8 Reasons Why All Real Estate Brokerages Should Have A WordPress Based Company Website

WordPress and Real Estate are a match made in tech marketing heaven if you ask me. WordPress’s flexibility, seo elements, and relative ease of use, coupled with an unbelievable community of users (and corresponding online documentation) have allowed it to become the world’s most popular content management system… And real estate agents in droves are using wordpress every day as the backbone for their entire online web marketing efforts.

But… there seems to be a relative low number of Brokers using wordpress to build web entities at the company level. Instead of going into why this is so, I think it might be better to illustrate the reasons why most real estate brokers should consider scrapping their current site favor of something wordpress based.

8 Reasons Why The Bigshot Real Estate Broker Should Consider Switching To WordPress

1. Save money on hosting!

I recently had a conversation with a real estate broker who was paying one of the reputable real estate web vendors $300/month to have his site hosted… Ouch! With wordpress, hosting can be relatively cheap. ($7/month with bluehost or hostgator would probably suffice for most smaller brokerages.)

2. Save money on website maintenance fees.

The same broker who was paying $300 for hosting was paying $100 an hour every time he needed something on his site edited.  With wordpress, learning to create or edit content is generally fairly simple. Sure, there are things that can be complicated for most real estate brokers, but usually finding free or inexpensive wordpress help is no big deal. (Try typing “need wordpress help” over at http://search.twitter.com to see what I mean )

3. WordPress Plugins!

Bottom line. WordPress plays with everything! Wanna embed a youtube gallery with your latest posts? No problem. How about image links to all your social profiles. No problem. IDX integration. Yeah, usually not a problem.  Lead capture forms? Free. Just Sold Stats? Free. (With Zillow or similar integration.) Google Maps, Analytics, Chat, etc… You bet. Lots of free toys  play nicely with open source,  free wordpress.

4. Inexpensive Design

There are thousands of wordpress templates out there… any of which would word fine with real estate. Now… of course some are better than others, and I have my favorites (over there in the sidebar,) but bottom line is this: You don’t need to pay a designer 2,3, 5k just to get your website skinned with wordpress. And… if you don’t like your first attempt, changing themes is an unbeliebably painless process…

5. Search Engine Optimization

WordPress is search engine friendly right out of the box. There are some awesome plugins and tweaks that can seriously enhance the search engine friendliness of your wordpress site, but stuff that a lot of  professional SEO’s would charge thousands for can be had with wordpress pretty much off the shelf. (That said, you still should pursue the tweaks I’ve alluded to here.)

6. WordPress has become sort of a universal language

Meaning this… If you recruit a new agent and he/she needs a website or a blog, she or he will likely “speak wordpress.” Ok… maybe this isn’t fair to say yet, but give it 5 years..

7. WordPress is extremely conducive to the creation of neighborhood, agent, & “one type offer” style niche sections.

What do I mean here? Well, let’s put it this way… If you came to me and said you needed a new “short sale” website to drive local distressed property owners to, we could build you the “site” in about 1 hour. Why? We wouldn’t really be building you a new site. With wordpress, aggregating content onto a single page, with a customizable header, nav, and sidebar – all under the same install and domain — is no big trick.

8. Last, and most importantly….WordPress will enable you to Establish Local Market Dominance by  taking advantage of Agent Generated Content in a way that’s infinitely more efficient than your current situation!

So that’s it, 8 reasons why large real estate brokerages need to switch the company website over to WordPress.