I plan on building my own individual site over the next month and am looking for input on what features most appeal to buyers and sellers. I'm particularly interested in which kind of pages get the hits and which don't.

Do checklists, mortgage calculators, or links to financing and other services make a difference? How about dynamic content on the front page that shows a different listing every few seconds that's fully clickable?

Mostly, I'd like as many useful features without cluttering up the design or site.

"Search for homes" and "featured listings" probably get 95% of the hits on my site.

Once you get them to your site via search engine optimization and/or pay-per-click, it's critical that they quickly (one or two clicks) find a way to search listings. There's more on that and other content help at http://www.technologyforrealestate.com/web_site_presence/site_content.htm

You can also get good help for how to capture the contact info from your visitors at
http://www.technologyforrealestate.com/web_site_presence/making_visits_count.htm

If I had to do it over again, I would build a website from scratch and not use a template site such as Advanced Access. Although Advanced Access has great technical support and is very user friendly, it appears that it is very difficult for a new template website to make it high on a google key word search as it does not recognize a new template site as having much unique content, since so much of it is the same on every Advanced Access customers website. I have hundreds of links to my website, and get excellent key word search results on MSN.com, but I have been told that Google and Yahoo will not give me good results as they do not recognize much of my unique content, and only rank Advanced Access customers who have had their websites for a long time.

Basically, unless you highly customize each and every AA page, you're not going to rank.

Template sites are just not good in so many ways.... you're not usually going to rank well.. if at all... you look like a gazillion other sites out there, over time it costs more for these sites (that don't really bring in business) than a custom site.

More importantly, you're RENTING your website. If or when you decide you don't want to pay their monthly fee, you have NOTHING left but a domain name. You must start all over from scratch.

That makes NO sense. You build up your business and your name and branding and then POOF - it's gone. Along with all of your work.

If you're serious about real estate, get a real website. It will help you so much more than you can even imagine.

If I had to do it over again, I would build a website from scratch and not use a template site such as Advanced Access. Although Advanced Access has great technical support and is very user friendly, it appears that it is very difficult for a new template website to make it high on a google key word search as it does not recognize a new template site as having much unique content, since so much of it is the same on every Advanced Access customers website. I have hundreds of links to my website, and get excellent key word search results on MSN.com, but I have been told that Google and Yahoo will not give me good results as they do not recognize much of my unique content, and only rank Advanced Access customers who have had their websites for a long time.

I completely agree about having a custom website, and luckily, I have nearly ten years of web development experience so I think I can make just about any kind of site I choose. It's the choosing that's the really hard part.

Links to listings seems essential, and of the hundred or so sites I've looked at, ones that help you know more about the agent as a person seem vastly more appealing on an emotional level.

My plan for getting hits includes buying about 25 local real estate names for my town, its neighborhoods, & surrounding towns and having a single page on each describing the particular area with semi-dynamic content changed weekly (basically, I'd have a pull-quote box where I'd type in a forthcoming area event) and a link to my primary domain site. (i'm only paying $1.99 for the domain names so that's not much a cost issue.)

My hosting plan allows me to add domain names for $1 each/month so I figure I'm still beating the price of canned sites and I get a much higher SE bang for the buck.

What I'm really wondering is what other kind of content on an agent's individual site draws people in? or is useful to customers? I'd be particularly interested in what the weblogs say.

Bruce,

It takes at least 6 months, sometimes as long as 12 months, for a new site to show-up in the search engines (especially Google), regardless if it's a template site or a custom site. How long has your site been online?

It's also your responsibility to change the stock content. That's why it's called a "template site".

MSN is usually the first to rank your site. Google being the last.

The SE's will not recognize the stock content that came on your site, but they will recognize unique content. It just takes some time.

My site has been online for less than a year and I can't even keep track of all the 1st page rankings I have. I got my first few 1st page results in Google at 5 months.

Basically, unless you highly customize each and every AA page, you're not going to rank.

Template sites are just not good in so many ways.... you're not usually going to rank well.. if at all... you look like a gazillion other sites out there, over time it costs more for these sites (that don't really bring in business) than a custom site.

More importantly, you're RENTING your website. If or when you decide you don't want to pay their monthly fee, you have NOTHING left but a domain name. You must start all over from scratch.

That makes NO sense. You build up your business and your name and branding and then POOF - it's gone. Along with all of your work.

If you're serious about real estate, get a real website. It will help you so much more than you can even imagine.
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I agree totally. YOUR name is what need branded.
I am working in team, and my role is to maintain the website I build my self. We had so far a HUGE sucess in numbers of listings based on the fact that we have our own website, not RENTING.

I know this sound litle bit nuts, but the lats 5 listings, we have the sellers calling us!
Our former top producers in our company are having a hard time, keeping up, and their production is not on the same level.

I am approached every day, asking if I can make them a similar website.

My plan is to start my own web design company, focusing only on the need the REALTORS® has.

So I agree totally with RealEstateWebGuy

Here is what I think works best for buyers/sellers as well as search engines:

Make a list of the pages you want to create ahead of time based on the information that people are looking for from you. If you get asked about condo prices a lot then create a page that is focussed on that one issue, maybe have sales stats on the page lots of verbage about the types of condos and the price ranges in differnet areas of the city....but remember that in the end once someone gets to your page they have to have a reason to call YOU, you have now built a sense of knowledge in the eyes of the buyer so make sure there is a real call to action on that page.

Repeat this with as many subjects as you can think of and make sure to keep these topics tight so that they each rank well in the search engines.

In the case of the search engines, you can get ranked in each fairly quickly by making sure that you get your site linked in as many directories, forum posts and other high quality websites as possible. Also if you know anyone with a blog especially a real estate oriented one, get the mto post an article about your site with a link back to your site

I agree. I used an Advanced Access template for a while, but switched to a custom site in March after using them for 2 years. Since then, I've gotten many more leads and compliments on my new site, which is more organized. I still need some SEO and CSS, so am hiring a person to complete it.

I would start with a JOOMLA CMS, and HOT PROPERTY as my list management system.