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Monday Q&A: How Much Does It Cost To Build a Real Estate Site With WordPress?

January 25, 2010 by · 7 Comments

Today’s Q&A launches our first post series: Site Building 101. The five part series (including this article) runs through the basics of building a site using WordPress including choosing a domain name and web hosting, designing your website, selecting a great real estate search vendor and creating an email drip campaign.

Question:

“How much does it cost to build a real estate website with WordPress?”

Answer:

When building a website for real estate you have two types of cost: fixed and variable.

Your fixed costs are:

  • Domain Name (i.e. yoursite.com)
  • Website Hosting (Serves your website to people who visit your domain name)
  • Email Drip Campaign Marketing Service
  • Real Estate Search Vendor

Your variable costs are:

  • Website Design and Maintenance (varies by skill level)
  • Website Marketing and SEO

Eventually your website hosting and email marketing service might become variable costs after you reach a certain growth point and need to move up to more expensive plans. For a brand new site or one that doesn’t get 30,000+ visitors per month the upcoming hosting plans will be perfect.

So, how much does it all cost?

Domain Name – $10.69 or $1.99 with hosting at GoDaddy.com

Website Hosting – $5.59/month at GoDaddy.com to $8.95/month at Dreamhost (we use Dreamhost for ORE101).

Website Design - Premium WordPress Theme – $60 to $100

Email Marketing Company – $19/month at Aweber

Real Estate Search Vendor – $25/month to $60/month+

Total Cost For First Year - $670 – $1,166

For first time website creators that might seem like a bit much. The bulk of your cost is going to come from having a real estate search (aka IDX) on your website but that’s also going to be your biggest lead generator so it’s absolutely necessary.

Also, when compared to a custom website, which typically run $5,000 – $10,000, a WordPress site is an inexpensive lead generating machine. If a custom website is something you’re considering for the future I recommend building a WordPress site for now and then, once you are well established online, invest in a top tier website.

Over the course of the next two weeks we’ll dig deeper into each of the costs associated with building a successful real estate website.

Check out our entire Site Building 101 series using the guide below:

Site Building 101 Series:

1. You’re here!

2. Choosing a Domain Name and Web Hosting

3. Designing Your Website

4. Selecting a Real Estate Search Vendor

5. How to Build an Email Drip Campaign

Photo Credit: Jakob Montrasio

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Filed Under: Building a Website, How-To Guides, Marketing, Monday Q&A, Premium Themes, Technology, Website Tips, WordPress · Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

iPhone App Review: Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It! Vook

January 15, 2010 by · 3 Comments

A Vook™ is a video book created by Bradley Inman’s new company of the same name. So far my experience with “vooks” is limited to their iPhone app “Crush It! Vook” which is essentially Gary Vaynerchuk’s newest book in digital form and stacked with 13 videos (one for each chapter in the book) of @garyvee in action.

The physical “Crush It!” book sells for less than $15 on Amazon.com and is well worth buying. It’s a quick read (160 pages) covering topics ranging from building a personal brand, how to use social media to build a brand, discovering your passion and life lessons from Gary Vaynerchuk. I read the book once and then proceeded to re-read it immediately after.

So the book is good. But are 13 videos and the Crush It! digital book wrapped up in an iPhone app really worth $6.99?

In one word, absolutely. Having read an entire book using my iPhone in the past though, I highly recommend using the app as more of a companion to the physical book as opposed to a replacement. Reading on the iPhone screen can be very tedious.

Let’s dive into the app:

Crush It Vook Loading Screen

The vook takes about 10 seconds to load before presenting you with the Table of Contents for the digital book. Choose a chapter to start reading or choose a chapter and tap the top of the screen and you’ll presented with three options: Go back to the Table of Contents, Previous/Next Chapter arrows and change the font size (three levels).

Chapter One

Along the bottom menu you can select the ‘Watch’ button to see just the videos in the application in addition to ‘Connect’ and ‘About’ which we’ll talk about in a bit.

