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Originally posted by competentone
Nice site, though I would suggest you might make the sales pitch from the nice lady a click-able link -- I was bombarded with her speech ever time I hit the back button to look at another page off the main page.
You might want to explore not just marketing to "property managers," but real estate agents generally -- everyone in the business I know handles both sales and rentals. Some of the larger real estate agents have their own employees who handle rentals.
There is a huge "vacuum" of quality when it comes to real estate agents' websites -- or at least that is my reaction to most of them, but some of that may be from the agent's behavior and not from any template they may be using with their online marketing efforts. (I can't get over things like multi-million dollar properties being listed online with only one or two poor quality photos!)
Don't the multiple listings services and major franchising firms already have a pretty good lock on the business of providing "website solutions" for individual agents/property managers? Are you competing with or providing additional online "web presence" to the existing business? Or is your focus on reaching the smaller independent agents currently without a web presence? Is your focus strictly on the retail market or do you offer solutions to the commercial property managers?
As for marketing your product/service, do you really need to be giving a sales person a cut? How effective is your website in doing the "selling"? Are you going to find that you need more of an "order taker" or an extra "tech support" person rather than a sales person if your website itself is strong enough on its "selling"?
I guess I have more questions than comments, though the two can be pretty connected.
Good luck with the venture.
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I'm definitely marketing to realtors, although they do have access to many companies that provide good-quality, affordable realtor websites. Tons of offerings out there. The property management offerings are very thin, that's why I'm going after that segment. My focus is PMs both with and without websites. If they do have a website, chances are its pretty much crap and home-grown.
The website isn't really doing much of a job selling on its own, due to the challenges of getting traffic to the site. "property management website templates" isn't a very popular search term on Google
Yes, I can count on slow, incremental growth, but I really want to get the operation jump-started with a sales effort.
Thanks for the comments and questions... keep them coming. Really valuable.