Want To Sell Your House? Start A Website About It
1 September 2006Gregg Swann over at Bloodhound Realty has a post on a strategy he uses to sell houses more effectively: he’ll make a website about the house specific to the home’s address. That gives buyers a place to go to that’s often a little easier to remember than a specific page on a larger site. He’s done pretty well with it, and he gives as an example this site:
http://www.1102westculverst.com/
It’s entirely dedicated to a specific house, which sold for nearly half a million dollars - more than enough to justify the $10 fee to register the domain.
Personally, though, I’m not sure this is the best option in and of itself. It’s great for a way to give buyers an easy way to find information on the house again - just put that URL on a flyer or handout. The problem? When I searched for 1102 West Culver St in Google, the website doesn’t come up in the top 50. In fact, the Bloodhound Realty Blog only comes up at number ten with a mention of the street address in the text. What’s the deal?
It might be the Google Sandbox, a problem where newer sites do not tend to rank well until they have aged somewhat. That poses a problem for the idea of creating a domain for your home - it will be hard for people to find it using Google until it’s older, and this site was started in January and still doesn’t rank for the address.
Another part of the problem might be the way he’s set up the site, using a generic template from the main real estate site he uses. As a result, the title of his page is “Arizona realtor-buy, sell, relocate, invest in Pheonix/Scottsdale AZ” - the same thing as his real estate agency. It would be a lot better for it to be “1102 West Culver St., Phoenix, AZ” - in fact, the template approach may be resulting in a duplicate content penalty on all his sites.
What would I do instead? I’d have a subpage about the house on the main Bloodhound Realty site, buy the domain “http://www.1101westculverst.com,” and then do a 301 Redirect, which is a way of sending anyone who types in that web site to the subpage you created. That way you can advertise the house as having its own site, and anyone who tries to go to it will be sent automatically to the place on your site that’s about the house. No penalty for making a new site and no problem with having 50 sites about different houses all being considered the same thing by the search engines.
I’m also fully aware that most people’s eyes have glazed over by now - which should be another little piece of advice for you. Making websites that work well can be complicated even for professionals. So while it is technically only $10 to do it, to do it professionally could mean you have to hire someone for a lot more. BUT - if you’re selling one house, and want to put up a site about it, it’s pretty easy to do. The caveat is that you’re going to have to do your own advertising - getting people to know about your site through something like Google is the hard part that can require a lot more technical knowledge.
Discuss this in the Free the Drones Forums.
4 Responses to “Want To Sell Your House? Start A Website About It”
September 1st, 2006 at 1:43 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 …
September 2nd, 2006 at 3:06 am
[...] Greg over at Blood Hound Realty has been discussing the way he creates a unique web page for each of his listings so that he can promote a specific URL for the home that he is selling. He and the FreetheDrones blog talk about the reasons he does this as well as the costs involved. FreetheDrones talks about it as “only $10 to do it” but I would suggest that it is significantly more than that. The time required to build the site, even quickly, is also part of the costs of doing this. I applaud Greg for doing this. [...]
October 11th, 2006 at 3:12 pm
[...] I have a new domain going live tonight, the first custom web site we have done for a real estate listing built as a weblog instead of a static web site. When we talked about this before, Free the Drones wondered if custom web sites might get lost for a span of time in the postulated Google sandbox, a place where Google, at least hypothetically, exiles new domains to make sure they are not spam, scams, who knows what. [...]
November 28th, 2006 at 1:40 pm
Another easy way to accomplish this is to do what Greg recently did and use a blog platform. There are many advantages, not the least of which is how easy it is to update content. Plus, the site will stand alone, so the issue of a redirect doesn’t come into the picture.