I’m excited to announce the launch of a new project that has pretty much consumed all of the last 5 months for us. PropertyTown is our new marketing platform built exclusively for real estate professionals.

Project Background

I spent a good chunk of ‘06 and the first half of ‘07 doing some consulting work for a couple different companies in the real estate space. During those gigs, I spent a great deal of time looking at many of the companies providing hosting and marketing services for real estate agents. I was truly stunned at how poor most of the services were. The majority of the companies we looked at were selling less-than-optimal platforms and giving their customers very poor marketing advice.  

When our last consulting contract was about to expire, we took some time to think about where we wanted to go. One of the options was for us to take on a new consulting job with a very large company that provided marketing services to thousands of agents. Our role in that project would have been providing them advice on how to develop new web 2.0 type applications that would help get their clients up to speed with the rest of the online marketing world. However, after a couple meetings, it became very clear to me that this particular company had far too much corporate bloat to ever be able to develop anything remotely cool in any type of reasonable time frame.

So we decided instead to explore the option of developing a product of our own. The biggest challenge was coming up with a plan that would not only be unique, but also fit us as a company. That meant that whatever we decided to do, it wasn’t going to be a high-volume, mass-marketed product. Instead, it needed to be something where we could leverage not only our programming capabilities, but also our years of SEO/SEM consulting experience.

We initially got the project rolling by recruiting a handful of real estate agents who were interested in participating in a beta program. We started banging out code and they spent a ton of time trying to break it. (And they did break it) They also had a huge role in feature development. They told us what they wanted, and for the most part, we built it. But the beta program wasn’t just about code. It was also about helping the agents learn new ways to build their online presence that wouldn’t end up getting them in trouble.

The project as a whole has been quite challenging. Turning Wordpress into a true CMS, and teaching real estate agents that there’s more to online marketing than keyword-stuffed reciprocal links were no easy tasks. But it’s all been worth it. In 5 months, we’ve accomplished more than some of the big “players” have accomplished in the last 3 years. We developed a ton of really cool features and tools, and our beta agents are doing exceptionally well. In fact, everything is now running so smoothly that we’ve decided it’s time to open up our community to new agents.

Join Our Community

If you’re a real estate professional who gets the web, and is tired of all the poor performance and broken promises that exist in today’s agent services market, swing buy the PropertyTown site and submit the contact form. We’ll follow up with you and schedule a call to discuss all the details involved with joining our community.

Join Our Affiliate Program

Also, if you’re someone who provides any other types of services for real estate professionals, you might want to seriously consider becoming a PropertyTown affiliate. We are offering a two-tier referral program that pays recurring monthly revenue for the life of the client.