Every real estate investor looks to attract targeted, qualified leads, and closing deals with these people. The more leads you attract and convert to closed real estate transactions, the more successful you get.
In today’s internet age, most of your leads will come from the internet – and for this you must have the right real estate investor website.
Even in this day and age, I still come across so many people running real estate investing businesses with no website.
In most cases it turns out they have no idea if they need one or not. Lots of them happen to not even understand what this website thing is all about. Others think only the big guys should have a website.
Let’s make it simple – you must have a website. If you don’t have a good real estate investor website for your business, you are losing a lot of deals.
And not just any website will do. A good real estate investor website must have certain qualities to meet your needs and help you grow your business to the next level.
In this article we’ll cover:
- What is a website?
- 10 qualities of a good real estate investor website
- Types of real estate investor websites
Let’s get to it.
What is a website?
I know this sounds too basic, but you must understand it before you can get a website. This will only take a minute.
I get asked this question from time to time, so I think it’s a good idea to answer it here.
If you are reading this article, you are looking at a website. A website gives you a virtual presence online, where you can engage visitors that want to learn about you or your business and probably do business with you.
Lots of times this will happen even if you never meet them.
All websites on the World Wide Web have three things:
1) Domain name – This is a name that is unique to you or your business, such as myname.com.
A domain name can only be registered once. It is a good idea to think about what name you would like for your business before you get a website. There are numerous free tools to check if a domain name is take or not.
You can register a domain when you buy your website, or register it separately.
2) Hosting account – This is where the website is physically located. This is usually a space on a server.
Most real estate investing websites bundle this with the website, so you won’t have to think about it.
3) The website – These are the virtual files that sitting on a server that you see, such as this page.
The information you see when you go to a website is served by these files. Again, when you buy a website, you will not have to differentiate all this as it would most likely come as a “website”.
When you buy a website for your real estate investing business, in most cases you will place a single order which takes care of all three components.
But sometimes you will need to separate them. More about this in a minute.
10 Qualities Of A Good Real Estate Investor Website
Just a “website” is not enough for your real estate investing business.
What should you look for when you need to buy a website?
Most people have simple informational websites. These websites rarely engage their visitors beyond providing information.
A good website must work to make you more money by promoting your business. Here are a few qualities a good real estate investor website must have:
1) Attract real estate leads and convert them to closed deals
Obviously you must attract new clients to be successful.
For this to happen, your website should be
i) It must be optimized for search engines
It must be easy for people to find you on the internet.
This includes motivated sellers and people looking to buy your houses or other prospects that you target.
A well optimized website will place you higher up in the search engines. The higher you are, the more people will find you.
This heat map picture from moz shows how people interact with search results.
As you can see, most people scan around the top of organic listings. Fewer and fewer people scan down the page.
The goal of a good real estate investing website is to rank as high as possible to attract more leads.
Your website needs to be built and delivered with advances SEO already done on it for you to rank well.
It also happens that your website ranks especially well when you target your local market where you do business.
Our interactive real estate investor websites are delivered fully optimized and targeted to your local market for this reason.
And it must have the tools for you to improve your SEO whenever you need. SEO is always an ongoing process – especially creating fresh content.
This is why our interactive real estate investing websites are delivered with this ability in the virtual back office.
Secondly, search engines are now ranking websites based on mobile first.
This means that to attract traffic, your website must have good SEO and be mobile optimized. This article goes into the details of why mobile optimization is a must.
Thirdly, search engines love fresh content. And they reward you for it. It’s all about traffic. This short video explains it.
This is the reason why our websites are delivered with a fully optimized WordPress blog for you to post fresh content.
A well optimized website for real estate investing will make you a lot of money for a long time to come.
ii) It should have good social engagement
Social media is huge in today’s market. People like to share things on the web – such as your properties, or your web page.
Providing this ability attracts more leads for you – and more closed deals.
Again our interactive websites are fully equipped to handle this.
