There has been a lot of talk this week about single property websites. The Real Estate Tomato debated whether single property websites are powerful listing tools. Mr. Marc Grayson at the Tomato started a Zillow wiki page for single property websites. And the Future of Real Estate Marketing explores several single property website offerings including using Wordpress to do the job(we absolutely agree).

Realivent has just launched our Wordpress single property blog offering at : http://www.propblogs.com/. It’s still in early form, but we have lots coming. Currently, our single property blogs allow you to create yourlisting.propertyblogs.com using Wordpress in minutes. Once you have activated your blog, choose a theme, start a Realivent listing account, and activate your plug-ins and within minutes your site is a full blown website that can be used anywhere.

Here are 2 examples:

http://46greenwood.propblogs.com/

and here’s one with a Video Tour:

http://3901lickmill100.propblogs.com/

Built on wordpress, all you have to do is create a listing account at Realivent.com, add some photos, and soon videos and Realivent creates the blog for you. Complete with listing details, contact forms, Zillow comps (Can be turned off), and much more. After you add the listing you have to activate the blog by giving the blog an address. We automatically add the street number and street name to create the property address, but you can change it to anything you want (if it has not been used yet). Once you create the property blog, you can then use our Listing Designer and post the listing on Craigslist, which in turn will send people to the listing blog.

We have developed multiple plugins that enable you to create a full real estate website on your blog. The plugins we have released (with more coming soon) are:

Featured Listing Plugin – displays your active, pending and sold listings on a page in your blog.

Home search plugin – IDX framed home search plugin for your blog.

Property Watch plugin – allows visitors to your site to fill out a form that contains information for home searches. The form gets emailed to you, and you (the agent) sets up the new lead in your automatic email notification system.

And all of these plugins are already in the propblogs.com system. All you have to do is just activate them and connect them to your listing account.

I myself am a true believer of single property websites and had used them for the past couple of years. Every time I would get a listing, I would setup a domain for the listing – i.e. 123abcstreet.com or use my own domain 123abcstreet.realivent.com and I setup the site, post all my pictures and add video tours. Then I setup visitor statistics to monitor daily traffic to the site. There were many benefits, but the problem was it just took too much time.

But now since our new tool has been developed, the time to build a single property website or blog site has just dropped dramatically. Now any agent can create single property blogs in minutes. I’ve been testing the system and have been able to get sample sites up and running in less than 30 minutes, complete with: Featured Listings, Video Tours, and About Me pages.

There are multiple benefits with Single Property Blogs including:

1. Seller is impressed with the extra service that your provide. No, this is not an ego booster as was mentioned in other comments. Ask any seller if they want a dedicated website setup for their listing and I guarantee you that they will not pass it up. Why ? It is another marketing tool that helps the overall picture. In this buyer’s market, you want to stand out and maximize exposure for your listings in every possible way.

2. It makes it easier to remember your property. If you are using your single property website in your flyers, newspaper ads, online ads, and any other place you market your property you will find that people recognize and remember 46greenwood.propblogs.com easier than www.realtycompany.com/listings/?id=139480480. Also, for anyone that is driving by the house and does not have the time to stop by, they can easily write down the easy to remember web address and go home to view the property online.

3. Yes, single property websites are search engine friendly. And this is even more true with single property blog sites. For example, do a search for:

1721 Alabama St San Francisco on Google and the 1st result is a blog that features that listing.

Now for single property blogs that would most likely have multiple instances of the home address 1721 Alabama St San Francisco in it, the search engine ranking would undoubtedly increase.

4. Increases overall rankings – You can also add links to the blogroll on each blog. Add links to your personal or business websites on each property blog, and when that blog gets indexed, you get another link back to your site and your pagerank goes up…it’s all about building a huge link web back to your main site.

There are many other advantages that we will talk about later, but the main disadvantage for agents has always been the time it takes to setup a single site. From buying a domain name to developing the look and feel to uploading pictures and videos, it has always been a time consuming task.

We hope we can make the time factor a non-issue. Just try it today for FREE, in fact get one for each of your listings at:

http://www.propblogs.com/

And let us know how fast you can get your Single Property Blog site up and running.

 

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