Table of Contents For Videos

Each video is about 60 – 90 seconds long. The videos, though brief, build off of each chapter in the book and explains more about the subject by offering tons of useful insight from Gary Vaynerchuk and others. Video quality is pretty good and you have the option of double tapping the screen to get rid of the black bars below (zooms in to full screen video).

Gary Vaynerchuk In Action

Finally, you have two more features in the app: a ‘Connect’ page which gives you a profile of the author, filmmaker (in this case Lauren Saffa) and more contact info for Gary Vaynerchuk, his publisher and Vook. The ‘About’ page is similar to the content you would find inside the book sleeve and credits for the production of the vook.

About Gary Vaynerchuk

If I had to offer one negative I would say that the book portion of the app needs work. Amazon’s iPhone Kindle app offers a significantly better user experience in the sense that you can tailor your reading experience more to your needs with the Kindle app versus Vook’s built-in reader.

For example, with the Kindle app you can rotate your iPhone to landscape (widescreen) mode to read that way. Also, if you close the Kindle app it will re-open to the last page where you left off before closing the app. The Vook reader doesn’t support landscape mode nor does it save where you last left off before closing the app.

There’s a lot real estate agents (and brokers) could learn from someone like Gary Vaynerchuk. Many people in our profession are so entrenched in the old way of doing things (gate keeping and the like) that personal branding and proving that you care will go a long way in getting more clients and repeat business.

Buy the Crush It! Vook on iTunes

Photo Credit: magerleagues

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Filed Under: iPhone Apps, Marketing, Mobile Apps, Online Branding, Technology · Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Monday Q&A: What Is A Premium WordPress Theme?

January 11, 2010 by · 1 Comment

The popularity of WordPress spawned a significant number of free website designs, also known as themes, over the past couple of years. Because the designs were free they were also used heavily throughout the community which created a sort of design monotony among WordPress sites. The lack of technical support coupled with infrequent bug fixes for freebie themes sent webmasters in search of a better solution.

Before premium themes your only other styling option was to hire a designer and coder to give your site a custom look all its own. Though certainly worth the cost of admission, custom designs can be cost prohibitive with total project costs upwards of $2,000 or more depending on your level of customization. On to today’s question…

Question:

“What is a premium WordPress theme?”

Answer:

A premium WordPress theme fills the void between freebie themes and custom design work by providing a high quality, super affordable and often ready-to-use website design for less than $100. At this price point it’s affordable to experiment with different site designs and color schemes for your website. There are a few points to consider before buying a premium theme including:

  • How will you use your site? For business blogs or real estate websites running WordPress as a CMS you’ll definitely want to go custom or with a premium theme. Free themes are acceptable for personal blogs but reflect poorly on your business because it shows that you tried to build your website as inexpensively as possible. This could project the idea that you cut corners wherever possible to save money which is NOT the story you want your website to tell!
  • What type of content will you be posting (video, podcasts, written articles)? Some premium themes are built around a specific niche (band pages or brochure websites) so you’ll want to make sure your premium theme supports the content you’re looking to publish.
  • Does the premium theme company support its products well? I’ve seen some beautiful WordPress themes out there where the developer only releases one or two updates or none at all to fix bugs that could cause your premium theme to be unusable. Rule of thumb: An active support forum and quick bug fixes are signs of a well supported product. Look for change logs that show what changes have been made under each version number.

A great way to research company support and customer satisfaction is to use Twitter search. When Twitter users are happy or mad about a product they almost always tweet about it. Use Twitter search to find out about their experiences so you can have more control over your experience.

Do you use a premium WordPress theme on your site? Have any theme clubs that you prefer?

Filed Under: Monday Q&A, Online Branding, Premium Themes, Technology, Website Tips, WordPress · Tagged With: , , , , , ,

3 Things You Must Know Before Uploading Real Estate Videos

January 8, 2010 by · 6 Comments

If you were a good boy or girl in 2009 chances are you received a Flip HD camera before the holidays drew to a close. Flips are great because they’re small, record in HD and can be used to record listing walkthroughs and neighborhood tours.

