Real Estate Lead Funnel!

REALTORS®! New from Tour Real Estate – RealFunnel Sites!

These streamlined websites offer an elegant landing page to welcome your clients and feature amazing functionality without a big price!

Perfect for new agents, or agents who have a few extra domains laying around, these light-weight sites load lightning fast and help drive traffic to your main website, Facebook business page, and showcase your exceptional services.

No hassle! Hands off performance that just WORKS!
Way better than sending clients to Zillow to find some other agent, or just having your extra domains forwarding in (which does nothing for your search engine visibility!), RealFunnel Sites from TourRE get real results real fast without you having to do a thing.

It’s not just for real estate agents either!
We can develop these lightweight sites to help farm your latest subdivision, to target a specific niche market, or even to showcase your builder!

Interested? Ready to claim a bigger piece of your internet pie?
Pricing starts as low as $199! Let’s talk!

Tis The Season…OF SPAM!

Ah the holidays!
It’s the time of year when we take a moment to pause and reflect on all the good things the year has brought us, the lessons learned, and the plans for the coming new year. And if you’re a website owner it also means it’s time for SPAM!

Spam comes in many forms, from the plain advertising type to the outright malicious kind that will try to take over your computer, so it’s important to be aware of the dangers.

You will be glad to know that we here at Tour Real Estate Inc take the security of your real estate website very seriously!

Just one of the ways we excel is in overall uptime of our servers and security of the data it contains. Unlike many web systems that rely on open source code – like WordPress – we use proprietary code that we’ve written ourselves over the last decade. This helps insure that your site will be as safe as it can be.

Despite that fact however it seems like a few times every year some familiar faces make the rounds and start sending emails to our REALTOR® clients making them fear the worst.

You may receive emails similar to these:
“Good morning Your Name,

I’m on your website right now and there are some links returning “404 Not Found” error.

Not sure who’s taking care of the site, but I have a list of them in case you’d want to fix them.

Thanks,

—
Kathryn Brown”
OR
“I was compiling education resources for a project and found your site. Thank you for putting together this page – www . your website . com

I couldn’t get these links to work:

LINK1
LINK2
LINK3

I also would suggest you consider adding the websites below to your list. I have continually seen these referenced and have found them all to be helpful education resources. Hope this helps!

LINK1
LINK2
LINK3

Thanks,
Linda”
Don’t let these Chicken Little tactics scare you!
In most cases nothing is broken and these people have never even visited your website. They are merely seeking to make contact in order to engage with you for some other purpose – either to sell you services or gain access to your website or computer.

You can take comfort in the fact that we are here for you! If ever you have a suspicious message or have questions about your real estate website we’re only a call or email away. We want you to all be safe this holiday and through the new year, so we’re sharing this information to keep you informed and protected. As always, if you have questions about your website of any kind please get in touch!

NEW! Home Affordability Report

We are excited to launch our NEW Home Affordability Report feature!

This new standard Tour Real Estate website features provides your website visitors with a fast, easy way to get in touch with you in order to find out what kind of homes they can afford before they even begin searching. It’s great for the consumer because of it’s ease of use; it’s great for REALTORS® because it’s an unintimidating lead capture point with real power.

This elegant real estate lead capture point keeps things simple while still gathering all the information you need to either contact the potential client directly with more information or add them to our automatic home finding Dreamhome Program so that they get listings in their price range immediately in their inbox.

At TourRE we are constantly looking for ways to refine and improve our system of real estate webtools; we’ve been doing it for over a decade. We invite you to contact us to find out more, or visit our website to see examples of our work and learn more about what we offer to help you move more real estate!

The Best Real Estate Website

How many tools do you have in your toolbox?

Chances are it’s more than one. A hammer for nails. A wrench of bolts. Different tools for different tasks.

Your efforts in promoting your business are much the same: there is no one tool that fixes everything. But your website is an amazing multi-tool: IF you use it.

A hammer left in the toolbox drives no nails, a website left alone drives no sales.

The good news is it’s easy to use your real estate website from Tour Real Estate Inc to not only represent your services 24 hours a day seven days a week but to also be used as a powerful tool for the clients you’re already working with!

Here’s a few functions you’re sure to love:
Send Automatic Search Results by Email to Drive Clients To Your Website!
Create Blogs In Your Site To Keep Content Fresh!
Add, Edit, Remove Area Links to Your Partners
Create Unlimited Custom Pages
…And Much More!

