Q: How much does this cost?
A: Pricing depends on population of the community. Price starts as low as $250/month.
Q: Do you actually give exclusivity to one Real Estate Professional? I’ve heard this before and it wasn’t true.
A: yes, we give 100% exclusivity to 1 Real Estate Professional per neighborhood site for as long as they want it.
Q: Why can’t I just build a community website on my own?
A: You totally could. But it would cost you 10X what charge and more importantly it would take 100X more of your time to find and wait for someone to build it. Once the basic platform is built, you would have to hire somone to keep it up to date, or you would have to spend hours every week yourself to find local content to post on it. Once you have content on the site every week, you would need to spend money to get people to go to it. (See FAQ # 5 to read how we know this).
You are a Real Estate Professional, you need to be serving your clients and building new relationships, not making sure your neighborhood website is running. Leave that to us!
Q: How do you keep each site up-to-date?
A: We have built a proprietary algorythm that scans the internet for news, events and deals in each neighborhood. It organizes, categorizes and updates each site every day with this local content.
Q: How do people know about the Parkbench Neighborhood Websites?
A: Many ways!
1. The local business owners have multiple reasons to promote your Neighborhood site for you!
– Once they have been interviewed, they share their interview on their social media pages which generates hundreds if not thousands of unique visitors who want to read about their favorite local business owner.
– The local business owners tell their customers to go to their profile and write a review in exchange for a coupon. (This feature is built into their profile)
– The local business owners put up window stickers that say “Thank you for shopping local Parkbench.com”. (We send you these)
2. SEO of each site gets greater over time so when people search for something in the neighborhood whether its a local business or a local Real Estate Professional, your neighborhood site will show up! We have many examples of this to show you.
3. The team at the Parkbench HQ uses social media, press releases, email marketing, and more to help Parkbench become a household name.
4. Each neighborhood Realtor of course! The bigger our network gets, the more cities we get into, the more people know about Parkbench which drives more awareness to every neighorhood site.
Q: Why was Parkbench started?
A: Well, here is our story..and this is how we know how much it costs to build a site on your own.
Parkbench was not supposed to be a business at first. It was just an idea that one Real Estate Professional named Amanda Newman had 2 years ago with her small business owner boyfriend Grant Findlay-Shirras, to get new clients in a neighborhood they just moved to. Since they were both in relationship based businesses (Real Estate Professional and fitness professional) they wanted a tool that would help them go around and meet people in their new community. So they decided to build a neighborhood website to give the local businesses free advertising. This gave them a reason to go around and get to know the business owners by offering them something of value first.
With all websites, it ended up costing much more than planed and took way longer than promised. Over $30K and over 6 months to be exact. And this was just for a the basic site with a few features they wanted. But it worked for them. They both were building tons of local relationships, their neighborhood site was getting thousands of hits, businesses were getting reviews and returning customers and they were getting referrals.
Then, another local realtor contacted them and asked if she could advertise on their neighborhood site. *Light bulb* They realized that Real Estate Professionals all over had the same need as they did. So from there they built another neighborhood site…then another site for another Real Estate Professional..and then another..
Today over 600 Neighborhood sites are launched. The site you see today has features that Real Estate Professionals over the past 2 years have asked for. Because Parkbench was started from a real need, Amanda and Grant continue to listen to their clients and are always improving the neighborhood sites for Real Estate Professionals. Now Real Estate Professionals think of Parkbench as the tech team building them the ultimate neighborhood site they always wanted without them having to lift a finger.