International Property Agents

International Property Agents is an award-winning real estate and development company, specialising in property development Overseas.

IPAs strategy has been to develop an online community and resource where clients (existing and potential) can meet, chat, research and buy property overseas, all from one website.

Unlike many of their competitors the IPA website provides a mechanism for visitors to interact with each other and the company.

The IPA website recently won the prestigous Best Real Estate Agency Website, Turkey at the CNBC International Property Awards 2007.

Building a natural resource by talking

A huge amount of time has been invested by IPA in building an extensive resource for people looking to buy overseas property. The resource includes guides for almost everything from basic currency information and phrases to the legal process of buying overseas property. No resource can cover everything though, and that's where the visitors and clients themselves can get involved.

To get visitors talking to each other the IPA website features an online forum. Anyone can review the forum posts, and if you want to ask a question, sign up is simple. A key part of the forums growing success is that the IPA staff themselves actively participate in the discussions. This means that there's always an expert on hand to help with questions.

By allowing visitors and staff to communicate in an open forum the resource itself grows naturally, without the need to second guess a vistor's needs.

Active forums are also a great way to drive traffic from internet search engines to a website.

A better approach to selling new developments

Some of the properties IPA sell are their own developments, and developments are often sold before they are complete. This can be a potential barrier to new clients to whom the development process is unfamiliar.

To give new clients confidence, the IPA website has a Developments diary area where the progress of each development can be seen through detailed descriptions and images.

The diary page for each development shows a calendar where the days on which events have occurred are highlighted. All visitors have to do to review an event is to select a highlighted day.

If a visitor wants to monitor progress on-going they can subscribe to a developments RSS feed.

The sale

So what if a client decides to buy a property under development? Well, there are two methods. A client can reserve a property either through an IPA agent or directly through the website.

For each development a floor plan is available showing which units are not yet reserved, all the IPA agent or client needs to do is select a unit, provide some preliminary details, and reserve it.

Once a unit is reserved it can no longer be reserved by anyone else (though a fallback system allows units to be made immediately available again should a sale fall through).

Conclusion

Building an online community is a long-term project for any company, but in a short time the IPA community has already seen significant growth, and with growth comes higher visitor numbers and greater sales.

IPA have a large number of staff and agents across Europe updating the website. Air's multi-user environment provides an easy way to manage these users, allowing the website, in particular the resource area, to benefit from a large number of potential contributors.