Thread: What Would You Pay...

Here's a question for you real estate agents out there - what would you pay to purchase a web site with top search engine rankings in your market for your primary keywords?

Let's say the site ranks #1 or #2 on Google, #2 on Yahoo, and #9-11 on MSN for your top 2 keywords and has dozens of other top rankings for additional valuable keywords.

And let's say the site is a nice looking web site, has funnel points to capture leads, a place for you to add your featured listings and photos, a blog for your to post on, a drip email/contact management system, an MLS interface, and a few other items that make it a complete site.

How much would you pay for this site? If you decide to answer, please let me know the market you service.

Are you talking about a website that belongs to an individual Realtor or is it a coop website with many different Realtors on it?
I would think the difference between the two of those would affect the price as one is much more valuable than the other. Thanks.

A custom site for an individual real estate agent.

Originally Posted by HHI Golf Guy

A custom site for an individual real estate agent.

I pay $150 a month for one of our sites. It is from the Craig Proctor system, success websites.
My problem with these types of sites is that googlebots look at some of these as duplicate content and will not give duplicate content a high quality score.

However, the upside is most of the work is done for you.

I think the most important questions to be answered is what purpose is your site idea used for. What is the goal of the site, what is the desired outcome.

If the agent is driving traffic to his/her online site through offline mediums than google ranking is not important.
If the agent wants organic traffic than page ranking is huge.
But no agent should ever depend 100% on organic traffic as google algorithms can change without a moment's notice.
You need to have a combination of driving traffic yourself to your website as well as getting organic traffic.
I don't see how someone can promise page rank for real.
Advanced access pages that were ranking highly in the search engines were being dropped in ranking left and right all of a sudden, so you never really know.

I think Realtors need to have more than one site.
I also think that Realtors need more education to know how to choose a good site and what constitutes a good site.

Nice speech, but you did not even come close to answering my question. If you want to talk about what you consider to be the purpose of a real estate web site, driving traffic from online and offline sources, or any of your other musings please start your own thread and don't hijack mine.

Again, the question is: In your market, what would you pay for an existing custom web site that ranked at or very near the top for all of the real estate primary KW's in that market?

Once again, assume the site has all the bells and whistles for MLS integration, custom listings, lead capture and follow up, etc.?

I am sorry. I was not trying to 'highjack' your post.
I am new to this forum and I was only trying to be helpful.
No harm intended.

In our area with all the specifics you mentioned, I would pay $150 to $250 per month.

Fair enough. What market are you in?

FWIW, I'm contemplating seeding certain U.S. markets with sites, optimizing those site for a year, then selling off the sites at a profit. The sale would be a complete sale and transfer of the domain. I don't believe in renting out sites to people.

Since my SEO services alone start at $1,500 a month, I don't think that you and I are in the same ballpark when it comes to price

Originally Posted by HHI Golf Guy

Fair enough. What market are you in?

FWIW, I'm contemplating seeding certain U.S. markets with sites, optimizing those site for a year, then selling off the sites at a profit. The sale would be a complete sale and transfer of the domain. I don't believe in renting out sites to people.

Since my SEO services alone start at $1,500 a month, I don't think that you and I are in the same ballpark when it comes to price

Are you a Realtor in Hilton Head?
I look forward to visiting Disney's Vacation Club there in the near future.
Yep, I am out of your league. You are probably well worth what you charge.

I have to see results from what I am doing first before I go into the big time expenses. Been there, done that in 1999-2003 and never got what was promised to us, etc. I am sure you have heard it all before.

I am using Blackwater group and Compass for SEO and Placement services right now. I just started with them so I do not know how good or not they are, etc. Thanks for the info on your services.

I know a vendor who sells good sites that they charge $300 per month for and they charge a $3000 up front fee for the site but they are always doing more with the sites. Most of their sites will come up in the top 2 pages of google. Maybe that will help you in what you are trying to do.

My real estate license is not active. I do have partial ownership in a local brokerage here in the Hilton Head area. Instead I run a web marketing firm. Recently, one of my clients (a major publishing company) hired me directly (instead of my firm) as VP of Web Development and Marketing. In the past I had turned offers like that, but this offer involved ownership in the company if we meet certain hurdles.

As far as the idea I am floating, it's just another way to drive top line revenues without a huge investment. Domains are cheap, and we can do all of the design in house. There is a time factor involved with research and developing ad copy, and of course there is additional time invested in the optimization process.

We would not be seeding sites in small towns, but rather in larger metro areas or areas that sell high dollar real estate. If an agent can make $500k-$1M in annual commissions they should have no problem shelling out $25k+ for a top ranked web site.

Even at 500k+ in comissions, I'd want to be sure a 25k investment would be worth it before dropping that type of money. I'd think you'd want to prove it's worth with more than just pr, and ranking for a few key words. Maybe when running them, refer leads to agents in your target area and keep track of them. It may help the sale significantly.

But it's not for our market. The average agent probably nets only 10k, and top agents are probably in the 100k range.

-Tim