Slowdown in Real Estate Sales Spurs Internet Marketing

While the present real estate climate helps buyers with incentives, and sellers are willing to lower prices, desperate real estate agents look for magic bullet from the net.

WebKnowHow
Tuesday, September 5, 2006; 05:03 AM

Just a year ago, real estate and resort condos for sale were the hottest thing going. If you advertised one with a price even near appraised value, or offered a preconstruction condo loaded with amenities, investors couldn't buy it fast enough. Realtors were happily making huge commissions, and the investors happily anticipated huge profits from "flipping".

Prices increased in the resort areas like Florida and Las Vegas, while huge high-rise developments took over and carpeted the landscape with bulldozers and construction workers. Then hurricanes came, the war progressed, interest rates and gas prices went up, and the so-called real estate "bubble" became a reality.

In the summer of 2006, developers have more condos than they have buyers, prices on homes and condos are coming down, and realtors are suddenly hurting for sales.

One thing is obvious - the internet is the lifeline. But those fancy websites known as "flash sites" are dangling in cyberspace, and the money required to advertise with the search engines is hard to come by.

Real estate web designers that are skilled in search engine optimization are the answer, but they are a rare breed.

Most web designers go for the most high-tech look, and have no idea what the search engines require to rank a site in the natural search results. There are so many developments now that ranking for all may be impossible.

And there are a few areas where real estate didn't top out last year. Prices remain affordable, and the hometown agents are now gearing up for their share of the pot.

"These developers and real estate marketing firms are looking for the fruit of their investments in internet advertising." says Bryan Pearl of Pearl Web Marketing.

Myrtle Beach Web Design, a real estate search engine optimization company owned by Jan Chilton, has teamed up with Pearl Web Marketing to offer the solution. Websites specialized for realtors and property developers can be attractive to buyers and search engines alike. Between the two companies, Pearl and Chilton have a large number of clients who benefit from referrals, can provide press release services and advertising blogs, and have several real estate directories to provide a complete internet marketing experience.

Pearl modestly tells his prospective customers, "Out of twenty-seven million results on the internet our website, CondosAndResorts.com, is in the top ten search engine results for the term 'condos for sale.'" Chilton maintains several condo websites that are near the top for most Myrtle Beach search terms.

Angela Privett Treadway, Co-owner of Privett and Associates Realty in Sevierville, Tennessee has been with Pearl Web Marketing for three years.

"Internet advertising is a significant part of our marketing and it drives hundreds of leads per month to our office," Treadway explains. "The internet is certainly the best and most cost effective way to generate sales, providing you get with the right company."

Pearl Web Marketing and Myrtle Beach Web Design currently service realtors in South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee, Hawaii, Kentucky, Arizona, California, and Florida. For ethical reasons, they will seldom work with more than one agent per city.

Although their primary focus is in real estate, they have together designed a mortgage company site, a condo insurance site, a lake front property site, and have customers in interior design, engineering services, construction, and resort rentals.

Pearl does website design primarily with developers and realtors for search engine placement especially geared towards selling the dream of owning vacation homes and condos. Myrtle Beach Web Design has been helping realtors and Myrtle Beach condo rental companies with search engine placement since 2003.

The merger of these two talents has been a perfect match, even though they are several states apart.

Learning what each search engine expects, enticing prospective home buyers, and keeping up with the constant algorithim changes is what, together, they do best .

Pearl and Chilton share their knowledge and confer daily to keep each other informed. Chilton is presently working on a Real Estate marketing (http://www.echoforum.com/) tutorial site to help with Google placement, called EchoForum.com.

There are many other tools to use in driving traffic to websites. Online ads in the right places, trading links with other quality websites, and creating press releases which span the globe are just a few. All of these factor into your placement in the search engines.

There are many things which can be done to generate traffic. It isn't rocket science, but requires time and constant monitoring of the trends. For this reason, most realtors would prefer to have a professional handle this important aspect of their business.