Sean Callahan, a former sales person and sales manager for Homes.com in San Diego California, has done work on thousands of real estate agent websites and put over 2,500 agent websites in the top spots of Google and Yahoo for the past 7 years with some pretty amazing results.
Callahan, who also went on to teach search engine marketing courses for The San Diego Learning Annex seminar group for 2 years says "The primary breakdown for real estate agents for getting results online is based on lack of conversion". Callahan continued to say that "Most real estate website companies are more concerned about the site looking pretty rather tan it being functional for lead capture and thus the amount of traffic and marketing that needs to be done to make them productive is not cost effective".
Callahan who took his search engine experience and background working with real estate websites went and set up several of his own online websites only to find out "What we were telling agents to do did not work and my background working with real estate websites did not really help me figuire out how to successfully capture leads and sales online".
It was at that time that Callahan decided he better figuire it out real quick if he was going to have any sort of a career as an Internet marketing consultant, so he went out and bought more websites and started doing test marketing to find out what would work and what was a myth.
"Everyone has an opinion on what works and what does not work, but until you roll up your sleaves and start trying it yourself, it is all talk and not reality", Callahan continued "It took me about 2 years and thousands of hours of test marketing to finally figuire out how to format a website so that it would convert a high percentage of traffic and thus produce sales and leads for Realtors".
After taking the time and effort to make sure Callahan had a working product in place he started up "Real Estate Marketing Nerds", a small company based out of Pacific Beach San Diego and with the help of one friend started calling real estate agents to offer them the opportunity to have their websites fixed up and put into the "Pay per click" sections of Google and Yahoo.
"Pay per click search engine marketing had a bad rap since most agents spent a lot of money with no results, but that is because a large percentage of real estate sites do a very poor job capturing leads and not because pay per click marketing does not work" Callahan said "The fact is that if you set up a pay per click account correctly and send traffic to a website that is designed for lead capture, pay per click search engine marketing produces one of the fastest and cheapest returns on a marketing budget investment"
Callahan estimates that the average real estate website captures about 1-2% of the traffic that goes to the website, but the sites he fixes up and modifies will capture up to 10-15% of the traffic coming from search engines.
According to Callahan the average closing ratio of Internet based leads is 3%, so in order for an agent to close a home online they need an average of 35-40 leads, which in turn is actually about 10-12 "good leads" of people qualified and looking to buy in the next 30 to 60 days.
"An agent will need 10-12 good leads in order to get one lead from someone who is motivated to buy in the next 30 days or sooner" he said. Callahan continued to say "If an agent needs 35 leads on average to sell a home and they have a website that is capturing 1% of the traffic going in there, then they will need between 3,000 to 4,000 visitors to get the number of leads they need to sell a home and that is why MOST AGENTS ONLY SELL 2-3 HOMES PER YEAR from their websites ..... in a day where 80% of homes are sold via the Internet 2-3 homes per year is not a good number" , Callahan went on to say.
"Websites are like mailing lists" he continued "If you buy a mailing list, or have a group of people trying to sell you a mailing list, the most practical question would be "What is the response rate of your mailing list"?...that allows you to find the best list based on the results it gets and easily sort out who you want to do business with but unfortunately most real estate website companies do not think that way"."They are more concerned with the looks and fancy tools and not on how good a job the website does in real time converting traffic into leads, and that is why most agents are frustrated and spending money on marketing packages and websites that do not work", Callahan said.
Callahan says his Real Estate Marketing Nerds (www.realestatemarketingnerds.com)
The Real Estate Marketing Nerds company is now focused on providing the most cutting edge internet marketing tools and resources for agents including video distribution, custom designed classified ads for Craigslist that get search engine rankings, in addition to high conversion rates, custom Press Releases, high profile directory listings in Google and Yahoo, in addition to still setting up pay per click accounts and modifying websites to do a better job capturing leads.
"There are several real estate website companies that produce a good product and agents are best off to have us fix those up and modify them rather than spending thousands and reinventing the wheel building their own website", he finished.
For more information on the real estate marketing packages offered by Real Estate Marketing Nerds visit their website at www.realestatemarketingnerds.com
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