May 22 2013
Single property websites are one of the best tools for marketing your listings. Whereas your personal agent website is all about you and the services you offer, single property websites serve as an exhaustive source of information on a single listing. Not only is it good for your main site's SEO, but because it's a website solely dedicated to marketing their property, it's a potent way to impress sellers--and even win listings.
Today, we're taking a look at a single property website solution that's very potent. ListingsUnlimited from Properties Online is more than just a website provider--it's a full-on marketing suite that makes attracting buyers a breeze.
Your single property website is home base for all your marketing activities for a listing, so we'll begin by taking a look at the process of creating a website within ListingsUnlimited.
The driving idea behind ListingsUnlimited is that creating a website should be simple. By removing the need to know code or do any heavy technical lifting, ListingsUnlimited frees you up to spend more time marketing your listings.
This emphasis on ease of use is reflected in the Control Panel. Everything is laid out and categorized clearly with icons that make it simple to find what you're looking for.
The first thing you need to decide is what you want your website address to be--a domain or a subdomain. ListingsUnlimited offers over a dozen subdomain options like .IsForSale.com, WillSellShort.com, IsBankOwned.com that lets visitors know more about the property's status at a glance.
Users also have the option to buy their own top level domain, so their website address is 123MainSt.com instead of 123MainSt.IsForSale.com. ListingsUnlimited makes this easy to do by enabling you to buy a domain from Properties Online right from the control panel.
In line with its overall user friendliness, ListingsUnlimited makes designing your website very simple. You have four basic layout options to choose from. Though this may not seem like a lot, when combined with over three dozen color schemes and 300+ header options, agents have thousands of possible designs available to them.
We were especially impressed by ListingsUnlimited's available color scheme options. In addition to several eye-catching combinations, they offer colors that match the branding of major franchises, making it easy for your single property website to echo your brokerage's branding and your agent site.
Once you've chosen the look of your site, it's time to build your content. This is as simple as entering listing details within the Property Info section. ListingsUnlimited will prompt you to enter information like listing type, property type, property status, address, price, number of bedrooms and baths, square feet, lot size, MLS number, and more. In addition, you can highlight five property features.
The property description is simple to set up, too, thanks to a WYSIWYG editor that works and feels similar to MS Word's interface.
Photos are the single most important thing you can add to your website. They're the number one thing that buyers want to see online. Your ListingsUnlimited single property website puts these front and center, allowing visitors to view photos in a slide show at full screen and at full resolution.
The photo editor features a wizard that lets you easily upload and edit photos. From this interface, you can rotate images, add captions, and drag and drop to rearrange the order they appear on your site. We especially liked how you can add banners or buttons to your photos that draw attention to certain features of your property. Choose from text like Just Listed, Bank Owned, Reduced, New Construction, Open House, and more.
The strength of single property websites is that they are a complete source of information about a listing. Properties Online understands that buyers want to know more about a home than just its square footage--they also want to know about the surrounding community, open house times, and more.
To that end, ListingsUnlimited autopopulates local school data based on the property's address and also generates a Bing map for your website. Open house times are easy to input and will instantly display on your website. You don't have to worry about remembering to remove the open house information from your site. Once the event has passed, it automatically disappears from your home page.
For more in-depth information, each ListingsUnlimited website comes with its own "Document Vault" where you can upload commonly used disclosures, zoning information, city records, and more as doc, docx, pdf, jpg or gif files. You can optionally password protect the vault or require site visitors to fill out a lead capture form in order to gain access.
Once your site is up and running, it's time to market your listing! ListingsUnlimited gives you multiple tools to accomplish this. Here's a look at the highlights:
No website suite would be complete without tools to measure traffic to your site. ListingsUnlimited features an analytics tool in the control panel. From there, you can see statistics on referrers, pages viewed and hits to your website, videos, flyers, mobile site, Craigslist ads, and more. This ties together all your activities by enabling you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.
ListingsUnlimited goes well beyond a simple single property website solution. As we've seen, it provides you with all the tools you need to market your listing--both online and off.