Now that you’re equipped to start shooting video for your listings there are a few things that you need to keep in mind before shooting your first video. Camera? Check. List of video shots needed? Check. Video host that won’t delete your videos after you’ve uploaded them? Che– wait, what? Yeeeeaaahhh.

1. Read each video host’s terms of use policy. - Wellcome Mat was designed for real estate videos so you don’t have to worry much about their terms of use policy. Vimeo, on the other hand, wants nothing to do with real estate video walkthroughs and explicitly forbids them (even if you pay for Vimeo Plus, their premium video hosting service.) Real estate is a commercial use and will be seen as such by video hosts.

2. Understand what you’re getting before you sign up for a paid service. - In some instances a paid service would be ideal for your needs. Wellcome Mat offers an ad-free HD video service for $25 per month with no obvious bandwidth limitation.

Viddler offers a similar service for $100/month but charges you if you exceed your pre-set bandwidth maximum of 50 GB. In other words, if you surpass 5,000 views of a 3-minute video each month you’ll have to pay an overage charge of $1.00 per GB up to 150 GB of overage.

One perk I really like about Wellcome Mat is their Pro account feature that allows you to create MLS-compliant videos (read: no agent contact info or branding). This is a very niche market feature for agents and a great point for a listing presentation.

3. Choose your video host carefully because your choice will reflect on your brand. - What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you think of YouTube? Free? Evolution of Dance? Professional?

When you’re going in for a listing appointment trying to win a client who will be paying you tens of thousands of dollars for your services (co-broke and your broker split aside) you won’t be establishing value by telling them that you plan to use the same free video service their kids use to opine about the latest Twilight sequel.

Unbranded video services will give you the upper hand on the cheapo competition and better control over where your video is presented. That doesn’t mean that you can’t syndicate your video to YouTube for widest possible coverage but it shouldn’t serve as your primary source of video hosting.

Your real estate videos are a visible indicator of your service quality so you should strive to convey an image of professionalism at every turn.

Have you used a video hosting service that you love? What do you think about real estate videos on YouTube?

Photo Credit: Jakob Montrasio
Filed Under: Marketing, Media, Online Branding, Technology · Tagged With: , , , , , ,

5 Web Tools That Will Make Your Business Explode in 2010

January 6, 2010 by · 5 Comments

For me, 2010 will be the year of implementing some ideas from Tim Ferriss’ newly updated book “The 4-Hour Work Week“. In the book Tim talks about the difference between being effective and efficient which are two words I’ve used interchangeably in the past.

The key difference between the two is that effectiveness determines how much you accomplish with a given task whereas efficiency focuses on completing a task in the fastest, least difficult way.

To be both effective and efficient I scoured the web in search of services that could take my business to the next level. Five such services are listed below:

Mint.com – Most well known as a personal finance and budgeting web app, Mint.com is a great free business expense tracker too. Log in to see what your monthly expenditures are and drill down by expense category (i.e. Business Services, Legal Services) to see what you paid out each month. Your expenses are tracked for the entire year too so you can easily view expenses by month which should make doing taxes a bit easier.

Highrise HQ - Highrise is a very flexible customer relationship manager (CRM) web application. You can use it to store notes on clients, create to-dos, track deals that are pending or have closed and much more from a clean, simple to use interface. I’ve used five different desktop-based contact management apps and a handful of web-based ones.

Nothing (and I mean nothing) compares to Highrise HQ by 37signals for the price. That’s probably why Highrise earned its way into Ryan Hinricher’s list of CRMs in his article “4 Essential Building Blocks For Agents New to Online“.

A free plan is available and users can upgrade to various pricing tiers depending on your needs. I pay $29/month for their solo plan which is a great value when you consider it serves as the backbone of my business. We’re just beginning to test another web-based CRM called Heap for this month’s experiment. Be sure to subscribe to website updates to see how Heap fares over the next month.

Google Analytics - If you’re starting your first site or haven’t been tracking how web visitors use your site you need Google Analytics. GA gives you an “inside look” at how visitors use your website including what keywords they search for in search engines like Google and Bing, what your most popular pages are and how many visitors you’re getting each month.

