Being a successful Realtor® means staying ahead of the game and using the latest technology to yours and your clients’ advantage.

While the average realtor focuses on the utilizing the main listing sites, such as Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, etc., and directories, it’s important for you to go a step further and make your listings stand out from the crowd.

What is a Single-Property Website?

A single-property website simply refers to a web page that focuses 100% on a single home that is on the market for sale or rent. They don’t usually include details of other properties so the focus of the reader isn’t pulled away from that particular home that is being marketed. Information found on the website would normally include property features, images, details of planned open houses, the listing agent and how to schedule a personal tour. They may also include video walkthroughs and 3D virtual tours.

These are a unique way to promote a property and when used properly in places like Facebook and other social media outlets can help to attract potential buyers and sellers.

You really do need to add single property websites to your armory so you can attract both prospective buyers and sellers. Single property websites take real estate listings to the another level and below are a few reasons why…

1) Keep the focus on your listing

When you send details of your listing to prospective buyers you want to keep their eyes on your listing for as long as possible and to avoid the distractions of other similar properties.

The more popular listing websites tend to clutter everything and confuse buyers as they search for properties that meet their search criteria. Instead of potentially sending prospective buyers off to view other properties, a single property website helps you to avoid that situation.

2) Control everything that the buyer sees

Unlike when you submit a property to the MLS and it’s picked up by other listing sites, you have 100% control of what people see on your single property website, and the quality of what they’re viewing. How often have you submitted a property with great quality photographs, only to see when they’re viewed on a syndicated listings website that the images come out small, dark and pixelated? This is because some of those site reduce the resolution of the images so much that they become so deteriorated that it’s hard to make out some of the details of the rooms in them.

With a single property website you can embed nice, large and bright images that showcase every aspect of the home. You’re also not limited to the numbers of photographs that you show, whereas the MLS will restrict you to a certain number.

3) Add more visual content

You really want to enhance the experience for a visitor when they look at your properties. The fact that you’ve got them checking out the home online, make the most of it and give them more reasons to want to pick up the phone to schedule a visit to take a live look at the home. If you feel you can justify the cost, then add in a 3D virtual tour, using something like the Matterport. Let people virtually walk around a home from the comfort of their armchair. The price of 3D virtual tours has come down dramatically over the last few years, and if you want to take the time to learn then you can even do these yourself.

If you don’t want to add a virtual tour, what about having a short-video teaser?  Hire a videography to walk through the house with his camera and also add some drone aerial footage to paint more of a picture of the surrounding area of the house. Sometimes we see links on property listings that advertise a virtual tour, and then it turns out to be a slideshow of the images that people have already seen in the listing – except that they are set to some background music. It would be interesting to see how many people actually view all of the snapshot images and watch the slideshow too. In our experience we’ve seen that people will watch the short video teasers that we’ve produced, which will in turn, entice them to click through the photographs.

4) More user-friendly

A single-property website is designed to be user-friendly and designed around that single property and not around the thousands of properties that are being fed into the site. Since the focus is on that one property, the user needn’t fear about clicking on the wrong link and being taken away from the listing. This is always a concern with the larger listing websites.

5) Show off your own professionalism

So above we have explained the various benefits of single property websites that focus purely on the listing of the property. But, offering these to your prospective selling clients can make you stand out too. We’ve seen it for ourselves, when we’ve accompanied realtors to presentation in order to help explain the technology that we provide and how it will help to get their homes in front of more eyes. When sellers see the property sites, their eyes light up and will often say that other agents they’ve spoken to don’t offer this service. Single property websites are just one way to show a seller that you are prepared to invest in their listing and not just add it to the MLS and hope for the best.

So those are just a few reasons why you may want to consider adding single property websites to your real estate agent toolbox. You may want to try and add one for your next listing and then solicit feedback from your client to get their thoughts.