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Unlimited free virtual tours and single property sites

By Matt Johnson

Services for Real Estate Pros with Home87

December 22, 2010 04:45 PM

Home87.com provides you with free unlimited virtual tours and single property sites with no gimmicks, no credit card, no premium features to make you pay, no game playing. It is totally free as in zero, nada, zilch forever.

No it is not a bare bone, ugly looking service like most others.

Yes our designs look stunning, with smooth transitions and all the bells and whistles you'd expect.

Walkscore, Google Maps, SEO control, unlimited pictures? yes

MLS compliant links, Optimized Craigslist HTML, document upload, printable flyers? Yes

Click2Call and LiveChat as widgets, social sharing? yes and many more features to make you happy.

Cost involved? We can't believe you're still asking the same question. The answer is still zero, nada, zilch. We know you're not used to things that are actually good and are yet free specially in terms of real estate tools; but believe us it is good and totally free. As a side note you better get used to it. Why? Because we got a bunch of other things up our sleeves coming your way soon which will still be for zero, nada, zilch.

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Ron T. Weems Jr.

Weems Property Group | KW North Sound - Bothell, WA

Managing the details one home at a time.

Matt,

Do your company syndicate the properties? If so, who has your company partnered up with?

Dec 23, 2010 09:27 AM

Rebecca Diamond

Berkshire Hathaway Fox & Roach Bryn Mawr - Bryn Mawr, PA

Main Line Homes for Sale

Thanks, Matt. Sounds interesting. I'll look forward to watching the growth of your family of products.

Dec 23, 2010 10:19 AM

Matt Johnson

Home87 - Bellevue, WA

@Fay you're welcome

@Christina We will have music as an option for the virtual tours... we intentionally left it out thinking consumers hate it but we've gotten way too many agents requesting it to ignore it so it'll be there beginning of January hopefully. The Meebo size is resized from our end no matter what you give us in order to ensure consistency and prevent out of alignments. PS: Thank you for commenting on my first ever blog :-)
@Ron We currently do not syndicate simply because of the fact that we havn't had the time to develop it. It will start syndicating to the top 10+ hopefully by the end of January-beginning of February

@Rebecca I look forward to it as well :-)

Dec 23, 2010 01:12 PM

Christina Miller

Sarasota Bay Real Estate - Sarasota, FL

@Matt

Actually I noticed the Meebo issue when I installed it on my website (thought it was just that cool) wanted to put it on my listing pages and my sidebar on those pages is smaller than 300px wide... No matter what I did I could not change the size. width="" and height="" did not control the size of the shockwave flash display being embeded.

But thnkfully the sidebar on my home/subdivision pages is 300 px wide so it fit there nicely and seems to work well... Figured if I was going to have the Meebo functionality on "your" listing contact form pages.. I may as well have it on my website as well. Then it is really worth using and keeping active in the taskbar.

The walkscore is a nice touch, good to see you used it, I have been using it on my listing pages with great success (clients love it).

Yeah, you need music. Some people hate it but it certainly is a nice touch... maybe put a music on/off button on the virtual tour page... everybody is happy then.

You guys really did do a good job, its pretty clean though I did notice when you click to "save all" in the setup there is no visual respnse to the "submit" action so I found myself clicking it twice. No biggie, just one of those user experience issues.

Ill be interested to see if "your" listing pages will be at the top of search results over the indexed IDX pages from other agent websites in my market. I am curious once your domain has a higher authority if that alone will be enough to get "your" pages to number one or at least up there with Trulia and the likes. Right now home87.com in not even in the MOZ index so site explorer does not even have any authority rating for it yet.... Sure that wont take long once this goes viral.

I passed your URL to a few brokers I know.

Best Regards,

Christina Miller

Sarasota Florida Real Estate

Dec 23, 2010 02:34 PM

Christina Miller

Sarasota Bay Real Estate - Sarasota, FL

@Matt

One last thought, this functionality would make an AWSOME WordPress Plugin..

