Update on Selling Your House Using a Custom Website
1 September 2006Bloodhound Realty has an updated post in response to the commentary here on the idea, and it’s a great read if you are considering this option. Greg explains why he doesn’t thing Google searches matter all that much if you’re going with this strategy - and points out that with a little variation of the search I did, his site comes out on top. We’ll have to agree to disagree about the “sandbox,” the theory that Google uses some sort of penalty to keep newer websites from ranking for awhile. I’ve seen it pretty consistently building websites depending on what techniques I use to promote them, but I’m pretty sure there is a penalty imposed and lifted at the three month mark.
He’s obviously got the experience in terms of real estate sales, so my guess is he’s right that most people are finding the sites using the easily remembered dog picture (and the name it invokes). I still think, however, that many people interested in a house in a certain area might try googling the street part of the address - looking for things like crime statistics, references to the area, directions, or other generic information about the area. I’d still prefer the “subpage” idea on the grounds that it’s a lot easier to rank well with one main website than with many smaller ones. And if you’re typing up unique descriptions of each house, a big real estate company would benefit from having hundreds of those descriptions on the main site. Somebody might type “pheonix arizona house for sale with pink sink” and pick up a random page you had about a specific house - whereas if they’re all split into different sites, no single site would be “important” enough to Google to grab you that potential customer.
(In my experience, Google treats the sites as separate based on domain name, with little consideration of the IP you’re hosting it from. He may have seen something different with his setup - but my hunch is that mainrealtysite.com/streetaddress.html would rank higher than streetaddress.com for the same keywords. And it’s also been my experience that you can pick up “peripheral” rankings if your main site does well for something and you mention something related on the subpage. Hence the “pink sink” example - the main site will do better for “Phoenix real estate” than the smaller one. It will also help the subpages do well for that phrase combined with random stuff they mentioned about that specific house.)
At any rate, he promises a lengthier explanation of the strategy in the future, which anybody who may end up selling a house in the future should watch the Bloodhound Blog for. The thing about marketing a house through the Internet is that everything is relatively untested. It’s not like a classified ad where tens of thousands of people have been doing it for 30 years. A lot of the information is only learned through trial and error - so if you’re an individual selling your house, you’ll want to pay close attention to how a professional has been doing it. If you get a leg up on the people who don’t understand the technology, you’ll get a better price for your house. Debates about the exact mechanics of how you run the web site may seem arcane or pointless to you if you’re only going to build one website, but you should at least be watching for the general concepts.
(As an update to this post from sitting around thinking about it - this sentence from Greg’s post jumps out at me of being important to think about:
One of their very important purposes is to capture the listing for that one home again and again, every time it sells.
What am I thinking about? Well, what if you’re a real estate buyer and you found your house through a website like this? You might want to try to get the domain as part of the deal - unless you plan on using the same realtor next time. And if you’re a real estate agency, holding onto these domains can offer a cheap way to get a lot of recurring commissions, assuming you can work something out with the person representing the seller. This is starting to get outside the realm of my personal experience, but it’s one of those new opportunities technology offers to those who get on top of it…)
Discuss this on the Free the Drones Forums.
One Response to “Update on Selling Your House Using a Custom Website”
September 1st, 2006 at 6:46 pm
The custom web site we built to sell your home might not Google well — but it doesn’t have to . . ….
Free the Drones, a saving and investing weblog I read every day, has a post today discussing our practice of building a custom web site for every home we list. I’m thinking that I should write on that one topic at length, because the strategy is …