About 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.

I’ve been cruising some blogs and articles lately (mostly articles) by experienced property commentators writing about single property websites and I must say that I found some of them to contain quite interesting material and they were certainly well written.

However, I did find most of them to be lacking in detail and proper research and the suggestions made therein to be either impractical in real terms, unnecessarily costly or just falling short of offering worthwhile solutions and relevant alternatives.

Let me give you some examples:

I came across a couple of articles by James Kimmins who writes for realestate.about.com. To be fair, James writes quite eloquently and does make some interesting and relevant points and has an engaging writing style that I enjoyed reading, but I did find the articles were somewhat lacking in real practical detail or fully researched facts. I’m not ‘having a go’ at James because he clearly seems intent on providing good information and tips that realty professionals can put to solid use.

The problem is that without including more comprehensive detail or pointing to a resource that provides that detail the reader ends up wondering how to fill in the information  gaps, or even worse goes charging off into cyberspace wasting time, effort and money on solutions that do little more than provide a “hard school” education to the aspiring Web2.0 realty marketer!

Here’s the link to the article in mention, and I’ll tell you why I find it lacking,..(especially considering the links pointing to it are entitled “The Ultimate Internet Listing Strategy”)

http://realestate.about.com/od/bloggingforrealestate/a/website_or_blog.htm

In the article James states the following,..

“Though you don’t have as much flexibility as with a static web page, they will generally meet your needs. The one drawback here is that each blog will need to have the pages copied into it, and the duplicate content won’t help you with the search engines.”

… and I’m thinking “what the?”,.. “not as much flexibility” James,.. are you kidding me?,.. there’s virtually no limit to what can be achieved with WordPress pages if you have the right theme and plugins and/or java scripts to go with them. So, unfortunately those comments are somewhat unwittingly flawed.

Secondly, “duplicate content”?? what duplicate content and where? A properly set up WordPress blog or CMS site will have different information on every page. Even if there are multiple (hundreds and even thousands) that all use the same template for different property listings,.. then each page is differentiated by the respective unique content.

The search engines don’t read CSS and couldn’t care less about design,.. they search content which usually shows up as html or xml language. My point is that those two inaccurate comments could deter prospective use of WordPress by agents for single or multiple property listings,..and more would be the pity because in fact a WordPress “property blog” (which is how the search engines largely see them) will beat the pants off a standard html conventional website every day of the week and twice on Sundays! I do realize it was your intention to speak favorably of the WordPress alternative, but those two comments certainly didn’t help.

The other point mentioned about the use of property address specific domain names such as www.123mainstreet.com and/or linking that to your own static pages seems somewhat confusing and I think it misses the point,.. but I’ll save that for my next post I think because it merits clarification.

Sorry if it seems as though I’m picking on you James but here’s another article of yours that again is interesting, is well written and makes some solid overall points but it sadly lacks any real practical solutions even though article does aim at being useful.
http://realestate.about.com/od/bloggingforrealestate/a/sgl_prop_blog.htm

This article also provides some interesting reading and it’s clearly a sincere effort to be of service, but again I find it’s largely just topical commentary that largely misses the point and the real practical options available.

There are several other blog posts that miss the point and just talk in general terms offering scattered views and inconclusive pointers but I won’t pick on them as they’re almost 2 years old and the market and Web2.0 Internet has changed drastically since then.

A couple of my previous posts give the indications of the real benefits and practical low cost methods of using WordPress as a single property website platform,..and of course I’m unashamedly referring to our very own IS-selling.com Individual Sites using WordPress. You can also read for yourself in our ‘About’, ‘Resources’ and other pages (shortly we’ll have more videos too) about how and why IS-selling.com WordPress sites just rock the competition and can save you countless frustrating hours trying to put something practical and presentable together yourself.

Watch out for my next post on this topic. You can subscribe to RSS here or follow me on Twitter.

Why should traditional realty sites bother with external listing or single listing websites?

Apart from the inherent advantages of diversifying and being seen to be proactive, there’s a very good reason why larger well established real estate marketing companies (such as Remax & Century 21 and the like.) should be actively pursuing other marketing means and that is,..

Web2.0 is shifting the balance of power away from traditional marketing methods over to search, social site proliferation and new tools on interactive websites that property buyers and sellers are flocking to in droves.

Simply speaking, if you’re in real estate and your not moving towards or with a Web2.0 perspective then you’re going to find yourself within the next couple of years scratching your head and saying “what happened?”

Here are some very simple but excellent reasons that realty professionals (whether small or large) should be using single property websites in their marketing strategy.

Of course we’re biased towards IS-selling.com sites even though there are other alternatives out there that are very worthwhile such as V-flyer & e-property websites which are hooked up to Web2.0 via XML feeds. However, neither of those two platforms are built on the WordPress 2.0 platform and therein lies the primary difference which sets us apart.

IS-selling.com sites are built on the WordPress Web2.0 platform which apart from being arguably the best blogging platform is continually evolving as a powerful Content Management System (CMS).

Not only do the IS-selling sites present properties very well visually and contextually but they also provide the following powerful Web2.0 connectivity:

1. Each site is linked to the agent’s/broker’s home site
2. Each site is linked to the listing agent’s blog
3. Each site is linked to the listing agent’s or agency’s Twitter account
4. Each site is linked to every other IS-selling site within the agent’s/agency’s account.
5. Each site is auto-linked via XML feed to Zillow, Trulia, Google-homebase, Yahoo, Oodle & Vast;
6. Each site has Web2.0 bookmarking and sharing widget
7. Each site has its own built in ‘visitor comments’ blog
8. Each site features auto-tagging for easy keyword optimization
9. Each site features SEO optimization controllable for your admin Panel
10. Each site can accommodate any new Web2.0 plugin module
11. Each site can feature the agents own individual colors and headers

Soon to be featured: Each site will have a “pixel resizer” to enable enhanced viewing on iphone, Blackberry, GPS. In the meantime, viewers can download a free WordPress viewing application from iphone that virtually re-pixelates and re-sizes the whole viewing experience.