Hey, I have a real estate website, and am looking for ways to encourage agents to join before marketing it to the general public. It's currently free and I have offered free featured listings to the first 15 listings. Does anybody have any ideas as to how I could encourage agents to join? Thanks.
Social Networks would be your best bet to begin with, if you're thriving on an online budget. If you have a good budget and can afford offline marketing, get a database of real estate agents and send them joining proposals with certain benefits for the early birds. That should get you a considerable Agent Base...
This gonna be a tough call. If you know somebody personally may help. I have seen they try posting one or two ads, see the results. If they don't get results they probably not gonna get back.
Thanks for the replies. I am related to one, though I don't know him well, so hopefully that will help me out. Unfortunately I don't have a large enough budget to buy databases.
I am an agent and know first hand that there is an 80/20 rule with agents. 80% get 20% of the work and 20% do 80% of the work. If you look to do business with that top 20% you will find that they are more willing to work with you. However on that note you should also know that they also know what they are spending their hard earned money on. Most good agents are very picky about where they market. Trust me, if you don't believe me check out my site at http://www.utahluxury.com. It is is similar to what you are talking about and it is not easy to even get some of them to market the listings for free on my site.
Thank you for the info dccv! I completely understand what you're saying and will focus on that top 20%.
I had a high traffic website that was a listing service for a specific area after trying to do a large area then ended up shutting it down because it takes a large budget to compete with all of these other companies that have been doing it for years and already established. As said above realtors are very picky about where they market their properties to make sure they are presented properly and wont want to spend the time to get there property on a site where no one will see it. It can be done but it is very hard and will take a pretty big budget to get it going I would also get a list of realtors by finding their emails on websites etc and market it to them by mass emails or send newsletters and try to get them on your email list. This is a great way to keep continued interest I found.
You can try to create a free directory. I am doing it for a french website: http://www.alertes-immo.com/agences-ile-de-france/ (Directory of agents in Paris). I am promoting "Free registration" with adwords. And once I get a significant list, I will propose them premium listing in the directory then paid listings.
All I can say is it takes alot of work to get real estate agents to participate even when its free. I launched my real estate social network in June of 2006 and took me quite some time to get real estate agents to use the site! So far we have been successful as we have almost 13K members and still growing What kind of website are your trying to promote?