Maybe maket it where you have an interface in the WordPress dashboard where you could upload everything from there...

Maybe some link love to my site in a future blog post for the idea?? LOL

Merry Christmas!

Christina Miller

Sarasota Florida Real Estate

Dec 23, 2010 02:46 PM

Joan Whitebook

BHG The Masiello Group - Nashua, NH

Consumer Focused Real Estate Services

This is a great benefit for real estate agents... happy holidays to you.

Dec 23, 2010 02:53 PM

Matt Johnson

Home87 - Bellevue, WA

@Christina I personally love Meebo's too... any other live chat system is useless b/c you can't be in front of your computer all the times. With meebo you have it everywhere. yes the virtual tour music will have on/off button for sure. Yes when you click on Save All you don't notice that it's actually saved or not so we will have something for it soon. As far far as indexing we do have all the fundamental SEO automatically in there. On top of that you can link everything within your content, and have full control over meta tags, and keywords within each listings. Type "5409 east lane" in Google it got there I think with in 3 days ;-)

The WordPress plugin or any plugin/application is a definete yes and we will have one but I have no ETA. We do own Agent87.com which is basically an agent website in WordPress that we will be launching in the new year so some kind of a plugin is a sure thing.

@Joan Happy holidays to you and everyone else as well

Dec 23, 2010 03:35 PM

Eric Michael

Remerica Integrity, Realtors®, Northville, MI - Livonia, MI

Metro Detroit Real Estate Professional 734.564.1519

I'll check this out when I have a few minutes. Thanks, Matt.

Dec 25, 2010 06:38 AM

Anonymous

Justin Bowers

YOU GUYS!!!!! don't do it! if you ever thought zillow was a trojan horse...

listen. modern day real estate agents... your value isn't your marketing budget anymore, and all this whole thing is is a pretty easy set-up with wordpress. but, this guy is asking you to take what is your value, your content, and post it on his wordpress websites.

all this is is a wordpress install with the multiuser option allowing mutliple sites on one domain. on top of that, there's another thing called buddypress which allows users to create their own profile. i'm sure you have all heard about the whole thing with being hyper local?

it's because you can do these types of set-ups and instead of joe schmoe taking the time to do it themselves (like blog here instead of your own blog) joe can take what is again, YOUR MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY and post it under somebody else's ownership.

every time an agent goes, "wow, free slideshow! you mean i can do like a postlets (another misleading mistake) using this!? it has chat!" and creates one of these free sites, you are embarrassing yourselves.

all this crap is smoke and mirrors for you all to simply give away your content. WHAT THE HELL ARE ALL YOU GUYS DOING!!!!!?

when asked what's the benefit up above, he replied, we also own fax87.com or whatever.

what is a fax and how is that going to benefit the guy later?

stop with the realtor.com, the craigslist, the postlets, the..ahem, ar.... Am I really the only one who is trying to point this out? you work your asses off, and spend an incredible amount of money and time earning that one and only paragraph that truly matters when trying to keep your business going. your listing description and listing details. you even pay to privatize that content with the mls, yet you'll race to not only put it on craigslist, but on postlets first.

i gaurentee i was the 1st person to post a property on craigslist with a clickable link in the ad. the more fancy the CL post, the less return i got in traffic. postlets, just like home87, is wowing you with crap that consumers don't care about.

it's so frustrating. i'm starting to think, you know what? enjoying real estate is a joke. i should do a home87 type wordpress/mu/buddypress thing, doll it up real nice, laugh at my traffic from all the FREE CONTENT i'm getting, and then through in some a la cart options to boot just to make it look like i'm doing it for pennies.

the whole home87 thing can be built and functionable in about 5 hours time--assuming of course you know how to install wordpress stuff. it's incredibly super duper i just punched myself in the face easy to do.

look. http://home87.com/wp-login.php

most of the time spent was creating these templates you can choose from so that they're...templatey. and, easy. getting agents to again just give away everything they work for was masterfully created once again. baaaahhhh!

