iHOUSE Website Customer Close-Up
Wendy and David are a husband and wife team with a story that is far from ordinary. Wendy is the broker and David (who is not a REALTOR®) handles all of their marketing. Originally from England they have only been part of the Orlando, Florida real estate market for a couple years, but together they have made Wendy the 10th ranked REALTOR® in both sales and transactions for Orlando in 2007. This year she has realistic hopes that she will be ranked even higher when the statistics for 2008 come out in January. Wendy says, “We are very competitive. We like to be number 1. I have been very pleased with how successful I have been in a short period of time.” But this is not the first time that Wendy and David have risen to the top of their field.
Back in England, before ever becoming involved in real estate, Wendy was an operating room nurse, while David worked at one of the largest Internet Service Providers in England. Wendy was a nurse for 10 years before she tried her hand at sales for a company providing medical supplies. Wendy says, “I then realized that I preferred sales to being a nurse. So I excelled at that. I was number 1 sales person for medical products. And then, I don’t know how I even got into it, I ended up with a shop.” Wendy’s small shop sold nursery supplies and she quickly found greater and greater success. Using David’s expertise in IT and Web development they expanded their nursery supply business into online distribution via an ecommerce site. According to David, “We started off as a small retailer and we went up to a large department store and 5 warehouses supplying 800 independent stores in the UK. So we went from a small supplier of nursery equipment to an FTSE 100 listed website. We were in the dot-com boom.” To put that into perspective, the FTSE 100 is the index of the top one hundred most highly capitalized companies on the London Stock Exchange. That is big business! Around this time David also became involved in home renovations. This piqued Wendy’s interest in real estate but according to her, real estate in the UK is “very, very” different.
“You can just buy a property, sell it yourself. It’s not as regulated as it should be. So we bought and sold property. We always wanted to have a real estate company in the UK, but it is very different. It would have been another shop. You don’t have things like the MLS in the UK. You literally have a high street shop, people come to your shop and tell you they want to sell their property. Then you just put a picture of the property in your shop and then you sell it like you would sell anything else on the high street. There is no regulation and no training as such, and I already had one shop, so we never got into it.”
A few years ago, judging the time was right they sold their business and prepared to move to America. One thing they had to figure out was what to do when they got here. “We had no idea what business to do, just like real estate is very different over here, so is selling nursery equipment. So we didn’t want to follow on the business that we knew in the UK. It could have been very difficult and a total disaster to try and do that. So we figured, “What else do we know anything about?” and “We know, we’ll do real estate!” They decided that Wendy would get the real estate license and David would focus on marketing.
So their first step in coming to America was to find a community they wanted to live and work in. Wendy says, “Coming over here with a British accent, most people sell real estate over in ‘Vacation Land.’ We made the decision that we didn’t want to do that. There were too many Brits over there and we wanted to be different. We just came over here looking for somewhere to live really. We came across Windermere and liked the look of the area and that is where we decided to set up business.” After Wendy got her license they had a bit of a rocky start. Wendy had a bad experience at her first office and decided to become a broker as soon as possible. Wendy says she was practically forced into being a broker “by default”. She became a broker in November 2007 and a year later she currently has 44 listings with a total value between $30 and $40 million dollars. “We do like to deal in the high end. I would say of my 44 listings, a quarter of them are over $2 million. It’s nice, but the little houses are good too.”
David also ran into difficulties with their first website provider. “We found they didn’t respond to any technical issues. Quite often we would have glitches and the most infuriating thing for me was, and what made us switch to iHOUSE, was they told us they were linked to the MLS and they could just do a direct data import, but they didn’t have an agreement with our MLS, so I was furious.”
David knows how to make websites, and in fact he does maintain several of his own, but he says, “I just like the simplicity of your sites. They work well, it ranks fine, search engines find it. For a point-and-click site with a limited budget, it is brilliant for bringing in leads, I have to say.
“Out of your tools I like the general submission tools that submit new listings into the various categories, the AOL and so forth. Those are some great little features. It saves me having to retype half a dozen times a day and manually submit.”
“Also, your IDX capabilities are brilliant. I have looked at a load of IDX solutions and I have recommended IDXPro to everybody I have talked to about yourselves. And your new system is very good. I am very impressed.”
“Our customer feedback is good. Though it only brings 30–40 visitors in at a time they are usually good quality. What I have noticed with the iHOUSE/IDX leads, they are usually good and we are normally very pleased with it. We do get those leads and they do convert and it only takes 1 or 2 leads in the multiple-million sale bracket for the website to really pay for itself a thousand times over. For the price you charge it’s a no-brainer for anyone coming into real estate.”
When asked how the mortgage crisis is effecting the local Orlando market Wendy says, “There is nowhere in the whole of the states really, and it is even worldwide now, that isn’t affected by this economy we are in, but I think Orlando is a little more secure than other areas because we rely so much on vacationers. So if you haven’t got people traveling from all around the world for Disney, you have the snow birds coming down for the winter, so there is never a quiet period in Florida. So as long as you are active and market yourself well you can be active all year round. We don’t have seasons as such. I think you could talk to a lot of real estate agents in Orlando who would complain that business was really bad. We have never been in real estate at a time when you literally just took orders. We have always had to work for our business. We market ourselves very effectively and it has paid off. We have worked hard from the beginning and not just sat back and moaned like a lot of people do about how bad business is. It’s that mentality. It’s, ‘If you are going to be miserable that just breeds onto people around you and just causes bad feelings all round.’ We are always positive, always upbeat and this last couple of months I have been busier than I care to remember.”
This philosophy is serving Wendy and David well. They are now setting up a new real estate office back in London and one of the first things they did when setting up the new office was to create another iHOUSE website.
