Listing real estate the Bloodhound way: Apprehending all of the marketing objectives of single-property web sites

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Trace Richardson wrote just lately on the technology of building single-property web sites, and, while he got almost everything wrong, from my point of view, I’m willing to cut him some slack. First, he’s a very thoroughgoing weblogger, and that buys a lot of credit in my bank. And second, he went after the topic as a technology problem, rather than as a marketing problem.

That’s a mistake, but hardly an uncommon one. It’s natural for us, when we think about doing something, to think about the doing, rather than about what it is we hope at the end of the process to have done. Build a web site? That’s easy: Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Build a web site that sells a house? That’s a harder job. Build a web site that thrills the sellers, slays the neighbors, sells the house and promotes you as a Realtor forever? That’s a Bloodhound job.

Here’s the thing: A single-property web site is not just another bullet point in your listing presentation. If it is, you might as well just buy yourself a Showing Beacon and be done with it. If you’re just shining your sellers on, just promising them yet another gimmick to get the listing, you might as well pick an easier gimmick.

There’s more: There is no way a third-party vendor is going to produce a single-property web site that will achieve what I consider to be the essential marketing objectives of the endeavor — not, at least, at a price you can afford to pay. You have to learn to do this in house, either yourself or with staffers you control directly.

And still more: Of all of the marketing objectives we can attain with a single-property web site, SEO is pretty low on the list. Even so, there are long-term SEO benefits to be reaped from doing a single-property web site properly.

This is our way of thinking about this issue. Your mileage may vary, and I entreat you to remember that a single-property web site is just one piece of an overall strategy that we use to market a listing.

Start here: There are four distinct parties that you are marketing to with a single-property web site:

• The sellers first and always, because you cannot sell the house if the sellers won’t let you
• As a secondary consequence of listing radically well, you should make a strong and enduring impact on the neighbors, who can bring you buyers and other sellers now and who can list with you later
• Your potential buyers, obviously, and we’ll talk about how to structure a site to capture and keep buyers
• Future clients, buyers and sellers, who find your single-property web sites long after the listed homes have sold

Stop just for a moment to look at that list again, this time from the perspective of Search Engine Marketing versus Direct Marketing. The sellers already know you. The neighbors will find out about you by the evidence of their senses. The buyers will find out about the house by any one of dozens of means, with horizontal search engines like Google probably being pretty low on the list. Of the four parties you can market to with a single-property web site, only the pool of future clients is likely to find you on a horizontal search engine, and, if they do, it will probably be a matter of serendipity — dumb luck. There are Search Engine Marketing benefits to be realized from doing single-property web sites, but they’re not the ones you are thinking of, and there is virtually no benefit to your marketing effort to focusing on ordinary SEO ideas. You don’t need to frustrate your Search Engine Marketing, but you have almost nothing to gain by obsessing about it.

What should you obsess about instead? Content. Anti-marketing is worse than no marketing, so if you make big promises about your single-property web sites at the listing appointment and then produce a four-page site with thirteen photos, you will have dashed your sellers’ hopes and turned people who were potentially raving fans into, at best, indifferent wretches. The neighbors certainly aren’t going to be knocked out, nor are potential buyers, nor potential future clients. You spent a little money and a little time, but you advanced none of your marketing objectives — and possibly grievously damaged your reputation in that neighborhood.

Still worse, you may have jeopardized your chances of selling the house. Buyer’s agency is a good thing, but it leaves listing agents with very few opportunities to make direct appeals to buyers. Plus which, we are all of us averse to push marketing, and just about anything you might say at an open house is going to seem pushy to your guests. Your single-property web site is your absolute best opportunity to make your case for the home — to show everything, to tell everything and to induce the fantasies of living in the home that are the sine qua non precursor to selling that home.

How do you do all that? With content!

You don’t need thirteen photos, you need 130 — at least. You cannot possibly do the home justice in a four-page web site, but fourteen pages might not be enough. To show everything, you have to have photos. To tell everything, you have to have documents. And to get buyers to fantasize about living in the home — by means of a cold, remote, hi-tech web site — you have to give them the tools of fantasy — virtual tours, video, floorplans, remodeling software, etc.

If we can do it, we want for buyers visiting one of our single-property web sites to move into the home in their minds — just from the experience of the web site. If we can’t get them that far, we want to answer every question they might have, passively, from the web site — both to satisfy their itch to know and to establish our transparency. We want for buyers to long, to marvel, to exult about the tiniest details in our homes, treating our single-property web sites like the Christmas Wish Book. At an absolute minimum, we want for our sites to dominate their time. The more time they spend on our site, the less time they have to spend looking at other homes. The commitment of action suggests that your heart is where your time is, where you effort is. The more time and mind-share we can command with buyers, the greater our chances of selling the home to those buyers.

