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03 Jan

Building an Internet Real Estate Company

Posted January 3rd, 2007 | View Comments

One of the real technical / managerial / social challenges that I have been giving a lot of thought to these last few weeks is the idea of how one might build a technologically savvy real estate company on the Internet. Part of this is driven by the simply mechanical question of working out how my compensation program will work for the blog I’m sharing with Bridget. Part of it is driven by considerations that are larger in scope.

The problems that I’ve run into in trying to start a more “company-wide” sort of web presence are partly technical, but I think those are the easiest to solve. My IDX provider, IHomefinder, now tells me that they can track (albeit it in a non-automatic way), the leads that are generated from a given campaign. This means that in principle one could build a very low cost company site and let agents link to it from their individual sites and still gain the generated lead. Those agents could use a variety of strategies to drive traffic to their own sites. Pay per click. Blogging for dollars. Article submissions. All the usual suspects.

Moreover, it’s possible one could work the site as a community blog, which could serve as an adjunct to agent’s individual blogging efforts — a sort of Metrolist-only ActiveRain, if you will. WordPress multi-user would support this kind of thing nicely, and it’s probably a pretty tractable solution for a nerd like me.

So the problems around such an approach are, it seems to me, more cultural and managerial in nature than strictly technical. If you have a tech savvy broker who could pull it off, would agents want training on the relevant techniques and would they be willing to sign the NDAs and “Your broker owns it if you quit on him” sort of language to protect the broker? And if they wouldn’t, how does the broker protect himself once he’s spilled all his trade secrets in weeks of agent SEO classes? Can you hire enough people — or teams of people — who combine the necessary sales and writing skills to pull it off effectively? What do you do about productive sites that agents already bring to the team? In other words, how can the broker optimize those to help his agents while mitigating the competitive risk to his own positions? I suspect that ultimately you’re forced into the same sort of geographical-splitting-up that brokers did back in the old “lead farming” days. “You take the east side, Bill, and Jane over here will take the west side”. But if you do that, certainly the guy who ends up with the blog for Oak Park is a bit less motivated than the owner of the Granite Bay blog.

Anyway, I’m not sure of the answers to all these questions. But as long as you’re not commenting on something, I thought I’d at least try to come up with something worth not commenting on.

Or who knows, maybe you’ll surprise me.

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-events/2007/some-morning-optimism_327.html Some Morning Optimism

    [...] Fans of neurolinquistic programming and other new age mind techniques will probably be encouraged by this tale. Yesterday I prepared myself by going out with a wonderful Lunch 1.0 with Mike and Julie. I then followed that up by wondering out loud about how to grow a successful web based real estate company. Sure enough, last night after about four hours sleep, I awoke with the Shared Website Agreement that I’ve been thinking about and unable to write just sort of sitting there in my head, waiting for me to pop it into Microsoft Word. [...]

  • http://www.InvestmentRiches.com Tim Miner

    Though I am not a Realtor or a broker, I have faced the same challenge – sort of.

    I created a family of sites, each with its own purpose, value proposition and unique members set. The flagship is our social community, http://www.InvestmentRiches.com

    The reason I say I faced the same challenge is that we were immediately faced with creating a strategy to market each site to the same mass group of people – real estate investors. But we wanted to maintain a separate identity for each site and not cannibalize traffic, rankings, or media mentions from one another.

    The solution for us – distinct keywords for each site, a common blog for the entire organization and happy thoughts each time I see more than one of our sites listed on the first page for a particular keyword.

    ActiveRain has made its mark using the blog platform, WannaNetwork with its Forums, and InvestmentRiches offering a rounded solution to its consumer base. Agents should embrace the guidance and insight you would be able to offer. Maybe not the typical agent, but certainly the ones that are more tech savy or those that have a desire to learn. Truth be told, most of the real estate professionals I have contact with (including my bretheren in the mortgage lending industry) are ill-equipped and far to removed from the “current” technology to really utilize it to the best of its potential.

    If I were a Realtor, I would be exstatic to be part of an organization that truly helped me create an internet presence (site and blog) that would produce lasting effects well into the future. Truth is, we all need a little help moving forward.

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-agents/ John Lockwood

    Wow, Tim, hey look a real comment!

    And as you can see, I am starting to see how to work it out on an organizational-wide level, but I do want to stay on the good side of the search engines that have been so good to me so far. I think that as long as I continue to provide good relevant content and follow the webmaster guidelines, there’s no reason I can’t help my agents be successful as well.

    To be sure, many agents aren’t positioned to take advantage of this, but some are. Many are already doing a great job of competing successfully in this market place and might be excited to be part of a company that recognizes its value, while at the same time offering top agents a very competitive compensation package.

    I should definitely check out what you are doing and hope to do so after a while. Thank you so much again for chiming in, and best of luck to you going forward.

  • http://www.malatown.com.cn/cities/shanghaixianhua.htm 上海鲜花

    Your article makes sense extremely, I supports

  • http://www.sacramento-home.com/real-estate-agents/ John Lockwood

    Oh, which part?

  • http://www.ozonew4m.com Ozonew4mWebmaster

    Very interesting… I was just passing through so i thought i would say hi :)
    hi :)
    A webmasters reading is never done :P
    I added you to favorites so no doubt i will be back so keep it up

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