The real estate brokerage community is a big proponent of having a professional do a job that a person is not trained to do. It is my view that we more than bring our value to a transaction by brokering the largest piece of business most people will ever undertake. We provide a marketing machine and exposure that a DIY lay person could only dream of. We protect them from themselves in negotiations. We share our prodigious knowledge and contacts by pointing clients in the direction of the best lawyer, CPA, loan officer, contractor or tradesperson. With very rare exception, I truly believe that you have to be an idiot to not use a broker in a real estate transaction. My colleagues prove me right every day.
Then, to save $500, real estate agents all over the country lose time, sleep and sanity building their own website instead of getting a professional to do it for them. Like some for sale by owners, a few agents do succeed and gain a valuable skill. They can build a website. I have probably built 20 websites myself. I can tell you from personal experience that consumers are far more concerned with the content I create than who did the code behind the scenes. If you are one of those agents who has successfully built an awesome website and know the ins and outs of Wordpress, good on ya. Much props. Way to go. Atta girl. Atta boy. You saved $500. You saved $1000.
Wait, no you didn't. You saved writing some checks, but your time is worth something. Time that you could have spent selling real estate, getting another listing, or putting a deal together was spent learning CSS code or installing a plugin. Or, you could have spent the time sleeping. Or relaxing (remember that?). Or creating content. You broke even. You may have even lost money.
I am not advocating that real estate agents not be tech-savvy. We should be cutting edge. But we should master technology to help us sell real estate better and in greater volume. Anything far beyond that is either
Therapeutic; or
The Booby Prize.
If you dig building websites on your own and savor the challenge and all that good stuff, then by all means don't stop. You are getting something more from your efforts than a website. You are relaxing. It is your model train set. It is golf. I get that.
But if it isn't fun anymore, or the results are disappointing, you need to get help. Think of it as deciding that it is time to list with a broker now that the FSBO thing didn't work out. I don't mow my own lawn. I don't have time. I don't change my own oil. And this past February, I decided to hire an expert to build my Wordpress site from the ground up. I paid them $699 and I got a site I am really happy about with IDX, Altos Research, all my blog content imported over, and a bunch of other nice things. Do I still need to learn a ton of stuff? Of course- and the company does webinars several times a week. But am I going to be one of those people in Facebook support groups asking for help in fixing my site because I crashed it trying to do something exotic on my own? Not a chance. I'll spend my time creating content and selling real estate.
The idea that you need to build your own Wordpress site to run with the big dogs may be costing you money. Hire a pro and devote your valuable time and focus to selling real estate.
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