So this is just a quick Friday message about something I read yesterday.

According to the National Real Estate Agents Study by The Real Estate Book:

“Over the next six months, the channels respondents expect to spend the most money on are: Internet marketing (40%) and the respondents’ own personal websites (32%).”

So think about this. As a brokerage, if 40% of your agents plan to spend money on Internet marketing, wouldn’t you like to benefit as well? Having a solution in which your agents have multiple ways of marketing online, branded and linked to your company website, not only makes your branding consistent but will improve your search engine rankings. If agents want to spend money on Internet marketing, why not have them spend it through you in a way that benefits not only them and their clients, but also the brokerage? 

There are several Internet marketing tools that brokerages should be offering their agents, one of them being Individual Property Websites. Individual Property Websites (IPW) give a property the chance to stand out with its own page, featuring more photos and more personalized information. As part of the Enterprise Platform we offer, your company has access to many templates for Individual Property Websites, which many of our brokerages choose to provide to their agents at a specified cost. Not only does this improve the overall consistency of your website but agents are more likely to take advantage of this marketing tool when they can do it directly through their brokerage; convenience is key. As a brokerage, providing these for a fee helps you offset the money you are spending on technology, a great ROI feature.

These company and Realtor branded IPW’s are not only an effective Internet selling tool for your seller, but also a great SEO tool, driving more traffic back to your brokerage site. One of our Enterprise Network Members are requiring IPW’s for all of their properties; check out Helen Adams Realty online.

What about the 32% of agents who plan to spend money on their own website? Another ROI tool offered by Active Website speaks directly to these agents; Agent Individual Websites. If an agent is going to spend money on their own personal promotion, don’t you want that to benefit your brokerage as well? Giving your agents the ability to set up individual website through you give you more control on how your brokerage is being represented. Your company branding will remain consistent and with each of these pages being set up as an extension to your main website, they can really help boost search engine rankings. Other features Active Website provides are Realtor Team Individual Websites and Individual Office Websites, providing effortless solutions for everyone in your brokerage. These sites are branded to your brokerage but can be customized by the agents, teams or offices with all of their contact information, pictures and properties, as well as links to their social networks and much more.

Lets do some hypothetical math:

Your brokerage consists of 100 agents and 32 of them want to create or maintain an Individual Website. If you charge $50/month for this feature, your ROI for 1 month of is $1,600.

The same brokerage of 100 agents has 40 of them that want IPW’s. If you charge $25 for the life of the listing, your ROI for 1 month of IPW’s is $1,000. That’s assuming each agent only wants one IPW each month – for any brokerage there are likely to be much more.

These are very safe assumptions and still, in just one month, your brokerage has made back $2,600 worth of your technology investment costs.

Regardless of whether your agents use these features through you or through a second party, it’s obvious that Realtors and agents want these features and are willing to pay for them. As a brokerage, it only makes sense to take control over the consistency and benefits of these features by using a technology partner that helps you provide these features to your agents in-house. 

I could go on all day about the many great features our Enterprise Platform has to offer but these are two great features to consider: take control and do it without breaking the bank. 

The original article was posted by MSNBC and you can read it here.