Every real estate realtor, agent, negotiator or Ryan Serhant wannabe, by having your own property website, will give you an additional 7 points for your prospects to consider you.
After successfully taking the Negotiator Certification Course (NCC), you’ll then be given a REN tag from the real estate agency that you will be working for. You realise that you are not alone, and there are more hungry wolves who are more competitive and ready to kill.
Inspired by that gesture, you are so pumped up and ready for action. Finding through your list for an opportunity, digging leads everywhere and you finally got an appointment. You fully dressed up for it even if it’s on Sunday morning and it doesn’t matter because the cha-ching$ will drive you!
During the appointment, the prospect looks at you, looks around the property and seems to nod everything you say. Then finally you asked, so Sir/Madam/Dato/Datin how do you like this property? “And they say it is very nice, I like it so much, but let me think about it and we will get back to you”. And you say; ..(whatever your experience taught you or trained to do).
Then both you leave and after a few days, you continue to wait for whatever shift in the Feng Shui nature, metaphysics alignment, self-belief level up and probably just wait for the luck to kick in like 4D.
Therefore, you are just waiting, hoping for them call you back and thinking there is nothing much you can do after this, WHICH IS NOT TRUE!
Most importantly, what will you want to do after this? Spamming them with WhatsApp messages? or nurture them with powerful insights about the property they are looking for?
Your employer or principal may already have their own website, but you definitely need to have one on your own as well, to give you these 7 additional points for your prospect to consider you:
1. You have an Online Brand Image
The website works like your business card, brochure, sales talking and contact details. It can hub all these under one domain name (www.yourwebsitename.com) and promote it on a massive scale.
Each professional negotiator who relies on quality lead, will draw potential prospects one step closer to becoming your customer by contacting you again through your website.
In other words, this is your digital business card. Everything about you, property listing, portfolios, services, appointment scheduling, contact information can be delivered in a matter of seconds.
Speed is key in the real estate industry. It is your brand image.
2. You have more control over your listing
Don’t discount yourself after getting your website, by not adding your listing to those popular property portals. Instead, it is important that you continue doing it to increase your “listing impressions”, but only consider doing it as a short-term strategy.
For long term strategy; owning a website and listing, you have more control over your opportunities like adjusting the duration of the listing and among others.
Short-term strategy benefits – Advertise on Property Portals:
- You can leverage the traffic from all active property seekers.
- It’s a money game. The bigger your spending, the longer you’ll stay.
- Steal your competitor visitors, and they will probably approach you as well.
Long-term strategy benefits – Having your own Website:
- Your listing duration can last until the world’s end. That means, your potential buyer can revisit your information, until they decide to buy from you.
- Listing up to 1,000 properties or more is possible, and you can have total freedom on how you like to present your information. Nice graphics, photos, hot models – no problem.
- Increase your listing impressions by sharing your website link. This is incredibly important. You can link your website to Facebook, Twitter, email, Whatsapp, and all the traffic will only benefit your website as opposed to the property portal that you listed on.
However, the best way to go about this is to do both Short-term and Long-term strategy, to increase your popularity and market share.
3. You can use WhatsApp responsibly
Technically speaking, communicating through WhatsApp/WeChat is convenient and easy. And that’s the norm these days. But you must also consider that your prospect may also have several messages/group/chats to reply, and they can only do it one at a time.
So, sending through your photos, following up after a few days, sending festive messages, and more photos, and more follow up, may seem like a harassment issue for your prospect.
There is no right or wrong dosage on how much time until you should follow up, how many photos you should send, it all depends on your chemistry with your prospect.
Plus, all these photos sent will be buried under their phone, behind their apps and there is no way they will spend time finding it back again.
Unlike websites, you just send them the relevant link and voila! they click and decide to buy after browsing through the mobile phone.
4. You can be more friendly with the Millenials
According to a recent study, 46% of Gen-X (1965-1979) and 58% of Gen-Y/Millennials (1980-1998) found their home through mobile devices. Meanwhile, 14% of all buyers found an agent through a website. Photos and online information about properties were more important to Millennials and Gen-X.
Technology is available for everyone now, even the Boomers (1946-1964) already so used to it. Having a mobile responsive website makes things super fast and easy for everyone, whether they are looking to buy or sell one.
5. You can have all the real database
A Website can also be a vehicle-means to collect customer information like their name and email at the least. That means, you get to create your own customer database list each time a new customer drops by your website.
This is a list of your customers, which we often call your “digital asset”, can be your long term contact point. You can send them information about your company, business, latest listing, festive greeting, partnership or articles all through email, without having the hassle to send through WhatsApp/WeChat individually.
6. You can advertise yourself and get personal
The most viewed page in a website after the listings page and contact page is the “about” page. This statistics shows that people are looking for confidence in you through websites before further communicating with you face to face.
The usual questions they look for are like your experiences, how long have you been in this industry, background and these will affect their buying decision. They certainly are not so inclined to ask you first hand through WhatsApp/Wechat.
7. Website is the online hub for your property listings
You may already be using multiple platforms to promote and market yourself (ie. Facebook, IG, Twitter, Mudah, iProperty, Star Property, Property Guru, your Principal and etc) and the more you have the better it is. Use this as your marketing vehicle instead, the brochure of your company.
Most importantly, don’t do it bluntly and achieve low rewarding results. In the end, nothing comes to you except short-term FAQ. Instead, lead these visitors to your website and reap the long-term benefits like getting more relevant in-depth questions, pull them deeper into the sales funnel and focus on closing the deal. Slicing the sashimi with a samurai sword.
Conclusion
This website we are going to build for you is your own proprietary, own domain (www.yourcompanyname.com) and not sharing with others in whatever manner.
Thinking and doing it long-term will help you in the real-estate career, giving you more edge in dealing with your principal, bigger property deals, and reaching more luxury people from the Tatlers.
Get your own Real Estate Website with the 7 Star Points starting from RM59 per month.
Special customisation for:
Individual Negotiator, Group Negotiators, Agency/Firm, Company.
Contact your preferred Web Design Company // WDD Malaysia today.