This data is useful to have because you can use it to discover things like your most popular blog post and write more posts just like it to generate even more traffic.

eFax - One of the first virtual services I ever signed up for, eFax is a fantastic way to begin your journey towards a paperless office. The eFax message center stores your faxes for 2+ years in PDF format making them very easy to access and read on a variety of devices. When you receive a fax you’ll receive an email from eFax with the fax attached in PDF format. I love this feature because I can view faxes on my iPhone.

I use eFax Pro which is $19.95/month. eFax offers a free 30 day trial if you’re interested in trying it out. I didn’t know about RingCentral, one of eFax’s biggest competitors, prior to signing up for eFax so you might want to compare the two and see which one you like more. RingCentral also offers a free 30 7 day trial which you can learn more about by clicking here.

Timebridge - Timebridge is one of those services that you use and then wonder how you lived without it. The fact that it’s free in its most basic form is just icing on the cake. Use Timebridge to propose up to five meeting times (all on the same day or on multiple days) to clients who can then select which time works best for them.

If none of the options work your client can suggest another day/time which you can confirm or reschedule to another day. The best part about Timebridge: the service doesn’t require meeting attendees to register in order to respond to your meeting proposal.

Do you have any web services that you use to keep the gears of your business running smoothly?

Photo Credit: jurvetson

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Monday Q&A: Should I Have A Live Chat Box On My Real Estate Website?

January 4, 2010 by · 9 Comments

Our second installment of Monday Q&A brings us to a website feature that’s been picking up in popularity lately: a live chat box. Live chat boxes are available through Google via GoogleTalk, Diverse Solutions (DsAgentChat) and third party chat providers.

The idea behind a live chat box is that your website visitor can get in touch with you immediately when browsing your site thus increasing the opportunity to convert them into a client. That leads us into our question below:

Question:

“Should I have a chat box on my real estate website?”

Answer:

A live chat box, like any other lead capture feature, is a great thing to have on your website provided you account for a few potential caveats that come with it. On one hand your website visitors can engage you immediately about any questions they have or to request specific property details. That’s a very good thing. Unfortunately, I think the downsides outweigh the potential good a chat box can do.

After using a live chat box on my website (via DsAgentChat) for the past year I noticed a few trends that resulted in me eventually leaving the chat app on my desktop turned off most of the time.

  1. Live chat users interrupt your workflow. – Most of the visitors who used the live chat to contact me only sought answers to a couple questions and then ended the chat session. This is counterproductive because a live chat window opening on my desktop would interrupt whatever I was doing at the computer. I liken it to someone walking up to you while you’re on the phone and just talking at you until you pay attention to them.
  2. The chat lead conversion ratio is pretty low. – After responding to questions from visitors who had no intention to continue speaking with me beyond the chat window I started to see the chat as a time and resource drain. It’s very similar to when you get an email and name inquiry with no phone number included except you have a live conversation in between; it might lead to something but the odds aren’t in your favor.
  3. If you don’t respond right away you may lose out on a prospective client. - With the immediacy of live chat your website visitor expects a fast reply to all of their questions. Now, say you leave your computer to grab a water bottle or you’re on a phone call with a client. That time away from the chat box could cost you a lead who might have otherwise inquired on your site using contact forms or your IDX (both of which have more in-depth information requirements from your leads.)

There are some ways that you can help alleviate some of these concerns like using a virtual assistant to respond to chat leads or asking for their contact number before getting into answering questions. The question then is whether it’s worth going through all that trouble to respond to chat leads. For me, it’s not worth it.

As always, if you have any questions you would like to see answered here you can ask us on Twitter or by leaving a comment in the box below!

What has your experience been with live chat boxes on your website? Worth it or not?

Photo Credit: Cyron
Filed Under: How-To Guides, Lead Generation, Marketing, Monday Q&A, Technology · Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Jan 2010 Experiment: Heap CRM

January 1, 2010 by · 9 Comments

For the month of January 2010 we’re going to experiment with a customer relationship manager (CRM) called Heap.

