June 2008

The importance of having a top quality website

Several key questions to ask yourself about the  power and effectiveness of your online presence...

ALL bar the diehards in estate agency will accept that the majority of people looking to move home use the internet as their primary reference.

Indeed, while people do still look at newspapers and magazines, these are very much secondary media — handy for the casual glance at what’s going on in the market but almost irrelevant when the serious business of moving home gets underway.

And this is not just my opinion — last year The Estate Agency Academy conducted the largest vendor survey ever undertaken in the UK which provided clear and overwhelming evidence that estate agency has moved online.

So, is having a website and subscribing to two or three portals all an estate agent needs to do? Not if you want to seriously compete.

You should have an online strategy and expect to review this every month and to be continuously refining with a major overhaul every 12 months or so.

In particular you need to address the following issues:

How can I make sure my own website is appealing to the number one target audience — vendors?

In the same way that the look and feel of your office used to be a determining factor for whether people would invite you to give them a valuation, now this same process takes place online. Your website needs to stand out and express the values of your business, its personality and create the right feeling — you need visitors to say to themselves: “This agent seems right up my street” from the first moment they land on your home page or any other part of your site.

How can I make it easy for people to find me online?

Even if your business has been established for 150 years, the chances are that people won’t remember your name, or if they do they will possibly mis-spell it and consequently not type your URL into their browser. You need to make sure that your website is optimised with all the search engines and Google in particular — this is an ongoing job and the criteria changes all the time. You also need to think about pay-per-click advertising and the different search terms people use as well as making sure that your URLs are prominently featured in all your offline and online communications. To put it bluntly — if people can’t find you easily online then you might as well not exist.

Which are the best portals for my estate agency?

There are only five worth seriously thinking about — Rightmove, Globrix, PropertyFinder, FindaProperty and Prime Location. It’s unlikely you have to be on them all but the chances are the biggest and most successful estate agencies will be, certainly on at least three.

Get over the fact that once some of them took your listings for free, as Globrix now does, and you’ve got to pay: advertising online is cheap — incredibly so compared with what you pay for newspapers and magazines.

Of course if you’re still advertising extensively in print media. then the extra cost will hurt — the answer is simple: cut out press advertising and save money online.

You also need to think about how to stand out on the portals. There are things you can do that cost nothing, such as only having superb photography and well-written copy, but you will need to invest in banners and prominent positions if you want a higher profile than your competitors.

Have I considered the roles of my website and the portals?

It’s too easy to fall into the trap of your own site appearing to be a mini-portal — instead your site should inform, motivate and enthuse rather than just simply promote stock.

And will you give all the information on every property to the portals or will you hold some things back to make people come to you? I would be tempted to experiment with this — after all, your objective is to get traffic to contact you directly, not to have them get all the information they need and bypass you in the process, particularly if you’re in a multi-agency situation and in respect to vendors.

Also, how will you make people want to return to your site, ideally making it their first point of contact in respect to their property needs?

The functionality needs to be carefully considered.

It’s very tempting to offer all sorts of gimmicks and extras and in the process the site becomes cluttered and confusing.

Yet at the same time you need to be useful and helpful; this is an area that needs careful consideration and ongoing management.

How does my website and online presence dovetail with other digital media and traditional media too?

Remember your ‘sold’ and ‘for sale’ boards are still hugely valuable and yet increasingly so is SMS. Are your clients using Facebook, LinkedIn and other network sites? The answer is “yes”, so how might you interact using these media and does your PR even consider online opportunities?

If not, you’re missing out big time — and just what are people saying about you in blogs and chat rooms? Is it favourable? If not, what are you doing to counter any negative commentary?
This is increasingly a major issue — people trust their peer groups much more than you might realise and if they read negative stories of poor service and the like, whether these be fair or true matters not, they are likely to believe them and act on them.

There are now companies investing in search engine optimisation primarily to make sure the negative commentary appears lower down the Google ranking rather than simply to have the good stories appear first.

It’s not just estate agency that is undergoing an online revolution — all business sectors are, and the developments of the next year or two will dwarf those we’ve seen so far. Too many estate agents are solely concerning themselves with the current market, which is understandable given how tough things are. However, if you ignore what’s going on online, then you do so at your peril — I predict some radical changes ahead that will make the issues of today seem small by comparison.

The way to search for homes in the future — and how you and your website can be part of it

‘The property search engine model is going to dominate and your properties need to be on the net in the right place and in the right way’

GLOBRIX launched just over six months ago with the announcement of our funding from News International in November and the subsequent ‘go-live’ of our site in January.

