One of the most specific problems related to content management in the Manufactured Home Community industry is syncing real-time updates of homes that are for sale.
Community managers and listing agents use third party services like MHVillage or Rent Manager to promote their homes for sale. These services are valuable and help you reach a larger audience for a small investment. They are great resources.
Listing Services Are Helpful, For the Most Part
We have learned from our customers that even though they publish their available homes on listing services, they do not like to send leads there. The reason for this is that competitors’ listings are displayed in ads directly on their property pages. The listing services are good for reaching a larger audience, but they want to maintain available homes for sale on their own website, where they can control the user experience and capture direct leads using conversion funnels. So the listing experience is helpful, but it is not necessarily beneficial.
Displaying Available Homes on Your Website
What if you want to display your community’s available homes on your website? Perhaps you have tried to utilize your website to display your available homes real estate information, but you run into some problems. Do any of these sound familiar?
Time Consuming Double Data Entry
Without any data integrations or custom programming, chances are you have to re-enter the same information on your website, such as re-typing the home details, uploading all of your images, reviewing the content, and publishing it. This can take up a lot of your time and it becomes a burden, especially when your data changes.
Available Homes Data Becomes Out of Sync
If you are doing double data entry, it is a common problem for the data to become out of sync. You sell a home, add a new listing, change a sale price or mark it as a pending sale, and so on. These all are instances where you need to continue to change the data in many places for it to remain accurate. It can be difficult to manage and maintain all of that information.
Fielding Repeat Calls and Emails About Homes Already Sold
The story is a familiar one. You or your organization sells a home. You continue to receive calls from eager, interested customers for the home that has been sold, because the listing among various sites does not sync, leaving homes that have sold on one site still “for sale” on another site. You need a solution so that you do not have to continue to repeat yourself to disappointed customers.
Website Management Problems
It is all too easy to forget to update your website, because it is not easy to update your website, from security certificates to content and images to data. If your website is not using a modern content management system (CMS) like WordPress, it can be difficult to locate the content that needs to be changed. The process can be cumbersome and — let’s face it — not fun.
Even if you manage to get your listings on your website, display consistency can be an issue. If the layout is bad, it can be hard for your website visitors to understand the information. You are running a business, not a website design company. You need help managing your website.
Search Engine Optimization
Staying on top of search engine optimization is confusing or not a priority. On one hand, generating content about your community can be fun and exciting. On the other hand, maintaining relevant and up-to-date-content — both of which feed SEO — is another job for you. It would help to have SEO done for you, or for it to be more efficient.
Custom Programming is Expensive
Most of the listing services offer some type of integration tools where you can pull in the data to your website. The problem is, they require a web developer to build a custom solution, which can be expensive and take a long time to build. If you need changes in the future, you may be waiting a long time to receive them in a timely manner.
A lot to consider, isn’t it?
We Can Help
You need real-time updates of data between MHVillage and your community’s website.
If only you had one place to make all the content changes you need and they appear on your website, solving both data entry and website management.
This is where we come in: The Done-For-You Website Solution For Manufactured Home Communities. We work with community owners, property managers, and internet marketers to provide a modern website that solves specific problems for the MHC industry.
If you are struggling to keep up with constant content and data changes, as well as all of the demands of the Internet and technology, give us a call. We can help.