"This is a great benefit for real estate agents.."

lol

NO IT'S NOT! amazing.

Dec 29, 2010 03:24 PM

#20

Christina Miller

Sarasota Bay Real Estate - Sarasota, FL

You have lost your mind. MLS is not "private" that content is on every agent site that displays IDX in my market. If it was wordpress the login would be wp-admin, not wp-login.php.

I see it as a good marketing tool and it does not cost anything. And... Uhhh.. as a real estate agent I want to give my "content" away, the more people that see the house the better chance I have at getting both sides.

So what if Matt gets a PR of 7 out of the deal, PR is worthless and I could care less. I think what he created is cool. It is free unless I want to pay for a rider or a domain.

And if it was so easy, why didnt you set your own up and do the same thing he is doing?

Dec 29, 2010 03:47 PM

Anonymous

Justin Bowers

You're missing the point. First off, no you don't want to give your content away. You want people to find it. And, if you go to the wp-login.php, you'll see it's in fact a wordpress login page. Going back to your so what, because people won't contact you when it's on other sites. This is all elementary. And, I do use that technology, but I'm not trying to benefit off others hard work.

so let's review.

MLS. You have to be a member. The information is confidential and private.

Admin goes to a wordpress dashboard, so whatever. You can go to any of Matt's sites and do wp-login.php or your admin. lol Wordpress.

It's not a good marketing tool because the fact is people will not limit their options to your one page. They'll continue to click for other homes and that's a big "duh" to me. Getting both sides? Why would you want to do that? More money? Jesus Christ we are doomed.

Where are you getting this thing about PR? It's cool? Cause it's free? You don't see how every time you make one of those, you're pushing yourself further away from being found tomorrow?

I've done 100's of real estate sites. I currently have a main hub site, then all my subs have unique content for specific niches that I create because I don't believe coming up with something "cool" and "free" is my business model.

Really though, all smart ass comments aside, no you do not want to give it away. Do you still do mailers? Newspaper ads? If so, probably not even close to anywhere the amount you may have done 5 years ago. EVERYTHING with real estate is online.

Consider this Home87 site a big mailer that's going out with tons of listings on it, and one of em is yours. But, you're not doing the mailer. You're not going to benefit from it. The person who sent the mailer is going to do so to make their phone ring. Your argument is, well I got on a mailer for free.

Ok. you win.

Dec 29, 2010 04:06 PM

#22

Anonymous

Justin Bowers

here's a much better way to put this whole thing.

only members of the mls can add content. why?

Dec 29, 2010 04:11 PM

#23

Matt Johnson

Home87 - Bellevue, WA

Damn Justin,

Don't you have something better to do than write a 2 pager paragraph? What are you a critique? Lol I can't even finish your entire writing. I think you insinuated that we are a word press site? In which case totally wrong and good luck ever building such a thing on wordpress and I love wordpress because we've built companies around it.

I'd love to defend/debate every poiint that you have but unlike Gary Vaynerchuk I do not care about EVERY SINGLE persona and EVERY SINGLE comment and I do not try to make every person happy. I care about the 70% population that are with me and the other 30% I say Happy new year and good luck.

@Christina

IF I'm every in Florida (Which I will next year most likely) I owe you lunch :-)

Dec 30, 2010 08:17 AM

Anonymous

justin bowers

I'm not arguing that wp isn't awesome. I'm trying to explain the value of content and how giving it away is a sure fire way to snuff urself.

Dec 30, 2010 08:35 AM

#25

Christina Miller

Sarasota Bay Real Estate - Sarasota, FL

@ Justin, I dont think you understand the real value of content and how it should be used and where it should be used. FYI Point2Agent syndicates a lot of MLS content to companies on behalf of many MLS boards (that allow it) as do many high-caliber broker websites with custom RSS feeds designed to syndicate office listing content to a lot of other companies like Zillow, etc. The more people that see the listing the better chance you have at selling it.

