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5 reasons WordPress is the most powerful agent website solution

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Your website is your marketing hub. All your marketing efforts tie back to it in one way or another, which makes it your most valuable digital asset.

With your website in the middle of everything, it must have the capabilities to handle everything you throw at it.

You want a website that is beautifully branded, scalable and tailored to your real estate needs — but also a site that just works and won’t become outdated in a year or two.

There are plenty of website solutions available to real estate agents and brokers — all with different features, usability and price points. The difficulty isn’t finding a solution, but finding the right solution — and I do believe there is a right choice.

5 reasons you should have a WordPress-based site

Below I discuss four categories of WordPress features that make the platform the optimal choice for real estate companies:

1. Ownership

Options such as Real Estate Webmasters, Real Geeks, Placester, eAgentC and Market Leader can make solid offerings for agents. The backend features of these sites are well-suited to the needs of the industry; they come out of the box with property search features and are often completely set up for you.

But the problem I see with these solutions is ownership. Sure you might own the domain name, but the website is not actually yours because you do not have control.

I don’t think any smart agent should let another company have control over their most critical marketing asset.

2. Growth and endurance

You need a website that will not only scale with your company’s growth but will also last longer than a few years before it becomes outdated and needs a complete overhaul.

3. Features and integrations

Real estate-specific solutions, like the ones mentioned above, have built-in features that add convenience for the agent. However, these features, also make the sites more rigid and inflexible, which can become a problem for real estate companies looking to push the envelope with the latest marketing tactics and technology.

WordPress is not built around a few core features created by a small internal team. WordPress is an open-source platform with thousands of developers around the world building plugins and applications that can solve just about any problem you can create.

This means WordPress will integrate with the latest technology available, where dedicated solutions tend to fall behind and become obsolete.

Must-have features

Capabilities via WordPress plugins

The point is you can do most anything with WordPress plugins. Features that would need hours of an expensive developers’ time can be handled in a few clicks by you or a marketing intern.

4. Inbound marketing: SEO and blogging

Targeted traffic is the lifeblood of your website. You need a site that is search-engine friendly and easy to create content within, including blog posts, community pages, landing pages and resource pages.

5. Beautiful, responsive designs

Great branding is crucial to successful real estate agents. Your website needs to be designed beautifully, easily navigated and responsive to mobile devices.

If you currently have separate desktop and mobile sites, I recommend you consider switching to a responsive site design. The upkeep is much simpler, and the experience remains consistent for your visitors across all devices.

The downside

Obviously, I think WordPress is a great solution, and I recommend it to everyone. However, WordPress is not perfect.

Setup

Whereas real-estate specific solutions come set up for you, there is more responsibility on your shoulders when it comes to getting a WordPress site off the ground.

Learning curve

Real estate-specific solutions have backend features made for agent-specific tasks that will help you get going with your site faster.

Think of these features like the bumper rails you can set up on a bowling lane — they will make your work easier and keep you out of the gutters. But just like bowling bumpers they will restrict what your site is capable of as well.

So who are WordPress sites for?

WordPress sites are great for small-time, individual agents as well as large, regional and national firms.

But I believe companies that want to stay on the cutting edge of digital marketing and are always ready to adapt to the ever-changing marketing landscape will enjoy the power and flexibility of WordPress the most.

Make no mistake, a great website will take a lot of work regardless of the platform you use, just make sure all that hard work goes into an asset that can keep up with your ambitions.

Are you using WordPress for your real estate website? Please share why you love or hate it in the comments section below.

Josh Brown is the founder of Alpha Agent. You can follow him on Facebook or Twitter.

Email Josh Brown.