Having a web site that gets visited by waves of people from all over the world carries its share of responsibility.
For you, the real estate agent.
I don't know if you've ever had a web site from an outside web developer, but many of you probably have. And most of those probably didn't do much for you. But maybe they did more for you than you were AWARE they did.
Consider the following true stories -
True Story No. 1
I had a client in Washington State (in Vancouver) a few years back. He was a part-time real estate agent. He worked for a company named Windermere. This was back during the "property flipping" boom and he was a carpenter by trade and he plunged into the flipping game like a hungry seal diving for tuna. I told him, when we first met, that eventually he was going to get calls from all over the United States - and from all over the world - but I don't think he really believed me. He kind of smirked when I said it, as if he thought the whole thing was an exaggeration.
Besides, he was primarily interested in having his real estate license so he could buy rundown properties and fix them up and sell them - and turn a few real estate deals on the side for friends and family (and the occasional random buyer or seller).
Six months into our first year together, his site took off. I tried calling him at various times, from different locales around the USA, as I went around the country, busily signing up real estate agents. He never answered. Didn't matter what time of day, or when I called. No answer. Finally, about nine months into it, he answered his telephone one night when I called him from my hotel room, during a violent rainstorm I was in the middle of, in Emporia, Kansas. He picked up the phone and said, very warily, "Hello?"
I told him who it was. "Chris!" he blurted out. "How you doin'!"
We got caught up on each other's lives for a few minutes, and then I asked him the $64,000 question - "How's business?"
He said he had gotten a few deals via emails that had been sent to him, from the new site I'd put up for him nine months earlier. But other than that, not much.
"Have you gotten any phone calls," I asked him.
He paused. "Why do you ask?"
"Well," I explained to him patiently, "your site is getting incredible traffic now, and people from all over the USA and the world are coming to it, and the real estate business is a worldwide game. Have you seen any calls coming up on your caller ID that you don't recognize..." He admitted that he had. Lots of them. In fact, he said that he had pretty much resorted to TURNING THE DARNED PHONE OFF during the day, and during the evening, especially .He was getting a lot of phone calls from out of state that he couldn't identify. Strange area codes, etc.
Uh...earth to client - are you there? This client of mine was getting bombarded with calls from all over North America and beyond - and they were coming from REAL ESTATE PROSPECTS who had been looking at homes on his web site. Ha ha.
How many deals did he lose because he didn't answer his telephone? Who knows.
The point is - ANSWER YOUR PHONE, especially if I work with you. People WON'T leave messages if they call and you don't answer, because they FOUND YOU on the Internet (due to my hard work), and they want instant gratification. If you don't answer, they'll go back to Google or wherever else they found you, and they'll call somebody who is actually AVAILABLE.
But this demented (and sadly) true story is just the tip of the iceberg.
True Story No. 2
I put up a web site for a RE/MAX agent in Vancouver, Washington, many years ago. The site I built for her eventually got WAVES of traffic from all over the world. I noticed that she had been getting a lot of email leads from the site I had put online for her. (I keep copies of those email leads, so I can track exactly how well my site design changes are doing, and to "keep score".) Now, keep this in mind - 90% of the people who come to my sites, will contact my clients from their existing home search pages - because I LINK to those home search pages, from my highly visible web sites. So...in this case, this woman had received about 112 email leads just from MY site alone. God knows how many she got from her home search pages, which also had an "Email me" link on them. Her home search page was a standard RE/MAX page, like most real estate companies provide for their agents. (And, in terms of how many phone calls she got, who knows - I can't track that.)
So I went into her office to renew her for a second year, feeling sure she had already realized that the 112 emails my site had sent her, would indicate that signing up with me for a second year was a no-brainer.
Except...she hadn't GOTTEN any of those leads.
Huh? I knew that I had gotten copies of them, what could be happening here? I thought about it and came up with an answer.
"Open your spam email folder," I said to her, as we sat in front of her computer, discussing things.
She complied. And there, inside her spam folder, were the 112 emails that my web site had sent her over the past year.