Don’t keep sending clients to Zillow! Get a site that works for YOU.

If you’re tired of the run around, and ready to get a website up and running that will help you create a powerful digital presence we would love the chance to speak with you. Contact us today to learn more about our template real estate websites, custom web site design, and all we can do to help.

ADA Compliance: Fact or Fiction

For whatever reason the various real estate news portals across the web circulate a story about the importance of ADA compliance every few years, sending ripples of panic and fear through every real estate website owner online, as well as their poor tech people who manage those sites. To help dispel some myths, and offer some comfort to those confused we’ve prepared this article with helpful information you may want to consider.

Some Basic Info: Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) The ADA prohibits discrimination on the basis of disability in employment, State and local government, public accommodations, commercial facilities, transportation, and telecommunications.

While it is certainly important to make sure your website is as usable and available as it can be for everyone, concern over these standards at this point in regards to your website is largely a non-issue, here’s three reasons why:

• Most visually or hearing impaired internet users already have hardware and software that makes the web readable.
• There are actually NO standard approved ADA compliance rules for websites.*
• The only way this even becomes a concern is if a suit is brought against you, at which point you have over 14 months to get your website “compliant”.

Some of the items listed as being part of compliance are already taken care of in our system, or in basic standard web design best practices. These include:

• Text alternatives for images
  Most major images in our system allow for users to edit alt tags as they please.
• Captions for videos or other multimedia
  These are a standard part of almost all video. Especially via services like Youtube which we support.
• Presenting content in different ways
  Very vague. Our content is provided in a fairly standard way. Text. Images. Links.
• Making content easier to see and hear
  Very vague. Most browsers, and other softwares, also handle this on their own already.
• Making it easier for everyone to use and navigate
  Very vague. Best of all, our websites already do this.
• Website use from a keyboard
  These settings are generally able to be controlled via the users own system settings.
• Giving users enough time to read and use the content
  Taken care of! We don’t encourage fast changing slides or page forwards.
• Making sure the content you present doesn’t cause seizures
  None of our sites use seizure inducing content.
• Having text that’s readable and understandable
  All of our text is readable.
• Consistency of content and navigation throughout the site
  Consistency is part of any good web design, and just one of the things that we excel at.
• Use of error messages and ways to get back to where one started
  Our system always provides error information and a means to go back or reload a page.
• Content is compatible with various web browsers
  Our sites are tested to be available on all major browsers and screen sizes.

Curiously enough, most of the websites that are announcing this urgent need for compliance themselves are not ADA compliant. We can only assume these radical scare tactics from these sites and news sources is yet another way to Cry Wolf for attention in hopes of increasing interaction and web traffic.

Take Heart!
Once a standardized set of ADA compliance rules is released we will work diligently to include them into our system as part of our frequent, regular updates.

Should you make the decision to future proof your web presence with ADA compliance, we here at Tour Real Estate Inc, your providers of stunning real estate technology for over a decade, are happy to provide custom design towards this goal. Our attractive custom real estate websites provide a visually striking way to define your brand and stand out from the competition. Contact us to find out more!

*In July 2010, the DOJ released an advanced notice of proposed rule making seeking comments on website accessibility issues. The comment period closed in January 2011. The proposed rules have been delayed several times since that date. It appears that we will have to wait a little longer to see those rules—until at least 2018.

Idaho Builder Websites

Most of you already know we provide some of the very best real estate web sites in the industry, but did you know we also can create exceptional sites for Idaho builders and developers as well? It’s TRUE!

We love working with home builders in Idaho who are looking to showcase their plans and homes. Our builder websites are 100% custom designed to fit your needs – and we don’t believe they need to cost a small fortune! – whether it’s something just basic to get you up and running or a full blown dynamic web presence complete with floor plans and galleries we can help!

Don’t forget developers either!
It’s great when folks work together and our custom designed real estate developer websites provide a platform for agents and builders to come together to showcase a community. It’s a great way to share costs between parties and spotlight listings in the subdivision as it grows.

Need mobile responsive design?
We excel at mobile design and can gladly offer stunning concepts that will be sure to keep your potential buyers coming back. Unlike many other companies who simply forward your domain to some third level dot mobile platform our mobile websites are html compliant and full working versions of your design. We don’t skimp and cut corners – we innovate!

If you are an Idaho home builder feel free to give us a call to find out more about how we can help you create a powerful online presence today!