Seeking Marketing Partner for Innovative Real Estate Website

[ethetree]

I just completed development of an innovative real estate website (sellmestraight.com) aimed at the for sale by owner market. The concept is unique and for both buyer and seller, but it is the seller tools that set this site apart from anything the competitors are offering. The site is 99% completed, just finishing up the final round of testing now. I am looking for a partner to take the concept and run with it from a marketing standpoint in exchange for a 50% equity stake in the company. I am not looking for an investment, I need someone who knows how to market a startup and is willing to put in the energy required to make this a success. PM me if interested.

[Edward P. Allen Jr.]

I just completed development of an innovative real estate website (sellmestraight.com) aimed at the for sale by owner market. The concept is unique and for both buyer and seller, but it is the seller tools that set this site apart from anything the competitors are offering. The site is 99% completed, just finishing up the final round of testing now. I am looking for a partner to take the concept and run with it from a marketing standpoint in exchange for a 50% equity stake in the company. I am not looking for an investment, I need someone who knows how to market a startup and is willing to put in the energy required to make this a success. PM me if interested.

I have over 25 years experience in publishing community Real Estate magazines. l would like to hear what is so different and better about your For Sale By Owner site. I am not sure that I will be interested in partnering with you to market this site, but I am willing to give you some significant input as to how this site can be marketed and monetized. What I propose is to take everything that you think is so great about your site and how you think it can be profitable and try to shoot holes in your opinions and plans. If your plans hold up and I can add something to them, we can discuss whether you would like me to partner with you in marketing your new site.---Edward P. Allen Jr.

[ethetree]

The basic concept of the site is that is uses profile based matching similar to dating sites. So it is really an interactive experience between buyers and sellers.

Benefits to the Home Buyer:
1) After a buyer fills out a "Buyer Profile", which includes details such as tastes, preferences, priorities, and even intangibles such as emotional criteria, the results are matched against existing "Property Profiles". This robust matching technology provides a much more accurate match and is easier for the user to get advanced results than other real estate search engines.
2) The use of a profile keeps the buyer engaged in the matching process and keeps them returning to the site to see what their latest matches are.
3) The buyer can use the site's internal messaging to easily and anonymously keep track of their correspondence to home sellers.

Benefits to the Home Seller:
1) The biggest benefit to the home seller is the ability to actually view interested buyer profiles and contact them directly through the site. In the same manner that buyers are matched with properties, sellers are also shown all home buyer profiles that match their property for sale in ranking order. As far as I know, the ability for a home seller to proactively contact a pre-qualified home buyer that is highly likely to be interested in their home, is concept exclusive to sellmestraight.com.
2) Sellers are not only able to see a list of all matching home buyer profiles, but they are also provided a real-time report showing any buyer profile that has actually viewed their property listing and how many times and how recently. This is another huge tool to allow the seller to be proactive in the selling process by targeting the most interested buyers.

These benefits, combined with the simplistic design of the site, I believe give sellmestraight.com an advantage over any other for sale by owner site available.

[Edward P. Allen Jr.]

Thanks for the explanation of your new site. I agree that the robust matching capabilities of your site could be very attractive to users of your site. What I need to talk with you about a lot more is how you planned to monetize the site. how does it make money?---who pays for what service?---and how you envisioned attracting paying users to your site. The biggest obstacle to a site like this that is dependent upon single individuals to take part in it as paying customers is for them to be exposed to it. The existing Real Estate search sites that are owned by NAR, individual large franchises such as Coldwell Banker and Re/Max, and many other compilers of properties for sale all have access to hundreds of thousands of searchable properties all over the country. For a site like yours to have any stickiness for the people that come to it in search of homes it needs a whole lot of FSBO properties to even be slightly interesting to them. How do you envision being able to compete for the attention to and the use of your site by home seekers when they have countless sites that will show all properties for sale in any area?

[ethetree]

The main profits would be generated by listing fees paid by the seller ($39.95 for 1mo, $74.95 for 3mo, and $109.95 until sold), there are no fees associated with a buyer account. These fees should be very competitive with sites like forsalebyowner.com. Of course there could be ancillary revenue streams for affiliate marketing for things such as legal documents, lawer referrals etc.

The big draw to sellers that would need to be publicized, and what sets the site apart, is the seller tools. Home sellers would need to be made aware of the fact that they would not just be posting an ad to a black hole and then sit back and hope someone calls (as is typically how FSBO works), but could actually view a list of pre-screened buyers and reach out to them proactively. This proactive approach is the key to getting sellers to list their home on sellmestraight.com. The other draw for buyers, would be the quality of leads. Since a buyer has to actually sign up and fill out a profile, the pool of buyers is going to be streamlined mostly to home buyers who are actively seeking a house, as opposed to “leisure surfers” doing some dream shopping. For example, my wife tends to search for homes just to see what’s out there and do a little dreaming, but when I asked her what she thought of the sellmestraight.com she said “I would probably only use it if I were actually looking to buy a house”.

