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The owner of my company approached me expressing an interest in having me build him a website to promote the sale of his house(s.) He owns a complex type thing consisting of three houses with a shared driveway. The entire property is probably worth $1.5-2 million, and he wants to do the For Sale By Owner thing to avoid brokerage fees. Fair enough. The idea of building a custom, one-time-use website to promote a run-of-the mill property sale just strikes me as odd, though. Is this something that is actually done, by anyone, ever? It just seems, with the dozens upon dozens of sites out there for FSBO listings, and the dozens of easy ways to post and share photo galleries, like a waste of time. He's had a professional photographer come through and take hundreds of photos, and they came out great. I think if he/we just listed the property in as many FSBO places like that as we could, as well as obvious places like Craigslist, that'd work. But that idea didn't seem to satisfy him. He wants "a website." I don't understand how one would even get traffic to such a website, or what purpose it would serve other than being a gigantic photo gallery. Complicating matters, he doesn't seem to know what he actually wants. He wants "a website" but doesn't seem to want to offer any input whatsoever on any of the details of what he's looking for. I sent him some links to some templates, asking him to choose a favorite; no response. I asked him what he would want to use for a domain name; no response. It's getting frustrating. I'm a software developer, not a real estate guy. I can build the site, but I don't feel it should be solely my responsibility to make every decision about what the "deliverable" should be and the owner seems to think that he's given me everything I need to just take his request and run with it and I can feel an impatient vibe coming from him. Anyway, I guess my real questions are a) is the idea of making a full-blown website for a property sale as ludicrous as I'm convincing myself it is, and b) if so, how does promotion of FSBOs in the $1.5-2M range generally go down?
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Dec 20, 2015 18:46
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| # ? Apr 29, 2024 19:53 |
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Why in the world would you not use a template (e.g. wordpress, squarespace, etc)?
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Dec 21, 2015 04:58
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I asks he will pay you a flat fee or hourly rate for creating the site to specification, once y'all actually agree on said specs. The question is, if something goes wrong or he fails to sell his house and blames your site for not delivering the buyer, could it affect your day-to-day employment?
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Dec 21, 2015 05:47
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It is not crazy at all for a $2 million property to have an informational website. The most likely route of promotion to generate traffic would be a URL listed on a yard sign and printed flyers in a box in the yard, and the purpose of the website would be to provide photos, videos, and other information to already interested buyers. Your goal would not be to generate cold leads from a random website.
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Dec 21, 2015 06:51
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I have definitely seen domains that were 123fakestreet.com, but usually they were done by agents and linked to the MLS listing or agent's web site. The issue is more that the design process is becoming an Oatmeal comic.
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Dec 21, 2015 14:50
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app posted:Why in the world would you not use a template (e.g. wordpress, squarespace, etc)? I definitely plan on using a template; like I said I sent the owner a bunch to look at. I was debating WordPress but I'm also fine with just slicing up a PSD or using a plain HTML template and throwing in a few slideshows with some free slideshow tool. I'm decent with Drupal but have never used WordPress before. Drupal seems like overkill.
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Dec 21, 2015 15:23
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SpelledBackwards posted:I asks he will pay you a flat fee or hourly rate for creating the site to specification, once y'all actually agree on said specs. The question is, if something goes wrong or he fails to sell his house and blames your site for not delivering the buyer, could it affect your day-to-day employment? The implications for what happens to my day-to-day employment (or at the very least the owner of the company's opinion of me) if things go sour with the sale have definitely been on my mind, but I feel like if I carry it as far as being able to get the site up and have it be decent looking, I'll have done all that's expected of me. I just hope "what's expected of me" doesn't become "solely responsible for all online aspects of the house sale," which is what I'm afraid of. Juggling listings on a dozen FSBO listing websites, being the only guy who monitors emails pertaining to the sale as we'll presumably not be handing out the owner's personal email directly, and all that, does feel daunting. As far as the flat fee or hourly rate goes, I think this is just something I'll be doing on company time when I'm at work anyway. My boss is out on vacation all week so it's not like he'll be feeding me any new projects or riding me about pending ones; as long as I can keep up with day-to-day things I'm confident I can do the house listing/description website. (In case it's not clear, my boss is not the owner.) BEHOLD: MY CAPE posted:It is not crazy at all for a $2 million property to have an informational website. The most likely route of promotion to generate traffic would be a URL listed on a yard sign and printed flyers in a box in the yard, and the purpose of the website would be to provide photos, videos, and other information to already interested buyers. Your goal would not be to generate cold leads from a random website. Gotcha. I wasn't expecting the website to be generating leads on its own (although I think the owner might have this unrealistic expectation that it would), and it'd more just be a landing zone for potential buyers who'd actually find the property/website through some other means. When I said "promoting" I meant I fear that the owner thinks that you can just put up a website about a house for sale in some dark corner of the internet and expect people to just stumble upon it. Our conversation definitely gave me the impression that he thought the site could generate leads; I'm fully aware that we need to list the house elsewhere to get traffic to the site. Delysid fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Dec 21, 2015 |
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Dec 21, 2015 15:48
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I saw a couple when I was recently buying a new house and they were nice. The main reason to have one is that the real estate listing things (MLS, redfin, realtor.com, zillow etc) have lovely formats, low picture resolution, and a very limited amount of text you can type in. It would be basically impossible for me to list all the selling points of my house in the 1000 character limit that they give you, let alone present them in a nice way with high quality images. If I were making a page to sell my house, I would keep it in a simple format - a nice list of features at the top, an image slideshow (probably not automated) where each picture has additional optional text below it to spell out more features and the pictures are high quality, and then some simple contact information at the bottom. I would make sure that google could index the page, but mainly I would link to the page on sites and in the MLS listing basically as a "For more detailed information, visit 221bbakerstreet.com" after the other info. For a $2,000,000 house, if you increase the sale price by 0.1% by having a nice website then it's worth it. In more likelihood, you would increase the sale price by 0% a lot of the time, or 1-5% some of the time, depending on whether your site brings in a potential buyer that otherwise wouldn't have bothered to visit your house. But on average I think it would certainly be worth 4-8 hours of work to build a nice little site.
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Dec 21, 2015 21:53
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