Since this is our inaugural experiment at ORE 101 here’s a quick overview of how our experiments work:

What Our Monthly Experiments Are Designed To Do

Each month we choose an online service or product that we’re going to try out over the next 28-30 days. These products/services are chosen at random though we are open to suggestions (let us know what you want to see put to the test in the comments below.)

After the experiment has been chosen we keep you up-to-date on how useful the product/service is for our businesses and whether it’s worth trying and/or paying for.

About Heap CRM

Now that you know how we hold experiments, let’s explore more about our first experiment of 2010: Heap CRM. Heap is a web-based application that allows you to import your leads, opportunities and customers.

You can also create email and event templates to help automate the process of working with clients, save messages, add files from Google Docs and bring it all together with a calendar. Heap is not all that much unlike the hugely popular CRM web app by 37Signals called Highrise HQ but it’s stacked with significantly more features.

Leads, Opportunities and Customers

Your database of contacts serves two purposes. First, they are your contacts and you can use custom categories to determine what group works best for them. Second, they can be used to spin-off as leads, opportunities or customers (or all three). Erion Shehaj does a great job of explaining how to use this to your advantage by classifying contacts as follows:

  • Leads (90 Days+ From Buying/Selling)
  • Opportunities (60 Days or Less)
  • Customers (30 Days or Less)

This allows you to keep track of your sale pipeline so you can see what part of your business needs the most work. As Erion explains:

“Your 30, 60 and 90 day pipelines are the food, water and air for your business. In other words, if either one is neglected and becomes scarce, your business’ future prospects aren’t looking too good. If your customers section is vibrant and deals are closing, but your opportunities pipeline is weak, you’re headed for a drought in a few weeks. If your leads pipeline is not being fed, the whole system comes to a screeching halt.”

Email/Event Templates

This is pretty self-explanatory but here’s a quick overview: Your email and event templates are crafted by you to suit your follow-up style. You can reuse these templates again and again in order to streamline your workflow with each client. See an example workflow for an Opportunity buyer below:

Real Estate Buyer Follow-Up

Real Estate Buyer Follow-Up

So that’s what we’ll be playing with for the month of January. You can come along for the ride as Heap offers a 30-day free trial for their CRM web app which is $9/month per user afterwards (no credit card required for the free 30-day trial). If you have questions about Heap be sure to leave them in the comment box below and we’ll dig into the app until we find an answer. :)

This post contains affiliate links. Find out why we use affiliate links by clicking here.

Filed Under: Experiments, Technology · Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

The 9 Most Significant Real Estate Tech/Marketing Moments of 2009

December 30, 2009 by · 2 Comments

2009 was one hell of a year for the real estate industry. We saw an $8,000 first time buyer tax credit come and almost leave before pulling a fast one and occupying our guest bedroom for another 6 months.

The mortgage industry, always a bit of a rocky boat, even went through a few extra spin cycles with FHA changes and the introduction of the HVCC. With enough market drama to keep six Mamas busy it’s easy to accidentally overlook nine of the most significant real estate tech and marketing moments from 2009.

Fortunately, we’ve got them all here:

houselogic-featurette

1. RPR - Nothing has set the real estate industry on fire this year quite like the introduction of the RPR and its sister site, HouseLogic. RPR (REALTORs Property Resource) is the spawn of NAR acquisitions and licensing agreements that will give REALTORs access to a national database of property information including public records, details of prior transactions and much more.

Rob Hahn predicts death reinvention. Brian Boero of 1000watt Consulting thinks there will be some wins and some losses to go around in the post-RPR world.

2. NAR rules Google is not a scraper site, allows indexable IDX search results. - When Google indexes your IDX search results, you win. You win if you have an indexable IDX on your site because if a local home buyer drives by a home, writes down the address and Googles it your website will be in the search results waiting to give that buyer more information about the home.

One particular local board of REALTORs (MIBOR) was up in arms about this practice and received the blessing from NAR to go after one of their own members to prevent listings from being indexed by Google in the Spring of 2009. A recent IDX policy change by NAR in November 2009 works to amend this decision by switching sides and no longer referring to Google as a ‘scraper site’.

