Virtually every real estate broker has a presence on the Internet today. But many of these sites are basically boring static pages with stale "About Us" descriptions and little else of value other than to retrieve agent profiles and current listing information - not very exciting stuff by itself.

Two years ago, when the Internet was the hot new thing to do, you could just throw a few pages into a web site and be a part of the club. But times have changed. The Internet has and continues to exceed all expectations. It is transforming the way everything is bought and sold. You name it - books, cars, vacations, attorney services - and homes.

Brokers who share this vision of an online marketplace are making substantial investments in their Internet presence and are reaping substantial rewards from it. For example, Coldwell Banker has made a major commitment to the Web and is currently converting more than 10% of its Internet leads into home buyers or sellers. That’s five times better than the results typically achieved in other traditional direct marketing programs!

The Internet can no longer be viewed simply as a repository for "brochureware." It is a dynamic, interactive marketplace crowded with millions of consumers spending billions of hours and billions of dollars searching for and buying products and services. Buyers and sellers are trying to find your business and when they do they’ll demand responsive, high quality, first-class service. If you don’t deliver a class act within seconds they’ll go somewhere else, with the click of a mouse!

First impressions are lasting ones and your web site is your face to the world. Regardless of the size of your company or how luxurious your office space is, the Internet is the great equalizer. Your smallest competitor can look like the local mega-firm and steal away home sales, relocation, mortgage, and other business from you just because your Internet presence isn't up to par. See for yourself. Go look at the web sites of your competitors as well as the sites of companies in other industries to get a flavor of what your prospective clients are seeing. Then look at your web site. Would you do business with yourself?

Commitment from the Top

What does an effective Internet presence require? First and foremost the company’s senior management must be committed to using the Net as a critical component of its marketing arsenal and agree to devote adequate resources to do it right. If the support isn’t there, don’t bother. Whipping together a site without much forethought and consideration of your audience is an announcement to the world that you are totally clueless - it’s better to stay off the Net. (Blinking lights, little twirlies, and other annoying neon doodads and graphics that flash and go boink-boink around the screen aren’t the solution. They only scream to the visitor, "I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING!")

Once management is committed to treating the Internet as a serious marketing media, you're ready to get started. A complete discussion of the steps and considerations required in the development of an effective Internet marketing program won’t fit in the space than we have here, but a summary of the critical components is provided below.

Elements of an Effective Internet Marketing Program

• Identify your Primary Market. The requirements for a site targeted at first-time buyers, luxury homes, second homes, relocation, or retirement are quite different. Understand who your audience is and design your site accordingly.

• Establish your Business Objectives right up front. For example, "We want the Internet to generate 120 new home sales this year," or "By year-end we want to be a brand name recognized by at least 50% of the "connected" home buyers and sellers in our market area." Whether your goals are hard or soft, or some combination of both, make them concrete and measurable. You may not make your goals the first time around, but unless you set objectives you’ll have no way of monitoring, adjusting, and comparing your Internet marketing with your other promotion programs.

• Set Clear and Quantifiable Marketing Goals. Setting goals that can be measured will enable you to meet your primary objectives and help you establish a budget for your Internet marketing. For example, “To generate 120 new home sales this year, or 10 per month, we’ll need at least 100 qualified leads per month. Based on our traditional marketing methods a qualified lead costs about $25 each, so to get started we'll establish an Internet marketing budget of $2,500 per month. Then track your results! The better Internet Service Providers (ISPs) will generate statistical reports, analyses, and profiles of the visitors to your site.

• Hire a Professional. Don’t develop the web site yourself or have the college intern do it - hire a professional Internet development company. You’ll get astronomically better results. Make sure the company you choose really understands your business and marketing, as well as the techie stuff. Make sure they can they tell you what’s working and not working to sell homes on the Internet, and can really help you meet your objectives. Find out if they’re deploying the latest Internet technologies that will pull consumers into your site, and ask them how they can help increase your agent’s productivity through a company Intranet.

• Don’t Pick the "Low Ball" ISP for your Host. New ISPs (Internet Service Providers) are springing up everywhere and the competition for users is fierce. Don’t pick one based on cost alone. Make sure your ISP offers fast, reliable, and available access to your web site, and will be in business next month. A site that is down or slow to load is a site that doesn’t get seen. Visitors won’t sit around and wait for your pages to load, they’ll click on by just like you do. Pay the extra cost to get an ISP that offers a high performance - it will more than pay for itself.

