Websites dedicated to an individual property listing are a common trend amongst real estate agents in the US. Many American agents use specific web based applications like vflyer, postlets and mymarketware to quickly and cheaply create a single property website. Single property websites aren’t really used by agents in Australia rather they appear to be opted by private sellers who can’t gain access to the larger Australia real estate portals.
So what is a single property website? It’s basically a website which is dedicated to a single property which is for sale or lease. Here is an example of a vflyer property website which is hosted on the vflyer website and also a postlets site. There are basically two types of single property websites, a subdomain or an individual domain website. Both vflyer and postlets offer a sub domain service which allows an agent or vendor to have a single property website as a subdomain of vflyer or postlets.
Mymarketware offers agents and vendors the option to have their single property website under a unique domain name which the agent/vendor can select. Although this option is a little more expensive because it requires more work to setup, it is a lot better for SEO if a descriptive domain name which reflects the location and type of property is selected.
What are the benefits of having a single property website for your listing(s)? A lot of the suppliers of these websites rant on about how having a single property website will improve the likelihood of a buyer finding the property on the internet. This is a little unrealistic given how competitive the online real estate segment is. Even when one of these sites is indexed by a search engine it will never rank above the real estate portals, most real estate franchises and any real estate agent in that geographic area who has a reasonable online presence. Unless you are lucky enough to secure a domain name which represents what a user will type into a search engine then i don’t see too many buyers finding the property website before they see it on a real estate portal or agent website.
But where I think single agent websites can help an agent or real estate agency is improving their online presence and SEO of their existing agency website, helping attract buyers and vendors to their agency. If you are creating an individual website for every single listing in your agency then an average agency would be creating 70 to 100 websites each year. These websites will be specific to the property type and suburb the property is located in and all will link back to the main agency website. Also, once a property has sold the status of the property will change to sold on the property website but the property website will remain on the web forever.
What does all this mean? This is great for your agency website SEO. Over a period of time you will have a bundle of websites all with content, keywords and domain names specific to the suburbs your agency operate in. How this really helps your SEO is that you can link all of these websites back to your main agency website increasing the direct traffic it receives. Also, it’s these links from websites containing similar content to what your website contains which search engines dig and will improve your page ranking.
I’ve seen one service in Australia MyPropertyAddress who cater for this niche market but I’m not aware of any other existing services. If there are any others out there then please make yourself known!