3. iPhone fever starts infecting real estate brokerages. - Redfin, Corcoran Group and ZipRealty all released ground breaking iPhone real estate search apps in 2009. I think markets like Manhattan (where Corcoran Group is based and there is no MLS) will benefit most from an iPhone search app because each brokerage represents exclusive listings.

It remains to be seen whether Redfin and ZipRealty’s iPhone apps have a big impact on their businesses or ended up targeting the wrong end user altogether.

google-listings

4. Google (re-)enters real estate listing search in a big way. - Ah, Google. We wondered why you were so eager to spend money building out StreetView, Perspective Imagery and integrating Google Base into Google Maps. Now we know: Google is creating individual listing pages for all properties submitted to Google Base. See an example here.

This has the potential to dramatically alter the real estate search engine landscape. Google already has 72.11% of U.S. general search market share which is undoubtedly responsible for sending a large portion of web traffic to places like Trulia, Homes.com and Zillow. How will Google’s next move into real estate affect these sites?

5. REW announces a framable IDX solution. - Real Estate Webmasters, long known for their high end real estate website design and indexable IDX solution, has been quietly preparing a rollout of their first framable real estate search (aka IDX) which will debut in January 2010.

The IDX market has been pretty stagnant lately so agents and brokers will really benefit from a key quality player joining the game. You can see a demo of the new REW IDX by visiting http://www.rewidx.com/.

bluescape

6. Coldwell Banker attempts to redefine search with BlueScape. – Coldwell Banker worked on ending 2009 with a bang by introducing their new beta search called “Bluescape”. Rob Hahn offers deep insight into the user experience of BlueScape while criticizing the search as being a “half-baked solution in search of a problem”. The rest of Rob’s article is well worth reading when you have 15-30 minutes to take it all in.

7. “If You Want To Close More Deals, Force Registration!” - A straight forward suggestion by Eric Bramlett (disclosure: Eric is an editor and content advisor for Online Real Estate 101) on BloodhoudBlog to force registration on real estate website searches to close more deals broke out into a discussion of business ethics. Both sides (pro-forced registration vs. anti-forced registration) argued fervently but registration and conversion rate numbers do support the idea of forcing website visitors to register to view listing details.

brokentv

8. Century 21 kills national TV ads in favor of online marketing. - Almost immediately after the new year began in 2009 Century 21 dropped a marketing bombshell. The Realogy brand announced that they would no longer run national tv ads and will, instead, reallocate that budget to online marketing efforts like display ads and pay per click marketing.

To most internet marketing junkies this was a “took long enough!” announcement but the implications this shift has for other national franchises is significant.

9. REBarCamp goes virtual, becomes huge success. - First there was REBarCamp, an in-person “unconference” that allowed anyone with a story to tell or topic to teach to stand in front of the masses and give it their best shot.

Harnessing the power of virtual technology, Jim Cronin, creator of Real Estate Tomato, helped lead the way to the first ever virtual REBarCamp. The first Virtual REBarCamp (#vrebc on Twitter) attendance exceeded expectations by nearly 100% to nearly 2,000 users so a second VREBC was set in motion. The next VREBC will be January 4, 2010 from 9:00 am – 4:00 pm PST. Click here to learn more or register for Virtual REBarCamp II.

RPR, forced registration and indexable IDX search results have caused quite a stir over the last year. What’s your take on the mega events of 2009? Do you support forced registration to view real estate listings?

Photo Credit: schmilblick
Filed Under: Marketing, Technology · Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Launching December 28th!

December 7, 2009 by · 6 Comments

Get ready, we’re launching on December 28th! :)

Filed Under: Android Apps, Experiments, Facebook, How-To Guides, iPhone Apps, Lead Generation, Marketing, Media, Mobile Apps, Monday Q&A, Online Branding, Plug-Ins, Premium Themes, Screencasts, SEO, Social Media, Technology, Twitter, Website Tips, WordPress ·
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