Web site is the cheapest approach to having a Web presence. You enjoy creative control over all the content, and can make revisions and add pages as needed. With software and tools available today, you no longer need to worry about mastering HTML to create a Web site. When you want to start slow and add to your site as you become more confident in your career and focus, this may be the way to go.
  
  
• Cons: Cheap and cost-effective aren’t necessarily the same thing. When you assume responsibility for building and maintaining your own Web site, you’re committing a chunk of your time. At this stage in your career, your hours might be better spent with potential buyers and sellers, learning the market, and trying to build referrals.
  
  
  For the convenience of a Web site template set, you also surrender some individuality. That may work for now, but as you discover effective ways to use your Web site, expect you’ll want a more distinctive look and feel to how you present yourself online.

• Why? Unless you have a background in graphic design, you may not be equipped to build the best Web site. It requires skill gained through experience. Anyone who specializes in Web design understands what works and doesn’t work online, how to package content and graphics so visitors are inclined to explore your site, and ways keywords and meta tags can be used to guarantee your site ranks high on search engine results. That’s a lot to learn when you’re also trying to jump-start a career in real estate.
  
  
• How? You can hire a Web designer or turn the project over to a company that specializes in real estate Web site development and hosting. In either case, visit and explore other client Web sites before choosing your vendor. If you’re leaning toward a Web designer, you’ll be best served with someone who has already built sites for other real estate professionals. Ask your colleagues for leads.
  
  
  You’ll pay for the convenience of professional Web design services. Hourly rates vary by market, but expect to pay $25 per hour minimum. Even a simple site can cost $1,000. The starting price can be much lower (less than $500) for a simple site built from a design theme or template set. With either approach, expect to incur a monthly site hosting and maintenance fee of at least $30 per month.
  
  
  When you’ve selected your vendor, but before you sign a contract, thoroughly explain, in writing if necessary, what your Web site should include. Insist on a written estimate of all costs, including the ongoing maintenance fee. If the vendor will host your site on its server, make sure you own the content and domain name and can take them with you if you ever decide to move your site to another server.
  
  
  Hiring a professional will relieve you of most, but not all, the work. You’ll probably need to write or approve copy about yourself and your company and take pictures of your listings for inclusion on the site.
  
  
• Pros: The convenience. When you’re just starting out, handing off responsibility for developing and maintaining your Web site allows you to concentrate on selling real estate. Since Web site developers typically host and maintain sites, they’ll also handle domain name and search engine registration. The vendor will test and find ways to guarantee good search-engine placement and make suggestions to attract new and repeat visitors to your Web site. Plus, you’re likely to get a much more appealing and effective Web site than you could build yourself.
  
  
• Cons: The expense can be prohibitive when just starting out. Right now, you may not know enough about real estate or your local market to justify the expense of a professionally designed Web site. Also, if you become too reliant on an outside vendor, who isn’t always on-call, you may not be able to update your site or add new home tours as quickly as you’d like.

Secrets of a More Effective Web Site

Remember why you’re online:The real purpose of your Web site is to demonstrate your services, knowledge of the market, and professionalism so prospective buyers and sellers are encouraged to contact you. So regardless of whether you build your own Web site or have someone else do it for you, you should remember the attributes that make an effective Web site.

• Keep it simple.A good share of your site visitors will be connecting to your Web site through dial-up Internet connections. They won’t wait long for pages to load. Avoid animated graphics, busy backgrounds, audio and video files, and large photos. If you insist on these, offer a link rather than including them as page content.

• Make it easy to contact you. Include office and cell phone numbers and an e-mail link on every page of your Web site. Check e-mail regularly and answer promptly: Anyone who contacts you by e-mail expects a quick response. You should try to respond within a few hours but no later than 48 hours.

• Help visitors navigate. Feature links to the different content areas of your site at the bottom or side of each page so visitors can easily move around. This navigation should be consistent and easy to locate throughout your site.

• Use external links sparingly. Every link to another Web site is an invitation to leave and never return. If you must rely on external links for additional information, set the link so that it launches a new Web browser window and your site remains open in the background.

• Track traffic.Web site traffic tracking provides valuable insight into how well your site is attracting visitors, and what they are or aren’t looking at. It’s one of the best tools available for building a more effective Web site.

• Revisit regularly. Whether you build it yourself or farm the project out, accept direct responsibility for making sure your Web site functions as planned. Visit at least once a week to make sure all pages load and links work properly. Resolve any problems immediately.