Whether you’re selling a swanky oceanfront villa, rustic mountainside chalet, or a more modest property behind the gates of a private country club community, every listing deserves a robust digital presence. This digital presence should provide a dedicated spot to wow buyers, entice them to learn more, schedule a tour, or even start the offer process. It should be a tool for engaging buyers as much as it satisfies your clients.
Of course, it’s no small task generating the interest necessary to produce the lucrative sale sellers always seek. The noisy landscape of online marketing quickly drowns out even the best, most refined messages.
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Mass listings, individual needs
While useful, given their mass appeal and the number of buyers that access the sites, real estate aggregators are the most notable examples of a noisy online landscape. They effectively transform shopping for real estate into an Amazon-like marketplace with hundreds of competing listings. Again, not altogether bad, but it presents a challenge when you want to distinguish one of your listings from an increasingly growing list of offerings.
Similarly, standout properties may also become lost among the listings in the widely employed MLS. While MLS is a great tool and a step far above the aggregators — even among brokers and fellow agents — a property can easily get overlooked, further complicating your efforts. The online MLS is a wonderful piece of technology, but it is just one piece of a much larger marketing puzzle.
Even your agent or brokerage website may not prove advantageous for singling out the story you want to convey for a specific property. There’s little doubt your website excels at spotlighting your talents and expertise, services provided, and the area served. It’s also hyper-effective at featuring your current offerings (and past successes) and your most coveted real estate listings. But it’s not the best platform to single out an individual property — for SEO purposes or for providing equal time to clients.
If, however, you want to spotlight a particular listing — a custom estate, vineyard villa, expansive parcel of land, or the labor-of-love historic renovation — there is a better way forward: a real estate property website.
The importance of real estate property websites
Professional websites lend credibility to any venture. In luxury residential real estate, a website can prove vital in your attempts to draw interest and drive leads in an always competitive marketplace. From a basic marketing standpoint, single property websites are also called individual property sites or micro-sites.
A single property website holds the key to your marketing success. Consider what it means to have a website, one not shared with all of your closest friends and competitors. A single property website creates a presence. In real estate, presence is a huge factor in convincing buyers to engage with one of your listings. After all, you would rather direct an interested buyer who has yet to physically visit the property to an aggregator than hope on a wandering eye that could cost you a sale.
You could refer potential buyers to your brokerage or agent site. However, you’ll have to account for all the other information you want to convey about your business on those sites. A potential buyer won’t be satisfied with just cursory details about the property.
A stand-alone property provides realness about what the property offers. Having its own digital space instantly elevates a listing over others. For buyers, it offers meaningful engagement and a better user experience.
Users will appreciate no longer having to squint at dark, fuzzy pictures and instead seeing the professional, high-resolution shots filling the screen. Even better, they’ll enjoy the opportunity to tour the home virtually.
You can replace the wall-of-text property overview with thoughtful prose and vivid descriptions of the home’s livability and the surrounding neighborhood and community benefits. Further, you can fill an individual site with valuable tools such as maps, floorplans, and links to neighborhood amenities or points of interest within the community.
A vital value proposition
Aside from attracting leads, a single-property website also helps you elevate your business. It gives you an edge that’s hard to top in the current real estate climate.
For sellers, whether individual owners or institutional investors, ROI is critical to their bottom line. By giving them a tool that evaluates the presence and marketability of their property or real estate assets, you’re directly speaking to that ROI. The more their listing stands apart, the greater sense of exclusivity it has, and the better chance they have to see a sizable return.
In turn, you and your real estate business become a valuable partner. You raise the prospect of enhancing the marketing for any of your luxury listings. Creating an exclusive digital space to accentuate each property’s most important selling points carries a broader reach and generates greater interest. At the end of it all, you’ll see substantial returns for your clients. And securing lucrative, multi-million dollar listings is key to your ongoing success.
A tool for every house or home
A common misconception regarding individual property websites is they are reserved solely for the most opulent real estate offerings: eight- or nine-figure compounds or vast mansions with 10,000 square feet (or more) of space.
While those property types certainly lend themselves to the solo site experience, several other property types can benefit from a domain to call their own. Consider how important it is to differentiate the following home types:
- Custom mansions
- Historical or architecturally significant properties
- Renovation projects
- Vacation properties
- Acreages
- Rural or urban properties
- Townhouses
- Condominiums
Each of the above has subsets, which don’t even include the specific architectural styles of each property type. A single property website allows you to expand on what makes each of your listings unique.
