Single property website

Single property websites are a new development in real estate technology marketing. They are turn-key websites that are created to market a specific property.

The concept is relatively new, having been launched in 2005-2006 by a number of companies who offer real estate agents the ability to access their online stores, upload their listing data and photos, and publish the site for an agent.

Many companies have become full property marketing services, offering mobile phone website technology, text message call capture, virtual tours, property feedback systems and more.

A number of real estate website companies have seized on the trend and are now offering the same technology to their real estate agent clients as an added benefit. Because agents in many cases already enter their listings into the "Listings for Sale" section of their business website, these companies add the convenience of "auto-populating" the listing data and photos immediately into the single property site.

More recently, real estate companies have entered the fray and are beginning to offer this product as an "agent benefit" and "for profit".

The ordering process to create this type of site is fairly straightforward and homogeneous across the different companies offering the product:
# Upload Listing Data
# Upload Pictures
# Pick a domain name on the fly and publish it.

Some real estate agents even build them from scratch. They typically include Virtual tours and extensive information about the subject property, making that web site the single best source of information on that particular property. It should also be noted that these sites typically use the address of the property for the second order domain. This concept can and is sometimes used also for commercial properties, among others.
Because a small percentage of agents use this marketing, these domain addresses are usually available at any given time. Even For sale by owner sellers sometimes build a web site using the house address as the URL.

Ultimately perhaps 20 large real estate web sites may be utilized from realtor.com to craigslist.com, and all of them point back to the featured property web site. These property sites are in reality sub-domains on the main web site of the agency and all of them are hosted on the one site.

Benefits
Single property sites quickly gained popularity because there are very few things that a real estate agent can do for under $100 that market a listing individually and showcase its value.

Generally, agents seem to acknowledge that single property sites are not to be "optimized" for search engine placement in the way that their traditional business website might be. Discussion as well as public press releases by various companies, real estate agents benefit from single property sites in the following ways:

* Impress the seller and win the listing by offering a differentiator in a listing presentation, and demonstrating how the agent will tangibly market the property.
* Create an open house for a property. Often, many of these companies add the ability to purchase a sign rider at the point of sale and hang it on the real estate sign for the property, allowing "drive by" traffic to visit the site and see the property. According to a recent study by the NAR in 2006 , 15% of home buyers found their new home by driving by a yard sign - so it can be argued that single property sites enhance the value of the sign and the listing.
*It is likely this concept may have originated in a Council of Residential Specialists class. These two-day classes are somewhat like real estate agent "Think Tanks", in which as many as 50 or 100 agents work in groups for ideas aimed at bringing value to sellers. This concept is in step with CRS principles.

Drawbacks
While one may argue that the benefits far outweigh the costs, the following are drawbacks to this marketing tool:

*The cost of creating these web sites from scratch without a 3rd party company is extensive on time. Assuming one has these sites hosted on an existing account, the only monetary cost of creating them is purchasing the domain name itself.

*Redirecting these single property sites to one's primary web site may annoy some of Google's algorithms as they are essentially "duplicate content" and thus may lower the primary site's rankings. As a result, one may want to host all these sites on a secondary hosting account which is unrelated to one's primary Real Estate Web Site.

*SEO is hard to achieve on these web sites as they should only be up and running for a few months (this is the period an agent would hope a property sells within) and by the time they begin to appear on Google, the property may already be sold, making them nothing more than a billboard to the primary site at best. This of course can be resolved by making sure all the big web sites have this site referenced immediately and thus ride on the coat-tails of a site that does rank on Google.

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