If you are renting a home, how likely are you to upgrade the kitchen, or invest in new landscaping to increase the resale value and curb appeal? Not likely, I imagine. After all, when you rent, you know that any investment you make in your home will be lost when you decide to move.

But here's a question for you: Do you rent your website, or do you own it? Are you one of the million or so agents who choose to pay a regional or national real estate technology provider for the privilege of borrowing their server and their content management system on a monthly basis? Yeah, I thought so.

While many real estate agents encourage an ownership mindset when it comes to real estate decisions, they have a hard time shaking the renter mindset when it comes to their own real estate website. Are you really going to invest serious time or money in a website you don't actually own, knowing that if you decide to switch providers, you'll have to give it back and start over? Of course not.

The solution, of course, is to own your website, not rent it from a boilerplate real estate website provider. There is obviously more cost up front with this approach, but the payoff can be the difference between surviving and thriving in your real estate career. Owning your own site gives you freedom you never thought you had to try new strategies, add new content, and implement customized sales tools.

Don't Lose Your SEO Investment

One of the most important reasons to own your own site is that it ensures you won't lose your SEO investment. When you own a professionally built, search engine friendly real estate website, you can confidently invest in it to improve its sales performance knowing that you will still own it a decade from now. Sure, you may change the colors or graphic design every now and then, but that doesn't lose your SEO investment.

Some of the most important aspects of SEO are maturity (how long has your site been around?), content (how relevant is your information to what people are looking for?), and backlinking (how many other websites point links back to yours?). When you change websites like underwear, you are constantly resetting the clock on your SEO profile, ensuring your site never ranks as well as it should. On the contrary, when you commit yourself to owning your site and investing in it for a lifetime, it will only improve with age, providing a greater and greater share of your leads and income.

Don't make the mistake so many other real estate agents make. Don't keep renting every new website-du-jour that comes along. They're just designed to enslave you to their rental business model. Instead, make the determination to take control of your web marketing efforts for life and become an owner, not a renter. Believe me, you'll be glad you made the investment.

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