When my friend and former business partner Liz Chace and I started Residential Properties 30 years ago, we were fairly successful agents in our own right, but we were working for a bunch of ‘old boys, and we thought that there were changes that needed to be made. At about the same time, Bill Gates and his friend and former business partner Paul Allen had just bought the rights to a computer operating system they had developed for IBM called DOS. 10 years later, as we continued to grow and tweak our business model, the World Wide Web was launched to the public as a research tool, and then everything exploded! The late 90's brought us hamsters dancing, toasters flying, and the advent of Google, Netflix, Craigslist, and www.rirealestate.com, Residential Properties first website. The Real Estate industry could have gone the way of the Travel Agent, but instead we embraced the new technology and adapted our business model to take advantage of the incredible marketing opportunity the web has to offer, and now 90% of all homebuyers utilize the internet in their home search. Thanks to my first webmaster, Liz Bodell, www.rirealestate was a great success, easy to navigate with lots of great photographs, and we began to be known for our marketing and our market share grew. Back then we were still spending about a half a million dollars advertizing in newspapers reaching fewer and fewer people. Then one week something amazing happened, the newspaper neglected to publish our ads and we still had great turn outs for our open houses. We soon shifted the bulk of the marketing budget into our new website, residentialproperties.com, and have never looked back. Today, just having a website is not going to give you the advantage you need, people use the internet for information, the more quality information you provide, the longer people will stay on your site, the greater chance you have to convert them to buyers. My website is a robust marketing tool, now administered by Tom Flanagan. In addition to running our IT department, Tom is a syndicated columnist for Inman News, the industry's most authoritative source of market conditions, trends, and technology, an active member of our technology partner the Enterprise Network, and is a sought after tech speaker both nationally and locally. We have introduced agent web sites, stand alone property sites, property and lifestyle videos, and blogging. We have a great interactive mapping tool, lots of community information, and we enjoy great search engine optimization. We syndicate our listings to more than twenty real estate portals, ensuring maximum exposure for our listings. If you are selling your home today, you are doing yourself a disservice if you do not market your home with a Realtor who has a strong and effective web presence. Just having a website and a Facebook page does not guarantee success in Real Estate. When interviewing potential Realtors, check out their website. Does their site have lots of good quality photographs and information about the property and surrounding communities? Do they have good search engine ranking? If not, find a Realtor that does. This Week's Real Estate Insight While we have not been quite as successful as Microsoft, Residential Properties is the number one independant Brokerage firm in Rhode Island, and thoughout the State, the Residential Properties Chevron is almost as recognizable as McDonald's arches. We owe much of our continued success to aggressively utilizing the internet. Apart from Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who could have known what the world would be like 30 years later, certainly not Liz or myself. I can't imagine what the next thirty years will bring, but I do know that I'll be down in Florida, and my son Ian will be dealing with it.The Internet Changed Everything!
- By Michael McCann
- Posted
When my friend and former business partner Liz Chace and I started Residential Properties 30 years ago, we were fairly successful agents in our own right, but we were working for a bunch of ‘old boys, and we thought that there were changes that needed to be made. At about the same time, Bill Gates and his friend and former business partner Paul Allen had just bought the rights to a computer operating system they had developed for IBM called DOS. 10 years later, as we continued to grow and tweak our business model, the World Wide Web was launched to the public as a research tool, and then everything exploded! The late 90's brought us hamsters dancing, toasters flying, and the advent of Google, Netflix, Craigslist, and www.rirealestate.com, Residential Properties first website. The Real Estate industry could have gone the way of the Travel Agent, but instead we embraced the new technology and adapted our business model to take advantage of the incredible marketing opportunity the web has to offer, and now 90% of all homebuyers utilize the internet in their home search. Thanks to my first webmaster, Liz Bodell, www.rirealestate was a great success, easy to navigate with lots of great photographs, and we began to be known for our marketing and our market share grew. Back then we were still spending about a half a million dollars advertizing in newspapers reaching fewer and fewer people. Then one week something amazing happened, the newspaper neglected to publish our ads and we still had great turn outs for our open houses. We soon shifted the bulk of the marketing budget into our new website, residentialproperties.com, and have never looked back. Today, just having a website is not going to give you the advantage you need, people use the internet for information, the more quality information you provide, the longer people will stay on your site, the greater chance you have to convert them to buyers. My website is a robust marketing tool, now administered by Tom Flanagan. In addition to running our IT department, Tom is a syndicated columnist for Inman News, the industry's most authoritative source of market conditions, trends, and technology, an active member of our technology partner the Enterprise Network, and is a sought after tech speaker both nationally and locally. We have introduced agent web sites, stand alone property sites, property and lifestyle videos, and blogging. We have a great interactive mapping tool, lots of community information, and we enjoy great search engine optimization. We syndicate our listings to more than twenty real estate portals, ensuring maximum exposure for our listings. If you are selling your home today, you are doing yourself a disservice if you do not market your home with a Realtor who has a strong and effective web presence. Just having a website and a Facebook page does not guarantee success in Real Estate. When interviewing potential Realtors, check out their website. Does their site have lots of good quality photographs and information about the property and surrounding communities? Do they have good search engine ranking? If not, find a Realtor that does. This Week's Real Estate Insight While we have not been quite as successful as Microsoft, Residential Properties is the number one independant Brokerage firm in Rhode Island, and thoughout the State, the Residential Properties Chevron is almost as recognizable as McDonald's arches. We owe much of our continued success to aggressively utilizing the internet. Apart from Bill Gates and Paul Allen, who could have known what the world would be like 30 years later, certainly not Liz or myself. I can't imagine what the next thirty years will bring, but I do know that I'll be down in Florida, and my son Ian will be dealing with it.