• Incorporate Dynamic and Engaging Content. Don’t design your site based on paper-based or television-based medium you are already using. The Internet is an interactive two-way media. Incorporate content that is dynamic and engaging. For example, you could automatically notify prospective home buyers as soon as new homes are listed that match their housing desires, or tell them who has the best interest rates today or when the rates drop to a certain level. You can help them calculate exactly how much they can afford, and then immediately show them your listings that fit their budget. For home sellers, you can show a real-time graph of sold price versus list price versus days on market for homes like theirs, then display their expected net proceeds. Add a "chat" center that discusses real estate issues of interest to the public and let’s them ask questions online.

• Become the Community Bulletin Board. Get visitors hooked to your site so they’ll return, over and over again. The trick is to keep your site from getting stale. Post all of the community events and happenings. Regularly sponsor sweepstakes or drawings for various giveaways, such as tickets to local concerts or Beanie Babies. Add school reports, online yellow pages, local weather, job listings, cost of living estimators, credit reports and links to other popular regularly changing sites. Keep track of what they do on your site and personalize your home page for them when they return. Keep in mind that only a select number of visitors to your site will be actively looking to buy or sell a home, but if your site is engaging and useful to them for non-real estate needs, they’ll bookmark it and return regularly. When the time comes to buy or sell you’ll have already established "shelf space of mind" and you’ll get their business.

• Promote, Promote, Promote. Complement your Internet presence with other forms of advertising and promotion. Plaster your web address on everything - business cards, letterhead, flyers, For Sale signs, radio and TV spots, your building, your dog, and so on. In particular make sure to incorporate your Web presence with your print advertising. Point prospects to your web site for more information and add "teasers" to your print ads to entice them to your web site. For example, in your weekend ads you might add the line "Our new listings are first posted on our Internet site every Thursday by 5PM. Please visit us at http://www.MyCompany.com." Get a link to your site posted on the site of other complementary businesses, such as local mortgage lenders, termite and home inspection companies, or purchase banner ads from them if available. The major Internet search engines such as Yahoo and Excite sell banner ads that display based on what a user enters in their search. So, for example, you could have your ad displayed only when a user enters a search for "homes" in "yourcity" You can’t get much more targeted than that!

• Co-op with Other Brokers. One of the tricks to having home buyers and sellers use your site to search for homes is getting enough of the market on your site to make it worthwhile. Since at least 50% of your sales come from your competitors anyway why not use it to your mutual advantages by offering to post their listings on your web site in return for them posting your listings on theirs?

• Register with the Major Internet Search Engines. Internet search engines (such as Alta Vista, Excite, InfoSeek, Lycos, and Yahoo!) are one of the primary ways people will find out about you so don’t take this task lightly. There are also dozens of other real-estate oriented sites that will reference your site for free or for a small fee. And make sure that your site developer includes descriptive keywords in the "META" tags in your web pages that describe your business and what your site offers so that the search engines can index your site appropriately.

• Don’t Forget to Ask for the Order! Make sure your site offers a variety of ways for prospects to easily get in touch with you. Every page should offer a link, button, or some other obvious way to contact you, by E-mail, toll-free number, carrier pigeon, or otherwise. Don’t make it difficult for your prospects to buy when they’re ready. This may seem an obvious point, but it’s surprising how many web sites bury this critical information.

The Internet will undoubtedly become one of the most important components in your marketing mix (if it isn’t already.) The key to success is to be persistent and keep your web site fresh, interactive, and informative. If you’re not overwhelmed with the results you’ve achieved on Internet to date, then you should talk with folks who understand your business and know how to help you accomplish your business objectives on the Net. You have nothing to lose and a whole world to gain by using this revolutionary marketing resource effectively.

Rich Paulson is a respected Internet marketing consultant and Terry Startsman is a Senior Vice President of Interealty in charge of its Broker Innovations group. Broker Innovations is a separate division within Interealty that is dedicated exclusively to providing technology solutions to real estate brokers and associations. For more information, visit their web site at www.interealty.com

Published: August 25, 1998

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Editor's Note: This article reflects the opinions of Rich Paulson and Terry Startsman only and not necessarily the views of this or any other publication, organization or Website owner.