#7: Top 8 Ways Estate Agents Can Build Trust Online
Published on 17 July 2010 under
Online Reputation
It never ceases to amaze me how so many estate agents believe it’s fine to throw up a nice looking website, listing all of their available properties and hope that people will find it and submit enquiries through it.
No matter what part of the world you sell property in, you will have competition. Your competitors will have websites featuring their properties and therefore property hunters who find yours and your competitors’ sites need to decide who to submit their enquiries to.
You may have the best looking site with some excellent properties but that doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically get the enquiry.
There are many factors that come into play when someone decides whether or not to interact with your website and contact you through it. But today we’re going to focus on one of those which is trust...and it’s a big one.
The trust factor
Why is building trust so important for a website? Do I really need to answer this question?
Anyone, and I mean ANYONE can build and publish a website. It’s very easy these days with plenty of tools available for even the most technophobic of people out there.
It also doesn’t have to cost a lot of money or take much time to do. It’s simple and if anyone can do it how do you know whether or not to trust a website? Don’t you feel better buying something through a website that you already know or has been recommended to you? Don’t you feel more at ease if you can see what other people are saying about the product or company you are interested in? Isn’t it more reassuring to know who is behind a website before you hand over your credit card details?
Think about the times online where you may have been put off entering your email address somewhere because you’re unsure if they are going to start spamming you, or put off from paying for something online because you don’t know if you’ll ever receive that product.
All this anxiety is based on a lack of trust for a website. If your website doesn’t put people at ease then it’s not going to work for you as well as it should.
Think about all the problems Facebook has encountered recently with all the privacy concerns its uses have had. Although it was never truly going to affect Facebook, as it is such a massive and popular website, the concerns did show that people are concerned about their privacy online.
Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes
Over the years I have based my entire online reputation on trust. I never have the best websites, the most modern of the most functional but I do open up so that people can get to know me and trust me and it is that trust that they have in me which consistently yields the results for my sites.
In a moment I’m going to cover some of my most successful methods for building trust. They are all very simple yet highly effective and they won’t take much work at all. In fact some of them are so simple you’ll wonder why you hadn’t thought of them before.
The reason you need to follow these steps is because online marketing is more than just SEO and ranking well. It’s about fine-tuning every aspect of your and your business’s online presence. If people can trust you they will buy from you. People generally buy from people but so few agents really know how to get this message across in their online marketing.
Disgraced estate agents
I run a large social website for property owners in Spain called Eye on Spain. As most of you are probably aware, there have been many problems over the past few years with some very unscrupulous agents and property developers. Many angry buyers turned to my website and others to vent their anger and warn people about these agents.
This has caused me some massive issues over the years with all sort of legal threats and the like. In the overseas property market especially there is a real lack of trust in anything anyone ever says about these markets. There were too many lies and horror stories in the past and agents need to adapt their marketing to reflect these changes in attitudes.
The top 8 trust methods
It’s time for you to adopt these proven strategies for making you and your business the most trustworthy online. Here are the top 8 methods you can start implementing today to stand out from your competitors:
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