Check Out My Home's Custom Website, It's Shiny

The custom website for homes (ie: www.1234myhomeroad.com) is always my favorite discussion with agents in the Maison Nouveau office. Being a major selling point for many agents, the last thing I want to do is insult anyone else's marketing strategy, but this is one fad that is extremely dated and should go away.

The first and most important point regarding the home custom site is the ability for users to be able to find it. It takes at a minimum 6 weeks for an optimized website to get crawled by the largest search engine in the world Google and I've seen some take up to 4 months. Even still once it's been crawled and categorized a buyer would have to search for the exact property address in order to find it. No matter how bad you wish a user could search for "East Bay Home" and have your home be first, this will never happen. So really the only way someone will ever hear about 1234myhomeroad.com is through a sign rider or advertising it, which is the route many agents often take.

The second point is the ability to capture the data of users who visit the site. Home custom sites are typically built by a third party or even a title company and done very cut/paste. They most likely do not include a sitemap or metatags, two integral pieces for having a great website nor do they have the greatest ability to capture the visitors data. The major real estate players all employ methods to capture information of people that visit their website. So in essence by having a custom site you are in fact driving web traffic away from a better vehicle for capturing possible buyers information. Not too smart.

And finally, custom sites are promoted in such a light that the seller is much more web savvy for going with a particular agent. I'm not denying that certain sites don't look great and it's important that your home looks dressed to impress, but why can't that be done without discounting my first two points? Truthfully you can't unless their company has a great website. Because of the temporary nature of custom sites, they are built to put a smile on one person's face, the seller. What would put a smile on my face is selling my home and I would want it marketed in the smartest and most successful way possible.

So when you're getting those home valuations make sure to discuss the agents online marketing strategy and if their whole package revolves around a custom site, better think twice. I'd rather the agent saves their $7.99 in domain costs and place my home on traffic generating websites, like Realtor.com or even Zillow.com.