There are a multitude of real estate website solutions on the market and many, if not most, are of sufficient quality to establish your web presence as a new or aspiring real estate professional. However since recent marketing surveys show that more home buyers are coming in contact with the home they ultimately purchase from the internet vs a real estate professional, it is essential that contemporary real estate agents have an internet presence that is more than just adequate but effectively markets their brand, services, and properties.
Thus if you are a professional that simply won't settle for just adequate, then you should seriously consider self-hosting your own blog and property search website. The contrasts and benefits of self-hosting as compared with shared-user website solutions are as follows:
* Your original content articles (e.g., blog posts) are hosted on your own branded domain name, and not on a shared-user domain such as Active Rain, Blogger, Wordpress, etc.
* All of the local MLS properties are hosted on your own branded domain name, and not provided externally from a shared-user domain by a framed or iframe solution.
* Unlike when hosting with shared or networked domains you will have full control of all design and content aspects of your self-hosted websites.
This blog hosting service was originally free but once reaching critical mass and monetization occurred, a new user can now expect to pay up to $30 a month for the privilege to contribute content to the network's consumer domains. This cost, more than pays for self-hosting a Wordpress blog on your own branded domain name at $10 per month operating cost via many internet hosting services.
Case Study
The majority of this cost is associated with a Virtual Private Server hosting plan that provides a measure of performance guarantee for concurrent multiple user property searches. We ported most of her shared-user online blog posts (~150 index-able pages) over to her self-hosted blog and then transferred her MLS provided framed property search solution (~0 index-able pages) to a self-hosted solution using her MLS's RETS feed. This brought the total number of pages index-able with unique title names under her branded domain name to approximately 12,000 pages. Of course, I can not relate just how many hours my client worked this past year to author additional pages and reach almost 300 original blog posts and 19,000 property pages indexed with major search engines. Viewing the self-hosted website analytics for March 2009 reveals 14,803 visits by 8,721 unique visitors.