The following statistics are provided by the National Association of Realtors (NAR):

• 90% of consumers did online research before they bought their last home.
• 36% of buyers found the home they ended up purchasing on the internet, while only 2% of buyers found their home in the newspaper.
• 63% of Agents marketing budget still goes to offline advertising (newspaper, flyers, etc).
• Consumers’ looked at an average of 12 homes over a period of 12 weeks before purchasing.

Are you staying in touch long enough to capture a relationship with an online lead?

• 89% of consumers said that response time was very important when choosing their agent.
• 56% of consumers expect a response from their agent within 30 minutes.

Online Consumers understand that the internet is an immediate medium. Are you succeeding with your online leads? Do you have a hole in your business model? What is your average response time?

• 88% of Buyers said they would use their agent again or recommend their agent to others (66% said definitely, 22% said probably).
• Only 10% of Buyers used an agent they had used previously.
• 81% of Sellers said they would use their agent again or recommend their agent to others (59% said definitely, 22% said probably).
• Only 24% of Sellers used an agent they had used previously.

The vast majority of consumers — 66% of buyers and 59% of sellers — say they would “definitely” use their real estate agent again or recommend that person to others. Yet only 10 percent of buyers and 24 percent of sellers say they used the same real estate professional that they worked with for their previous transaction. Why is there a disconnect? One reason, undoubtedly, is a lack of consistent communication.

Your day is busy and your time is important.  Make sure that you aren’t letting your clients fall through the cracks.  If you don’t have the time to maintain these high levels of contact, let a drip email system lend a helping hand.  Consumers need constant reminders of who you are, what you do and what does that mean for them.

Make sure you provide the right level of contact.

With all their rich features and professional looking interface, you would think that property websites would be expensive and only suitable for top-performing realtors. But property websites are actually very affordable, and can easily be employed as an online marketing tool by every real estate agent, across all their listings.

A professional-looking property website, filled with unlimited images, text, audio, video and more, costs just $60 for an entire year. There are no monthly fees, no hidden costs of any kind, and the website stays up – and serves as a great testimonial to the agent’s marketing abilities – for a full year. The top-level domain name makes it easy for buyers to find the site, and makes sellers extremely happy, and more likely to recommend their agent to future clients. Since, according to the National Association of REALTORS®, referrals are the top way for people to find a real estate agent, making sellers happy is of course a big priority.

Another major plus is that each Listing Domains single property website includes a custom sign rider for the property, so agents who use single property sites don’t have to order those separately. The combination of the sign rider and the property website works beautifully to market the home. The property’s URL is clearly depicted on the lawn sign rider located at the property itself. Homebuyers can drive by a property they like, then go directly to the URL listed on the rider to find a wealth of information about the home prior to scheduling a private tour. Yard signs remain an important real estate marketing method that complements online marketing. According to the National Association of REALTORS®, 82% percent of sellers in 2009 used a yard sign.

The ROI on single property websites is high not only because agents pay a one-time fee that includes a sign rider. Property websites also pay them dividends in the form of gaining them new clients, who see the sites they’ve created, whether through links on the agent’s main site or through friends and acquaintances, and want the same marketing for their own home. Existing property websites provide valuable long-term positioning for real estate professionals as tech-savvy marketers and demonstrate their marketing capabilities to potential clients.

Glenn Gephart did a great job branding  with the youtube plug in feature @ http://GlennGephart.com

Lu Anne Finlayson is so smart to use ListingDomains for commercial sales like www.DanceStudioForSale.com because the buyers can get so much more info then any other type of advertisement 

We have already discussed the importance of using social media in marketing real estate. Today we’d like to add that an important part of any real estate social media marketing campaign is using property widgets.

Property widgets are dynamic buttons that you can place online to showcase and promote your listings. A property widget is an excellent teaser – it shows just enough to entice people and make them want to click on the widget, which then takes them to your agent website.

At Real Estate Sites, we deeply believe in utilizing social media marketing as much as possible. Therefore, we automatically create an RSS feed for your listings. This enables you to build property widgets and post them to your blog, to micro blogging sites such as Twitter, and to social networking sites such as Facebook.

Because RSS is dynamic, and changes whenever you change your listings or add a new listing, your widget will automatically reflect that – the widget gets updated whenever you add or remove a listing.

By adding a property widget to your various social media outlets, you can create more awareness around your offerings, strengthen your brand, and drive highly targeted traffic to your agent website.

Any seasoned webmaster will tell you that having access to your website statistics is a crucial part of running a website. What’s more, website statistics are an integral part of any online marketing campaign. They are the best, most accurate feedback system.

Checking your website statistics tells you if what you’ve been doing so far is working, and whether you need to keep fine-tuning your search engine optimization and your social media marketing efforts in order to gain more visibility and achieve better results.

As experienced real estate professionals AND seasoned webmasters, we know it doesn’t make sense to build a single property website without giving you convenient access to the website’s statistics. This is why each of our property websites has built-in website statistics that tell you how many unique visitors you have had, and also tell you the top 5 referring search engines.

