Home Sales Heat Up in California. How Brokers Can Set Themselves Apart with a WordPress Real Estate Website
It’s deja vu all over again as the real estate business in California is heating up. That basically means brokers and agents need to be on top of their game with responsive WordPress real estate websites and the best data in the business.
Real estate folks in other parts of the country need to pay attention. California has always been a bellwether state. What happens in Calif, eventually happens everywhere else.
Here are the numbers. In the past four years, the state has issued 95,000 new real estate licenses. That means there are nearly 100k new agents out there who all want listings and sales.
Brokers are becoming increasingly aggressive. In five years from 2009-2014, more than 1,000 new offices have been opened by brokers just in Southern California alone.
Real estate companies are recruiting new agents left and right.
Why the rush? Here’s the prize.
Real estate sales in Southern California, like the desert in Death Valley, are hot.
Orange County saw nearly $19 billion in homes sales as of September this year. That’s the highest its been in 12 years after the Great Recession. Los Angeles homes sales generated $25 billion this year, an increase of a whopping 78%.
The whole Southern California region in fact experienced $55.7 billion in home sales this year.
That’s a big bucket of commissions.
This boom in real estate has also been great for the economy overall – title companies, mortgage companies, home inspectors and others are benefiting nicely. A estimated 60,000 new real estate related jobs have been added in the past six years.
One major reason for the boom has been incredibly low interest rates. Who knows how long those will last?
However, as you can see by the number of new agents and new offices, a bunch of people have their eyes on those commissions. In fact, one observer said it looked like there was a new real estate office opening up in a strip mall every week.
How to compete with a WordPress real estate website
Sure, California is the home of high-tech. It’s the birthplace of Hewlett Packard and Apple. You can be sure California real estate agents are equipping themselves with the latest in high-tech tools as well. In this type of competitive market, a shoddy, outdated website just won’t cut it.
That’s why a real estate website built on a WordPress platform is a must. WordPress is the gold standard right now for building a website.
It’s super-easy to use, the coding is built to be easily read by search engines such as Google and it’s highly-responsive for smartphones and iphones.
The other big factor that makes WordPress great is the ability for the average broker and agent to adapt quickly, adding hyper-local content to meet rapid changes in the marketplace. The school board announces they are building a new middle school. With a WordPress real estate website, an agent can quickly add information about the school AND optimize that page to be seen in Google and Bing rankings.
Speaking of content, data providers such as Home Junction can help brokers and agents tap into massive databases of local content – school enrollment, recent homes sales, property trends, etc. All fed into the agent’s website so they are seen as the agents with THE local knowledge.
When you have $55 billion in property sales taking place in an area, it’s like a feeding frenzy. Only the tech-savviest brokers and agents will thrive and survive. Be sure you have the tools to be one of them – a WordPress based real estate website and current real estate data.
Go here to read information about Southern California’s hot property sales.
