We believe that your website, and the tools connected to it, are the backbone of your real estate business.
Or they could be.......
Over the past 15 years, I have spent a TON of time working with real estate agents on how their website fits into their overall marketing strategy. For years we discussed on ActiveRain how you could use your blog to drive traffic to your website and what kinds of landing pages you should link to. Those same tactics continue to be important for helping you to capture new prospects for your business. But beyond that, your website should also give you the power to nurture your existing database, especially your past clients and sphere, but also buyer and seller prospects/leads that you may have in your database.
A few years ago, ActiveRain owner Ben Kinney brought BlueRoof360 into the fold under the Ben Kinney Companies. Until recently, Blueroof360 has mainly focused on building awesome tools for brokerages. Over the last 3 months, Ben requested that our team devise a plan for making custom websites, and the tools around them, available to individual agents.
Today we are excited to announce ActiveRain Custom Websites.
What's included with an ActiveRain custom website:
- Fully customizable website with IDX search capability
- Advanced lead capture including open house lead capture tools
- Dedicated mobile search so your site looks amazing on any device
- Full CRM with tracking for what people are doing on your website
- Listing Alert tool so you can drip on buyer prospects with new listings
- Market Report Tool so you can keep your past clients and sphere up to date on what's happening in the real estate market around their home.
- Transaction Management tools so you can streamline the transaction process.
- All of this for the affordable price of $99/month.
My 3 Favorite Tools in this Offering
1. Area Pulse Market Reports Tool.
Do you know why Zillow exists? It exists almost exclusively because they spotted a need in the real estate market that our MLSs were not allowing us to fill 15 years ago. The overwhelming demand for homeowners to want to see what their home is worth, or what is selling around their own home is almost exclusively what drove the early days of Zillow. People wanted information about their homes value, and as an industry we weren't providing that data. It was locked up behind MLS walls, so that only agents could provide this data to their customers. But as an industry, the tools to provide this data were almost non-existant.
So, in steps Zillow with a promise that a consumer could visit Zillow to see what their house is worth or what may be selling around them. The validity of this data, or how close those estimates actually were wasn't even a consideration. Zillow made an imperfect product, convincing your customers they could go online to see what their home is worth. We all know that in order to get an actual valuation, you'd want to use a boots on the ground real estate agent with a unique understanding of your specific market. But how do we keep the people in our database looking to us as the expert when they can easily go online to get the data? We have to stay in front of them with weekly, bi-weekly or monthly reports letting them know exactly what is active, pending and sold around their home.
This tool has been an amazing way for our Ben Kinney Teams to stay connected to our past clients, sphere and also any seller prospects that we have in our database. Every day we have people in our database looking at our market reports and it's an awesome way for us to know who in the database we should be reaching out to and talking to about the market around their home. Hands down the best tool we have ever used for connecting with potential sellers in our database.
2. Open House Registration Tool.
The Ben Kinney Team relies heavily on open houses as a way to generate prospects for our business. As Ben once said, "where are you more likely to meet a real buyer......sitting in your office or sitting at an open house?"
Today, the way we do open houses is by using an open house registration tool that is connected to our website and CRM. Doing this allows us to get every visitor to the open house into our database (CRM) so that we can ensure that we follow up with them after the open house is over. It even sets up a listing alert automatically so that our open house visitors starts to receive new listings from us each day (if they choose to keep that option checked, which 80% do). This helps us to stay connected to that open house visitor and drive them back to our website to look at additional homes that come on the market in the coming days, weeks and months....until they are ready to buy. And of course, if they come back to the site and start looking at some of the listings we have sent to them, we can easily see that activity in the CRM so we can reach out to follow up again.
3. Tracking inside the CRM to see who is visiting your site
In addition to the open house tool and the area pulse market report tool, your CRM will allow you to set up and send listing alerts, showcasing newly listed homes to anyone in your database. Listing alerts are a hallmark of a solid IDX/CRM. So, onec we start putting listing alerts and market reports into play, it's important that we have the ability to see who in the database is interacting with these things we send them. Every single day on the Ben Kinney Team, our agents are making smart calls to the most likely people in the database to transact. Based on who is looking at our market reports and who is on the website looking at listings, we are able to reach out and connect with our database and have much more meaningful conversations. We know what homes they like or we know if they were showing an interest in the market report because we see that activity inside our CRM. The calls we make today are highly targeted, allowing us to get the most from our daily prospecting efforts.
Curious to Get a Tour?
This Friday, March 27th at 12pm Pacific time (3pm Eastern), Jarad Hull, our website guru and I will be doing a tour of the new ActiveRain IDX product. We'd love if you would join us should you have any questions. Or you can get started today and then on Friday you'll be able to follow along and make adjustments to your own site as we go through the presentation.
Get signed up and we'll see you Friday
Or you can head over and get your new ActiveRain IDX website up and running now
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