Real Estate Web Sites: Cutting the Cheese

I started writing a post last week about real estate websites. The title was going to be something like, "10 Good Real Estate Web Sites," but I got stuck on about #3 before I had to run off and show more houses. Then I came across this article over on Inman News and I didn't feel so bad about not being able to get to #4. After looking at the first 100 results returned by Google when searching the term "real estate," the author says that all 100 websites came up short. What were they lacking?

"Truth. Honesty. A real voice. Every site I visited spoke to me with a voice wholly not its own, spewing every real estate cliché under the sun."

In a word, they were cheesy.

One of the reasons I started All Around Ktown was, ok I admit it, business was slow.

Another reason was that I was incredibly angry with the folks hosting my personal business web site, which, in the interest of full disclosure, I will hereby admit is about as canned and cheesy as they come. In my defense, I was somehow tricked into a year contract that I never agreed to, much less signed, but which it appears nothing short of litigation is going to let me out of. Believe me, I've tried. Being the cheapskate I am, I refuse to relocate my domain name while I'm still paying for the wretched site and hosting. So, my brain said, "Hey, let's get another domain and forget those guys over at Shmealtor.shmom. We'll blog!"

And the final reason I started All Around Ktown was that I was looking around to see what was out there on the web about real estate, and Knoxville real estate in particular, and found that most of it was just canned cheese designed to get your business.

Popular thought among most Realtor-types holds that time not spent "prospecting" (when did we all become gold miners, anyway?) is wasted time. And time is, of course, money. Sell, sell, sell!

Why take time to produce (what I hope is) quality content that (I hope) people enjoy and why provide (again, what I hope is) timely information that others can (hopefully) use , when you can just hire a company to auto-produce your real estate blog content for you (yes, there are companies that will do that, and no I'm not going to link to them because they're evil)? Best of all you don't even have to try to relate to people or be original in any way! Easy cheesy!

But it's not so easy being cheesy. First, it costs a lot of money. Auto-populated website or blog content doesn't come cheap. And second, throwing up canned content in the hopes of snagging a "prospect" or two is just silly. You might even say it's a waste of time. People aren't stupid. They know when they're reading canned content and it doesn't impress them. It insults their intelligence and that's no way to do business.

So, I hope that you, gentle reader, do not find what you read here the slightest big intelligence insulting or to have even the slightest hint of cheese, be it cheddar, nacho, mozzarella, or even Emmentaler. Because if you do, that would mean that I am truly wasting my time.

100 Web sites, one unfulfilling experience - Inman News