Are you planning to make a real estate website but don’t know where to start? Are you trying to figure out why your website isn’t giving you an ROI? Thinking that if you keep going down this path, it’s just wasted time and energy?
In this article, I outline the don’ts of real estate website development. As experts who provide great real estate web design to help realtors grow their businesses, my goal is that with this little bit of guidance, you’ll be able to easily create a website that can ROI for you quickly.
These are the 5 biggest problems I’ve seen for agents trying to build their websites.
Problem #1 – Needing IDX or an MLS search on your website
There is this belief that you need to have some sort of MLS searchability on your website to capture leads.
The problem with that is it will be very difficult for your website that you spent a few hundred or thousand bucks on, along with your nominal IDX subscription fee, to compete with the resources, funding, and marketing of established tech real estate marketing companies like Zillow, Realtor.com, and other established sites.
They spend a lot of money to make sure that their technology is cutting edge and that they have the largest mindshare of your potential and existing clients when it comes to search. It’s an uphill battle to try to compete with that, especially if you don’t have the same kind of resources they do.
What you can do instead, is to focus on the unique problems that your potential clients are facing. Help them understand that there are solutions to those problems and then position yourself as the problem solver.
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Problem #2 – A bunch of pages you don’t use
It’s the belief that you need a website with a ton of pages like a blog, a buyers page, a sellers page, a neighborhood page, a page for your resources, a page for your team, a page for you, a page for your listing presentation, a page for you sold properties, and the list goes on and on.
However, there are a few problems with this line of thinking.
Most agents I speak with are really busy and have a very hard time carving out time to work on their marketing, much less updating a page on their website or writing a blog post. These pages tend to become outdated very quickly.
Also, these pages become ghost towns if you’re not marketing them. A lot of effort and time is wasted creating these pages only for 0 people to visit them, this is based on the hard data that we’ve collected working on real estate websites.
Instead, what you can focus on is your visitor. A visitor visits your website because they’re looking for 4 things – someone who talks about their problem, can present a solution, can present evidence of said solution, and a call to action.
If you focus on these 4 things, you’ll find that you can get some really great results with a simple 1 or 2-page website vs a website with hundreds of pages that no one really visits.
Problem #3 – Still using a contact form
Nowadays contact forms are spam magnets.
There are more people soliciting business from your contact forms than actual leads wanting to chat. If you do get a lead that wants to chat, you end up having to chase them down to book a call because you don’t know their schedule.
A pro tip we recommend is to instead, use a calendar app.
There are a ton of calendar apps out there like Calendly or Schedule Now to name a few. The idea behind this is simple when a lead schedules a time to chat with you it locks in a specific time and day for you two to connect based on each other’s availability.
It’s an efficient solution that solves both the problem of spam form submissions and chasing down leads to connect with you.
Problem #4 – Making your website about you
There is still this underlying belief that your real estate website is about you and your accolades – what you’ve done, what you’ve sold, and how many years you’ve been in business. It’s a false belief and shows a potential client that you’re more into talking about yourself than helping them.
An easy way to tell if you’re website is more about you than it is about your future clients is to count how many times you use the word I in the copy of the website. Aside from a short bio, the word I should be non-existent.
So instead, focus on using the words you or yours to replace the word I. For example, “Your solution to first-time home buying” or “your solution for foreclosure”. It repositions the copy to be more about your future clients thereby making your website more empathetic to them.
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Problem #5 – Building a website and not marketing it
This is the biggest sin I’ve seen in real estate website design that is still rampant today. You’ve spent a bunch of time and money building out this beautiful website and then believing that “if you build it, they will come” or, now that I’ve built it, Google will do an SEO thing and I’ll start getting a lot of traffic and leads.
Building a website and expecting traffic to magically appear is like opening up a brick-and-mortar shop and expecting customers to magically start walking through the door.
Instead what you can do is before even starting the process, think about how you plan on marketing it. Is it through postcards or Facebook ads? Think about how you plan on building traffic to it so that you can start converting that traffic into leads.
Final Thoughts
Anyway, these are just a few insights I’ve seen in my many years working on real estate websites and working with agents, teams, and brokerages. Remember, your website isn’t about you, it’s about your leads and your potential clients.
Looking for more real estate strategies to grow your business? Join our free Square 1 Facebook Group for similar content that can help you in your Real Estate journey. If you are interested in one-on-one coaching, then schedule a strategy session with me today, and let’s talk about how I can help you move your business forward.
