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Bill Kraatz Licensed Real Estate Agent, Florence, KY

Date: April 18, 2007

Also having great success with MoneyMakingWebsites.com

Averaging $11 to $1 return the past 3 yrs.

Bill Kraatz

LivingInNorthernKY.com

serving Cincinnati's South Side and Best of the Bluegrass Horse Farms

Suzanne Hathcock Stephens said:

By the way, Maria. One of our clients has gotten as many as 18 leads 
per day from her Point2 site at <a href="http://www.realestateutah.com/">http://www.realestateutah.com</a>; it 
averages about 1/2 dozen leads per day. suzstephens@opendoor.com said: 
 
Maria, we are having great success with Point2Agent sites forlead 
generation!

See what's free at AOL.com.

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Keith Byrd, San Luis Obispo, CA

Date: April 19, 2007

Ok, now you’ve got me curious.

I ran a WebCEO ranking analysis on the site. It took keywords from the home page and meta tags and I added other ones (the last 4 on the list). The report is here:

http://www.locallinks.com/utah_ranking.htm. The ranking report looks at the first 30 search engine results for each keyword phrase.

Except for the one ranking for “Utah real estate”, I’m not seeing how anyone would find this site. What search terms are people using??

Also, you have 2 forms front-ending access to the MLS search and online home valuation. These forms appear to not do any verification of email address. What percentage of the “leads” you are quoting that this site is generating are bogus (either bad email or phone number)? The site also doesn’t seem to be friendly to return visitors. Do you have to fill out the form each time you want to search the MLS and are these counted as leads again?

Nothing personal Suzanne, I’d ask the same questions to any vendor making claims about lead generation.

Also, Suzanne is correct in bringing up the age of a domain as something that search engines (Google) looks at. If a SEO company gives you examples of their work, check the age of the site. You can either do a Whois to see when the domain was registered or use a tool like this onehttp://www.linkvendor.com/seo-tools/site-analysis.html which will give you the date that archive.org has for the site. If a SEO company is saying they can get your site ranked high and your site is new, make sure you ask the SEO company for examples of other sites they have successfully ranked well that are as new as your site/domain. This is not to say that new sites can’t get good rankings. Just make sure the SEO company is able to show you that they’ve been able to do it for others.

Keith Byrd

www.SloCountyHomes.com

>All organic, approx. 80% Google. The new Point2Agent site design is a few months old. It replaced a small developer site that had been online since 1995 and had not generated any leads in recent years. The only significant change was in creative strategy. Minimal SEO.

>Suzanne

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Suzanne Hathcock stephens Vendor, Battle Ground, WA

Date: April 20, 2007

Since the RealEstateUtah.com domain was pointed to the new site March 5, 2007, the site has had 5408 unique visitors, average of 53 unique visitors per day, average of 22 repeat visitors per day. About 60% come from no referrer. 20-30% from Google, and the rest from other SEs and miscellaneous referrers (3% Yahoo, 2% MSN). In April, 85% of search visitors were referred by Google. As I mentioned previously, all searches are on combinations of Utah + real estate, realty, homes, etc.

Unfortunately the site still suffers from its ten year legacy of SEO done as badly as possible: frames, title tags like "Home", little text, etc. I hope the site owner will follow through on her plans to build out pages for each of the larger Utah cities; that should help with SEO over the long term.

The search form should be setting a cookie so that repeat visitors don't have to sign in again. It's not as consistent as I would like, a point which I should ask Point2 about. It looks like roughly 20% of form submissions are bogus.

Suzanne

Suzanne Hathcock Stephens

Point2 Design Partner

Custom design for Advanced Access sites

Realtor.com advertising design

http://www.SuzStephens.com

byrd@SloCountyHomes.com said:

Ok, now you’ve got mecurious. I ran aWebCEO ranking

analysis on the site. It took keywords from the homepage and meta

tags and I added other ones (the last 4 on the list).The report is

here:http://www.locallinks.com/utah_ranking.htm.The ranking report

looks at the first 30 search engine results foreach keyword

phrase. Exceptfor the one ranking for “Utah real

estate”, I’mnot seeing how anyone would find this site.

What search terms arepeople using?? Also, youhave 2 forms

front-ending access to the MLS search and online homevaluation.

These forms appear to not do%2 0any erification of emailaddress. What

percentage of the “leads” you are quotingthat this site

is generating are bogus (either bad email or phonenumber)? The site

also doesn’t seem to be friendly to returnvisitors. Do you

have to fill out the form each time you want tosearch the MLS and

are these counted as leadsagain? Nothingpersonal Suzanne,

I’d ask the same...

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Glenn Ellenberger

Date: April 20, 2007

Maria, I have spent $2,000.00 for a lead generation site at Webxsites and I have to say that I can not identify 1 single lead from them. I have canceled the service. I direct people to my web site by advertising my web address on everything that I do. For example, for sale signs, post cards, brochures and homes books. That has worked well for me.

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Suzanne Hathcock stephens Vendor, Battle Ground, WA

Date: April 20, 2007

By the way, if I remember correctly, RealEstateUtah.com was on second page for Google searches on "real estate Utah" last winter before we took on the project. Whatever reason, it has moved to the first page. Apparently moving it from a different service to Point2 hasn't done it any harm, something we are always concerned about.

