It’s a question I get quite a lot from real estate professionals not just in Phoenix but around the country. Do single property sites work?
The short answer is YES. Everything works [in some way] online, if you are doing the right things in the right way targeting the right consumers with unique, dynamic, engaging and valuable content.
Single property sites work IF you are trying to target potential home buyers driving a geographic area. They can simply pull up to the home, enter the URL on the sign rider into their smart phone or iPad to get information about the listing: maps, calculators, city data, virtual tours, photos, area amenities or even print a flyer for later use. They also work if YOU are going to drive traffic to the single property site – yourself. By “yourself” I mean with your offline marketing – postcards, flyers, sign riders, etc.
Offline marketing also known as outbound marketing is your marketing message pushed out to the masses. Postcards, flyers, car magnets, calenders, sports schedules,coffee mugs, fly swatters, home made apricot jelly, bus stop ads, print real estate publications, that kind of “stuff” is outbound marketing. You simply use a call to action like “for more information about this home visit www.1687EJohnsonPlace.com”. If YOU are going to “push” your message out to the masses with your single property site URL then – YES, they work.
What’s The Point Of A Single Property Site?
The point of a website, especially in the ultra competitive real estate space, where over 94% of consumers start their home search is to get “found”. Not just get found but to get found by a consumer actually looking for your product or service – at the exact point in time they have identified a need for it. That being said, single property sites are a great supplement to your other online and offline marketing but to rely solely on a single property sites would be missing the boat. Let me explain.
Remember how I said single property sites work for consumers driving an area looking for a home? This assumes the consumer already knows where they want to live. A single property site is not going to help you much for the 99.9% of consumers that are either outside of your marketing area or don’t receive your push marketing messages.
I live in Phoenix, a destination for vacationers, conventions and snowbirds alike. Let’s assume, “John and Betsy” came to Phoenix on vacation in February, then went back to upstate New York where it snows and is cold and has high taxes and all the other stuff [can you tell I am from there?]. Let’s assume John and Betsy went back to Syracuse, Buffalo, Rochester etc. and decided shoveling snow just isn’t for them anymore. John, looks at Betsy and says, “honey I could live in Phoenix” Betsy’s eyes light up as she says “I feel the same way!”. So what do John and Betsy do next? What 94% of consumers looking for real estate do – they go to a search engine like Google, Yahoo or Bing. Question. How are John and Betsy supposed to find your single property site – www.1687EJohnsonPlace.com – if they don’t even know 1687 Johnson Place even exists?
How Consumers Search For Homes
How Do Consumers Search For Homes? It’s been my experience that consumers typically ask a search engine a question – a wish list if you will. They will ask Google for exactly what they are looking for when conducting a real estate search. 4 bedroom, 2 bath, gated community, pool, Chandler, Arizona or homes under 200,000 Gilbert AZ or 5 bedroom, 4 bath home for sale near Gilbert hospital or well – you get the point. How will John and Betsy find a single property site when asking Google a question like that? The quick answer is “they probably won’t”.
Don’t Market A Website YOU Don’t Own
If you are going to go to the trouble of creating unique, dynamic, engaging and most importantly – Valuable content online, and it takes the same amount of work [more or less] to set up a post on a single property site as it does a website YOU OWN, then why wouldn’t you do it on a website you own, that has more Google juice than a single property site could dream of – like WordPress? Many real estate agents make the mistake of believing all real estate websites are created the same – they simply are not. Getting found online is the new reality of real estate agents, this makes a website as important to your real estate business as a car, a real estate license and a lockbox key.
Book Marks
Every day I am online I discover a website that doesn’t exactly provide the information I needed but I’m happy I “found” it. What do I mean by that? Great question. There are all kinds of things consumers look for online that are related to buying or selling a home that don’t actually revolve around buying or selling a home.
Most consumers will do some kind of research online before actually looking for a home. If YOU were moving from Upstate New York to Phoenix what would you want to know BEFORE you looked for a home? Climate, Taxes, Transportation, Schools, Jobs, Crime, Cost of Living, Lifestyle, Sports, Things To Do all come to mind. A properly created and optimized website like WordPress, filled with unique, dynamic, engaging and valuable content provides you the opportunity to get “found” online. Many consumers will look for some of the topics listed above and stumble across a real estate website and Book Mark it. They are not ready to search for a home yet but found the website of value and plan on visiting it again – later.
The Proof Is In The Pudding
Try it yourself. Take OFF your real estate agent hat and put your consumer hat ON, MAKE SURE YOU ARE SIGNED OUT OF YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT, search for real estate, homes for sale or information a consumer would look for when attempting to gather information – to make an informed decision and see if you find a single property site on the 1st or even 2nd page of Google. If you can’t find a single property website in the search engines WITHOUT typing the address into the search bar – how is a consumer supposed to?
So the short answer is, YES – single property sites DO work to target local buyers driving an area OR if YOU are going to help drive traffic to them but the chances of a single property websites getting found online against a website with unique content, relevant keywords, back links, social media, video are – oh, let’s say – no bueno.
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