REAL ESTATE WEBSITES NEED NEW APPROACH IN NEW ECONOMY
by Karla Darocas
First Published in www.NewFrontier.ning.com

Tips for Redesigning Your Website

Now that the boom has busted, real estate websites need to be recalibrated to really seek out clients and lock them into a trusted relationship. Gone are the days whereby you can just post a bunch of properties onto a website and expect people to book a viewing. In today’s economy buyers are looking for value, more trust and more support.

There is no place better to study the effectiveness of a good real estate website than in Spain. During the boom, real estate websites were everywhere! Some of these websites were good but most were poorly designed, badly tagged for search engines and offered little - if no, value-added support.

Retag Your Site

Wikipedia describes a tag as, "A tag is a relevant keyword or term associated with or assigned to a piece of information (a picture, a geographic map, a blog entry, a video clip etc.), thus describing the item and enabling keyword-based classification and search of information."

Tagging your website with new keywords is a must in this downturn. More and more people are looking for reduced and special offer properties. Of course, the buyers with money will always want the best money can buy, but they are not stupid and will also want to see what their money can buy!

Retagging your site with keywords like “reduced, special offers, discounted, affordable” will help to capture new clients - as more and more money conscious consumers type these words into Google during their website searches.

Offer More Testimonials

During the real estate boom, there were so many real estate agents that were greedy and corrupt, that consumers were offered one bad experience after another. These “bad apples” thus spoiled the many well-deserving agents who offered secure and trusted relationships and service to their clients.

Given the bad press about buying in Spain, it is only logical that real estate website need to brand their worth by offering solid testimonials from satisfied clients. These testimonials need to have linkable names to those happy clients so that new clients can do their own research and follow up a confident claim. This process acts as a kind of “word-of-mouth” system, which we all know is still the best way to build trusting relationships. Plus, your testimonials need to be on the front of your website, positioned proudly, and buried deep into the site for no one to find.

Offer More Support

Rapid and helpful support to any client makes good business sense. Online support can be as easy as returning an email within a short period of time. Clients will always respond to a quick reply more favorably than a reply that takes weeks.

Build into your website a chat room whereby you can meet a client online at a certain time and you can have an active online chat and answer any questions immediately. Clients can easily get an immediate impression of your knowledge-base, personality, credible and service, while chatting away online.

Offer to telephone a client, at their preferred time, in order to answer any questions. This can be done by using an inexpensive VOIP (voice over IP) service. Many VOIP services such as VIOPcheap.com offer both headset telephone calling – as well as routing to your office phone. Basically, with this telecommunications service, you can call any landline in the world for free and you can call mobiles for super cheap. If someone has taken the time to ask you to call them on the telephone, then why not do it without hesitation?

In conclusion, learning how to do things yourself is a way to empower your business. It is a way to put the “pro” in promotion. If you let others run your website, then you giving away your power and you will never get anything into motion.

First Published on New Frontier - http://www.NewFrontier.ning.com

Any other positive ideas on this subject?
Send me your feedback
Karla Darocas
info@Darocas.com

ATTENTION: GLOBAL BUSINESS & ECONOMIC STUDENTS
 

THE PROPERTY-PRENEURS
An undeniable, universal truth is that we all need someplace to live. No matter at what age, we all seek to find a place to hang our hats, raise a family, have a holiday, or to retire. And, as long as this irrefutable truth exists, there will be “property-entrepreneurs” who will design your home, your community and your lifestyle, if given the chance.

THE GREEN-ENTREPRENEURS

The industrial revolution has peaked and now it is up to the “green-preneurs” to bring business back on track with sourcing, developing and marketing products and services that “help” Mother Nature instead of controlling her.

Costa Blanca
Cumbre del Sol, Community, Sun, Seaviews, Safe!
www.SpainLifestyle.com

Computer Aid
crashes, viruses, hardware, software, wireless problems?
www.Darocas.com

Computer Tuition
upload, download, build websites, send emails, join social networks, call home
www.Darocas.com