Why WP 4 Estate Agents?

I have worked for a few Estate Agents here in Spain (that’s where I’m based!), the Real Estate market has taken some pretty radical changes over the past couple of years, some for the good and some for the not so good! And Estate Agents have had to evolve or shut up shop, if they haven’t evolved and taken on new marketing ideas to get business through the doors then they will not be around for much longer.

The BBC states that over 75% of people searching for a property in their country or abroad, use the internet to search for properties for sale and information related to areas and facilities. That was a few years ago, chances are the stats are even closer to the 80% over above by now, so having a shop window on the internet is even more important than having an office on the High Street. In fact, here in Spain that is pretty much the case in our days, more and more Agents have had to cut costs in one form or another. Before you could walk down the street and there was an Estate Agency on pretty much ever corner!

Being able to add new properties to your website and updating information for visitors to see is also just as important, before CMS’s were as openly available many websites were built statically (some of the best websites still are) so the knowledge of HTML was vital to producing a website that is updated on a frequent basis and to a high standard. To have a website like this, you are going to need to pay someone either on a full time or part time basis to do this – if they are good at what they do then it will not be cheap for you to maintain. If you can do this yourself, then you are potentially saving yourself and your Estate Agency thousands of Euros (Pounds, Dollars) per year in maintenance and updating costs. Put that together with SEO (search engine optimization) and your talking mega bucks!

Not only can you make WP search engine friendly using mod rewrite, you can optimize your own website with tools that you will find on this website free of charge, ping other sites and search engines with newly created or edited content, your visitors can subscribe to your website using and RSS news reader or by signing up to updates via your own website and create downloads of media for your visitors to see. The list goes on … The possibilities are endless.

So WordPress is the future … and on this website I will show you why!

A bit about me!

As I said above, I have worked for Estate Agents in Spain for quite some time now … I have owned two Spanish property forums, one worked well but I sold it (wish I hadn’t now!) the other one is pretty much dead on its knees! I have designed dozens if not hundreds of Real Estate websites throughout Spain and Europe – using various CMS platforms and static websites.

I have been doing SEO for a couple of Estate Agencies for the past five or six years now, they still haven’t given me the boot so I must be doing something right! And I own about 20 Estate Agency websites myself which I out source the thousands of leads to members of a network that I also do work with (Alphashare).

Why start WP4EA?

I started a Spanish Real Estate Forum a few years back which its main aim was for Estate Agents to club together and learn about online promotion, SEO, web design and marketing. Another main factor for the forum was for Estate Agents to network amongst one another and to collaborate with other companies (property sharing) which is quite normal in Spain. However, it didn’t quite work out that way but it was a busy little forum and there were hundreds of active members.

I later sold the forum, which I regret now!

Back then, very few of the Estate Agents were interested in SEO or online marketing, however – now I have the same people that were not interested in what we were offering back then, coming to ask questions on SEO and web design (big slap on the head)! Now Estate Agents in Spain know the importance of the internet and see how it can make or break their companies – they have also seen how well the ones that are now ten steps ahead of them are doing by heavily marketing on portals, SEO on their websites, PPC campaigns, e-mail marketing and other forms of media online such as videos now. Now they all want a slice of the pie.

Just recently we have had a big request for CMS websites, so agents can freely edit their own websites – many static websites to WordPress website conversions and many companies wanting to break away from software companies that have tied them down into a system that they can not control themselves and in some cases … they don’t even own their own websites. What we have been able to do is give them their freedom back and help them save money by cutting out these over priced web companies taking them for every penny they have.

The BIG but is, no one has any money! So doing something like WP 4 Estate Agents seemed like the most logical thing to do and the cheapest! Hopefully this website will not only help the Estate Agents that are here in sunny Spain but also throughout the world, that’s my hope anyway.

What I post here on WP 4 Estate Agents is my personal opinion and what I have come across whilst shifting through thousands of websites on the net, I am a friendly guy, so if there is something I have missed or there is something that would be of interest on this website, then please contact me – I am more than willing to have good information posted on this website.

Kindest regards,

Richie Aubin

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