Every so often we just need to celebrate a success and today presented a wonderful opportunity.
J.D. Powers and Associates has – in a buyer’s market – named Keller Williams Realty number1 in buyer satisfaction for the 3rd straight year!
We got a very kind nod from NAR and REALTOR® Magazine as well!
Congratulations to all of the 70,000+ associates nationwide who have made this possible and most especially to our own competent and committed Agents here at KW-FVR!
It’s easy to lose sight of some of the big picture when agents work on their websites. Look around and see all kinds of confusing options you have if you want to start out an effective Real Estate web site.
But we have to do better. I’m not going to say that a template is or isn’t the way to go, what I will posit is that a little time and a lot of vision will enhance your brand.
There’s so much information and we want our clients to have access to every bit of it…we want to be their experts and to prove it we have sites with as much information as possible on them. I love the desire to share, I’ll talk about that here a little later on – look for “what sharing does for the selfish” – but it pays to spend a little time upfront thinking about the way you present your information.
Keep it simple. Always. Two reasons (among many) I want to let you in on: 1. If it’s confusing and unattractive you stand to lose. It’s not good enough to get to the top of the search results, you have to get leads from it, as well. If they click away you have no opportunity for lead capture. 2. If there is no call to action they will not know what to do. There’s no reason to chose your site if there’s nothing you’re asking them to do.
Make sure you have room for you. It’s important that you are branding yourself – be that with a color scheme, an image or logo, or with a consistent presentation. People do search for you when they see you listing, never forget to consider the power of your name when you consider SEO. Tell them what you do and why you are the agent to work with. Never forget to make yourself easy to contact. It’s amazing how many agents don’t have their phone number on their website. If someone wants to talk to someone NOW they will find someone – be that agent.
While you’re in there, it’s not about you. Seems counter intuitive, I mean you built it to get people to work with you, right? Well, sort of. It’s about the consumer and your future client above all. Address the community you are the expert in, address what your clients always need. Make this your presence while you are asleep and think about what the people you work with are looking for. If this seems unspeakable hard to approach, remember that many of your clients are demographically a lot like you. Use that to write to yourself as you would be as a client.
Have some fun. It’s important that you put yourself into your site in this regard, as well. You are the value proposition and your talents are why you get referrals. Have fun with that. Add a section about the people you work with. It’s an easy way to slip in testimonials without being heavy handed and a great way to make it about your clients. It also gives them a reason to return.
Give ’em a reason to come back. It might be a customizable search they can save and log back into. Maybe it’s a blog or an interactive section they can come back to and see their questions answered.
There’s no way to cover everything in a single post, so we’ll return to this. This should be a great place to start, however.
In short, make it pretty, make it functional, make it about the client and make it unique. The unique thing you have is you – no one else is you or brings what you bring to a transaction. In the meantime, here’s some beautiful sites for you to look at.
If you’re an Illinois Real Estate agent practicing here in the Fox Valley there’s a few things impacting your business that we should be looking at right now. I know, isn’t there already a lot of changes and information to keep up on with license law and lending protocol? There is, but there’s some local changes I want to look at today.
I posted elsewhere yesterday about the Fire Sprinkler Systems mandates that seem to be coming here, at least to St. Charles. I’m not sure where you fall in the debate, but either way it’s something very worth knowing. As far as day to day Realtor stuff, though, I’m trying to get some of the changes out and we have a pretty good resource with the president elect of our local board (Boni Mondragon) as an associate broker here.
The first thing to pay attention to is that MRED and ConnectMLS are cracking down on agents and members sharing or divulging their ConnectMLS passwords. Already 2 brokers have been fined, one for $2,500 and another for $5,000. If you’re already asking if it’s sharing if your assistant uses your ID, it is. The proper protocol is to add the assistant to the MLS.
On the tech side of this, if you read this document you’ll see that flash 10 and above will be a requirement – So, no iPads/iPhones ever and my Android phone is out until I get the FroYo update.
Thanks and talk to you soon!
Keller William-Fox Valley Realty 