Name of your website?Costasales.com
Your name?
Jim McKinney
Your Location (city, etc)
Torrevieja, Alicante
Please give us a short summary of your website?
Spanish property portal for independent real estate agents selling property in Spain to list their properties.
What inspired you to launch your own website?
We looked at the way people were looking at finding property in Spain on the internet. A lot of people said they could not navigate web sites easily and many had their home page just full of adverts so it was difficult to see where to search for properties. We also wanted to offer small real estate agents a personal web site that was also part of a larger property portal.
When did you launch your first website, and what was it?
December 2006. Costasales.com. Although we never really started to promote it until September 2007.
How did you decide on a name for your website?
We did a search of the domain names for something relevant to selling property in Spain
What makes it different from other, similar offerings?
An easy to use web site no major advertising on the home page just a simple layout with easy to find search boxes. We also offer the smaller real estate agent a free personal web site within Costasales. They can use this as their only web site without the need for hosting. Once a visitor is on their free web site only that agents properties are shown. Each free web site is customizable with their own banner, logo and colour.
What is your eventual goal? (To sell it, keep it for income, secure a book or other mainstream media deal?)
Keep it for income
How does your investment of time and money balance against your success?
We are still a new web site competing in a very large industry so the time and money spent so far easily outweighs the financial rewards we receive.
If you had an unlimited development budget for development, how would you change your site?
Now we have been going for a year we would re design the site slightly and make the different areas run more efficiently
If your site got really big, really quickly, would you be able to keep up with the demand?
Yes no problem as most of the site is easy to maintain and most agents upload their listings automatically
What unexpected costs and headaches have you had to deal with?
Installing an xml reader to upload agents properties automatically. This proved to be more difficult than we realised to make it work sucessfully.
What has been your biggest challenge?
Getting the site up in the rankings on search engines and this is an ongoing mission.
What method has been most successful for promoting your website?
We have just started writing web articles and exchanging links along with adding to directories such as the "world website directory" and Yahoo directory"
How has running your website differed from your expectations?
We had no real expectations from it as it started as a small project although it is now growing. Originally we thought we would be attracting only the smaller one man band real estate agents but we find 90% of the agents listing with us and larger busineses.
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?
one year but we would keep it regardless of it's success as we enjoy running it.
What was your biggest breakthough
I think once our automated uploading system was installed. We went with just over 1,000 property listings in September 2007 to over 20,000 in February 2008
What is your website address?
Costasales.com
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