Archive for December, 2009

Traditional Offline Real Estate Listing

Tuesday, December 15th, 2009

There are several business issues to be addressed when operating this type of business. Like a traditional offline real estate listing, you should ensure that all listings you place on your Web site are accurate and are not misleading. If
anything changes with the listing (e.g., the price changes, features change, it is no longer for sale or is sold), you should update your site immediately with the new information.

For example, if you sell a house but don’t update your listing with this new information, potential buyers may contact you. When you tell them that the sale has been made, they may be discouraged from ever visiting  your site again.

If you enable real estate agents to post their listings on your site, you are going to have to develop a system to track and monitor who is posting what on your site. First, you should make sure that you don’t allow people to post listings on your site if they are not licensed real estate agents. Since agents will be able to update their listings on your site with images and text, you are going to have to set up a password-protected area where they will be able to enter your database to manipulate information. To easily track your clients, you might consider using their real estate license number as their unique ID. This would make it easy for you to reference them when searching through your database.

Future Marketing Purposes

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Initially you will have to pay for the development, design, and hosting of your Web site, computer hardware, computer software, a printer, a scanner, and a digital camera. If you currently have some of these items, your initial start-up costs will be considerably lower. A major cost that you will incur is associated with the development of the database that will contain your real estate listings.

If you are going to include only your own listings, this will not be that expensive; however, if you are planning to offer your services to agents across a wide geographic span, it will cost significantly more. You will also have to design some sort of tracking system to track your referrals to the agents that you represent.

You might consider purchasing comprehensive Web traffic analysis software, which will enable you to track where your Web site visitors are coming from. This information can be quite beneficial for future marketing purposes. Other costs that you will incur are related to the promotion of your Web site. Estimated cost is $10,000 to $60,000 to start.

The approach you take to operating this business determines how many employees will be needed. If you are going to represent only your own real estate listings online, you will need one employee—yourself. If you are targeting a wide geographic span, one to three employees will be needed. They will handle the offline and online promotion, fulfill service requests, and take care of all administrative tasks involved with running the day-to-day business operation.