How has technology impacted Dubai's property market?

Even as folks started listing their properties on the rudimentary internet portals in an earlier era, real estate agents were skimming the market for potential buyers and showing them multiple properties in a locality to ensure a sale takes place. The real estate selling and buying on the internet has changed leaps and bounds since then. The traditional real estate also co-exists albeit a little cautiously, watching the growth of online marketing competition. The early adaptors of technology have a lot to look forward to.

For one, the ease of reaching out to a potential buyer. Today, many real estate agents, agencies, builders, and developers own exclusive portals. These portals host a multitude of properties with high-gloss images, property details and agent/seller contact information. So, if you are seated anywhere in the world, you can access these properties at your fingertips. Websites of reputed agencies and builders catch on by brand image and word of mouth. For newer agencies, it needs some extra effort to build on the brand image on the internet. Digital marketing including search engine optimization, social media marketing, newsletters and other multi-level activities help in reaching out to the right target audience.

Most importantly, building your own portal for real estate transactions comes with its own set of advantages.

• Analyzing the visitor demography: Linking your website to social media sites helps in profiling your potential customers better. Understanding their age, gender, occupation and location will help you customize your content and communication better.
• Geography: Tracking visitors based on their country and city will add to customizing the features of your website, change language options or translation of the website content and enhance the cultural experience through informative content.
• Browser & Device information: This will help in optimizing your website to provide the best possible customer experience relevant to the electronic devices from which visitors access your website
• Keywords: This will show you the most popular terms used to search your website
• Page Information: You can find out how long do visitors spend time on your website and which are the popular pages that they spend more time on. You can also track what they downloaded and how many times was it downloaded. This helps in building your resources section where you can upload reports, fact sheets, White papers and so on.

Although these advantages are a short glimpse into the potential in owning real estate portals, it should give you a fair idea on what you can do by building your own portal.

There are many agents and sellers who do not own a portal but would love to engage in online real estate business. Budget constraints in building their own website or limiting it only to a static site with no technical expertise to maintain or upgrade ensures that they are at a loss of being in the real estate market race. Indeed it’s not easy to own an online portal for e-commerce / real estate with no solid technical team or budget to maintain it. In the ever changing world of technology, one needs to constantly upgrade websites to provide the most engaging content, navigation, features to keep the audiences interested to keep coming back as well as to refer their friends or family or business connections to your website.

Fortunately, there are reputed third-party portals that can host your listings and provide you with all the technology know-how in taking your real estate transactions online. With a dedicated team to continuously build, upgrade, update and maintain the website, these portals will allow you connect with your customers at a single market place at a nominal cost compared to running your own site. Ensure, the website you are being associated with has a catchy URL name, has presence on all popular social media, good user experience (where you do not struggle to upload your information every time), timely customer support and features with top notch industry standards!

With these little tips, be assured your online transactions in real estate will take a new turn. There is no need to miss the bus if you are short changed for the ticket, here, in the era of internet.