As it turned out, I jogged her memory (she was a sweet lady, 72 years young at the time in question), and yes, she had gotten LOTS of phone calls from out of the blue that she couldn't explain - including a call from a lady in Hawaii, who sold her mansion and moved to the USA and bought another one. But for some reason, she couldn't put 2 and 2 together and realize that, even though prior to our business relationship, she had never gotten an out-of-state phone call, there was no connection, in her mind, to the fact that she had gotten a TON of out-of-state calls during the prior year. I patiently explained how it all worked (again), and showed her the actual site statistics (hits, etc.), and all of her dominant search engine rankings, and she finally "got it". Well, kind of...I mean, if a person is that clueless, the overall import of a situation like that isn't going to stick with them for very long, I don't think.
True Story No. 3
That last one was hilarious. But this one is even better. Hold on to your hats...I designed a web site for a very congenial real estate agent in Calgary, Alberta (Canada) back in 2003. She was beautiful, too, which is beside the point. (I love women what can I say - god's greatest work, in my opinion.) She already had an existing web site online, which she loved more than life. She had built it herself, and she had poured countless hours into it (a labor of love there, and I can definitely relate...the problem is, we're all demented, and sometimes that dementedness will jump up and bite us).
I explained to her that eventually, due to the fact that the new site I was going to put online for her would eventually get a LOT of traffic - and then shuttle most of it to her existing web site, the one she had put so much work into - I explained to her that this would send a TON of traffic, eventually, to the HOME SEARCH pages that existed on that "flagship" web site. It works like this - my site gets seen on the Internet. It links to your existing home search pages, whatever they might be. And your home search pages eventually get bombarded.
She said she understood completely, we finalized the deal, and off about our business we went.
 Eleven months later, her new site was ROARING. It was dominating in the search engines, and all of the advertisements that I had placed for her, by hand, all over the Internet, were contributing more and more visitors to our overall slice of the Internet pie. I called her up and tried to reach her, to talk to her about renewing for a second year. I tried several times. She wouldn't answer her phone.
I emailed her at least 20 times - no reply.
Finally, after about a dozen phone calls, over the final month of our agreement, I gave up. I knew what had happened. I knew that her "flagship" site, the one she loved so much and had designed herself, was getting a LOT of traffic now - because I was SENDING her that traffic. And she had mistakenly thought that GOD had somehow smiled on the site that she had so painstakingly designed, and all of that traffic was just flowing to her because her 'flagship" site was so great. (Wrong - ha ha.)
 Finally I called her up using a phone card from a pay phone. She answered. (This was about three weeks after our agreement had expired, and I had already taken her site down, the one I had designed for her - because she ducked my phone calls and emails and her agreement had expired.) I told her who I was. She sounded stand-offish. I calmed her down. "Your web site, Natasha, the one YOU created - it was getting a LOT of traffic up until about three weeks ago, wasn't it?" She sounded glum. "Yes," she whispered.
"And now...it isn't getting ANYTHING...is it."
"No," she sobbed.
True story. Ignorance will freaking kill you. When I put up a site for you, that site is going to LINK to your existing home search pages. And my site will indeed generate tons of traffic over time. And if you aren't aware of WHERE that traffic comes from (from my work - wink wink), you are going to mistakenly think that god somehow smiled on you, and that the steady flow of traffic is just coming to you because the Internet gods suddenly like YOUR web site.
Nothing illustrates that point quite like this next story...
True Story No. 4
I have no idea how many clients of mine have quit out of sheer ignorance. Every site that I have ever put online for a customer has gotten great traffic, over time. And every one of those sites has sent traffic to some configuration of existing web pages they already had online. Maybe it's the attractive price that I charge for my work (for a single site). My rates are at, or even below, the average price for a "basic" web site designed by a "basic" web designer who doesn't send waves of traffic to those sites (because he doesn't have a clue how to do what I do).
But for whatever reason, I have had many clients quit because they were just plain ignorant.
Knowledge protects - ignorance endangers. (Repeat this five times.)
I had another mother/daughter real estate team in Beaverton, Oregon, who were clients of mine for several years. I put up a suburban-themed site for them back in 2003. It was my first shot at designing a site with a suburban theme - versus a large city theme. I thought that if I advertised them as experts in Beaverton, Oregon - a Portland suburb with a fast-growing relocation population, complete with high-priced houses - that they would get WAY FEWER leads, but a lot more deals per lead generated.
