We love winter here at Union Street Media. Besides the fact that it’s one of the most fun times of year in Vermont to be outside (yes, seriously!), it’s also a great time to get your real estate website ready to go for the spring market and beyond.

The website development process was much more cumbersome when we started building websites for real estate brokers 25 years ago. Now, the process is much faster, takes less of your time, and has a bigger impact on your business.

If you’re thinking about redoing your site in the new year, here are a few things you can do now to kick-start the process.

Check out our turnkey layouts! Websites are a blend of art and science. After 25 years and thousands of launches, we’ve figured out what works on real estate websites and what does not. We’ve developed a series of layouts that incorporate our best practices, look great, and are efficient to build. Most importantly, once deployed, they have a bespoke look that makes them appear like a custom build.

It’s important to note that layouts are different from templates. Templates are cookie-cutter websites – seen one, seen them all. We use layouts to show what the structure of your website will look like and where content will appear. Once we color in between the lines of your new site, adding your branding elements, content, and photos, you end up with a website that speaks to you and your clients’ uniqueness.

What to do when you redesign a real estate website:

• Establish one point person to be the main point of contact for Union Street Media, so communication stays streamlined and organized.
• Collect your logo, color scheme, and any other brand assets you want to include.
  Photos, videos & content used to be the biggest delay in getting sites from concept to launch. Maybe it’s because we used to be surrounded by cows in Vermont, and we always felt the cows would come home the same day the content was delivered from a client. Fortunately, that’s changed significantly, reducing the website development requirements. We can source high-quality images, and create video headers with local and relevant scenes from your market. There are lots of content creation tools that help speed up writing, too! All that being said if you can review or prepare the copy you want to use throughout your site (including text for the homepage, about pages, and agent bios) that will really help speed up the process.
• Local is the “last mile” of real estate searches that the national aggregators cannot do effectively. Identifying the top 10-15 towns and/or property types that you service and have (and want to grow into) at the start of the process will help us build a site for where you want us to go in the long run.

For us to do together
Review your current site and define your goals for the new one:

• Target Audience: Who are you trying to attract? Buyers, sellers, renters, investors?
• Primary Goals: What do you want visitors to do on your site? For example, sign up for new listing notifications or favorite listings
• What Works: List the elements of your current site that you like and are performing well
• What Doesn’t Work? Identify the features or pages causing issues (slow load times, hard-to-find contact info, poor mobile experience, outdated design, etc).
• CRM Integration: Union Street Media can integrate many of the real estate industry’s leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. Make sure you know which system you use or plan to use.

Getting Started with Digital Marketing for Real Estate

A website without marketing of any kind is like putting up a billboard in the basement. Put another way, “if you build it they will come” only applies to the Field of Dreams. Union Street Media helps most of our clients with real estate digital marketing at some point in their website journey. Even if that’s not the case for you, thinking about how you’ll market the site after it goes live will help us set up the right foundation during the development process.

A few things to keep in mind:

• What are the real estate keywords you want to rank for (e.g., “luxury homes in [your city]” or “best real estate agents in [your city]”) in a dream world? We can help identify if users are searching for those phrases and help point you in the right direction of where to add content that will resonate with those keywords
• What off-site marketing tools do you currently use? We’ll collect the links to your social media profiles and link to them from your site. Just because a social media channel exists does not mean you should use it. Sometimes less is more in the real estate social media world.
• Who is linking to your site currently and can you get more people to link to your site? Links are the block and tackling of SEO relevance.
• One of the things we love about the Internet is that it is never “over.” Your site isn’t “done” at launch, it’s just complete enough for now to go live. Generally speaking, it’s better to launch too soon than too late as your new website will be so much better than what you already have online. Once you’ve flipped the switch on a new site, ensure you have a plan for ongoing maintenance. Union Street Media clients on all but our most basic packages have access to a Digital Specialist or Digital Advisor. Take advantage of the opportunity and check in with them regularly or be prepared for them to reach out to you.
• What performance analytics do you have? Review your site’s current analytics (using Google Analytics, etc.) to see which pages get the most traffic, where visitors are dropping off, and what search terms they use to find you.

By preparing these aspects, you’ll set yourself up for a smoother, more effective real estate website redesign process with Union Street Media. Would you like more specific tips on any of the steps above? Please reach out to us and we’d be happy to have a conversation with you!