In addition, you can easily view your daily activity, monthly activity and total visitors. We have also included a reporting function in our property websites. This useful tool allows you to email a detailed report to your sellers. You can show them exactly how popular their home is!

Creating an agent website is an important step in the right direction when it comes to real estate marketing. But creating a real estate website is not enough: you want people to actually find your website when they search for an agent or for listings.

This is where search engine optimization becomes important. There are many things you can do to help major search engines such as Google index your site correctly, and we help you with them. One of the things you need to do is submit your website to all the major search engines. We do that for you – one less thing to worry about!

We also include a link exchange opportunity in our agent sites. When you get legitimate links from other websites that point at your site, you increase your site’s authority and therefor its visibility in the search engines.

When it comes to on-page optimization, or in other words the way you optimize your own site to include important keywords, our real estate sites enable you to modify your meta tags to include your surrounding areas and your areas of expertise.

We also provide tutorials on pay per click marketing using tools such as Google Adwords, on blogs (blogging is a great way to add relevant, optimized content to your agent site!), and other ways to help drive traffic to your real estate site .

ATTN ListingDomains users! We have just released our new Flash Slide Show control that can display your property photos FULL SCREEN at FULL RESOLUTION. Our dynamic resizer will optimize and display your photos to fit any size monitor. Our enhanced slide show features include:

	Unlimited Photos
	Dragable Thumbnail Strip
	Photo Captions
	Set Your Image Timing
	High Definition Full Screen Mode

A professional-looking, easy to navigate agent website should be a big part of your real estate marketing strategy. We are real estate professionals too: we know that as a real estate professional you work hard each and every day to manage your business and to show potential clients that you are different – and better – than other agents. We know competition is fierce, and we want to provide you with the best tools to be the best agent in your market.

No doubt, you realize by now that a business – any business – must have a website. These days, if you don’t have a website, you seem unprofessional. People look for information online, and any business that can’t provide them with that information is dismissed as irrelevant.

But you don’t just need any website. You need an affordable website that is tailored specifically to your needs as an agent, that offers many features and lots of flexibility, and that is user-friendly. Our agent websites offer you just that. They are packed with features and are very easy to use. After all, our Realtor websites are designed by agents for agents!

We pride ourselves on offering you the most useful features, and the best design options, for the lowest price. Our real estate websites are extremely customizable. You can get as custom as you want, or you can sit back and use our default text and graphics – you decide!

Our agent websites also take advantage of social media, which has become an important marketing tool for real estate professionals. Our websites include a built-in posting tool that enables you, AND your visitors, to quickly add your website to various social networks such as Facebook.

Just as important: our real estate websites are optimized for search engines, which helps search engines index your site properly, and as a result, helps people find your site when they search for properties or for a real estate agent.

Your website could very well be your first point of contact with a new client. Is your website giving your clients the right impression? With our award winning agent websites you can rest assured that you have all the latest online tools built right in. Our design team is always working hard to ensure that your website not only looks clean and professional, but is designed to give buyers and sellers the information that they are looking for online.

Please visit Real Estate Websites today to create a free demo of your very own agent website.

Single property websites are a wonderful listing tool that more and more real estate agents and brokers are using. They have very good reasons for doing so: creating a single-property website for each of your listings can help you drive significantly more traffic than using traditional tools.

Traditional vs. Modern Real Estate Marketing Tools

ListingDomains websites drive more traffic to your listings than traditional marketing tools such as virtual tours and online classified flyers, because those rely completely on other websites for generating traffic.

When you use traditional methods, you don’t get the benefits of word of mouth advertising, and you don’t get sign rider or search engine traffic.

Creating a property address domain name, coupled with the custom sign rider, is a far better real-estate marketing strategy, which can make a huge difference in the amount of traffic each listing receives.

SEO Benefits

There are significant SEO benefits to creating a single property website. First of all, having the address as the domain name means it will likely be listed very high in search engine page results. So, when someone enters “555 Main Street, Santa Rosa” in the Google search box, your 555MainStreet.com website will likely be the first result listed.

In addition, all of your single property websites link to each other and back to your own website. This can help each property website gain authority and page rank and become more visible in search engine page results. This can also enhance your own website’s search engine rankings, since there are many websites linking to it.

Social Media Benefits

You don’t just get SEO benefits when creating single property websites. You also get social networking exposure. Each single property website includes a built-in posting tool that enables you, or visitors to your website, to quickly post the listing to popular social networks such as Facebook or Twitter. Another convenient tool allows you to post the listing to the incredibly popular Craigslist.

Syndication

When you create a single property website using listingdomains.com, we syndicate your listings to all the major real estate portals, including Trulia, Vast, Google Base, Zillow, Oodle, and Yahoo Real Estate. This can help drive even more traffic to your website, and insure that your listings are advertised to a world-wide audience.

Our software is easy to use and user friendly. Creating a website usually takes less than five minutes! Visit ListingDomains today to start creating your own single property websites and increase traffic to your listings.