Are most real estate investors, agents and companies missing out on their most valuable wealth building asset?
Real estate sales and direct investment has been responsible for a great deal of wealth building and income generation throughout history. However, many Realtors and investors are sadly neglecting the incredible wealth building power of their real estate websites.
The vast majority of individual property professionals and companies fail to recognize this. At the very least, they resist change while others pocket 7 to 9 figures from their web assets alone. It is one of the best ways to attract leads on a daily basis. So why are real estate websites so important today and what can industry players do to capitalize on the opportunities they provide?
Real Estate Websites Should Be More than Just a Placeholder
Many real estate agents and investors continue to maintain their websites as a basic business listing. They know they are told they need them, they just haven’t made the time to figure out how to work them correctly. Some companies have even refused to adopt technology all together.
At a minimum, these companies should be using the web to improve branding and attract more real estate leads.
This doesn’t even have to be that difficult or expensive. Fortunately, many are getting better about integrating technology and at least giving it a shot. Still, many fail to understand that this could be one of their most valuable assets.
The High Value of Real Estate Websites in 2014
Beyond the ability to use the internet to generate real estate leads and for follow up marketing, websites are considered some of the most precious real estate.
Don’t believe it? Just look at some of the 9 figure sums thrown at brand new real estate related tech startups recently. Or even just at the amazing transition of RealEstate.com which first sold for $8.5M, and then was bought out by Trulia as a part of the Market Leader deal for $355M. It wasn’t even the number one property site on Google.
This clearly offers as much potential to build wealth as direct investment, though it can be harder, take longer to develop and be more expensive. Still, with a little more effort, many could be racking up huge wealth online while earning a high end income from bricks and mortar.
5 factors that make websites worth so much:
- Domain name desirability and limited availability
- Volume of web traffic
- Control over the market and flow of leads
- Cash flow from advertising
- Current hunger for yield
Of course, this means that not every website launched is going to be worth $100 million. It’s going to need to have a desirable internet domain name, be generating traffic, and at least capable of becoming a cash cow in its own right.
6 More Ways to Build Wealth in Real Estate
Here are some other strategies and paths for building significant value in a real estate company or entity and position it as an attractive buy for corporate giants with bigger pockets:
- Build a massive social media following and control great custom social URLs
- Dominate the local market or a specific niche
- Create a hot buzz worthy brand (sometimes larger firms will take on smaller brand identities if they are well loved enough)
- Corner the market or secure future income with contracts and exclusive partnerships
- Land the top talent and make them fiercely loyal
- Be the first with a new twist or trend that has a lot of income potential
