San Diego Housing Traffic
The chart below shows the unique traffic to www.brokerforyou.com for September 2016.
Yes, in September brokerforyou.com generated over 25,400 unique visitors!
Many times various website owners quote traffic by saying how many hits their website generated in a month. if you look to the right column on this chart it does show the monthly hits and for September that was over 141,300. But, the reason I don’t quote that is because many hits could be generated by just one visitor. I’m not going to get into how hits are calculated here, except to say that anyone who is promoting their site by saying how many hits it receives is really being misleading or very naïve.
The best way, to determine real visitors is by unique visitors, where one unique IP address is counted in a 24-hour period.
San Diego Housing Traffic
So how does brokerforyou.com compare with other San Diego real estate site? Now you should know, that one of the key factors that many believe is taken into consideration in the Google ranking algorithm is the age of the website. Obviously, websites that have been around longer rank better than websites that were just created in the last few years. Sure, there are a few exceptions to this is just a general rule, but, for residential real estate sites it is pretty accurate!
Below is a traffic chart for a 10 year old Del Mar real estate site. if you look at the unique traffic for September 2016 on the Del Mar site you’ll see that it was almost 550 unique visitors.
So even though this Del Mar site is over 10 years old, brokerforyou.com generated just for the month of September 20 16, generated 46 times more unique traffic!
#1 Real Estate Website Secret  – San Diego Housing Traffic
From my experience, residential real estate sites in major metropolitan areas need to generate tens of thousands of unique visitors per month if they want to have a possibility of at least generating one actual client. So, if you have a residential real estate and your generating around 500 unique visitors per month, you may be asking yourself how come you’re not getting any actual clients. Well, now you know!
So, should a real estate professional even have their own real estate site? In my opinion the answer is definitely yes! If you’ve contacted a potential client any other way excluding from the Internet ( let’s say at a social event, a civic event or through one of your interest groups) you can almost be assured that before they decide to do business with you, whether that buying or selling property they are going to search the Internet to see what they can find out about you and to look at your site to get some background about your accomplishments and interests. Therefore, without your own website you would be at a distinct disadvantage.
Plus, if you do things right and build up your website, your search engine placement should improve, your unique traffic go up and eventually you will be generating a couple of new transactions directly generated by your website.
Also, having your own website is a valuable asset when you’re ready to retire you have something to sell! let’s look at what it cost to have a website:
Approximately to have your URL registered runs about $12-$15 a year. To save money on your address registration I would recommend that you register your address for a minimum of five years at a time. Now, you need to pay for hosting. I can set you up with reliable hosting for just 9.95 per month! so, for just about $132 a year you can maintain your site.
San Diego Housing Traffic
So what would be your possible return on investment (naturally not counting your time in posting articles and keeping your site current with content) for setting up and maintaining your own website over a five-year period? For a five-year period, your hosting and registration fees would come to approximately $660. Now, here in San Diego the average residential home price is about $500,000. So, let’s be super conservative, or depending on your point of view, very pessimistic and say that over that five-year period you generated only one new sale from your website. Also, let’s say your commission was just 2 1/2%. This would work out to be approximately $12,500. So let me ask you, would you invest $660 to generate a $12,500 commission?
Now, I know this does not count your work and time put in to update and maintain the site. But, if you use a WordPress platform which I would highly suggest maintaining your site and putting fresh content on is relatively very simple. How simple, I’m certain almost any middle school student would know how to do it! But,, I still didn’t account for the time that this would take. But there is a great market out there for new agents, and even larger real estate brokerage the possibly buy your site when you’re ready to move out of the area or just retire. Therefore, I personally offset the maintenance and content creation time that you put into your site by the fact that you’ll be able to recoup way more than that on a possible sale.
Another point to consider, Is if you really develop your website and its generating thousands of unique visitors, it should be quite easy to sell some sidebar space to your favorite escrow company, title company, home maintenance company or mortgage professional. Actually, if done right your advertising revenue can well exceed your basic annual cost to maintain your site. Yes, your website could easily become another source of real estate advertising income.
Let’s look at this another way — real estate referral fees of 25 to 30% are pretty common for a solid new client. So let’s say that you agreed to a 30% referral fee for the client in the transaction noted above, that generated you a $12,500 commission. This referral fee would cost you $3750! Now compare that, to the $660 for the basic URL registration and hosting of your site for five years, and assuming that it generated just one closed $500,000 sale. This is a good reason to have more that one real estate website!
San Diego Housing Traffic
I think I’ve been pretty conservative in my example above, but I know there’s many who may not agree for various reasons. So why not take a moment, and leave a comment below on what you think about this article. Yes, whether you think it’s way too conservative, or overly optimistic, I’d appreciate your views.
Lastly, I’d like to say that for the past seven years or so I’ve considered myself semi-retired and am now about to go into full retirement. therefore, my main San Diego real estate website, brokerforyou.com is up for sale. If you would like to get further information about this site just email me at bob@brokerforyou.com. I also am going to be selling a number of neighborhood (downtown,PB,San Diego FSBO,National City,UTC,Sorrento Valley & more) websites mostly set up for here in San Diego but I also have ones for Orange County, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento and San Jose. These are all well-aged websites that are generating traffic right now. You can get a real estate aged (appx. 10 years old) website but you would be getting years of content, one or more high-ranking Youtube videos and the fact that most sites rank on page one/two for their neighborhood top-level key-word phrases.I’d say that the typical real estate agent would be very lucky to get one page 1 placement for their city-specific neighborhood key-word phrase unless they were working in a very noncompetitive locale.
I’m going to be converting all the sites over to the WordPress platform so they’ll all be easy to maintain and update. If you should be interested in one of these sites, again just send me an email and let me know the location that you’re interested in and I’ll send you specific information about the site that we have for that area. For all the areas outside of San Diego I just have one website available for sale for each. Within San Diego County I do have a number of websites for areas as far south as Chula Vista, East to Alpine and Jamul,West for La Jolla, Pacific beach, Encinitas, & Del Mar and North for Fallbrook, Mira Mesa Carmel Valley and Poway. Once these sites are sold I will not be creating any new ones for these areas. So even if you have a site now, investing in one of these generic San Diego named neighborhood sites could turn out to be one of your best investments in your real estate career.
San Diego Housing Traffic
