I/E Speaks

If you are building your site from scratch and you can’t quite figure out where to start then consider this: What is the real estate industry all about?

The obvious answer is buying and selling real estate. While that’s true, it’s not the real basis of the industry. Being a real estate professional is about service. It’s how well you service your clients that will lead to actual sales.

Viewers of your site are not just looking for homes; they are looking for a realtor that they feel will provide them with good service, support and advice. This is why its essential to build a user focused site based on those principles.

The typical marketing strategy in the past for realtors has been to market YOU. Your Ability, Your Prowess in sales Your Success… YOU. No longer is that the case.

With the wealth of information at hand, and the ability for someone to actually “shop” for a realtor online. All people want to know about you is what it is that you can do for them now or in the future and they want to be able to determine that by the content on your website.

So the first step in building a site is to ask yourself, what kind of content, tools and services can I put on my site that will answer the question for them?

Long time client Jan Horn (www.janhorn.com) was looking for new look for the site we had designed for him back in 2003. Initially we had come up with a site for him that had a fair amount of content. With most realtor sites, we want the content to feed the search engines need for words they can scan to rank the sites.

Since Los Angeles is a very competitive market in terms of getting ranked high in the search engines, and since the client’s is working a niche market of architecturally significant homes, we decided to create a new site for hi that spoke more to that market, than play the search engine game.

We don’t often take this approach, but in Jan’s case it made sense. We work very hard at working with our clients to come up with individual solutions for their business, and for www.janhorn.com we came up with a site that’s as stunning as the homes he represents.