Suzanne Hathcock Stephens

Point2 Design Partner

Custom design for Advanced Access sites

Realtor.com advertising design

http://www.SuzStephens.com

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Lenn Harley Licensed Real Estate Broker

Date: April 20, 2007

Keith Byrd wrote:
Ok, now you’ve got me curious.
I ran a WebCEO ranking analysis on the site. It took keywords from the home page and meta tags and I added other ones (the last 4 on the list). The report is here:
===========================================
I ran what I thought were logical keywords for the site and found it to be
very well ranked in Google. The URL goes back in the Archives to about
1998.

Lenn Harley
Homefinders.com
Serving home buyers in Maryland and Virginia

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Chris Newell Licensed Real Estate Agent, Milton

Date: April 20, 2007

Don't know what can be done to beat Point2Agent in terms of a dirt-cheap lead generation site. My hideous, awful (according to some designers, anyway) site is gathering me an average of 12 new prospects a day, fluctuating much higher when I have the right-priced listings. 80% of them are leaving their work phone number. They are turning into money consistently. On one listing recently I had 4 of my own offers, all from web site leads, and 2 other agents had offers from people who found the listing on my site.We get less than 1 lead every 2 months from mls.ca, yet get 2 or more a day from point2nls. Hmmmm.Positioning? SEO? Hey, my site at http://AllMiltonHomes.com is the ugly duckling of real estate web sites. I don't add content other than listings, I may make as many as 6 minor changes a year, and that's it. I don't think it places on Google or any of the engines these days very well at all.Oh, but the domain has been around since about 1995. And my P2A site does have between 1900 & 2000 handshake agreements.You want lead generating, money-making web sites? Point2Agent.comNewell

Editor's Note
Is the Agent Handshake program generating much business for you, Chris? http://Point2Agent.InternetCrusade.comJohn

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Chris Newell Licensed Real Estate Agent, Milton

Date: April 20, 2007

NOTE TO READERS - YOU NEED TO READ THE WHOLE PIECE. John asked if we get much business from the handshakes. Hmmm - define 'much'. In March we did 4 sales directly as a result of the person contacting us about a handshake listing. Those 4 sales were just over 1/2 of our 7 sales for the month. I slacked and took 17 days off, as did my wife, who runs the business. My one buyer agent is showing to 4 different buyers this weekend in price ranges from $375,000 at the low end to $700,000 in the high end, and 2 of them are at the high end. All from handshake listings. I am just a touch worried about handshake though - the future of it. I have started to pay a lot more attention to the agents I approve, because of what is a small challenge now and could be a bigger one in the future. When people contact us about a handshake listing, I explain that the reason I don't know much about it is that we are part of an advertising co-operative, sharing listing inventory amongst some 1900+ web sites. People get that and have no problem with it. If they are looking outside my area, I will refer them out. The probem with the handshake comes in with some of the agents who get in there and are not ethical or are just plain STUPID. There are, at different times, quite a few listings that are marked active and sold months ago. Nothing Brendan and the boys can do about it. There are also many agents on there with business models that I will not support - no listing fee or tell buyers to call listing agents and then get a rebate or sundry other models. The business models are not advertised on the site but they exist and will not be given the opportunity to advertise my listings and make money to try and put me out of business. If we had any EBA's, I would love to handshake with them; I find it a challenge to always provide inventory to the agents who don't have any. HAVING SAID ALL THAT . . . . Agent Handshake is the greatest thing since peanut butter was re-invented as a personal-pleasure food. Add to that the fact that P2NLS is blowing the national site that my dues support completely and utterly out of the water and, well, what could be better?

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tsirico

Date: April 21, 2007

I made the fatal mistake of trying Home Values for 18 months....I could have burned the money...it cost me money because the leads were bogus. Been there...done that...

glenn@glennellenberger.com said: Maria, I have spent $2,000.00 for a lead generation site at Webxsites and I have to say that I can not identify 1 single lead from them. I have canceled the service. I direct people to my web site by advertising my web address on everything that I do. For example, for sale signs, post cards, brochures and homes books. That has worked well for me.

Teresa M. Sirico

ABR-CRB-CRS-ePRO-GRI-SRES

1998 Board President

1999 Educator Of The Year

2004 Realtor Of The Year

TERESA SIRICO REALTOR LLC

90 Taylor Ave

East Haven, CT 06512

203-469-5330

203-468-8686 (Fax)

tsirico@snet.net

www.teresasirico.com

TRUST TERESA!

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Charles Hutchinson

Date: April 22, 2007

I bought into RealEstate.com (which is also e-loan.com), which uses the point-2-Agent system. I found point-2-agent very powerful. At the 'professional' level, they even assign you a 'coach' to help you. I stopped using the realEstate.com system, but are planning to contact point-2-agent soon. I'm glad to hear that people are getting networking referrals from the system.

Charles Hutchinson

William Raveis Real Estate Company

Hutch@CharlesHutch.com

(866) 490-3898

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