This is one of my favorite sites, since the release of WordPress 2.5, things haven’t been the same. There are so many plugins available to turn a simple Blog into just about anything you want.
Why would you want to do that, you may ask? Affordability is one answer, go take a peek at this site, PattiMace.com, it uses a real estate plugin that allows you to post home listings, and even creates an .xml file for an RSS feed, that can be used to add your listings feed to Google Base and others, so that your listings are available in places like Google Real estate! That will increase the visibility and make it easier for people to find you!
This is the main reason for using the WordPress format, which is highly customizable, through themes and plugins, to get your pages picked up by the search engines! After all, having a website that nobody sees is a waste of server space!
You might wonder why I would tell the world about how easy it is to build a Real Estate website? That is clear, there are way too many “professional” website designers out there, that are just too expensive for the average real estate agent to use, so, they try to do something themselves, or get into expensive hosting contracts that are not always in their best interest. It isn’t that these designers are bad, they just are too expensive for a small business to use. Large real estate brokerages can do this, and rightly so, take a look at the Houston Association of Realtors website (HAR), this is where the properties are listed with MLS, and is a wonderful site, but, as an agent, or even a small brokerage, building something like this is way out of reach.
So, an agent needs a way to stand out, this is Patti’s page at HAR, you would never find her, unless she was to get extremely lucky and someone was to find her using HAR’s Member Finder, in other words, a needle in a haystack! By having her own site, that is also functional, and very visible, she can have the clients find her, and avoid that luck of the draw search process, do you know how many real estate agents there are in Houston?
Using the Wordress Blog, she can write useful posts that help people, even if they have no interest in buying a home in her area! The more she writes, the more her sites page rank will grow, the better that page rank gets, more people will be able to find her even easier.
Helping people, what a concept? I live by the philosophy that “if you help enough people get what they want or need, you will in turn, get what you want or need”, this is the purpose of this site, helping people get a website that will work for them, and be affordable for just about anyone.
For anyone that finds this post, and is looking to relocate to the Houston area, or just wanting to buy or sell a home in the Houston area, I can tell you this, Patti is a dedicated agent, and having a real estate agent that is dedicated to helping you, is a very important thing! So, take a peek at her site, send her an email, and let her help you.
If you are a real estate agent, or anyone needing an affordable website, drop me a note, and I will either build you a website, or help you to build your own.
This is a site that I did about a year and a half ago, it is a static Html site, that I also maintain and update the listings. After building this site, Wordpress became a viable CMS Platform, so now, I am working on building a theme that will match this as closely as possible, as these are the colors and the layout that this company wants, that theme is a work in progress, but it is getting there. I hope to have that done in the next weeks, it wont be exact, but it will be close, and you will be able to see the flexibility of Wordpress. Take a look at the site here, FellwockRealEstate.com. Post a comment and tell me what you think.