Advertising Listings on the Website:
What Are My Options?
Visitors to your website will typically be there for one of two purposes. The first and primary purpose for being on your website is to search for properties available on the marketplace. The second will be to find information, be it about the land transfer tax or the new HST, to tips on home staging and first-time home buyers. Faced with these facts, lets look at some of the most common problems that arise today with the way listings are presented to the general public.
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#1 – Clutter
Cluttering the page with too many Focus Areas, Listing Galleries, or Listing Links. It would be ideal if you could find the time and resources to attend to every area that someone generates interest in to you. However the reality is you cannot. By putting excess Focus Areas, for example, you aren’t really showing that you are dedicated to servicing a particular region, but rather that you are just hoping to attract business from anywhere. From this, someone might get the impression that you aren’t a Realtor whom has extensive knowledge and excels at doing business in a particular area, but rather just meandering all over, scrambling for business. |
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#2 – Mix Sold & Active Listings
Depending on location, generally there are regulations surrounding advertising sold listings (very strict in Ontario). Regardless, when searching listings, most people don’t have the time to spare to see all the properties that ARE available; so why would they want to spend extra time sorting through those that are NOT available?
If it is important for you to showcase your past transactions, then do it on a separate page. This gives the page a unique purpose with its own space; allowing for those that actually want to get a sense of your work history to do so, without encroaching on the functionality of your active listings page.
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#3 – Limited Search Options / No Interactive Search Map Tool
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#4 –Lack of ‘enhanced’ listing pages. Failing to update the listings on your website with proper descriptions, such as changing any abbreviations to full words; neglecting to add additional pictures and/or descriptions to them is also a commonly overlooked aspect of enhancing a listing. Leaving out Virtual Tour and YouTube property-video links is also another way that you’re taking away from the presentation of your listing.
So now that we’re aware of the common mistakes that many people make with the presentation of their listings, let’s look at how you can create pages with unique purposes that go beyond the run-of-the-mill setups:
*For detailed instructions on how to create each setup click on the respective image
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Random Listing Generator
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Featured Property of the Week
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Multiple Listing Spreads
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These are just a few of the myriad of variations on listing setups. It just takes a bit of creativity and time to develop a page that serves a purpose, and does so in a unique way. Giving people more options on how they can search for properties is never a bad thing, so long as you adhere to the recommendations outlined above! Why don’t you give it a try and see what type of listing page you come up with?
Authored By: Bryan Coughlin, Client Relations