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Hosting is all about the availability of your estate agency web site, 24 hours a day, every day. The prospects must be able to find your site, and when they do, it must not be seen to be on some cheapskate, half-baked, slow, 'free' service.

And make no mistake, many punters know a free portal when they see one - they use them themselves. You, as a serious estate agency, are expected to be using a serious service. Your domain name must be your own, not the basic "yoursite.isp-advert.co.uk" that goes with a free site.

Problems

Not only do free sites look cheap, they tend to perform badly, especially at peak times. And, if your site gets too busy, your ISP may just cut the service altogether until the end of the month, when your bandwidth allocation is restored.

Not only that, if their other sites get too busy, they might still drop your service for an hour or two. Good for business? We don't think so. And what about the pop-up adverts that some free services generate?

A customer could be enticed away from your agency web site, and you would never even know about it. From the point of view of serious business, some free sites are little more than tempting-looking parasites, interested only in generating business for themselves, and not for you.

The same general sorts of considerations apply to your e-mail.

Free Internet e-mail portals are a great idea for the general public, but they give entirely the wrong impression about any business that uses them; or perhaps it is the right impression? If you are serious about your agency, and about benefitting from the Web, it is time to take action.

Solution

The solution is a professionally produced and hosted site:

• Your Own Domain Name;
• E-Commerce;
• Fully Managed Secure Hosting;
• Database Hosting;
• Bespoke Hosting for custom builds, etc.

Property Portals

At the moment, Property Portals are springing up all over the place, offering customers the chance to search for their properties in one place. Unfortunately, whilst these sites are superficially a good idea, they can't do too much for you. For a start, customers see some of your information, but they also see that of your competitors. Indeed, many such portals are little more than a list of links for taking business away from you. Maybe you have to be listed there, as in Yellow Pages, but you can do better than that. What about customers who are searching for property in your area? How do you capture them? Whether you are listed in a portal or not, you have to be able to make the most of those customers that find your web site. Portals just have no relevance to this.

ISP’s

Perhaps you already have a properly hosted web site, backed by an ISP offering industrial-strength hosting... but at industrial strength prices. If you have a few hundred employees, perhaps you need this kind of service, and can afford the in-house web management team you would need to make the most of it. But for most SMEs, such a setup is a little over the top, and a little over what is an appropriate budget. The service is usually good, and very reliable, but its main weakness is that the ISP doesn't understand your business, has no experience of your business, and therefore can't help you with your specific requirements.

Bespoke Estate Agency Package

The free service providers offer what is known as 'flat' space, that is, space for pages that are essentially static: they just sit there, perhaps with a bit of flashy animation to make it look pretty. All potential customers can do is look at your pages, and maybe send you an e-mail (at the same time noticing your unprofessional-looking e-mail address).

But what if your customers could search your database for something that suits their requirements? What if they could register their requirements with your web site, and it would contact them automatically as soon as something of interest was available? How many customers do you lose because of lack of follow-through? The Web, properly used, is ideal for chasing up leads that would otherwise be forgotten about. A computerised web site is much better than the average Consultant at keeping track of people, so why not get yours working for you?

The industrial strength ISPs can build you a better web site than the freebies, who essentially offer you space and nothing else, but they will charge a fortune for it, and because they know nothing about your business, what you will get is a generic, out-of-the-box e-commerce system.

What you need is an ISP that has actual experience of the property business. One that can custom-build your web site to the specific requirements of your sector. One whose charges are tailored to your budget. You can have Active Server Pages to build pages from your database, targeted at each individual who looks at your site. Or perhaps you need an ISP who has heard of iPIX, so your customers can take advantage of full 360° panoramic views. Even better, an ISP that can manage not only your hosting, but also your web site itself, if that is what you require. Think about it.