Web2.0 Sociable Realty Sites!
Sunday, July 26th, 2009About 6 months ago, a friend of mine suggested to me that I should look at producing a ’single property’ real estate site. Knowing my background in real estate and my affinity with the internet and website creation he said it could be good to release something ‘nifty and competitive’.
After considering it for a while and having looked at many other ’single property’ websites (of which I found quite lot) I decided that the way to go would be by using the Web2.0 platform and capitalizing on that growing medium of communication. Something that would allow people to harness the connectivity of other social sites such as Twitter, Digg, facebook, etc., as well as having blogging characteristics.
Enter WordPress MU (WPMU) the Web2.0 social network that’s spreading like wildfire. It’s a really stable platform that many very large blog networks have been set up on (such as wordpress.com & edublogs.com). Not only is WordPress a great blogging platform but it’s also developed into a powerful CMS (Content Management System), so it was pretty much a ‘no-brainer’ decision to go with WPMU as the platform for our is-selling network of Individual Sites for properties.
Search engines love WordPress sites because they’re viewed as part of the social network. Our is-selling.com sites will technically be seen by the search engines as ‘property blogs’ and as such they will index and rank higher than conventional sites; especially when they’re linked up to Twitter and agent’s blogs, and also have an in-built blog where viewers can leave comments on the property and agent’s can respond.
Other individual property sites that offer exclusive domain names (such as www.1227anystreet.com) do a good job as far as presentation is concerned, and the ’sign riders’ look impressive,- BUT the site is a virtual island in a raging sea of competing network traffic, they’re not linked to any centrally indexing system or Web2.0 network, and as a result of that they’re seriously missing out on the real juice that the internet can be and should be providing them!
With IS-selling every site owner shares our distinctive domain name ‘is-selling.com’ which although we’ve marketed to be synonymous with ‘Individual Site’ selling, it incorporates the essence of what every site owner is doing,- which is to tell the market that the featured property ‘is-selling’. Therefore, site owners can now select an exclusive domain name that ties in exactly with the address of the property for sale,- such as http://729pikestreet.is-selling.com/. This is an instant process that happens automatically when you create new sites via our registration and login process. Provided no-one else happened to register the exact same address as yours (which is highly unlikely) you get the name straightaway and without any extra cost or time restrictions. Plus, the main distinctive advantage is that your .is-selling.com site isn’t an ‘island in the stream’, it’s a virtual search engine magnet and web2.0 social marketing mechanism!
The overall concept in creating ‘is-selling.com’ was and is simple; -
- Make the sites quick and easy to set up;
- Include relevant features and make them attractive;
- Incorporate Web2.0 Social connectivity (thank you Mr. WordPress);
- Make them very affordable so they can be included in the lowest of budgets
- Make them very simple to manage and load information into;
- Make then expandable to meet the needs of the market.
We believe that we’ve done (and are doing) all of those things and that all our hard work is starting to come together in an offering that the real estate industry will come to firmly embrace over time.
