When Darell Bowen decided to get back into real estate after taking a break from the business in 2001, he knew he needed to find his feet quickly. For Bowen, one of the biggest challenges was settling on the technology infrastructure needed to catapult Darell Bowen Realty back into the extremely competitive Florida Gold Coast markets around Florida’s West Palm, Wellington and Royal Palm Beach communities.
“After looking at the best search engines, I started talking to Homes.com and realized that my website wasn’t very compatible to contemporary technologies, especially mobile,” says Bowen, who goes on to say that before he started using Homes.com for his Web needs—from lead generation to Web features that are pulling in new clients by the dozen—he spent an excessive amount of time identifying what he thought were the top sites for real estate listings.
“My research identified the top four, so I set out to see what we needed to do to capture our leads from those sites,” he says. “After talking to the Homes.com rep, I discovered several options that I thought would be good for us.”
And thanks to a strategic partnership, the brokerage’s website is not only powered and managed by Homes.com today, but so are the company’s social media initiatives. And several of Bowen’s agents have since contracted with Homes.com for their own websites.
“The decision to use Homes.com for our website was driven by the fact that it would automatically adapt to a search from any type of device,” says Bowen, a key selling point for the broker/owner. “If you have a website, and it’s not optimized, clients have to do a lot of work to view it on a mobile device.”
For Bowen, having a mobile-optimized website is crucial, since most of his clients are on their mobile devices 24/7. “If people are out driving and they see a For Sale sign, they want to be able to pull up the information within seconds, and it needs to look good,” he says. “On our sites, clients get the information they need on a page that’s easy to read. Not only are the photos bright and vivid, they can also be viewed in high resolution when accessed from a desktop computer.
“Every week, there are leads coming in that we weren’t getting before, and we’ve only had our site launched for about a month,” adds Bowen, who notes that the Web infrastructure designed by Homes.com is easy to use. “Once we set it up to receive information, it’s pretty automatic. And the individual websites and tools that come with those sites are tremendous assets for our agents,” says Bowen.
“Homes.com helps us maximize the benefits we deliver to our clients, and that’s what it’s really all about.”
For more information on responsive design websites or advertising on Homes.com, click here.
