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As a real estate agent it’s vital you create an online presence.  Last year over 90% of home buyers began their search online, with over 70% using the internet to find a real estate agent.  

If you’re planning on creating a real estate agent website you may be worried it will cost you thousands of dollars due to the need to hire expert website builders.  Yet that’s where you’re wrong.  Using a free website builder program such as WordPress and some invaluable advice on the tools you’ll need to create a professional site, you can do the job yourself for much less than $100.  This article will tell you everything you need to know for creating a top class website to sell your real estate listings.

The Advantages of WordPress for Real Estate Agent Websites

If you’ve never seen WordPress in action you may not fully appreciate the advantages this free website builder program has to offer:

1. It’s completely free.  All you’ll need is a server to host your website and a small fee to register your domain name.
2. It’s designed with inexperienced website builders in mind.  There are hundreds of plug ins available to download from our resources page, which you can use to easily customize the program to suit your needs.  Plug ins are simply small pieces of software which are usually free to download.  They allow you to extend your basic WordPress program and create a blogging platform or website that’s fully loaded with the exact features you need.   
3. There are scores of WordPress themes written specifically for a real estate agent website.  A theme is a template for the design and layout of your web pages. Here are just a few real estate themes, which are available to download from our themes page:

•  AgentPress:  this is a clean, crisp and sophisticated real estate theme to showcase your properties and attract clients to your service.  Although it costs $99.95 per site you get a lot for your money.  It comes with search engine optimization built in and a really nice property photo gallery as part of the package.
• WP Pro Real Estate:  a simple and elegant design that has some clever features to enhance your customer experience.  These include the ability to add property status, such as “sold”, “reduced price” or “new to the market.”  It also comes with built in Google maps to display the location of your properties.  This is a really affordable theme at just $27. 
• Homeowner Real Estate: this is a fast loading, fully search engine optimized theme that provides impressive visual impact for your property images.  You choose your currency and theme color and the rest of the design is done for you.  Ideal for sole or multi-agent websites, it comes with a finance calculator, unlimited dropdowns and the ability to create individual realtor pages with biography and property listings.  The cost for this theme is $69.95, which is a one off fee. 

Essential Real Estate Plug Ins

Once you’ve downloaded your free website builder program all you need to do is begin loading your content and publicizing your website.  There are a number of essential plug ins that can help you to draw in good traffic levels and bring visitors to your property listings.  All of these are free to download from our resources page. 

• Great Real Estate:  this plug in comes with everything you’ll need to easily create your website and manage your property listings.  You don’t need to format your content at all.  Simply add all the details of each property in a form and the plug in does all the work for you.  There are a number of plug ins which work well alongside this one, including NextGEN Gallery, to upload and display your property images in a gallery and FeedWrangler, which allows you to send your latest listings to various websites, including Google Base, Trulia and Zillow.
• Real Estate Q & A:  a great tool for bringing in quality traffic to your website and establishing you as a local expert.  It allows you to join in a network of real estate agent blogs where questions relevant to the industry are sourced, pooled together and made available to the network members.  When you source a question a clean follow link back to your website is placed on all sites that publish the question.  This encourages visitors to come to your site and remain on it to browse questions and answers.  The system can also create an extra revenue stream through advertising embedded in the answers.
• Simple Real Estate Pack: an impressive package of real estate tools that can enhance your free website builder program and add important features that encourage your visitors and potential customers to keep coming back to your site.  These include mortgage and affordability calculators, an estimator of closing costs, live mortgage rates, a list of local schools within the area and market trends and statistical charts.  You can also embed Google Maps with local amenities such as grocery stores, hospitals and banks within a 3 mile radius of each property. 

Looking for Some Inspiration?

If you want to see what WordPress can do for your real estate agent website, check out some of these sites.  They are already using WordPress to create an online presence for their property listings and their websites look stylish, professional and have a strong visual impact:

• Doors of Your Life
• Josh Gonzalez
• LookiLoos

Some real estate agents also find that adding video tours of their properties can help to spark interest and bring in viewings.  This article gives you 3 simple ways to add video to your website.