AfterTek

Your house is posted for sale on numerous online sites, you’ve got a virtual tour and a “for sale” sign on the lawn, but does your house have its very own Web page? A site devoted to your for-sale home, perhaps with a Web address like 123oakstreet.com could be one of the latest trends in real estate marketing that could make selling your home easier.

Of course this doesn’t mean that you have to stop using real estate agents and companies to help you sell these homes. Placing your home online is just an easier way of bringing in the public. Finding a good real estate company(such as Ron Borders and Bozeman Montana Real Estate) is still a much needed thing for when you acctually sell the house.

Probably one of the most basic of these “single-listing” Web sites, as they are sometimes called, simply contain the same information that’s found on the local multiple listing service. But MLSListings.com allows only concise descriptions of homes and a maximum of nine photos, while most property-specific sites let agents and sellers post many pictures and lots of text. And they can include virtual tours or post documents such as property inspection reports online too, a convenience for potential buyers.

“We get literally hundreds and hundreds of hits,” said agent Jay Lord of Alain Pinel Realtors, who said he and his partner started creating such sites for their listings a couple of years ago. On most agent or brokerage Web sites, buyers might have to click through several layers before they find photos of the home they’re interested in, he said. But by creating a dedicated page for each home, “instead of focusing on marketing the Realtor or Realtors, you’re really marketing the home.”

Agents are creating sites for properties modest and opulent, from one-bedroom condos to luxury estates. They typically include the home’s Web address in all their advertising and marketing and may attach a “rider” to their lawn sign that points the way to the site.

“It’s effective because it gives people more information,” said Coldwell Banker Nancy Adele Stuhr, who uses a sign rider to advertise a listed home’s Web site instead of attaching a box full of paper fliers to lawn signs. “People can go home and get better information from my Web site than they would maybe get from a flier.”

The domain name of the home’s Web site might be specific; Stuhr is using 561Bushstreet.com for a current listing in Mountain View, for example. But some agents, like Audrey Sutton, go for broader names, like hilltopway.com for a listing in Saratoga. “Usually we try not to do the address,” said Sutton, of Asante Real Estate in Los Gatos, “because it’s really hard to remember four or five digits.” Lord builds sites for listings himself; Stuhr does hers with help from her tech-savvy assistant, Anne Millar; and Asante agents have an in-house Web developer. But many agents are contracting with outside vendors for their property pages.

One such company is Oakland-based iHouse, which last fall launched a service that allows agents to build specific sites for their listings. For $99, agents can choose a domain name for their listing and build a site including up to 100 photos, using one of about a dozen design templates. The company hosts the site for a year. “Test drives” of the product are free, so an agent can crank out a dummy Web site before meeting with a potential seller client.

And having a Web site just to show off their home makes sellers feel special, said Jason Lewis, iHouse marketing manager. “That’s how it’s so useful in the listing presentations,” he said, referring to meetings where homeowners interview potential agents to list their homes. “It’s very `I understand how to market your house.’” Being able to create a Web page to help sell a home allows real estate agents to stand out from the pack, said Andrew Elliott, director of business development for Realty World in Northern California and Northern Nevada. And that’s important at a time when the market has an excess of agents vying for each listing, he said.

Vreo, a San Luis Obispo company that builds Web sites for agents and brokers, is the vendor Realty World agents use to create their listings’ sites. The company’s version also costs $99 and includes a domain name, hosting and unlimited room for photos. Vreo began offering these “virtual property presentations” about five years ago, said Chief Executive Brian Boero. But they’ve caught on recently because of the slowdown in the real estate market.

“We’re in a buyer’s market now in much of the Bay Area, so everything you can do to promote that property is one step toward getting it sold,” he said. Do the property-specific sites really speed up sales? Lord said “absolutely,” but Stuhr said she doesn’t think so, and Boero said he’s not sure. But sellers like the sites and will probably keep driving demand for them. “Sellers these days expect agents to do more than buy an ad in the newspaper and put out a sign. And this is a way for agents to respond to that demand,” Boero said.

Some agents keep paying for the hosting of a home’s Web site even after the property’s been sold, in hopes that the new owners might turn to them to sell the place again a few years down the road, and they’ll be ready with the domain name. Other agents “give” the site to the new owners when the deal’s done. “It’s a fun closing gift,” said Lewis of iHouse. “It’s better than magnets.”