Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
Is making home buyers' and home sellers' dreams come true your passion? You're in good company.
Research shows that the demand for real estate sales agents and brokers is expected to increase by 5% between 2021 and 2031.
To stand out in today's sea of real estate agents, you need a future-forward MLS website. And fortunately, that's where hiring a real estate webmaster comes into play.
The question is, how can you find a good webmaster?
Here's a rundown on the benefits of having a webmaster and how to find the best real estate webmaster.
A webmaster can help you to create an MLS website that stands out for all the right reasons. With a professionally created site, you won't have to worry about prospective clients viewing you as an amateur. Instead, you'll build trust with consumers, and as a result, you'll be more likely to turn consumers into paying clients.
A webmaster can also help you to successfully compete with real estate agents in your area by adding your latest property listings to the site.
In addition, they can utilize digital marketing tools, like website videos, to generate more leads for you.
One of the best ways to find a webmaster is to ask friends in real estate who currently have websites for their recommendations. You want a webmaster who has a strong understanding of and experience with the property sales business.
You can also post an ad for a webmaster on social media sites to get the names and contact information of highly rated webmasters.
Before choosing a potential webmaster, you should ask them for the names of past and current real estate agents and broker clients. This will allow you to find out firsthand how results-driven and reliable your possible webmaster is.
Also, be sure to ask your prospective webmasters for samples of their real estate site work. This will allow you to evaluate their overall skills and style.
Furthermore, ask your potential webmaster how they plan to optimize your website for today's search engines. Their abilities in this area will dictate how well your real estate website ranks in Google and other search engines.
When choosing a webmaster, be sure to ask your prospective webmasters about their coding skills. Select a webmaster who can code your website using CSS as well as PHP, XHTML, or HTML5.
Doing this will help to ensure your site's longevity. That's because many webmasters today host websites in an environment featuring PHP, MySQL, Apache, and Linux. If your site falls outside of this environment, you may have a hard time getting a replacement real estate webmaster for the site if needed down the road.
Find a webmaster who is willing to put your MLS site's domain name in your name instead of their name as well.
By keeping the domain name in your name, you maintain full control over it. That means you won't have to worry about an unscrupulous real estate webmaster pointing the domain name for your site to another site without your authorization. In addition, you won't have to fight for control over the domain name if they fail to give it to you.
As you seek the best webmaster for your real estate website, be sure to also choose one who has a record of success in creating smartphone-friendly websites.
You don't want your real estate website to work only with a certain browser. Likewise, your website shouldn't work only on a computer. Instead, the webmaster you choose should test the website they create for you to make certain that it works with several browsers as well as on clients' mobile devices.
This is important given that mobile users' web traffic increased from more than 51% in 2016 to 53% back in 2019. In addition, mobile use is slated to keep growing and possibly eclipse the use of desktops in the years to come.
Find a webmaster who is additionally willing to handle the task of buying your MLS site domain name as well as arranging your hosting -- or web server space -- for you.
You can arrange your hosting and domain yourself, and you can also manage the process of renewing these every year. However, having your webmaster do this will free you up to focus more on making real estate sales.
Note that you may also be able to choose to pay your domain and hosting fees monthly versus annually.
When looking for a real estate webmaster, be sure to choose one who will give you access to your MLS website's code as well.
A reputable webmaster will utilize code that is open source and will grant you access to both the code and the relevant databases once you pay for their services.
This will be invaluable if you have to use a new webmaster down the road.
If you can provide the new real estate webmaster with the data and code to your current site, they won't have to start the coding process from scratch. This will generate cost savings for you.
You can find a reputable real estate webmaster by soliciting recommendations from family and friends with existing websites or seeking suggestions on social media. Then, to choose the right webmaster, you'll need to ask them about how they handle coding, hosting, and domain names.
At Realty Biz News, we take pride in offering the latest news regarding social media, technology, and marketing for realtors. We also offer resources on the housing market for homeowners.
Get in touch with us to learn more about our services, and start building your real estate business today!
