Estate Agents - do you really need a web site?

I am sure that many estate agents have asked themselves whether they really must have a website in order to compete in the modern online space. There are no doubt hundreds, if not thousands of real estate software companies that make all sorts of offerings about the benefits of having your own web site ranging from having an online presence to being able to dominate your competition. Agents typically feel compelled to get a web site because other agents have one, and because there is a certain pride in seeing your listings on your very own web site. The cost of developing a web site, and hosting it varies from provider to provider with ‘bare bones’ sites costing a few hundred rand per month whilst ‘fancy’ sites can cost tens of thousands of rand to develop especially if they are custom built to your specification. Most of the offerings available require you to pay a monthly subscription fee because that guarantees the developer an income stream.
Few real estate agents realise is that you need not own your own website, and that it many cases it is a more effective allocation of money to simply use someone else’s infrastructure to get your message out there. Essentially, what is being advocated here is to use online property portals instead of going to the trouble of building, maintaining and marketing your own site. Some of the leading property portals in South Africa allow you to have your very own agency profile whilst at the same time allowing you to upload your listings under that ‘banner’. Take for instance the services offered by ImmovablePropertyCoZa where you can register as an estate agent, and list your properties in the geographic area where they are located - all for the price of zero rands. Whilst it is anticipated that this provider will eventually need to charge a fee for its listings since no one can operate indefinitely without some form of payment it clearly makes the case for agents to keep an eye out for opportunities to market cheaply and effectively.
There is no point in denying that marketing of real estate has changed forever since the demise of the printed media. Fewer and fewer people consult newspapers, and magazines when they look for real estate and properties to buy or rent. Online listings are easier to search and navigate and the listings are often more up to date than the printed version. Many agents have disappointed buyers and renters by having to say that since the advertisement was printed the property has sold or been rented out whilst in the online space all they need to do is mark the property as sold or rented.
The beauty of using the infrastructure of a property portal as opposed to having your own site is also the added benefit of not having to be a computer geek to administer it all. Hosting a web site, after it has been developed, can be a painful experience especially since few agents have learned, or have the inclination to learn about how to operate a Cpanel or perhaps even a private server.
Then, if you really want to own your own web site, there is the challenge of having to market it on Google, Yahoo and Bing. Not every agent realises it but these search engines do not simply crawl your site and then you automatically rank for they keywords on your page - there is a lot more to it and it often costs time and money. If for instance you wanted to rank for a specific search term such as "estate agent in ‘town’" your site architecture would need to promote that and you would need to spend some time on off-the-page search engine optimisation. Considering that there are only ten spaces available on the first page of Google the odds are that you are much better off simply using an existing site that already ranks well.
So if you are still thinking about getting your own site then do the maths first! You might be pleasantly surprised to learn that there are cheaper alternatives out there such as ImmovablePropertyCoZa, Gumtree and a few others that give you an online presence at a greatly reduced cost.