Hi Everyone,

This is my first post here although i have been lurking for a few days now. I am 1rst year real estate agent and I have had relative success. I am not afraid of hard work and am willing to do what it takes to get to the top. I have closed a few big deals lately and decided it was time to take a step up. I currently have rights to www.cedarcityrealty.com but I have not taken advantage of it and I just have it linked to our office site. I will be hiring a professional designer to make that site the best in my area. I am looking at a budget of around 100 dollars a month for internet website fees. (btw i pay 6.95 for hosting per month to keep that domain name) The rest i would like to spend on online advertising. Being that I am a new agent and I need to attract new clients I was wondering what creative ideas real estate or other small business have done in your area in order to get there name out. Being that I am still new I cannot spend the big dollars yet, So i need to keep cost in mind. So if you have any ideas I would love to hear them. Thx in advance. Sam

Speaking as a professional who helps clients market online, and as someone who recently used the web to seach for and buy a house -- I'm not so convinced that there's much value for an individual agent to have a site. That's because people are not looking for agents, they're looking for homes.

Now I know that you can create a site which contains all of the homes you have listed, but how many is that? As a searcher, it's much more effective for me to use a site such as realty.com, or a real estate company website, which has listings for multiple agents. So before investing money into web marketing, ask yourself if this is really going to get you more clients. To answer that, you have to look at two things:

How are you currently getting most of your clients?
Are people using the Internet to locate a real estate agent?

My opinion is that you should use a two-pronged approach. First, you want to get all of the houses you have listed in front of as many buyers as possible. This may mean putting your listings on all of the top real estate sites.

Second, you want to get yourself in front of as many people as you can, because there are people out there who are planning to buy or sell a home and haven't got an agent. These people are more likely to approach someone they already know, or get a referral from someone they trust, rather than randomly looking for an agent on the Internet.

Hope that helps.

Welcome to the forums Raspy1!

You might also contact Martin or Josh over at www.sitetutor.com. They have helped a number of real estate agents and actually found us a great agent in Denver.

Thx for the quick responce. John to address some of your concerns which i find very valid. First off, Cedar City Real Estate enviroment is very different from most real estate markets. The vast majority of our growth is coming from 550 miles away in California. What this means is people are finding real estate agents and they rarely know this person. I have been using www.homegain.com and paying 30 dollars a month for the basic membership and gaining 5-10 solid leads a month. I also agree that when people search to find real estate online they do not want individual sites they would rather go to a site that shows everything on the market at the time. I could get premission from all the people in our office and at least put up all the office listings on my site. See the problem i am having in my opinion is because im a new agent I dont have all the listings that others have. So when people drive around and see a sign they call that agent. Also being a small town everyone knows someone thats a real estate agent. So getting those listing is tough. My approach is to try and sell as many houses as possible. During that time I planned and do go the extra mile to provide the best service possible for these people. This way when they decide to sell. (Average is 5-7 years per house) They think of me. Its a long term strategy but so far I am making it work. So with that in mind. I wanted to get as much of the online market as possible, being they are almost exclusively buyers. I also have the advantage of only being 25 and being some what internet savy and having the average sales agent be in there 40's or 50's and not so internet savy. Wow im rambling on. Well lets move on to the other question. What have real estate agents in your area done that was creative to get there names out and reconized in the community?

One idea that I have seen work for some realtors out here in Chicago is to hold general real estate seminars to give people the foundation for understanding the industry, the market and essentials for buying and selling. It won't help you to directly sell the houses that you have, but it gets your name in front of people who are interested in real estate, and may come back or refer friends to you in the future. Afterall, everyone needs a starting point when they are looking for a house.

You might also want to check out the book Web Design 2.0 at your local Borders or Barnes & Noble. I believe thats the title, if not something very very close. It covers a case study of another realtor who had a website much similar to yours through the process of building it into something much more professional. The insight of the design process might be able to save you some time and money with web designers.

Best of luck!

You can have a website that lists more information about a particular house than what is listed on the main real estate search sites.

So, someone finds a house on a main search site - sees the link to the realtor (you) - then goes to your site and gets whole ton of information that they would not get otherwise. I mean, you could put video walk throughs, extensive information about the neighborhood and nearby things to do, extensive information about nearby schools, etc...

We just bought a house about 1/4 mile from where we lived, but oddly enough we found it through a search site, not by walking to the end of our neighborhood. One thing we noticed was that the search listings simply do not provide enough pictures and video and to really give you a sense of the plusses and minuses of a given house. Since your clients are coming from a long ways away, they would appreciate having such detailed information to help them narrow down their search when they get there.

If you do this, sellers will want to work with you, because they will believe you will get their house sold quicker.

Raspy1, you might consider talking with your broker about an IDX solution or something similar which allows you display "ALL" listings in your local MLS.

I have and since we are still such a small town our MLS wont allow for IDX.

You can find more information about NAR's IDX Requirements at Realtor.org