2) It must engage those leads to take specific action
A good website must handle all the leads with kid’s gloves – like gold.
You only have about 10 seconds to win or lose these leads – or they leave for ever. So your website must be equipped to convert these leads when they land on your website.
A good website must be equipped with the following tools for this:
i) It must have video speaking models
Speaking models capture instant attention of a website visitor within a few seconds without being aggressive.
They must be natural, kind and friendly, and offer a message that appeals to the website visitor.
They should also offer a compelling reason for website visitors to take action, such as signing up.
Only our interactive real estate websites come equipped with speaking models.
ii) It must be equipped with personalized Ebooks
Your website must come equipped with Ebooks that are helpful to your visitors.
They must be fully personalized with you as the author to add credibility.
A visitor must sign up to get access to the Ebook, they must sign up. This gives you the opportunity to nurture these leads with automated marketing.
iii) It must have squeeze pages for all purposes
A squeeze page offers a free gift (such as an Ebook) in exchange for contact information.
Again this allows you to nurture them to close deals once you have their information.
A good website must come equipped with this, and the ability to create your own squeeze pages whenever you need.
iv) It must offer multiple clear calls to action
You must get every visitor perform a targeted action on your website, such as signing up (such as to get an EBook, submitting their house information, etc.).
Wherever a lead happens to be on your website, you must provide them with “baits” to take the next call to action.
This can be signing up on your website or calling you.
v) It must be friendly on mobile devices
It must be mobile responsive.
The content must be nice and easy to read on mobile devices.
Any phone numbers should be mobile active, you they simply need to tap on it to place a call.
3) It must nurture those leads until they are ready to close deals with you
You must nurture every lead carefully by follow-up email to warm them up to do business with you.
Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. (Source: Online Marketing Institute).
Most people forget to follow up by the forth follow-up. In the process they lose 80% of potential business!
To automate follow-ups, our interactive real estate investor websites come with inbuilt autoresponders.
They also come pre-loaded with personalized carefully timed follow-up messages to nurture all the leads your website collects. When a lead signs up on your website, they start receiving personalized emails relating to their interests. These warm them up until they are ready to do business with you.
Of course you can also create your own messages as necessary.
4) It must be easy to use
Preferably, you should manage everything from a simple virtual back office, even if you are new to computers.
You do not have to mess with stuff like HML, PHP, etc. A good website must get the job done nice and easy, no fuss.
5) It should make your work easy
Having a good real estate investor website does not mean you spend your life with your website.
Your business should become easier, such as automating follow-ups, making offers, selling, wholesaling or renting houses, etc.
A website should allow you to do more deals as it reduces your work.
This means it must be fully equipped with all the features you need to run a successful real estate investing business.
6) It must be adaptable to your business model
You must be able to adapt your website to suit any real estate investing business model.
You do not have to buy a new website every time you get a new business idea. Preferably, the website should allow you to make any changes yourself without having to hire someone else.
Our interactive websites can adapt to any business model quickly, usually with a few clicks even if you are new to computers.
And if you happen to have very specific needs, adapting them is a breeze.
7) It must have a variety of customizable designs
A good website must look good to the visitor.
It must be simple, well designed and informative.
And it must be created with conversion in mind, with all the interactive elements we have covered so far.
Most available solutions will have one or more real estate investing website templates.
Interactive websites come loaded with numerous customizable designs.
Equally important, it must offer the ability to customize content, forms and other elements on the website.
9) It must be affordable
Unfortunately, most real estate investing web sites are quite costly.
Most will offer a costly monthly fee.
Granted, one deal lost because you have a bad website can cost you thousands of dollars. But a good website must also be affordable for you to use it in the first place.
Our websites come with a low one-time payment, and you own it for life.
The video below illustrates this point quite well.
10) It must offer privacy
A good website must give you full control and privacy.
The web site must belong to you. Its data belongs to you, and it must be treated that way.