The bottom line for buyers is that there needs to be an adequate amount of homes available for them to view of course, but also the profile based concept lends itself to the social networking style that is driving the Web 2.0 movement as well as the fact that they can save money by buying directly from the seller, who can pass some of the savings of no realtor fees on to them.

The keys to getting buyers is to stress:
1) That there are a lot of homes available in their area.
2) The profile based nature of the site provides more accurate results, saving them time, and it adds a bit of fun to the process.
3) The site will save them money.
4) They can interact anonymously with sellers, making them feel more comfortable about asking questions about a property.

[Edward P. Allen Jr.]

Again, I like and agree with a lot of your selling points to both buyers and sellers. I do, however still question how difficult it will be to market this site. Obviously, the initial key is to get a large enough number of homesellers to be aware of the site and to pay to have their home on it. Again, I am concerned about the difficulty of finding FSBO sellers one by one in every area of the country.I recognize the power of viral spread for a website that is meant to be interactive like the social networking sites that have exploded, but these sites attract and hold the attention of users for countless reasons that would not be true for a single purpose commercial site like this. One truism on the WEB is that the more information ( work ) that you require a user ( in your case a homebuyer )to fill out, the less response ( number of homebuyers that will list themselves on the site ) you will get. This has been proven by countless lead generation sites that make money by capturing information that is valuable to another group or business that is willing to pay for this information ( leads ). So I foresee difficulty in exposing enough FSBO home sellers to the site and difficulty in finding ways to have home buyers find the site ( and once they do, be willing to spend the time to fill out the necessary personal info that your site requires ).Both of these problems , in many ways, are tied up with basic SEO issues. How are you going to( and how can you afford to ) drive both buyers and sellers to your site.As you know, most if not all of the social networking sites grew exponentially by offering their respective services for free and then attempted to find ways to monetize the sites. For you to charge sellers the proposed listing fees in the beginning of your site's build out ( when there are scarcely any properties or buyers registered on the site seems a difficult proposition to me. Again, the key to the growth of social networking sites and other similar sites has been the ability of the site owners to offer the service for free and monetize the site in other ways. Most had a pretty good bank roll behind them to survive this growth period with no income.

Your thoughts!!

[ethetree]

Being a brand new site, the postings are free and would be for some time, it is the long term goal to eventually start charging. So getting the ball rolling with sellers should not be an insurmountable obstacle. I think the auxiliary revenue streams (affiliates) would account for the only revenue generated the first year.

The issue of buyer registration is a double edged sword. It has immense implications to the seller because that is how the seller will be able to reach out proactively, and ensures quality leads, but at the cost of scaring some not so serious buyers away. Again, I think this could be spun into more of a positive selling point to attract sellers.

Years ago I owned a moderately successful site called entryleveljobs.net, which was later bought by collegerecruiter.com. This site also employed a model of requiring the job seeker to register before seeing available jobs. Although I did not nearly market this site to its full potential I did notice that it was not a major issue getting job seekers to register, but more difficult to get job posters to post. So I don’t see the need for registration on behalf of the buyer as the most difficult hurdle.

As for how I am going to drive traffic to the site, that is what I need a partner for. I am not a marketing guru, I am a tech and ideas guy, so I have no answers for how to make that part happen. I do not have a budget and thus would rely on creative marketing in the short term.

[Edward P. Allen Jr.]

Thanks again for the quick feedback. I think I have a good grasp of your site now. Here is my honest appraisal of the situation. In order for you to get this site known and used by home buyers and sellers you are going to have to market to both groups ( either on the web through various SEO methods or directly to these groups via traditional advertising media. In either case it requires money to undertake serious SEO initiatives that will bring your site to the top of various search criteria on Google and other search engines and/or money to advertise to reach these two groups and make them aware of your site. I do not know how it can be done otherwise. You could search all available compilations of FSBO properties and contact them one by one, but that would be very time intensive. I think that the use of clever and persistent SEO initiatives could slowly build the site, but that is not my area of marketing expertise---and I am not convinced that free SEO initiatives would be sufficient to grow this site anyway. I think what you need is a partner with deep enough pockets to invest in the build out of your site; not a marketer that has no budget to work with. I wish you well and hope for your success. I would be interested in following your site development and if you do get a marketing budget, I would be interested in working with you.