And, I was right. But the way I found OUT that I was right was hilarious (and sad, in a way).
When I first signed them up, they were getting zip from the Internet. Nada. Nothing. They worked for Prudential and they had their own little Prudential web page, which generated exactly ZERO leads for them at the time.
I put up their new site. I waited. The traffic took off.
A year later I contacted them from North Carolina. I told them, in an email, that their traffic looked good - smallish, compared to other clients of mine - but that was because our TARGET was Beaverton, and Beaverton only had a population of about 70,000 people. So, when people did searches for Beaverton properties, we were dealing with a much smaller market than Portland (which was the large, nearby, highly populated urban hub). Makes sense, right? It's a math thing.
They emailed me back promptly and sadly informed me that they were not going to renew with me for another year...
I knew immediately that something was wrong. So I emailed them back quickly and asked them why.
"Well," the daughter wrote back, "we're getting SO MANY DEALS from our Prudential web pages now, for some reason, that we don't see why we should continue working with you..." (A person CANNOT make this kind of stuff up - it really happened. And notice above she said "so many DEALS" - not leads.)
Now, keep it in mind that when I signed them up, they were getting ZERO leads from their Prudential pages. And I was the only other web developer they were working with...so I quickly realized that they were about to make the biggest mistake of their professional lives. I emailed them back fast and told them to log into their Prudential account, and look at the site statistics. If they did that, they should quickly see that they were getting a LOT of traffic to those pages, and all of it was coming from the new web site I had put up from them a year earlier.
They emailed me back a few minutes later and wrote, "We're in for a second year - sign us back up."
Ha ha.
Now...this true story almost had a disastrous ending. For both me, and my clients. But it turned out okay in more ways than one. Not only did they renew with me for a second year (and a third, and a fourth, a fifth, until they finally got distracted again and quit), but, I discovered something very valuable. Targeting a SUBURB was the way to go. Less leads - more deals. And they had ADMITTED it to me. Most of my clients would have lied about the volume of deals they had gotten, had they KNOWN those deals came from my work (because they are afraid I'll raise my rates if I know how much money I am making them - I haven't raised my rates in the 10 years I've been doing this). I don't raise my rates. I just get my clients to put up more sites. Then we both win. Increasing income for both of us. What could be better.
True Story No. 5
I had another client who was with me for six years. She NEVER answered her telephone during the day (or anytime else, for that matter - I think she was always on it, talking to...who knows).
Anyway, I constantly bugged her to answer her incoming calls over the years, and told her, by email, that she was losing a lot of business as a result of it. She just laughed, like what I said was crazy.
One day, over Christmas, I called her up and she actually ANSWERED her telephone when I called, for the very first time since I had known her. I asked her what the special occasion was (ha ha), and she said that she was laid up in bed due to a car accident.
After she had reassured me that she was going to be all right, and her injuries were on the mend, she excitedly said to me, "You know WHAT? Since I've been laid up in bed for the last two weeks, I have actually been ABLE to answer my phone regularly during business hours...I've gotten an average of like ONE SOLID LEAD every single DAY over the phone - for the past two weeks!!!!!"
She promptly got well, and stopped answering her telephone again.
***Brokers take note - you need agents who will actually ANSWER their telephones. You need agents who actually KNOW how to work a lead. You need agents who are HUNGRY and dedicated. And I can get them for you...
I can eventually attract the top producers to your brokerage if you have the brains to call me up right now, ask me to do a telephone presentation for you over the Internet, and start working with me. I can get you virtually unlimited business over the Internet (and, of course, I can prove this...either that or I've made up everything I've written here on this web site - which ain't likely - wink). And once the leads start rolling in, you can use those leads to attract the top Internet talent in the area, right into your office...
Call me. Unlike the agents mentioned above, I actually know what I'm doing.
Call me today for more information. Be glad to meet with you too. I'm currently in Austin, Texas - where I have relocated permanently. But I can do an online presentation right over the Internet for anybody, anywhere in the world - as long as they have an Internet connection and a telephone.
My name is Chris Ullman, I am an expert at marketing real estate on the Internet, and my mobile number is 512-450-8836. Call me today and I'll shoot straight with you about how I can help you make money.
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