iHOUSE Website Customer Close-Up
Lori Lange is an Associate Broker for the Lange-Yartz Home Team at Prudential Kansas City Realty along with her business partner and long time friend Lee Ann Yartz. Their team tag line is “We’re Sold on KC!” and it is clear from how she describes the Kansas City Metro Area and her own town of Overland Park why they feel that way. “Kansas City is a very family oriented community, with great public schools and lots of recreational opportunities. Overland Park is definitely growing in both population and business and Johnson County is probably the most affluent county in our Metro Area. If you look at Money Magazine, Overland Park and Olathe, which is a neighboring community are always in the top ten cities as far as affordability and quality of life. They are always rated very high.” Overland Park/Olathe were Ranked 6th in 2006 as one of the top 10 places to live in America. (Money 2006) This understandably makes it a competitive market with challenges all its own.
“I do work full time, often a lot more than full time. My kids are in college now and I kind of waited till they were a little bit older to get started, because it really is a 24/7 job. I mean I love it, but you don’t have a lot of control some times over what times people need you and what you have to do. So it is good that I have the flexibility of having older kids. We do pay-per-click advertising for our website and it is such a competitive way to do business that we see costs go up every year because more and more REALTORS® are getting websites.”
Before getting into the real estate industry, Lori was in Special Education working with kids from ages 3 to 5. “Real Estate appealed to me because I would have more control and be in business for myself.” After getting her license Lori went to lunch with her now business partner Lee Ann who had been working in real estate for a year previous to her. “She explained what I was getting myself into. We ended up working together at the start on someone else’s team. After about 7 years like that we saw that we were doing pretty well and felt like we could manage on our own and so we took the leap.” They have had a team of their own for 3 years now.
One of the first things they did when starting their own team was search for a website. First, they decided on a domain that would fit their brand (soldonkc.com), built a logo, and then started looking at the sites of other agents in their area. After a good deal of comparison shopping they settled on an iHOUSE® website. “The website was our first piece of marketing when we created our team. I would say it was one of the most important things we did to get started. It helped us get our team name out to our past clients, position ourselves in the marketplace, and helped us have a place for our listing inventory online. We also use resources like REALTOR.com® and pay-per-click. We try to have registration pages where our visitors can search for homes with the IDXPro® MLS search as well as the Dream Home Finder form and Free Market Analysis form. Now we provide those leads to the newer members of our team. That is how we are helping them get started, so they have referrals to work with and other kinds of business down the road.”
“The lead capture forms are the best part of the site, and the free home search is where we get the most information from potential buyers. Now that it is all set up I can’t say we spend lots and lots of time on there tweaking it, because I just don’t have the time. It runs pretty smoothly by itself now. I don’t feel that there is a lot that I have to do anymore.”
Kansas City is not unaffected by the shift to a buyer’s market across the US. According to Lori appreciation has slowed and inventory has grown although not as much as on the coasts. “I know we are a shrinking market in terms of the number of REALTORS® here. We have seen the number of our fellow agents dropping over the last year. That is probably pretty typical for other places. There were some recent articles in the paper about the idea that the number of agents is dropping faster than the amount of work available. I don’t think that is necessarily the case, because the number of sales has declined as well. I think the rate is pretty much the same.”
“We still see plenty of buyers and sellers. Our business is very busy and we have seen it continue to grow over the last 2 years. That is a good thing, if you can do that in a down market!”