How to Start and Promote a Real Estate Business Online

Real estate business is considered to be one of the most profitable businesses around the world. Especially in the urban centres.

The reason behind this is not far fetched. Unlike other needs, shelter is one of the most basic human needs . So, even if people may dispense with other needs, there’ll always be the need for shelter and accommodation.

This is where real estate business comes in. Also, factors like increasing population growth and urbanization etc have all contributed to the huge growth in demand for real estate.

All these are reasons why starting a real estate business will always be very lucrative for a long time to come.

Notwithstanding it’s lucrative nature, to start and run a successful real estate business in the 21st century, there are things you need to put in place.

In this post, i’m going to list the things you need to use in building and promoting a real estate business online, no matter where you are, starting with a website.

How to Build a Real Estate Business Website

Starting a successful real estate website is not only the surest way to boost your real estate business and upgrade your game as an agent or investor…

It’s also one of the easiest ways to establish your online presence and boost your business growth. Most people are yet to realize this.

Of course. Even where you don’t have a strong offline structure, with a good real estate website, you can get your real estate business up and running almost without any difference.

Now the reason I’m saying this is because according to this report by NAR and Google, for instance, real estate searches on Google have grown by 22 percent per year.

To even buttress the need to start and build an online presence for your real estate business, the report further holds that 90 percent of home buyers in the US searched online before actually buying a house.

Now the truth is, whether you’re in Lagos or in New York City, majority of the people looking for real estate in the 21st century are doing that online.

So, whether you have a good offline presence or not, to start a successful real estate business, you definitely need a strong online presence. Especially if you want to reach a wider audience and generate better sales.

Alright. With all these said, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that it’s very important you get a real estate website as a real estate investor. Because you need it.

Of course, if you don’t need a real estate website for displaying your property, showing off promos, and getting to convince clients for a meet up, you’ll definitely need it to push your brand and online presence.

Steps to Build a Real Estate Website

After realizing the need to build your own real estate website, the next thing you need to know is the step by step process that will help you in building a world class website for your real estate business.

The following are the steps you’ll need…

Get a Domain Name

The first thing you’ll need to put in place before starting a real estate business website is a domain name.

So you’ll first of all choose a domain name that’s similar to your real estate brand name. Find out if the domain name is available then pay for it.

If you already have an established offline presence, you really do not need a domain name that’s different from your brand name.

In this case, all you need do is to find a domain name that is same with or similar to the business name you already have. This will help your already existing customers to find you online more easily.

Where you don’t want to use your current business name as your domain name for any reason, you can get a new domain name.

Also if your current business name has been taken and you still want to maintain it as a domain name, you can settle for alternatives.

This could be by way of using a domain name extension different from the general .com like .us, .uk, co.uk, .ng etc (making sure it reflects your country) or adding something unique to the domain name that still keeps it close to your business name.

Get a Web Hosting plan

A web host is a company that uses technology to enable your website stay accessible online. In order for you to build a website, you will need a web hosting plan.

A web hosting plan comes in different packages based on the need of individual website owners.

When you’re done picking a domain name, you can then choose a hosting plan that will be suitable for your needs.

Now, before choosing a hosting plan, you’ll want to consider the kind of real estate website you want to build…

For example, if you’re a big real estate dealer with huge properties to be uploaded on the website, you’ll have to consider using a web hosting plan that can support that.

Also, if you’re building a real estate website that will have a lot of users, you will also have to put this into consideration, while choosing your web hosting plan.

If you can’t do this alone, you can get a website designer to help you choose the best hosting package that will work for you, based on your needs.

Build your Website

After your web hosting plan is set, the next thing to consider is to get over to start building your real estate website.

How’s this done?

You can get to build your real estate business website yourself, if you’re really savvy with the web development technology.

Otherwise you can get a reliable web agency to save you the stress and get your real estate property website ready in days.

So what do you go for? The choice is yours.

Alright. Moving on…

You may decide to have your real estate website developed from the scratch for more customizations.

This will require an advanced knowledge both for management and set up. And also the cost would be higher.

You may also want to use a more simplified software that will get your site up with all necessary technology like WordPress for instance or Joomla/Drupal

Whatever platform you choose to build your website, be sure that your decisions are based on your specific needs.

In any case, the goal should be to set up a modest website that will help you achieve your dreams of expanding your real estate business online.

How to Promote your Real Estate Business Online

Now, after your website is set up, the next thing is to work on promoting your real estate business online. This is where the real work comes in.

