There’s no question that, if you’re a realtor, you need a website—particularly if you’re here in Texas, where the market is searingly hot. With so many real estate agents out there vying for the next sale, you need to rise to the top by marketing yourself effectively. Many of the big real estate brokerages offer mini websites for realtors, but in our experience, the tools are pretty limited. Most will feature your photo, your phone number, and maybe—if you’re lucky—a few of of your listings. And when you move to a new brokerage (which seems to happen pretty often), you have no website to take with you. Instead, we advocate that realtors purchase their own domain name based on their name or something catchy and memorable, and point that domain to their own website.
Advantages of Maintaining Your Own Realtor Website
Most importantly, it will give your potential clients a way to get to know you quickly. Have you ever looked up a doctor and decided not to use him because he only has two sad reviews on ZocDoc, and no web presence whatsoever? Helping someone find a house is at least as personal an endeavor as getting an annual checkup. When shopping for a house, clients reveal their deepest financial secrets, their family planning goals for the future, and any number of personal quirks. By publishing your own website, you have the chance to tell your story to specifically attract the clients you want.
The National Association of Realtors website states that 54% of buyers and 64% of sellers found the agent they worked with either from a personal referral or they used an agent they had worked with before. And how do they follow up with a referral? Google search!
—via Mark Cordy-Senior C/G Marketing Consultant & Analyst at TABB Solutions, LLC
Why Choose WordPress for Your Realtor Website?
We’ve talked about a lot of the platforms available out there—Wix, Squarespace, Weebly. These vendors make it easy to set up a website for realtors quickly, but if you do, the features are limited. Most people today are shopping for their house on the Internet. With these platforms, you can’t necessarily add valuable functionality like an MLS search tool or a mortgage calculator. With WordPress, you can. This spring, we ran a pricing comparison of Squarespace and WordPress. Over time, WordPress can represent a major cost savings.
But the best part is that you can get a top-notch real estate website right out of the box. Take a look at this website as just one example of a WordPress theme built for realtors:
WP Pro Real Estate 7
- It can be used for vacation rentals, real estate listings, or apartment rental pages.
- You can organize and submit listings via the front-end interface.
- Bulk import listings using CSV, XML, or XLS files.
- Users can verify if a property is still available and book an appointment with you online.
- Powerful Mapping, custom built Google Maps integration, with marker clusters, awesome infobox and pins.
- SEO optimized: WP Pro Real Estate 7 is built with care allowing search engines to index the content of your site to achieve higher rankings for websites for realtors.
For more options, check out these 49 WordPress themes built just for the real estate market. In our opinion, there’s no better tool that’s more perfect to built websites for realtors. Then give us a call at 214-321-1110 or contact us. We can get you set up with your own realtor website quickly and painlessly.
