Hey Everyone,
I’m thinking about getting a website, to expand my real estate business. I’m NOT doing a lot of deals, I’m just doing flyers and doorknocking. This year alone I have done (3) bird dog, and (2) wholesale deals for myself oh yeah (1) failed short sale. So, is it a good idea to get a website to expand your business? Oh yeah, I just start paperwork for a LLC.
Thanks
Given how cheap a Web site is these days, I think you should get one.
Some people don’t want to pick up the phone and call you, but they are OK with filling out a form on your site.
This also allows you to have a more professional email address because it will have your domain as opposed to one of the Web services such as @gmail or @yahoo, etc.
google has some really great tools for small business and they are free.
i paid 10 bucks for the domain name through google to godaddy and google has website templates you can use and you can turn your @gmail into @yoursite.com.
you can create upto 200 users for each account that you have and they give you a ton of storage space.
they are called google apps or go to google and look at the ‘more’ button. you can also list products for sale using the google base feature including homes for sale that will come up when users search ‘real estate’…
Thanks Paul,
What do you think an idea price for a website should be. Is $797.00 a good price? Right now, I have a free website set up right now, which will send me seller info to my email if they sumbit, but to get all the works it going cost $797 and $29.95 month.
It was actived yesterday work on it all night. So, please let me know what you or anyone think about my site. I’m not sure if it will show up or not. I have not payed for the works yet.
Thanks
It may be a little ‘too much’ but i’ll let the experts chime in.
It’s more or less a squeeze page to capture the information, and then i follow up with a phone call. It’s simple, short, and sweet. Anyways, just my .02 cents, my website and craigslist advertising brings in a few leads a month, and it’s VERY cheap.
Hosted at bluehost.com for $10/month, built the page myself with dreamweaver (really not hard to learn, dreamweaver and online tutorials), and here I am.
Thanks LaValfre,
I was thinking the same about my site ( hope to be) I wanted get everything I do into one website loss mitigation and my wholesale business. So, are you doing pay per click or submitting your url
My seller squeeze page:
Is hosted along side my main site:
I designed them both myself with FrontPage. Hosting is about $7/month at www.doteasy.com I’ve been with them for several years, their servers are fast and reliable, and their tech support is helpful and fast.
My sites are currently generating an average of about 5 seller and 5 buyer leads per day with no SEO or PPC. I advertise on the free classified sites and mass email FSBO/FRBO ads.
No i don’t use SEO or PPC or anything like that. All i’ve done is advertise on Craigslist and i get a steady stream of leads. Nothing like Doug’s talking though.
I checked out your site’s Doug and there’s something very appealing about how straight-forward they are.
I just recently changed from a more extensive sight to a one-page squeeze for sellers only and i like it alot more. It’s much less to manage when you have to make sight alterations, and also it’s much more straight-forward to the seller. I had way too much text and content before, now it’s right to the point.
Doug, a question if you will. What happens after your seller’s fill out our form and submit, do they go to your homeseverday.com site? The reason i’m asking is the seller information is on you homeseveryday.com site, but your seller squeeze site is separate, so they wouldn’t receive that information until they ‘stumbled’ upon your site.
LValfre, I went through exactly the same stage where I had waaay too much info on my sites. I actually very recently slashed the amount of info I gather on my squeeze page and refocused it on motivational questions rather than questions about property features like I had before. Now I’m getting more leads and they’re much more qualified.
To answer your question, yes after filling out the form sellers do get redirected to my main page. I found that the bit of info I have on my main site doesn’t really make much difference to the sellers. I might actually just scrap that seller info page and have the “we buy houses” and “sellers” links go directly to the squeeze page for processing.
I leave the buyer’s page up there for now because at the moment I don’t store buyer info. I just tell them to come back often. This is because I have far more qualified buyers than sellers. I know this is lazy and I should get a database programmer in here to put together a system for automatic email alerts and stuff like that.
So you’re considering cutting out all the information for buyers/sellers and just having 2 squeeze pages that go to your main site with the home listings?
I liked how you presented the information to sellers, it was straight-forward and great for pre-screening. I’m considering something along the lines of your “i’ll buy your house for a low price” on my seller page since i deal with wholesaling, and am sick of all the useless leads.
Please do not post links to your personal websites…it violates the Forum Rules…
Keith
Moderator
Sorry Keith.
Websites are as good as what you spend on them…
you can get a very nice site for $1000-1500 or more, based on it’s functionality…
Or you can get a basic website for practically free, but more often than not, you’ll be able to put on there a few paragraphs about business and a phone number and email address.
We paid a fair chunk for ours, but you won’t find this design anywhere else… It’s completely unique. It also has some features that are not yet implemented such as a database backend that will randomly display properties for us, etc…
Also going to add in the contacts page for sending leads to us. it also has a built in newsletter autoresponder so it will put our communications on auto-pilot.
Some may want this, some may not. but you basically pay for what you get.
-c
I’m sorry too.
I have a site I designed about one year ago. I am now ranking on top pages for Google search terms. I am getting about 100 people a day hitting the site. approx. 10-20 leads a day.
I dominate my local area with a few great marketing techniques I use. I own 7 of the 10 organic sites for my local key words.
I designed the site to accept county subscriptions but I have not marketed to investors yet. If you want to get free leads go to my site and sign up. You can also check out a subscription…$25/month for everything, and I will show you how to dominate your local area.
I am not a guru teaching classes, although I know much more than someone teaching classes about dominating their local area on the net right now.
I also allow you to post content to the site. My goal is not to make tons of money from real estate investors. I want to have other investors who help the site grow as if it was theirs, that is why I only charge $25/month. This is the way to get a site to the top of every search organic term.
If you are interested in a site that is growing very fast and you want to be a part of it check it out. I’m looking for real estate investors who want to have a website that they can feel part of. I know search engine optimization. You can follow my member name to get to my site.
Let me know what you think,
Thanks,
Shaun G.
For the cost it takes to get a website nowadays is pretty much worth it. Personally, I have a website up at 1and1. It cost me $5.99 to get a .com domain, which is pretty competitive and you can get hosting plans for as little as $3.99 a month. Since you do not do many deals, getting the $3.99/month plan should work great for your site. It also comes with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) design software, so you don’t really need any HTML experience to design a website. I’ve never used this service since I design my own sites, but I am familiar with WYSIWYG setups and they are pretty easy to use.
Worse come to worse, if you want to outsource the design process, you can hire someone at a place like www.rentacoder.com. Just make sure to check out portfolios before hiring anyone so you know what your money will get you.
We are currently selling a property in BC(www.3719sandyhillrd.com) using a one page site for $29 including hosting for a year. Expiry.com