Because your effort here is what is going to determine whether your business will be seen online or not.

Below are steps you can use to promote your real estate business online…

Set a Goal and a Plan

One of the first steps towards promoting your website is to set a goal. It is very important you have a specific goal you want to achieve with your real estate website because this will you in measuring the effectiveness of your strategy.

With a specific goal in place, from time to time, you can get to measure your outcomes based on your laid out goals.

Where the outcomes are not yielding results, you’ll realize areas you need to reshuffle or put in more work.

Also, you’ll be able to find enough data that can help you understand where your business is going.

After this, you need to get a business plan. Your plan should answer the question about how you’re going to achieve your business goals.

Like any other business plans, it should involve key factors that will help you achieve your most important goals.

Evolve a Marketing Strategy

How are you going to promote your brand and get people to know about it? This is the question that should be answered by your marketing strategy

Your real estate marketing strategy should be your number one marketing tool. And it should be able to guide you on how to evolve a renown online real estate brand that will get deals online.

Your real estate marketing strategy should be able to address the following;

• Your target audience,
• Their demographic,
• The kind of content that appeals to them,
• Their buying habits,
• Their location (Where they hang out online). etc

Backed with this data, you should be able to evolve content that will appeal to your audience in a way that they will easily respond to your offers.

Create Useful Content

Again, backed with the data from your strategic planning, you will now go ahead to create useful content that will be highly beneficial to your potential client.

Beyond being useful, your content should be the kind of content your target audience can connect with. Therefore, it should be content that is tailor made for that audience, after a thorough research.

Optimize for Search Engines

From your Marketing Strategy, you should be able to know the kind of keywords you want to rank for. Work on building your content around these keywords.

Before even getting over to optimize your content, you have to first of all, optimize your website for your target keywords.

If done right, this can help in bringing up the website via search engine page when someone searches for something similar to the keywords you use.

After this, focus on optimizing each content you post on your website for keywords that will be beneficial to you. You have to be very strategic about this.

Get on Social Media

With over two billion people on top social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc, you have a lot to gain by setting up social media pages for your real estate website.

So, you have to work on doing this. Set up social media profiles and link them to your website. It could be two or three or more.

Be sure it’s something you can manage. Because, you’ll need to be updating the platforms with content on a regular basis.

Host FREE Seminars and Exhibitions

Host free seminars and exhibitions. This can be done online or offline. Although most people utilize offline.

Hosting a free seminar will help you showcase your available properties and then advice potential home buyers on what’s best for them.

In fact you could use it as some sort of get together or something, to further get the word out for your brand.

Also, the seminar does not have to be all about your real estate business. You can partner with or co-host it with other alternate businesses in order to get access t a wider audience

Get Testimonials from existing clients

Get testimonials from existing clients and use them as part of your story telling strategy and social proof for your brand on the social media.

This might look counter productive but in the digital world, social proof is still very relevant in building trustworthiness and reliability.

Use Paid Ads

Using paid ads like Google’s pay per click as one of your real estate marketing strategy is one of the fastest ways to drive relevant prospects to your website through search engines.

Although the cost might be on the higher side, if you can afford it, you can choose to run a pay per click ad while you’re still building your organic SEO on the other hand.

You can always stop running the ad, as soon as your organic SEO is able to catch up.

Use Social media ads

Another paid ad you can also use for your real estate website marketing is the social media advertising.

Say Facebook or Twitter for instance. Depending on your audience, with such advertising, you can get a great deal of publicity for your website.

One thing you should note about online advertising is that it is always best to work on testing the advertising platform vis-avis your audience before continuing with the ad.

Online advertisement is not something you should set up once in a while and forget about it while it runs. You should be able to test your results at intervals and then take actions, based on the results you get.

Now, besides the marketing strategies mentioned here, there are also a handful of other real estate website marketing strategies like blogging, Guest Posting across other blogs etc.

Understand, to a large extent, the success of your website is going to depend on the number of people that are able to see the website. So it’s very important you get your online marketing strategies right.

Now what’s next?

The next thing for you after reading up to this point is to get a real estate website for your business. Otherwise, you can share this post for someone that will need it.

With the continuous evolution of the internet, the most important thing right now is that you don’t need to have huge capital before starting a real estate business.

With a real estate website gotten right, any ordinary Realtor or agent can go a long way.

I’m sure this is good news for someone out there. What do you think?