One of the most common questions we receive from our clients is, "How do I become the top-ranked real estate website in my market?"

Perform a quick Google search for real estate in any U.S. market, and you'll almost undoubtedly see search portal giants like Zillow and Trulia holding the top ranking spots.

How have these search portals come to dominate the search results? And what can you do as an agent to surpass them?

Why Do Users Love Real Estate Portals?

To start, we must ask ourselves why users love portals to begin with. And the answer is simple: users love their intuitive platforms.

Pull up any real estate listings portal and you're likely to see a "map to the left, listing thumbnails to the right" layout. This listing layout has

Look out for some exciting improvements coming to how leads can be prioritized in the REW CRM.

At Real Estate Webmasters, our goal has always been to make following up with your most valuable leads as quick and intuitive as possible. We want you to spend your time on the highest quality leads that are most likely to engage with you.

As part of the upcoming 2018 Spring C REW CRM update, we’re introducing two brand new ways for you to sort leads, so you can get in touch with your website’s hottest leads first.

The new update will allow you to arrange your website’s leads from highest to lowest based on two advanced metrics: Score and Value.

But how will Lead Score and Lead Value change the way I view my leads? We’re glad you asked!

Lead

The VR experience on Vision is going to the next level in the latest REW CRM release.

Enhanced listings can now feature fully stereoscopic images and videos—taking your site visitors deeper into the places and properties they love.

Virtual reality is an emerging technology that is rapidly becoming more accessible and expected in the real estate industry. Property seekers today have increasing time and affordability constraints that make property purchases a high stakes game.

By employing VR, agents can help buyers choose which properties to view in person or make better decisions from afar without an in-person inspection. For sellers, VR offers another opportunity to create an emotional attachment between potential buyers and their property,

It’s time for another platform update, REW’s third release of the Spring. This update brings with it some dramatic enhancements as well as another series of requested fixes to our web products. We’ve committed to ensuring your REW CRM, Vision design, and REW mobile apps keep getting better, and I’m excited to share that our product development team have bundled your most requested changes into this release.

Here are some of the biggest updates you’ll see over the next few days:

Newly Designed Leads Manager

We’ve totally revamped how the REW CRM leads manager works by streamlining the interface so that it puts the most relevant information and actions at your fingertips. Though you can still dig deeper into the details of a particular lead if you

Forced Registration For Real Estate Leads: Yes or No?

If there's one contentious issue when it comes to real estate websites, it's registration settings. Some agents swear by forced registration and others shudder at the mere mention of the words.

The purpose of this blog is to provide a powerful example of how forced registration can impact real estate lead generation in a big way.

What is Forced Registration?

Before we jump into our experiment, let's clarify exactly what it is we mean by "forced registration." In this case, we mean that users are required to provide their email and phone number before they're able to browse a single listing on your website. To be clear, this is totally non-optional registration—the user has to either fill

Here at Real Estate Webmasters, we've created two phenomenal lead follow-up tools for our clients to use. Both are included as part of the monthly SaaS program and both can be used to help take your business to the next level, improving your ability to follow up with clients and leads.

However, despite seeming similar on the surface, REW CRM and REW Leads are two very different pieces of software. Let's break them down...

REW CRM overview

• Mobile responsive web platform
• Single portal for managing all aspects of your website
• Includes lead follow-up, content management & site settings
• Accessible on desktop and mobile devices (including tablet)

REW CRM gives you full control of your website and lead management in a single place. The

REW’s second spring release is here! I hope you are seeing our commitment to regular platform updates as we continue to introduce changes every month. Our product development team has also been busy preparing for the launch of the latest REW website platform. 

We’ll have more news to share about this feature-rich design in the near future, while we’re working hard to bring you enhancements and fixes to your REW apps, the REW CRM platform, and the Vision template.

Let’s take a closer look at what you can expect from this update:

REW Leads App

For our Android users, the introduction of Lead Reminders to the REW Leads App is big news. This feature works together with the calendar in the REW CRM to allow you to add, set, and receive notifications

Now that we've launched our branded REW IDX app and our clients have taken notice, we've started to receive questions about the two different versions of the app.

One of the biggest questions is whether a real estate agent needs an iOS app, an Android app, or both.

In this post, we're going break it down and answer that question.

When one app is actually two

First, let's explain why we have two separate apps.

When an app is created for both iOS and Android, the app is created twice—one for iOS devices like iPhones and iPads, and then again for Android devices like Galaxy phones and generic tablets.

That's because the iOS and Android operating systems use entirely different languages that aren't compatible with one another. Apple has

Real Estate Webmasters recently hired a market research company to complete extensive surveys and interviews with Realtors, buyers, and sellers across North America. We gained a lot of valuable insight into the real estate industry, which we've shared throughout this blog over the past month.

In this post, we're going to summarize the research that told us how Realtors can turn their buyers and sellers into loyal, lifelong clients who will be happy to share their name with all their family and friends. (After all, referrals are still a top way to get new clients..!)

Most people only passively follow the real estate market when they aren't planning to buy or sell. However, they are motivated to stay in touch when Realtors send information that helps

Unless you're a real estate SEO expert, upgrading your site can be scary.

You've worked hard to build up authority, earn traffic, and create a system that effectively generates leads.

Therefore, it's understandable that one of the most common questions we get when people are considering an upgrade is, "Will this hurt my SEO?"

The short answer is "no."

Completed properly, an upgrade shouldn't have any negative impact on the authority you've built. If anything, it should only help. Here's what you need to know:

Steps of a proper REW website upgrade

A proper REW website upgrade is simple:

1. Transfer - All content is automatically transfered by REW in its current state to the new website
2. Format - Go through the website and reformat