Agent Tips: Footers. Yes, You Need Them!

The world of real estate is riddled with interesting websites, to say the least. We're not going to dive into everything that an agent website needs to have, because we'd be here forever, but we will however point out an obvious part that we find missing A LOT: footers! As an agent or broker, your website does (or should do) a few different jobs for you. It should display your listings, have a bit of info about yourself and the city and surrounding area where you live/work, but most importantly, this website is there so that people can get ahold of you!! If your website doesn't have a footer or a page (ideally, it should have both) with your contact info, i.e. your phone number, e-mail address, and mailing address, then you'd might as well have taken those hard earned dollars spent on your website, flush them down the toilet, and sell your domain name.Contact forms are another thing we need to get out of the way. Contact forms are NOT the appropriate way to develop interactions with clients for a couple of reasons. The first, is that most people don't care to fill these out because they don't want to take the time to, or believe that their email addresses will be sold and mined for spam; the second is that this makes you look pretty ridiculous by having a "Contact Form" to fill out instead of just putting your e-mail address and phone number up on your website...it's not that hard! And if you're devastatingly worried about having your own e-mail spammed by having it publicly available on the internet, then just put it up on your website in the following example format: joe(at)remax(dot)com. This format is one that automated programs can't register as an e-mail address, thus making you way less susceptible to the ever-so-feared junk mail. Either that or you, like many many other people, can just deal with the spam as a cost of doing business and take a couple seconds (literally, seconds) and delete it, or intensify your junk mail filters.There is no possible way for us to express the importance of having your contact information readily available to the viewing public. It's probably the single most important thing to have on there, period. It doesn't matter how pretty or great looking or functional or purely awesome your website is. If your contact info isn't on there, people won't contact you. That's it. There's always the answer "Well, they can look us up, can't they?" Uhm...yes, they JUST did that by going to your website...and they probably won't want to dig deeper for your contact info unless you're the most life changing real estate agent around, because frankly, they can just find somebody else. If there's one thing there's no shortage of, it's real estate agents, so don't give people ANY reason to not get in touch with you. Do everyone a favour, and please make sure your contact info is on your website...we're begging you.For more advice, news, and fun times, follow us on Twitter or check us out on Facebook.