For us, it has been a busy and exciting period and it has been an ‘exciting’ time for most of the rest of the market in more ways than one!

For anyone who doesn’t know, Globrix (www.globrix.com) is a new property search engine. It differs from the established property portals in three main ways.

Firstly, and most importantly for agents, we don’t charge to be included on the site. We can take feeds or can automatically collect data from sites for inclusion on Globrix — all for free.

Secondly, we have a unique technology that adds much more depth in the online property search experience.

Rather than restricting people to searching by just price, location and number of bedrooms, on Globrix, searches can be made via items such as outside space, off-street parking or even period features.

Finally, we link directly to agents’ properties on their original sites. Unlike traditional portals, we have no interest in hosting people’s properties and controlling their flow of leads. We just want to make agents’ properties more ‘findable’ to homehunters and to pass users directly to agents — all for free.

Progress

Since we launched, we have hit some major milestones. Our property index has reached around 750,000 properties to buy or rent in the UK, putting us in second place by index size in the UK market and we have had nearly one million unique visitors looking for homes through the site.

In addition to this, we have had some real interest in our advertising proposition. We allow agents to buy limited advertising space to be displayed against search results for specific keywords.

For example, if you buy the ‘Exeter’ keyword, as local agent Bradleys has, then your logo will appear alongside the search results every time someone searches for property in Exeter.

We have signed some great advertisers — big groups such as Knight Frank and Savills as well as smaller regional agencies such as Beresfords and Rettie and Co.

The most important thing we’ve seen is a huge wave of support from the agency community.

We know that we couldn’t work without agents on-side and it has been hugely encouraging to see the sort of feedback we have been getting.

Clearly, our free inclusion model has been popular, but a large amount of agencies are also really keen on our direct linking approach.

Many agents have put a lot of time, money and effort into building their sites and, by driving free traffic, we are helping them to show some additional return on that investment.

Online agency

What we have seen in the few months since we launched is the onward progress of a revolution in the online estate agency market.

It’s fair to say that, in comparison to some other markets, estate agency has not always made the most of the online world.

Even today, there are several hundred agents who don’t even have websites of their own — something unimaginable in most other consumer-facing industries.

Some other sites have been clunky or slow to update, causing frustration among consumers and potential lost sales for agents.

This is now changing quickly. The big groups have some of the best websites around and many of the smaller, forward-looking agencies are coming up with slick, well-designed sites that really answer consumer needs.

For a long time, the established portals have been the ‘only game in town’ when it came to marketing properties online and this is changing as well — Google adwords provide a paid marketing opportunity and now Globrix is helping to drive free traffic direct to sites.

This isn’t to say that an estate agency can rest on its online laurels. The website is the new office window and needs to be treated as such.

Agents who don’t have their own sites and just rely on the portals to host their properties are in effect doing the same as advertising their property in another agent’s windows!

Agents who have old, untidy and out-of-date sites are essentially welcoming their customer into a crumbling, damp, old office.

No-one would expect every small agency to have a world-class website — the challenge is to ensure that everyone has got a web presence that meets a basic minimum standard.

Your website counts

Agents who haven’t already done so need to realise that their website is more important than their presence on portals.

If you can develop a great website and drive traffic directly to it, you’re generating free, or at least cost-effective, leads all on your own. The portals are important at the moment — but if you can make your website visible, usable and engaging, you will quickly be able to lessen your reliance on them and start to really build your own online space.

There are some simple things you can do. For example, think about your search engine marketing. Paid links such as Google Ad-words and optimising for ‘natural’ search are both good ways to stand out from the crowd.

In the case of Globrix, you should be aware that our technology picks up on key marketing phrases such as ‘new kitchen’, ‘garden’ or even ‘swimming pool’ that allows people to search by those features.

So make sure that all those interesting keywords that consumers are looking for are listed clearly in the details on the site.

Making your site visible on Globrix and other search engines is the easiest and cheapest way of driving traffic and is a easy win for anyone looking to make the most of their web investment.

The future

Estate agency is going to become increasingly reliant on the web — of that there is no question.

Homehunters already use the web as their first port of call in many, if not most, cases and that’s increasingly going to be true in the future. However, the property search engine model is, we believe, going to become dominant and, if that’s the case, then your properties need to be on the web in the right place and in the right way — sooner rather than later!