Name of your website?Lawrence, KS Real Estate
Your name?
Greg Thompson
Your Location (city, etc)
Lawrence
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Lawrence, KS real estate listings and homes for sale.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
To help assist home buyers with locating a home in Lawrence, KS and offer them professional assistance with the purchase of their home at no cost.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
1997 and it was www.frodex.com
How did you decide on a name for your website?
I used a name that was easy to remember and also included important keywords that represented the content of the website.
What makes your website different from other, similar offerings?
Unlike national real estate websites, our website is focused on our city. No other site is as focused on Lawrence, KS real estate and has the quality of tools available for it's users as www.SearchLawrence.com. We invest many hours each week updating the content and we keep our listing of homes for sale up to date, unlike many of the other websites which offer property listings.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Our continuing goal is to be Lawrence's top online brand for real estate by providing the easiest to use website with the best data and back it up with professional service when the time comes for the user to buy or sell a home in Lawrence, KS.
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
It would be hard to justify the time and money we spend on the website if we did not include the value of the experience it provides to our users. If it were simply a matter of making a profit, it would be unlikely that the website would survive because the local real estate market is relatively small. The website's concept would need to grow to cover additional markets to be profitable on it's own merits.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
We would invest in content. There are hundreds of topics we would like to provide articles on but we simply do not have the time to write them. Additionally, many of the mashups and other tools could be rewritten from scratch providing the best possible user experience for our guests.
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
I believe we would. We have procedures in place for rapidly scaling our services to meet demand and our technology infrastructure has a lot of headroom to play with.
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
3rd party technology providers who can not provide us quality service. We are locked into these service contracts because of local contracts and regulations with our data providers. It has greatly impacted both our quality of service and our costs of doing business online.
What has been your biggest challenge?
SEO. Organic search results are important to our success and it's a daily struggle to keep up. Our site competes head to head with well funded national websites because we focus our attention on being the best local website. But because the national websites are so well capitalized it will always be a struggle to compete.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
PPC has been the best method so far. It allows us to compete directly with the national online giants for market share on searches targeting local content.
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
It has taken a lot more effort than we had ever thought it would. The cost and effort required to maintain a website like ours appears to be a barrer to entry that keeps most local real estate agents and agencies from trying to compete with the large national brands for their fair share of the local market.
How long have you run the site already, and how long will you continue to keep it up if you don't enjoy big gains in traffic, income or popularity?
Our current site has been running for one and a half years. We has a web presents for 4 or 5 years but not at the level we do now. Our website was rebuilt from the grown up in January of 2008 and the version you see now has been online since mid February 2008. We have no plans on abandoning our website and hope to keep expanding it every year. We have a 3 year development plan in the works at this time.
Are you happy with the results you have achieved from your efforts?
Yes. I have been very pleased with the response we have received from our website and we know that there is tremendous room for improvement an expansion which should allow our business to grow as we tackle these new projects and improvements.
What is your website address?
Lawrence, KS Real Estate
