Why shouldn’t Estate Agents rely only on Property Portals?

June 15th, 2008 by admin · No Comments

The recent years have seen a remarkable growth in the number of Property Portals in UK. Big property websites such as Rightmove, Property Finder and Find a Property have become household names. Property portals continue to dominate the search engines. Most of the top 10 results of major search engines like Google are dominated by leading property portals.

Property Portals do have their advantages for Estate agents as they receive thousands of visitors to their websites. However there are many drawbacks for esatet agents who rely on property portals for their online marketing.

The drawbacks of Estate Agents that rely on Property Portals more than their own website are discussed in detail below

Property Portals provide your customer the opportunity to access your competitor Estate Agent’s properties not just yours. You are quite likely to loose your prospective customers as YOUR lead becomes EVERYONE’S lead. But your own web site leads your prospect to YOU ONLY.

Property Portals cannot promote individual web sites on the search engines. It promotes you along with hundreds of other estate agents. On your own web site, you have total control of all promotion, and all the promotion benefits for yourself.

Advertising on Portals can be useful for UK Estate Agents but it should exist in addition to your main website. Links from there to your independent site can draw more prospects to you and enhance your professional image, giving you the competitive edge.

The web address you put into all your ads, on your business cards, and in all other investments you make to market yourself should bring business to YOU — not to another company or to other agents.

When Internet users are researching your estate agent’s website for information about your services, and find that the company either doesn’t have their own Web site they tend not to take them seriously.

If Estate Agents aren’t using their own independent website they are missing out on branding opportunities.