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The Immovables Website Moved – The Deconstruction Of Phoenix Market Trends
By Artur Ciesielski | Essay
By Artur Ciesielski | Essay
Have you heard the term sunken cost? These are costs which are lost whether you like it or not. It can be more than financial cost. Emotional costs are equally expensive and can easily hamper progress.
When I started Phoenix Market Trends in 2007 it was a simple blog on an obscure platform, but it worked well. It was still the wild west in terms of real estate websites. Most of them being crap. That has not changed much either. Most of them are still crap, devoid of useful information, self-congratulatory regurgitated shit like every other realtor has.
No one tingles inside at the prospect of hiring another ‘multi-million dollar producer’. What does that even mean.
If you are one, you’re still starving, scraping in the discount barrel in Wal-Mart with your ass in the air while some guy takes a photo of you to post on his People of Wal-Mart Facebook page.
The site went through a few changes, some of them bad, which never saw the light of day. Just my wallet went skinny. There are some shit web designers out there too, full of promise yet skinny on substance.
In 2011 the site went REW. It went big time. My wallet $15,000 skinnier again. It was the good times despite the markets hard time. With some shaky linking the site peaked at over 1,000 visitors a day, which for a localized website is really good.
I posted good content, I invested more, I paid the $1,000 per month MLS fee – fuck you – ARMLS. Even an attempt at some negotiation to lower the fee only resulted in a status quo when they said, “those are the fees and that’s it.” I can’t be too hard on them. I knew the fees going in, but why charge agents so much for a raw idx fee in the first place. It’s the same fee big companies pay. I was paying to have my own listings on my site.
Sales happened. The income was worth the expense, but I started to get a bitter taste in my mouth from being Nickle and Dimed for any changes I wanted to make. Small changes with REW would cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. “You want to change your logo?” That will be 3 hours at $125.00 per hour. For comparison – on this new site – it took me 3 minutes to upload the logo.
Then the shit hit the fan. Google released the zoo hungry for black hat blood and lots of sites went down, penalized for playing bad. If you got penalized, traffic could disappear, it could go from 1,000 to 50 a day, as it did in my case. Others got wiped of the planet. 50 is not bad right? Yes, it’s 50 times more than most real estate websites get, but once you experience 1,000 per day, 50 just sucks.
Fixing the site meant hours of labor and guessing. You see, they don’t tell you exactly what is wrong. I still don’t know, but I suspect it was the implementation of a business directory on the site, which was a good faith gesture to local businesses listed and exposed. I think that’s it, because the removal of some guest articles and a request for reconsideration did not result in the removal of the penalty. I can’t argue with them. It’s their business and I have to abide by their rules and whim.
I’ve been thinking about this change for about a year. Then I just did it in a few days. I took some of the content out of the thousands of articles on the previous sites and moved them to the new one. I didn’t count, but, for sure less than 50 made it over and mostly those related to multifamily investing. There was no point moving blogs posts about the market as it was in February 2012.
The new site is built on a recently released Pearsonified skin on the Thesis theme. Thesis is awesome to work with once you learn it, especially if you don’t want to deal with or don’t like dealing with code.
It’s focus now is mostly multifamily property investing and ownership. I enjoy dealing with multifamily properties, I like the people who buy and sell them and there is less competition online. The latter doesn’t really matter though. After 16 years in the real estate business it’s just what I prefer and know really well and when I do get clients for home that knowledge translates really well, much better that the reverse.
Okay, I went to get a sip of beer and lost my train of thought.
Here is the new site. Keep in mind that, it being on WordPress makes it easier to tweak which will happen more often, so if you look at it now, it may look different from the capture below.
One major change: no listings. There are plenty of places to search for listings and I’m not in the business of displaying listing. When you hire me you hire my experience and knowledge not my ability to display the same boxes everyone else does.
Below is a snap of the site as it was just before it got the new look above. It was certainly a fancy, expensive and good-looking site.
What matters more, though, is conversion and flexibility.
There are so few thing one can do with a lead time in the weeks and minor changes in the $100’s of dollars each time. I prefer flexibility and a fatter wallet.
I just don’t like being charged for each little change and not being able to make them myself.
If you have not yet done so take a look at the Phoenix Market Trends website.