The following article is taken from Eye on Spain, www.eyeonspain.com

Why You Need a Website To Market Your Rental Property

This article is taken from the popular Eye on Spain ebook “Top 10 Strategies To Explode Your Rental Enquiries”. Find out more about the ebook here.

Rental strategies ebookThis may seem obvious and you may have already created your own website, but having your own website to market your property for rental is, as they say, a no-brainer!

However, having a website is just not enough. More and more people are starting to do it and soon everyone will be doing it, thereby increasing competition.

At the moment there are still huge opportunities with having your own site. Let’s take a look at what they are:

1. You are not limited as to how much information you can put on your site. You are limited when you list your property on portals.

2. You can generate traffic to your site from paid search and from natural search engine rankings.

3. Competition is generally low so it’s easy to do.

4. Websites can be built for free, you just need to buy a domain name.

5. You don’t have to pay anyone to build a website for you.

6. You have full control over what you want to show and how you show it.

7. You can incorporate some marketing initiatives into your site (we’ll cover this later).

8. If you generate your own leads then you don’t have to pay any commission to a rental agent. You get to keep all the money.

9. Once you build it and market it, it will always be there for you working away bringing you leads. It’s mostly in the initial effort you put in.

If you are serious about marketing your property then you really do need to consider building your own website.

Why do you pay website rentals portals to list your property?

Why do all rental agents have websites?

Because that’s where most enquiries come from…the Internet.

If you don’t already have a website then here’s some help to get you on your way:

1. Visit http://sites.google.com. Google Sites allows you to create your own website with an easy to use graphical user interface. It takes a little bit of time to find your way around and understand all the features but it is free and does allow you to create your own site quite quickly and easily. They even host it for you for free.

2. Although Google Sites does provide you with a domain name, it’s in the form of http://sites.google.com/mywebsite. This is obviously not very good for various reasons. You really do need to register your own domain and there are many companies that offer this service. http://www.godaddy.com is the biggest and cheapest for registering .com type domains. If your intended audience is predominantly, for example, in the UK, you should look to register a .co.uk domain name (I will explain why later). You can use a service such as http://www.123-reg.co.uk to do this.

3. Choose a domain name that means something and is not too long. Try looking for a domain name relative to your community name or the area where it is. For example, if you have a property at Roda Golf, you may want something like www.rentalrodagolf.co.uk. I’ll discuss this further in strategy 3. In Google sites there is a section that allows you to tell it what your domain name is for your website and then tells you what to do next to point your domain to your new website. It’s all very easy to do.

4. In the next strategy we’ll be discussing forms. Forms are important on the website as they allow you to capture enquiries which are what you are ultimately trying to generate. Google Sites makes this easy again with what they call a “spreadsheet form”. When someone fills out the form on your website it automatically places the details in a Google spreadsheet, in real time. It’s all very clever and it’s all free. So setting up your own website is not that complicated and you will see in the following sections why this strategy is so powerful.

If you use a free service such as Google Sites to host your website then your only cost is the domain name, which for less than 10 Euros per year is nothing really. There really is no excuse.

What are you waiting for? Start building your website now and get more rental bookings!

This article is taken from the popular Eye on Spain ebook “Top 10 Strategies To Explode Your Rental Enquiries” which offers the top methods you can use to generate more enquiries and more money from your rental property.  Find out more about the ebook here.

 


Comments:

CommentDateUser
Good advice Justin! We have our own website for an apartment that we rent out on short lets www.theapartmentcalahonda.co.uk and while it is also listed on rental websites, we also receive leads directly through to our site from those looking specifically for private lets in the area. Alana2/8/2011 1:37:00 PMAlana Burton
We have our own website do you put blogs on the rental websites and how do you do it? gilbar2/8/2011 5:06:00 PMgilbar
we have our own website www.casacooper.com but I think you need a reasonable skill level to be able to do it properly! Many rental websites that have been done by the owner look tacky and unprofessional with lots of spelling mistakes - that would put me off as a potential renter. I think it will be a long time before everyone is doing it. I would have thought the age group of people who own a second home is likely to be less "IT literate" for one thing. Just a generalisation of course - I am mid 50's but an an ICT teacher and spend a considerable amount of time keeping my website up to date.2/8/2011 8:06:00 PMLinda
The only thing I would add to this is pay for your own hosting, rather than use google sites. You can get hosting at somewhere like hostgator for around 5 dollars a month or less, which will adequately cover one website. Then, if you don't know much about setting up a website, you can set up a wordpress blog with their instant installer. Wordpress really is easy to learn, reasonably SEO friendly straight out of the box and easy to make it more so with popular plugins. Plus, you can add posts and pages to your site without messing about with background html code if you don't want to.2/8/2011 9:59:00 PMSummer
All great advice from Justin. Remember having the best website in the world and not having it found is like having the best restaurant in the world and locking your doors to the public. It needs to be seen. I have a 500 page website www.thisisspain.info and I spend huge amounts of time getting it linked to other sites, uploading other people's sites to mine and generally making the word aware of it. Follow Justin's advice and you cannot go wrong! 2/9/2011 1:37:00 AMSteve Hall
DIY / Free websites are generally very poorly designed and not very search engine friendly. Indeed, most are not even user friendly! They can limit what can / can't be done and are often badly written, have poor spelling and grammar. The site owner often have no web design skills and tend to 'over egg the pudding'. I wouldn't recommend it most of the time but it depends on your objectives and audience. Certainly if you want to get your site noticed by the masses you need skill and time... that's why most of us advertise on many sites NOT just one site. ... If you stop to think about it the Internet gets bigger by 100s of sites every minute so it gets harder every minute to get your website on page 1 of Google / Yahoo. And 99% of you will have a site that only attracts a handful of visitors a month... if it was all so easy eh? (call me cynical, but is Justin the master of hype so you buy is overpriced eBook?)... well all the info' is already out there if you care to look.5/20/2011 1:22:00 AMZoe
<p>i enjoy stores that allow you to keep the reatnl for a few days, even if it is a new release. if im going to get in the car and drive to a store to rent a movie (likely for even more money than On Demand), then i want to keep it for a few days, maybe watch it twice. i also like seeing older products in the store, whether it be movies, video games, etc. there is nothing wrong with offering VHS or N64 game reatnls cheap!</p> 2/12/2014 6:59:51 PMOrochimaru