What does it mean to be a real estate agent who doesn’t actually transact real estate deals AND who makes a living off of a website that doesn’t talk about real estate?
Well, this is exactly what I do, and needless to say, I get a lot of questions from my colleagues in the real estate industry about my website, MoveToTacoma.com.
In this post, at the urging of my Community Marketing Course co-creator Alyssa Christensen, I will try to lift the veil on my unusual business model. I understand that very few agents would do things exactly as I’ve done them, but I think that there are a lot of great lessons to learn from my unusual business model whether you want to follow in my path or you want to supercharge a more traditional real estate agent’s prospecting strategy.
The secret of MoveToTacoma.com’s success is: No IDX, no real estate talk, and tons of content.
When I first launched MoveToTacoma.com, the idea was to create a resource for people who were not familiar with Tacoma. I wanted people to have a way to explore the city, and the first (and most important) piece of creating a website that helped people do this was to develop a clickable neighborhood map. My thought process was something like this: maybe someone had a friend who lived in the Stadium District, for example, and they wanted to live nearby, but maybe Stadium District was outside of their budget. One goal of the neighborhood map was to give people a way to easily learn the layout of the city and which neighborhoods were closest to where they wanted to be.
The second component was the actual neighborhood pages, which include pictures of the neighborhood, testimonials from residents about what it was like living there, photos of a few houses representative of the area, and (whenever my budget allowed) a video of the neighborhood. All of this information is meant to give folks an idea of the strengths of each neighborhood so they can tune into the places they like best. This is super important for people relocating from out of area, because they are going to do all of their research online, and of course, the websites with the most info are going to become their go-to resources for research. I wanted to be the person helping them figure it all out, and neighborhood pages were essential for that.
Something that always surprises real estate agents is that we never really talk about houses on Move to Tacoma. While we talk about neighborhoods and occasionally share housing market info, the focus is very much on community. This is a strong value that makes the site different from a lot of websites. Since the focus isn’t on real estate, the website is still useful for folks when they are NOT in the process of buying and selling, which helps immensely with referrals.
The Podcast
The Move to Tacoma podcast was the real wild card. When I first launched Move to Tacoma, I’d never heard of a real estate agent hosting a podcast. I knew that I didn’t want to talk about houses (who would listen to that?), but I loved the idea of hosting a show focused on Tacoma and the stories of people who lived here and the cool things that they did. As the podcast evolved over the years, we went from talking about basic things like commuting times and things to do in Tacoma to much meatier topics.
A Point of View on Local Issues
When MoveToTacoma.com launched in 2015, many sellers were still upside down in their homes and Tacoma was still recovering from one of the highest rates of foreclosure in the state. By 2017, Tacoma was in the throes of a full on affordability crisis, and so, the focus of the podcast and the content of the site shifted to address this. The site also began sponsoring other podcasts (like Nerd Farmer and Interchangeable White Ladies) that focused on these issues.
In addition to sponsoring new voices and new podcasts, MoveToTacoma.com was the sponsor for Adult Civics Happy Hour, a forum where Tacomans could get a civics education on local issues through a progressive lens. These forums covered local politics, affordable housing, policing, racism, and much more. While not traditional real estate topics, real estate is fundamentally intertwined with issues such as homelessness, segregation, and affordability, so folks in the community mostly appreciated us discussing these issues.
The Numbers Behind it All
Alyssa tells me that people want to know about the numbers behind Move to Tacoma, so here’s a little about how much this site has cost and what it has produced over the years:
Cost: The initial cost to build MoveToTacoma.com was about $5,000. I got off easy because at the time, my web guy was still getting started, and I built out several of the pages myself. Pro tip: don’t do this—the pages I built out were the ugliest pages and were a source of embarrassment for both me and my web guy. Don’t cheap out; pay a pro to make your site look good! These days, I would say a site like MoveToTacoma.com would probably cost an agent between $8,000-$10,000, assuming you write all of your own content. In 2019, I paid an additional $6,000 for the site to be refreshed and brought up to 2019 standards, and we also added a few new features. Plan to invest in updates like this to your site every 4 years or so.
Clients: I hate calling people leads, and because of the kind of content that Move to Tacoma has and the relationships we develop with folks who use the website and listen to the podcast, I just refer to them as “clients.” On average, out of every contact I receive through the website, about 50% ask me to connect them to a real estate agent. Of those clients who I refer out to other agents, 50% close within 12 months. The average time from when I refer a client to an agent and closing is about 4 months (and this time is going down since our market continues to heat up!).
Closings: I admit that I haven’t been super vigilant about tracking and numbers from day 1, but I have gotten much better over time! Because of this, I can tell you that since January of 2017 (right before I stopped transacting and transitioned to doing referrals full time) we’ve closed 119 transactions from MoveToTacoma.com. The amount of time that I spend on each referral client can vary—sometimes it’s just a simple email introduction between them and an agent, sometimes we talk on the phone before I connect them to an agent, and sometimes it means having brunch and feeling each other out a bit before I make some suggestions.
Creating and running MoveToTacoma.com has changed my life.
First, having the podcast and the opportunity to interview so many amazing people in my community has made me smarter. I know SO much more about Tacoma’s politics, history, and people.
Second, it made me more aware of how the work I do as a real estate agent impacts the people around me—sometimes in good ways but also in bad ways—and that I bore a responsibility to educate and change the way I thought about housing and who has access to it.
Ultimately, MoveToTacoma.com gave my business the full pipeline of amazing clients it needed to take me from a traditional practicing real estate agent to an agent who finds clients the very best agents—which is a super cool job to have.
I’ve taken all of the lessons that I learned building MoveToTacoma.com and (with the help of my amazing collaborator Alyssa Christensen from Home Scribe Creative) put them into an awesome online course called Mastering the Art of Community Marketing. You can learn more about it on the website here or on the Community Marketing Podcast.