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The Real Estate Web Presence

The Internet has grown by leaps and bounds over the years. Today, the size of the Web is measured in billions of individual documents, with millions of new documents coming online every year. These documents run the gamut from web pages to PDF documents, from audio files to images and beyond.

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What's the end result of all this content? For one thing, it's harder to be found online than it used to be. So as a real estate agent, you have to work smarter and publish content through multiple channels to ensure your future "findability."

The Need for a Real Estate Web Presence, Illustrated

Let's look at a hypothetical scenario. Let's say we are a real estate agent in San Diego. There was a time, just a few short years ago, when only a dozen or so real estate companies in San Diego had websites. Websites used to more expensive than they are today, and they took a lot much longer to build and put online. On top of that, few real estate companies felt the need to go online ten years ago. There wasn't the "Internet rush" that we see in today's real estate industry.

So let's say we put a new real estate website online, catering to San Diego real estate shoppers. If we were one of only 13 San Diego real estate websites, that would make it really easy for people to find us online. If a search engine showed ten results on Page 1, we would have a strong chance of being on that page. Less competition, right?

Now flash forward to the present.

It's 2007, and thousands of San Diego real estate agents have websites and blogs online. In fact, when I search the phrase "San Diego real estate agent" in Google (with quotes around the phrase), I get 42,800 results. That means there are nearly 43,000 individual documents online (and in the Google database) that mention the phrase "San Diego real estate agent."

Even if you were to (A) eliminate repeat pages from the same websites, and (B) remove all web pages that were not owned by real estate agents, you'd probably be left with at least 10,000 individual websites owned by real estate agents. Search engines only show ten search results per page, so this means each of those 10,000 agents has something like a 1-in-1,000 chance of appearing on Page 1 of the search results.

That's some stiff competition!

Sure, search engine optimization (SEO) can help you climb up the search engine ranks. SEO is the act of improving a website for better search engine visibility and ranking. But even if you do everything right from an SEO standpoint and reach the top two pages of search results, there is still only a 1-in-20 chance people will click through to your website (over the other 19 listings on those first two pages of results).

From a research and communication standpoint ,the real estate industry has moved online. Just look at what has occurred in the last couple of years -- the rise of home valuation sites like Zillow and HouseValues, the increasing Internet usage among buyers and sellers, the massive number of real estate agent websites and blogs popping up.

Here's what it boils down to. In the very near future, all real estate research (and even many of the transactions themselves) will be conducted online.

So as a real estate agent or broker, you can pretend the Internet isn't that big a deal, and then later on wonder why your business isn't growing. Or you can embrace the Internet and grow your business to exciting new levels. If you choose the latter, you'll need a strong Web presence. You need to give people more ways to find you online, and you need them to be thankful when they do find you. By increasing your "findability," you will turn your one-part website into a multi-part web presence.