You can not just pop on google and search for "100,000 to 200,000 $ homes in Sarasota Florida" and get a list of results of what is for sale in that price range. The only way the listing will be found in google search results is doing a single page site/domain for a listing. That way when someone searches for a particular address they discovered as a result of a drive-by, they will find the page you created on Matts site.

You could optimize the page to be found when doing a search for "homes in Sarasota" if you optimize it for that search term but it would be on page 457 of search results under all the real estate agent pages unless you build 5,000 links to it and still it would be doubtful you would ever get to the first page.

Matt's tool allows you to make a single page site that is pre-optimized so people will find your listing when doing a search by property address.(which happens all the time) Once home87.com has a very high domain authority the home87 listing page you create will most likely be found at the top of search results for that address rather than a realtor site where the listing page (that was dynamically created as a result of the idx feed he is downloading) has been indexed. Giving yourself a better chance of buyers finding your listing on an asset or page you created (on your site or someone elses) allows you a better chance of getting both sides of the deal because the buyer comes to you rather than the clown who calls himself a Realtor who works for another office.

This marketing ploy is designed to be ancillary to the MLS listing data published on other agent websites and is done purely to give you a better chance at getting both sides of the deal because hopefully the buyer finds the property on an asset you created, not your competitors.

SO THAT is why Matt created what he created... Give a real estate person good value and something they can benefit from for free (which never happens in our industry so this is REALLY rare) and people will use it... then if they want to buy a sign rider to match a unique domain they purchase and Matt makes $2 from it.. so be it. At least I was provided a good value proposition by Matts application and there was never any expectation that I had to pay for anything.

That is what makes his product a very good one from a marketing perspective, it provides a very solid value proposition and if you ever took marketing in college you would understand what all this is about.

@Matt I dont know if my boyfriend would let you take me to lunch but I am sure the two of you would have a great time because he is the one that taught me most of this stuff... Before he came along... I was just a blonde!

Dec 30, 2010 09:47 AM

Matt Johnson

Home87 - Bellevue, WA

@Justin @Christina I agree with everything Christina says of course. IF you don't believe there is a value in home87.com then you definetly wouldn't want to use listingdomain.com (50$ per site) Singlepropertysites.com (120$ per site for one year) AgencyLogic.com (50$ per site) ListingPromoter.com (50bucks I think per site) AdvancedAccess and z57.com last I saw charged 100$ per lisitng and ihouse.com I think was 50$ and the list can go on.... and most agree that our design and user friendly site and the straight forwardness of the system beats each and every one of them :-)

@Christina I meant most likely for a conference, re barcamp, agent reboot or something. As a company we'd get together with a bunch of realtors, have lunch and talk about real estate related stuff :-)

Dec 30, 2010 10:20 AM

Anonymous

justin bowers

Ok. @matt. Will you be getting visitors to any other site based on ur footer backlink, or the convenient search all homes links on the demos at all?

Dec 30, 2010 10:25 AM

#28

Matt Johnson

Home87 - Bellevue, WA

@justin The only back link is/will be to home87.com

The CONVENIENT search all homes link that you see is to show the agent that they can direct visitors to their own website where consumers can search for homes in an idx or whatnot.

It gives back link to the agent's website, they can back link as much as they want bla bla but from our perspective we only have Home87.com

Dec 30, 2010 10:40 AM

Barbara Hensley

RE/MAX Properties - Rockwall, TX

Homes for Sale in Rockwall County, Texas

I am definitely going to check this out and will send it over to several agents in my office that need help in their marketing. Happy New Year!

Dec 31, 2010 01:45 AM

Bob Willis

Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices California Properties - Orange, CA

Orange County & L.A. County Real Estate Agent

I just tried to go to home87.com, and it cannot be found. Did you go out of business already?

Mar 20, 2011 08:59 AM

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