You should also be able to host it wherever you want with no limitations if necessary.
Our websites are the only ones that offer this capability.
Ready To Get A Website That Attracts Leads And Delivers Closed Deals?
Types Of Real Estate Investor Websites
Websites for real estate investing generally get classified by the business model they are associated with.
Let’s look at the most common models.
1) “We Buy Houses” Websites
Most real estate investors buy houses. Needless to say, this means almost everyone needs a real estate website for buying houses.
As we have seen above, these websites must be equipped with
- SEO, social media and blogging features to attract motivated sellers
- Tools to engage these leads when they land on the website – such as speaking models, Ebook, etc. They must get these visitors to take a call to action especially on mobile devices
- Inbuilt automation features that follow up with these leads hands off to warm them up to do business with you
- The must deliver motivated sellers pre-screened and pre-negotiated to give you a quick view if it’s a deal or not
- Tools to manage the house buying process from getting the lead to closing the deal
2) Wholesale Real Estate Investor Websites
Wholesale real estate investor websites are quite popular with most people.
Most people use these websites to wholesale houses to other real estate investors. For this reason, they must be equipped with several important features.
a) You must be able to publish your properties easily
You should be able to publish your properties, upload pictures directly from a virtual back office.
You should also be able to include any type of description including videos.
On the front end, the properties must be shown complete with the pictures and videos.
The listings must also include Google maps including satellite and street views.
They should also include a walk score – an indication of the neighboring areas and their accessibility. This information makes it very appealing when you are wholesaling these houses.
b) You must be able to build a buyers list
When you are selling houses, you must build a good list of buyers to sell your house fast.
These people are usually other real estate investors in your area who buy houses and fix them for sale or rent.
The website for wholesaling houses therefore needs to offer opportunities to sign up potential wholesale real estate investor buyers.
They should also be able to select which areas they want to buy properties from.
This video explains how this works.
c) It must allow you to email your properties to your buyers list
Once you list a new property on your website, you should be able to send it to your buyers with a few clicks.
Your website therefore needs to have a built-in email capacity so you don’t have to depend on third party services to send your deals.
d) It should offer extra features to market your properties
These include
- Ability to share your properties on social media
- Ability to display your properties on other websites – such as a partner
- Allow limited access to edit properties by other investors
- Easily integrate third party email services like Mailchimp, Constant Contact etc. if you need to
This allows you to market your properties faster.
3) Websites For Selling Houses
The real estate investing websites for selling houses should also have all the features of the wholesale websites.
They should also allow you to list houses for sale on retail, for rent, and for lease options.
4) Private Money Websites
These websites are created for you to attract private money for your deals.
They are usually most often informational. You should make sure you comply with FTC rules to make sure you are in compliance.
5) Other types of real estate investing websites
There are other types of real estate websites such as
- Websites for buying notes
- Websites for multi-family houses
So What Is The Best Website Builder For Real Estate Investors?
As we have discussed, the best real estate investing website builder is the one that is adaptable. One that allows you to customize your website as you wish with no limitations.
This means you can simply adapt your website to suit your needs without having to shop for a new website.
Only our interactive real estate investor websites offer this capability.
When you order your website, you can easily customize it to do what you need once you receive it.
You do not need to choose any designs, business model, and soon – these are all things you can change with a few clicks from a simple virtual back office.
In Summary:
This topic can get long, so to summarize here are the few features you should look for in a good real estate investor website:
- It must be equipped to attract leads, engage them to sign them up and nurture them automatically so they are ready to close deals with you.
- It must be easy to use
- It should make your work easy
- It must be adaptable to your business model
- It must have a variety of customizable designs
- It must be affordable
- It must offer privacy
Ultimately, a good you website should saving you money, time and effort while allowing you to close more real estate deals – and making more money.
Your Take
Do you have a real estate investing website for your business? What are you looking for in a good website for your business?
Please leave your comments below.
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