Comes tonight an email — over the transom, out of the blue — from a family relocating to Phoenix. Here’s a piece of it:
Somehow, I stumbled on to your website (looking at an old commentary on 1415 E Flower) and googling deeply. I am grateful that I did, because it seems that you focus on the kinds of unique homes that my family and I really love.
That page was one of maybe 40 I made in February of 2004, when Ronan Doyle was relocating to Phoenix. I would send him listings, he would tell me which houses he was interested in — and I would add some I thought he should be interested in. I would preview the homes, taking photos and making web pages so that he could assess his options from Atlanta.
We’ve worked this way with buyers for years. In consequence, we’ve taken pictures of hundreds of homes, making hundreds of web pages in dozens of web sites. By talking in web sites, we give our clients an easy, fail-safe interface for viewing homes.
What do we do with the web sites and web pages once the purchase has closed?
Nothing.
We leave the pages and sites on our file server forever. If there were anything confidential in the pages, we would excise it. But there never is — because the web is not secure. So the pages live on forever, each one a detailed chronicle of a particular house at a particular moment in time.
Why do we leave them on the server? For the reason named in the email quoted above — so that people can stumble on them and find out about us.
We never kill any worthwhile work product. Every single-property web site we’ve ever built lives on forever. Even though I have rebuilt our Phoenix real estate web site as a blogsite, all of the old pages are still out on our server — just in case they’re linked from somewhere — or in case some search engine thinks they’re still live.
But the lingering breadcrumbs of houses we have previewed for buyers are especially good sources of long tail search traffic.
Why? Because, as with my correspondent above, the people who find those pages will be highly motivated — determined to find exactly what they’re looking for. And whoever finds any one single breadcrumb has found the trail back to us.
It’s good odds that people who follow our breadcrumb trails are interested in knowing more about us. They’re definitely interested in the kinds of houses we sell. And there is a strong chance that, by the time they elect to make contact, the sale is ours to lose. That’s the Unchained ideal: Beyond competition.
We make these web pages and web sites with engenu by now, which simply means that we can make a lot more of them. Their job is to communicate with the clients they’re built for. But because they will be out on our file server forever, there is always the chance — eventually the lead-pipe certainty — that someone else will find them — and thus find us.
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David Sherfey says:
Greg, with engenu, will it be possible to create completely incognito sites that can be linked-to in MLS’s with rules for no-contact info or any other way to ID the source?
Your Cotswold Cottage demo is exactly what I am interested in doing as I have been doing this the hard way for the past year… http//18parkswooddrive.com A quicker way, as you describe, would be very cool.
We keep our old sites up too, with similar results to yours.
I’ll be the next in line for the beta…
March 19, 2008 — 9:13 pm
Greg Swann says:
> Greg, with engenu, will it be possible to create completely incognito sites that can be linked-to in MLS’s with rules for no-contact info or any other way to ID the source?
I had not thought about doing this. We speak of engenu as a communications tool, not presentation software. IOW, I wasn’t thinking in terms of virtual tours.
Until lately, we could link our single-property web sites from the publicly-visible Remarks section of an MLS listing. But our MLS permits an infinite number of virtual tour links, each one of which can be any sort of off-site resource, provided it’s unbranded.
An unbranded engenu would not be all that hard — simply a matter of checking for and passing through the unbranding variable (e.g., http://www.server.com/MySite/MyPage.php?ub=1 versus http://www.server.com/MySite/MyPage.php).
Here’s a question for the audience: In our MLS, it is legal to self-host a virtual tour provided there is no contact information and provided the viewer cannot access contact information by mouse click.
In other words, I could host a full unbranded single-property web site at http://www.BloodhoundRealty.com/123MulberrySt/ and as long as that directory, any subdirectories and any files did not provide contact information or links to contact information, that would be fine. Even though any internet user can easily figure out how to trim the URL to get to contact information, nevertheless, I do not have to host an unbranded virtual tour-like resource on another site.
My question: Do the same rules apply elsewhere?
It matters because if you have to be on an unbranded file server, then you really gain nothing with an unbranded engenu. The free version of engenu will be unbranded out of the box, so you could get a minimal hosting account for $3.85 a month and then echo the branded versions of your single-property web sites onto the unbranded server. The appearance of an engenu site is server-dependent, but any engenu site can be moved to another engenu server, inheriting that server’s engenu style sheets but otherwise behaving as expected.
I think I like this solution better, since it seems to anticipate more idiotic MLS rules.
March 20, 2008 — 8:17 am
David Sherfey says:
In our MLS, the broker id in the url you describe would be shot down, but a nondescript folder name that goes to a no-brand page is OK. That’s how I do it.
A little off topic but worth mentioning is that we use the house’s web page as the virtual tour. However, the virtual tour links in our MLS go nowhere out in IDX land. As a result, I put the unbranded url in the description with an instruction to “…paste this link…” The link is rendered to text in the IDX display, but it is still there wherever anyone is looking at the listing and wants more info. We get lots of traffic from this.
I’m not server-smart, but if the easy engenu solution is another hosting account it is surely worth it.
March 20, 2008 — 8:46 am
Vance Shutes says:
Greg,
I’m intrigued by this concept. Will you be expanding on it during Unchained?
Are you setting up a separate page for each listing at BloodhoundRealty .com, or are you setting up a separate domain for each address? If it’s a separate domain, are you using a template on WordPress for the domain?
March 20, 2008 — 12:41 pm
Greg Swann says:
David: I went and looked at your stuff. Y’all are serious listers. Very impressive.
March 20, 2008 — 5:14 pm
David Sherfey says:
Thank you Greg. We have a rule here, Seller first, Realtor last, but…the seller has to be a player, otherwise they don’t get any of the toys. Of course, we don’t actually say it to them that way.
March 20, 2008 — 6:11 pm