Real Estate Forums

HHI Golf Guy · 01-06-2007, 05:32 AM

The Kosloff Group is proud to announce an agreement with Down South Publishers to implement the web development, web marketing, and search optimization for 200+ nationwide real estate and vacation rental web sites. With the success of their flagship site, Hilton Head 360, Down South will be expanding their print media and web markets throughout the United States. Prior work with DSP on Hilton Head 360 and Hilton Head Hotels.com laid the foundation for this partnership.

In this unique agreement, The Kosloff Group CEO Shawn Kosloff will become an employee of Down South Publishers. This financial arrangement allows DSP to control costs while at the same time providing financial incentives and investment opportunities for Mr. Kosloff.

At the same time, The Kosloff Group will continue to service its existing clients as well as take on new clients at a reduced pace. By mid-2007 The Kosloff Group will expand its employment roster and allow for even greater growth for the company. In essence, the current arrangement with DSP is not much different than TKG taking on another portfolio.

DSP recently unveiled its latest real estate print media publication, Coastal 360 which will work in conjunction with Coastal360.com. The goal is to have Coastal360 up and running by the end of February 2007. This site will introduce the new core module for all of the 360 family of web sites and feature streaming video presentations for real estate, vacation rentals, and vacation itineraries for the areas between Charleston (SC) and Savannah (GA).

Upon the completion of Coastal360 the company will roll out sites for the South Carolina Low Country and coastal Georgia including Beaufort360, Bluffton360, Charleston360, and Savannah360. Later in 2007 the 360 family of web sites will grow to include major markets in Florida and Georgia.

One of the highlights of these web sites is the interactive mapping technology that you can see in action at the Hilton Head 360 web site. Mapping technology, imaging services, and multimedia services will be offered through the upcoming Media360.com.

REMAX LV · 01-16-2007, 06:17 PM

It is crazy how far technology is coming along these days! Everytime I visit a seminar here in the Las Vegas real estate there is some brand new piece of technology to help out in the real estate market

San Diego Real Estate · 03-15-2008, 01:28 PM

Hey Shawn,

Just curious as to how things are coming with this project? Now that you have had time to get things implemented and see some results with all your hard work!

Hope all your efforts are paying off!

HHI Golf Guy · 03-15-2008, 01:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by San Diego Real Estate

Hey Shawn,

Just curious as to how things are coming with this project? Now that you have had time to get things implemented and see some results with all your hard work!

Hope all your efforts are paying off!

Things have gone well, although a bit slower than we would have liked. It took considerable effort to convert 5,000+ listings and 27,000+ photos from our old database to the new database.

The new listing system can be seen on Coastal 360: Hilton Head, Bluffton, and Savannah Real Estate and Vacation Rentals. What we were able to do is modify the Open Realty system to meet our needs. This allows us to feed our local, regional, and national web sites off of a single database and show only the appropriate listings on each site.

We were also able to utilize and modify OR to feed both real estate listings and vacation rental listings from that same database. To simplify functionality, our advertisiers - no matter what region they are servicing - will input all listings on a single, neutral web site.

For the next two weeks our advertisers are test driving the new listings system. During that time we will recieve and evaluate their feedback, then take any needed actions. Soon after the conversion of Hilton Head 360 will take place, followed by the rollout of Bluffton360, Beaufort360, Savannah360, and Charleston360.

We also have a new ad management program in place on the site that allows for PPC ads, pay per impression ads, monthly ads, quarterly ads, annual ads, text links ads, flash ads, banner ads, hover ads, page peel ads, and more.

One of the key components of our ad program is making use of revenue management strategies that I utilized in my days as a hotel GM. In other words, ad pricing will be based upon peak periods of site traffic. And it just so happens that our peak traffic periods coincide with peak cash flow seasons of our real estate and vacation rental advertisers.

What this means is that our advertisers will be able to afford to run ads on our site throughout the year. For example, an ad that might cost $5,000 per month during peak periods may only cost $200 per month during the slow season. It's a win-win for us and our advertisers.

Keep in mind that if you view the Coastal360 site it is a very bare bones site, When Hilton Head 360 re-launches it will have all of the bells and whistles.

While I have your attention, I'll pass along a few more notes. Thanks to the efforts of those at Down South Publishers, The DuPont Registry will be featuring one of our Hilton Head properties on the cover of the next issue. This is due to our new cooperative marketing efforts with local agents, DSP, and the DuPont Registry.

The last piece of business that I would like to mention is the re-launch of one of my client web sites for Hilton Head real estate. The site is still in the middle of the conversion process, but you can take a look at some of the features now.

Next week we will be adding a Lifestyle Calculator (working name) where visitors can enter data about their lifestyle choices on the program will narrow down the ideal plantations and gated communities for them to begin their search for a new home.

If you get a chance to look through the site, pay close attention to the detail that the agent places on most of her property descriptions. This effort pays off, because it appeals directly to the ideal buyer client for that property.

Thanks for asking!

San Diego Real Estate · 03-15-2008, 02:08 PM

Shawn I'm pleased to say well worth the wait...

5,000+ listings and 27,000+ photos... Ouch

Those sites and the technology used is truly very impessive. Those are some of the best looking Real Estate websites I have seen out there!

Once again Shawn thanks for the update and Congratulations on a Job Well Done!

hmilesjr · 07-25-2008, 11:19 PM

Very nice work. Curious as to how the big three search engines are reponding to the site changes?

HHI Golf Guy · 07-26-2008, 10:24 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hmilesjr

Very nice work. Curious as to how the big three search engines are reponding to the site changes?

The Coastal 360 site is still a test site and is not being optimized.

However, the primary site was released with the new format in the past few months. Hilton Head 360 features Hilton Head rentals, real estate, and local information (shameless anchor text entry).

One problem we had with the old site is that Google had indexed comment and request forms for the thousands of listings. Each of those pages was essentially duplicate content with the same title tags. That meant 10,000+ pages of junk, nearly duplicate content. Between the delete URL requests I submitted and Google spidering the new site most of those pages are now gone.

Google has indexed many of our thousands of listings pages, although they have not re-indexed the majority of them since I tweaked the title tags. I expect another pickup in the rankings once the majority of those pages are indexed.

In the meantime, rankings have improved and all but one of our key terms are in the top 10 or just outside the top 10. This is mainly because of the on page optimization as there is no active link building campaign going on now. Any link building is strictly passive through the Social Bookmark tags I added and the RSS feeds I have added. In the next few weeks as a few new sections of the site open we will be adding additional feeds.

Rankings would be even better if there was an active link campaign going on. However, development of other sites (which drive our web revenues) have taken precedent at this time.

One interesting thing that happened over the past few weeks is the Yahoo Slurp (spider) has crashed our sites. When it hits our custom search form it triggers all sorts of strange queries and ends up leaving a lot of sleeping queries and that shuts down the MySQL server. Since I blocked Yahoo from accessing those pages the problems have gone away. Blocking the search form is no big deal because there are other avenues to pick up all of the listings.

mrbrian · 08-05-2008, 03:37 PM

Very nice site. The interactive map is a great function.