Over the past year the Business Broking industry has been decreasing as the number of saleable businesses has decreased and banks have tightened their restrictions on lending for businesses. This has made it harder for genuine buyers to gain the finance to buy and as a result of this, a number of Business Brokers have had to either down scale or close down.
As a result of the financial environment, budgets have been decreased and the once flourishing Business for sale website for RealCommercial (RealBusinesses.com.au), has been looking for different ways to improve its profitability in this decreasing market place. Some of the suggestions included increasing prices. Although this was met with a negative response from brokers, a number of them mentioned that this was a necessity because of the enquiries received from the website Others stopped their subscriptions and started looking for different options because this was going to become too expensive.
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Because of this fact the market leader has decided to leave the market place totally, and as of March this year will no longer be a player. Due to this fact and also due to a number of lost jobs in the RealBusinesses staff, there has been a number new websites pop up as well as existing websites making claims that they are either a new RealBusinesses replacement or will take over the number 1 spot left behind.
Just because the number 1 player has left the market, this doesn’t mean that a new player can take over the market. To gain reputation and direct traffic to a website can potentially take between 3-5 years. The only way to have clients follow you from one website (RealBusinesses) to another website name is to still have the RealBusinesses website name active and then divert this to the new name (this sort of defeats the purpose of a new website because you can’t gain any ranking on Google from this method either). To make a claim that a website can transfer their followers and ranking from one website name to another is not possible.
As the market place has been thrown into turmoil and people are looking to replace this big loss, everyone needs to be careful of signing any contracts for 6-12 months with websites which are making unjustifiable claims and deals. The last thing that anyone wants is to spend money on a website which doesn’t generate any enquiries. RealBusinesses was a big name in the market place because of RealCommercial’s marketing budget and name which gave it great Google ranking and leads from the RealCommercial website.
When looking for a new website, look at the following:
1. If the websites are offering free listings go for it, but make sure that they don’t have any catches or contracts at the end of this. Also make sure that you are spending your time helping to grow a website which can take between 3-5 years to gain leads and then charge you an arm and a leg,
2. Talk to websites who already have a good reputation, history and direct traffic to the website. Also ask for page views, enquiries and the number of new enquirers per month to give you an idea of how well it is performing.
3. If you are talking to a new website, never sign a medium to long term contract until they have proven themselves first, no matter what they claim. Also ask for page views, enquiries and the number of new enquirers per month to give you an idea of how well it is performing.
If you stick to these 3 rules, you should do well. Good luck and we hope this helps to reduce the turmoil in the coming months.
Author : Paul O’Brien Business Development Manager Business2Sell.com.au and Businesses2Sell.com.au