Online Marketing: 5 Things to Look at If You Aren’t Selling Homes on the Internet

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By Mike Parker

RISMEDIA, October 2, 2008-We’ve all seen the figures proving the importance of the Internet in selling homes today. Perhaps a lesser known statistic is the one NAR put out that tells us that more than 90% of all agents and brokers are unhappy with the yield from their online marketing efforts-their website.

Individual agents are bombarded with conflicting messages from “authority sources” that often are simply inaccurate information in the guise of useful information. Millions of dollars are collectively spent without a meaningful return in the hope of cracking the code of how to succeed in selling houses online.

Modern day Elmer Gantrys run the equivalent of modern prayer meetings and revivals seeking to inspire flocks of agents to follow the “one true path to success,” only to raise hopes but continue that awful statistic: 90+% of agents and brokers are unhappy with their yield from the Internet, the place where over 84% of all residential real estate sales happen. In the face of such futility, it’s no wonder that so many agents just have a website in self defense and expect nothing from it.

My staff and I have evaluated tens of thousands of sites over the years, worked with thousands of agents and their brokers and one thing that strikes me repeatedly when doing so is the dearth of real knowledge about online marketing services for Realtors. It’s as if no resources exist that can truly aim the non-techie agent in the right direction-they do-and that there are no simple rules to improve one’s odds of success-there are.

Everyone must cover the three basic precepts about online marketing: 1) Can buyers find you online? 2) Can you incent shoppers to register on your site so that you can farm them? 3) Do you follow up on leads immediately when you receive them? If you can answer “yes” to those, but still are not succeeding; if you have a decent website and it is not helping you sell houses and list them, perhaps you should look at the following examples of simple-to-fix mistakes that might be holding you back:

1. Do you know where your leads are?
Recently a client told her Customer Service Representative (CSR) that she was receiving lots of traffic to her site, but no leads. Upon investigation, the CSR was aghast to find hundreds of unanswered leads piled up in the back end of the client’s website. It happened that when the client set up her site with her provider, she neglected to set her lead forwarding correctly and her leads for seven months were not being forwarded to her. Check to see that you have the proper e-mail forward and text messaging in place and that it works: test it yourself. If you do not receive the lead within minutes, either your website host does not forward them instantly or your settings are off.

2. Did your website provider finish your site and program your HTML tags?
Every day, I see websites that have “Homepage” or “Home” as their title tag. (To view yours, go to your site, go across the navigation bar to “view” and click on it. A drop box will come down. Click “Source” on that. A window will open in your browser where you can see what is in your identifier.) This simple missed finish to your site consigns you to oblivion online: When people go shopping for homes online, they do not type in “homepage,” nor when search engines are looking for the sites to show a searching party do they look in a file drawer that begins with “homepage;” search engines look in the file by the name of the market, first. Because 92% of Internet buyers choose their agent with the help of a search engine, it is essential that your site is indexed under its market focus, not under “homepage” or any other incorrect title, such as your name.

3. When a shopper arrives on your homepage, does it confirm that they are in the right place?
Recently, a client complained to his CSR that he was having lots of “one page view visitors;” that is the visitor lands on the homepage and then clicks off of it (There’s a statistic for this called ‘bounce rate.’). When that happens, no one sells anything. The fix was amazingly simple, actually: the client was selling homes in Del Mar, CA, but in his eagerness to snare everyone looking for a home in the San Diego marketplace (which is a fool’s errand if you are not in San Diego), the first thing a visitor sees when they arrive at the client’s site is “Welcome to San Diego Real Estate.” The shopper wanted to look at homes in Del Mar, not San Diego, and clicked off immediately even though the search engine brought that visitor to the agents specializing in Del Mar. Because the welcome was misleading, the clients were leaving. The fix? Replace “Welcome to San Diego Real Estate” with “Welcome to Del Mar CA Real Estate.” Not very hard, but hugely effective; aim your site locally and you will have more success.

4. Does your website require registration to view listings, or is it optional?
Requiring a shopper to “sign in” is often counterproductive. Not only does this practice result in more bogus registrations than legitimate ones-also wasting your time trying to qualify those bogus leads, most shoppers click off when confronted with “sign in or bug off.” It’s human nature. Make your sign-in optional, and give shoppers a real incentive to register on your site. Throw out the “free home inspection” and replace it with “Register with us to keep informed and we’ll give you a complimentary three day trip here to Hawaii if you buy a home from us. “A client did that and he is prospering nicely while many are not. Give people a real incentive to register with and to use you and your services. In places where such incentives are frowned upon, optional sign-in is still far more effective at generating quality inquiries. Make your site simple and informative and they’ll sign in more often.

5. Does someone respond individually (not just with an auto responder) to each lead immediately?
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted research into the effectiveness of online marketing and found that leads contacted within one hour of submission were 10 times more likely to result in successful contact than those not contacted within one hour. An auto-responder is better than nothing, but a personal phone call is even better: not only are you likely to find the submitter still at their computer and available to talk, you will absolutely blow the submitter away with your superior service.

Submitters are never as eager to talk to you as when they just sign in. Their eagerness to speak with you declines in direct proportion to the amount of time you take to call them. Even 24 hours is too late for maximum efficiency.

There are many more such simple errors obstructing many agents success online. Selling houses online is really a fundamental thing and if you would like your site looked at by someone who works with sites daily and evaluated for these and other errors at no cost or obligation, just click here and one of our staff members will do so and advise you of the results. If you would like a primer on how to get your website found by Internet buyers, just send an email to realestate@theblackwatercg.com and we’ll send you a great booklet, free, and no one will call you.

To succeed in selling residential real estate today, you need to make your website work for you. Making it work for you is not rocket science, it is not hype and hawking, it is simple mathematics combined with knowledge of what works. The errors above are real ones, committed by folks just like you: trying to succeed online. So are the fixes. The basics are the same, whether you sell homes or any other product: you can succeed online.

About the Author: Mike Parker is a principal at the Blackwater Consulting Group, Inc., and specializes in online marketing services for Realtors® and real estate professionals. You can reach him by e-mail at mparker@theblackwatercg.com.

To request a free review of your website to determine if it can be found by internet buyers and if it is search engine friendly, click here and it will be evaluated free.

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