Estate Agent websites are become a thing of the past with many now choosing to just use Right Move.  Estate Agency Websites are very important in order to attract customers from the web.  Using Right Move puts you in the same boat as all the other estate agencies - you should try to stand out.  Listing Properties online is great for search engine optimisation and can double up as an office tool which allows your customers to search just your properties from your website.

Having recently been through the saga of trying to sell my house and buy another, I have, like thousands of others in the UK, been trawling the Right Move website for properties that suit my needs.  I can definitely see the benefits of the Right Move estate agency website – everything in one place, simple searches, and a layout standard which allows your to compare easily.  However, with uniformity comes monotony.  I probably visited this site everyday for 3 months and I was desperate to look somewhere else to hopefully find something new to look at!

Estate Agents seem to be neglecting their own websites and purely listing their properties on Right Move.  I wonder if Estate Agency is now one of the few markets which do not use search engines to advertise and attract business.  Property is a huge market and by all using one platform, surely estate agents are putting themselves all on the same playing field.  A lot of estate agents don’t even list their available properties on their website.  The content alone from adding the listings would help to move them up search engine rankings.

When targeting a local area, it can be very important to have a content rich website to feed your search engine listings.  For example, if someone was to search for ‘estate agent Portsmouth’, or even ‘house for sale Portsmouth’ you would home that in this more limited market, your Portsmouth Estate Agent website would be listed – not just Right Move where you may not be found or appear among another 100+ estate agents in the area.

With conventional static HTML websites, managing your property listing could be a lengthy task, but with content management and listings modules, it can be very simple and even produce your property listings for you.  There are obvious benefits here for letting/rental property lists, as your clients can search your database themselves online and print their query results.  You can very easily have a ‘featured properties’ panel which is linked to your database to advertise your best properties – which can be updated daily to keep your website fresh!

For a totally maintenance free listing, it is even possible to use and I-frame to show the Right Move listings for your estate agency on your website.

Finally, it is important for estate agents to capture data of their own, without relying on Right Move.  Agents should capture this data on their own website and email their database regularly.  In8 websites can manage all your ‘opt outs’ for you ensuring that you comply with data protection.

In summary, Estate Agents do not need to rely on Right Move for all their custom – their website should create a proactive impression of the business and allow their customers to communicate with them directly online.  They should not see their website purely as an information site, but as a marketing tool.

For more information on estate agent website design please visit www.meoncreative.com

Anna Tarrant - In8 Website Design Hampshire

Content Managed Websites that work for you.