How to create a single property website
You might think it takes a lot of time and effort to craft a compelling, SEO-friendly website that appeals to buyers and satisfies your client’s need for exposure. But that’s not at all the case.
Luxury Presence understands your time is valuable. So is ensuring each of your listings generates as many leads and offers as possible. We designed our property websites with both concerns in mind. And you won’t need to hire a web designer or tech expert.
Our process for creating websites ensures you and your team members don’t waste time on fussy details, so your client listings earn as much exposure as possible. It all starts with our simple, user-friendly platform.
Webpage building, simplified
Websites can be simple and still be effective. In fact, the more straightforward a site, the more SEO-friendly, and the more it will drive a user to action. Google appreciates the specificity of individual property websites and tends to rank them higher.
So how do you start creating stunning property websites? It’s an easy four-step process:
- Select the property for which you want to create an individual website.
- Choose from one of Luxury Presence’s award-winning design templates. Once you select a design, the creation tool automatically populates the template. The filling in of baseline data and adjustment of pictures is all done for you.
- Finalize your URL. Luxury Presence provides free subdomains as part of your account with us. You can purchase a custom domain and link it to your property site if a particular listing requires it.
- Launch your brand new, SEO-friendly individual property website.
Yes, it’s that easy.
Your property’s information populates directly from our CMS. The platform also integrates with some popular CRMs. Using a Zapier integration, you can connect to Compass, Follow Up Boss, and SendGrid to ensure you capture leads generated by your property website.
Customization
Of course, there is no one-size-fits-all website. Though the Luxury Presence platform expertly enhances any property’s marketing needs, we understand certain homes, regions, or property sellers require more TLC than others.
So you can meet those additional demands, the platform allows you to customize each website.
- If you need to add or remove pictures, it’s an easy drag-and-drop function.
- If you want to spruce up a few headings or trim (or expand) some of the copy, click on any text area and edit as you see fit.
- If you need to insert a new page or remove one that no longer applies, it takes only a few seconds.
The beauty of the Luxury Presence property website platform is that you can create and customize as many property sites as you want at no additional cost to give your listings a considerable marketing boost. When you realize the additional costs of establishing stand-alone sites from scratch, you will only be able to imagine utilizing the Luxury Presence platform for your listings.
Promoting single-property websites
Real estate property websites serve as the hub around a listing’s online marketing strategy. The more you publicize and promote it, the more effective it becomes.
The most advantageous way to use a property website is to integrate it within paid campaigns on your social media accounts. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or YouTube, the presence of a single website broadens your marketing reach with less effort and time.
Micro-sites are also SEO-friendly. Google often prefers sites with a singular purpose or aim, so a single property site carries higher ranking potential than adding another page to your agent or broker website.
Sites that compel users to spend more time viewing their pages rank higher. You can compel users to spend more time on your website by making it one where they want to:
- Click through images
- Take a virtual tour
- View multiple pages in one session (translation: they’re viewing images and reading copy)
- Fill out a form (i.e., request more info or make a ‘contact us’ request)
The most effective websites are valuable conveyors of information with which users (in this case, homebuyers) want to engage. Google loves that and rewards those sites.
Further, you can merge any physical marketing around a property website.
- Keep your messaging consistent, and match additional materials to the template you select for a listing’s website.
- Flyers, mailers, email blasts, text messages, or personal communications should portray the design and feel of the website. Not only will consistency add professionalism to your marketing, but it will also add memorability.
- Incorporate Q-codes that link back to the site and provide a quick and easy access point for would-be buyers.
- Ensure the property’s unique URL is as ubiquitous as its physical address and any marketing material you produce.
Ultimately, consider the website an extension of the property. It’s the next best thing behind physically touring the property. The more you promote it, the greater the number of leads you can expect to see.
Final thoughts
It’s important to note that websites for individual properties remain a niche of real estate marketing. Many agents still view the practice as best reserved for only the most ultra-exclusive residential real estate.
If the practice generates the necessary interest for those lofty properties, imagine how it can help sell any luxury home looking for an edge in its online marketing. And you can create one with minimal effort and without having to be an expert web developer (or hiring one).
A dedicated property website serves as the core of an asset’s marketing. A seller sees their listing positioned as something special. Buyers sense they’re purchasing a valuable investment — a listing worthy of its website. And since they feel they’re buying a truly special property, they are more apt to pay top dollar.