This is marketing. It’s not cheap and it’s not easy. But it works, where the cheap and lazy option is most likely to be a complete waste of money and time.

I’m going to go through a few of Trace’s suggestions in order to argue with them, but the most important point is this: Everything that he is talking about and everything else that I might talk about is trumped by content. If you’re not willing to build out your site to the extent necessary to sell the house, don’t bother. You’re wasting your time and giving your seller yet another disappointing-Realtor story to tell.

Domain names: Trace argues against using the street address. I see this as a mistake. Every bit of your marketing for the home should feature the domain name, and virtually every access to your single-property web site during the pendency of the listing is going to come in by direct entry. Using the street address tells your seller and the neighbors that your objective is to sell that house, and that house only, where choosing something more generic is a lot like getting a tattoo that reads, “Girlfriend.” The one long-term SEO benefit you can hope for from a single-property web site comes from people searching on specific street names, so your on-going inventory of past sites can serve as search engine breadcrumbs going forward.

Serving single-property web sites on subdomains: I don’t hate this, and there are even things I like about it, but it seems to put the marketing cart before the horse. A stand-alone web site is impressive to the seller and to the neighbors, and it doesn’t hurt you with buyers. A redirected sub-domain will search better, assuming your main domain has some years on it, but search results are not very important while the home is being marketed. You could argue that hosting separate domains is more costly. This is the very dangerous idea of trying to cheap out your marketing, but it’s a false notion in any case: Many web hosting services will permit you to host multiple domains on the same one account. The traffic for a single-property web site is so low that you could easily host dozens on the same IP address (we do it) with no bandwidth problems. But: Here’s a very good reason for hosting your single-property web sites on unique domains: Each one of them can link back to your main web site/weblog/blogsite, a sort of squeeze-your-own Google-juice. This is the best SEO benefit I can think of from building single-property web sites.

WordPress: I love WordPress — for weblogs. I don’t like it at all for single-property web sites. Why? Because a single-page is easy to build in WordPress. Anyone can do it. It just takes time. But that time adds up if you are building fourteen or twenty pages — and mistakes are laborious to correct. We built engenu for reasons like this, for producing huge numbers of web pages as quickly as possible. For some jobs, engenu is done within seconds after the job is set up. For a single-property web site, we’re going to have to go in and finesse every page, but we start with 95% of the work already done. Typically, the editing of an engenu page on a single-property web site consists of adding body copy and captioning photos. Everything else is done automatically by the software. Even if you build a WordPress site to be the top-level page in your single-property web site, you still need some way of pounding out all of the many pages of static content. Trying to do all of the content necessary to achieve your marketing objectives within WordPress will be painful and time consuming.

But remember, that’s all details. Your number one objective in building a single-property web site is to sell the house, and what will sell the house, more than anything else, is content.

Here’s a quick run-down of the content we used on 14237 North 11th Street, a 1970s ranch home in North Phoenix.

These are the photos, each built in its own slide-show page:

• Front Yard and Elevation
• Entrance
• Living Room
• Dining Room
• Kitchen
• Family Room
• Arizona Room
• Backyard
• Guest Bedrooms and Bath
• Master Suite
• Garage Laundry and Storage
• Neighbors

This is the supplemental content, much of it devised to be very “sticky”:

• Virtual Tour — This is an Obeo.com tour with “virtual remodeling”
• Home Warranty
• Interactive Floorplan — the software lets you move your furniture into the home to see how it fits
• Neighborhood Map — A Google maps map featuring all the nearby amenities
• Full MLS Listing
• Comparable Listings
• Full-Color Flyer
• All About BloodhoundRealty.com
• Custom Yard Signs

Some of those pages have sub-pages, so there are well over two dozen pages for the site. On other houses, we might do video or a Virtual Coffee Table Book. For more-urban homes, we want to start doing a video neighborhood drive-by, just so buyers can get a feel for the new neighborhood. Is there more? There will be. We just haven’t thought of it yet.

There’s no way you can do work like this with a vendor, and there’s no way you can do work like this if your goal is to slam it out, cheap it out, shine it on. But a single-property web site this thorough will get attention.

• You will knock your sellers’ socks right off — and they are your best source of future listing referrals.
• You will impress the neighbors very deeply. They will keep your magnet on their refrigerator.
• You will give yourself your best possible chance of selling the house — which is the job you were hired to do.
• And you will leave very impressive breadcrumbs on the trail behind you, to attract future buyers and sellers.

You don’t have to do this. But doing anything less than the whole job is probably a waste of time and money and might well be anti-marketing — worse for your reputation that doing nothing.

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