Company Website ?

[Christine Lovett]

Looking for feedback please if you have a website for your REI business. What do you feel it helps more on: marketing/networking to other investors OR attracting buyers/sellers/renters for your properties? What are the essential "pages" your website includes? Do you manage the site updates yourself or are you having to use an outside source? Thank you!

[Darrell Shepherd]

It really just depends on what your goals as an investor.  I use Investor Carrot, I like what they do for the cost.  I also have a few sites from Cameron Dunlap's iFlip stuff I'm trying out.  Not sure I'll keep them, I ran across that stuff on my Facebook feed.  Cam taught my very first RE Investing seminar something like 14 years ago, so I figured I'd see what he was up to.

I'm not ranking now on my main site, but am doing stuff to get there in a year or so. Right now any time I want leads I crank up my Adwords account. I get some action of Craigslist ads I post that are linked to my site. Getting to be a lot of competition for attention on there, though. If I do a mailout I see a significant increase in online leads, too. People dont have a lot of equity around here right now, so I do more stuff through networking and even MLS than my website, but my last one came from my site and it was a good one. More than paid my website and marketing expense for the year...actually more like the decade.

You definitely don't need a website to buy or sell a house, though. I only have my lead capture sites, I don't see much need in having a website for other stuff. I had a seller site when I did high volume and did a lot of owner financing. Selling them 1-2 at a time retail its better to just list them IMO. I'd have a sell site if I was wholesaling, since you wouldn't be putting them in MLS.

Like has been said, the only traffic you'll get is from you sending people there, so keep that in mind.  Setting up a website does nothing unless you put in the effort to get people to it.