Property Letting Agents | Internet e-Marketing - Letting Agents Cheltenham - Estate Agents

Confused Letting Agents As the Sales and Marketing manager of a residential letting agent in Cheltenham this is a question I often ponder.

My background may be at the root of this as I in fact studied Business Information Technologies at university.

As well as this, factor in also that I run a popular personal website on consciousness studies, and of course run this popular property lettings Blog. Being fairly Internet savvy I tend to spot the errors being made by other companies as well as noticing those of our own agency.

Property lettings often seem to come down to a wild gamble on whether a visitor to Rightmove notices your £500 apartment of one of the dozens on with other agents. This is however only partly true. There are numerous other factors at play and opportunities for agents to stand out, especially in the e-business area of their company.

Having the brightest letting board colour or largest box in the local paper are not going to make the necessary tweaks to marketing strategies that most letting agents are seeking. To tackle changing times in the property markets agents have to think of the bigger picture. It is fact almost all advertising for myriad disparate industries are headed online fast. Newsaper, radio and television advertising are fading away into obscurity.

There is of course something to be said for paying a few of the major portal sites like Rightmove, Findaproperty or Propertyfinder. Two or three of these should easily pay for themselves but do closely monitor whether each is giving you value for money and drop any that are not. Alongside this however one should consider other options. There are some decent free portals out there like Zoomf, and others that are at least pretty cheap.

Perhaps most importantly the agent should look at his or her own home web site. At some point clients will [hopefully] reach that point and be ready to approach us depending on what they find there. Make the landing page welcoming and clear in how it directs the visitor toward using your expert services. Do not have some red and pink, flashing, twirling, monstrosity interspersed with irrelevant pictures and confusing text. Get a good site built and ensure you quality test the content properly by all means necessary (perhaps ask potential clients what they want to see).

Once you have the letting agent’s home page manifique it is merely a question of how to get it found. The web is my friend, a very big place indeed. There is somewhere in the region of 180,000,000+ unique Internet sites currently catalogued. Do not assume the old line from Field Of Dreams,"if you build it they will come...” will hold true here. Face facts that you’re initially an unknown in a huge crowd of nobodies all pushing toward the distant stage.

Check your Alexa rank regularly to see whether you have moved from rank 20,000,000 yet. Any site lower than this position is ignored as it is such trivial visitor numbers so as to be not measurable. Alexa offers interesting data reporting that can help in guiding and monitoring your efforts. Combined with some decent analytic software you will be ready to try new strategies and record results.

The next big issues are then those of Search Engine Optimisation, Paid Search Marketing and Quality Link Building. If you’re not very Internet savvy get yourself some expert consultants for your project, perhaps ShadowFaxMedia and myself. SEO is an in depth subject and most people involved in it realise its difficult to say what exactly is the winning formulae 100% of the time for every business website.

The bottom line is that not all potential customers enjoy property portals with their overwhelming lists of properties, many being duplicates or extremely similar and some even have been long since let. These customers will take to their search engine of choice be it Google, Yahoo or some other. They will then search for a product in the manner that they feel is most likely to find it [your product].

There are a number of factors that come into play as to whether your product or service appears on the first results page from a clients web search. I won't detail them here but interested parties can contact me for a chat via the Contact section of this site.

Ideally you want to be in position 1 for something uber relevant to your niche of the local or national markets. For example try this search in Google: 'luxury property to let in Cheltenham'.

You should see an article from this site in position 1 if you are searching from within the UK.

Try the Google search for the following term: 'lettings agents Cheltenham'

This brings up three of four different links (depending on time of day) leading back to to HMT Lettings whose site has been fully optimisex by myself. Right there on page 1 in Google!

There is far more detail to the story of a successful website, but obviously I am not looking to give away all my secrets here for free. Suffice to say that the vast majority of letting agents in the UK have so far failed to comprehend the e-business market or are just simply not sure how best to embrace it.

My advice to landlords is of course, "contact an agent whom has it already figured out!"

Bruce Fenton
Sales & Marketing Manager
Bruce@musthavepads.com