Michael Rhodes new website is a big hit
Michael Rhodes, are a leading independent estate agency in Romsey, Hampshire and have been successfully selling houses in the area since 1993. They are also prominent member of the highly respected Home Sale Network (HSN)

Chris Riley (left) is the managing director and he was aware of Reapits reputation for excellence from fellow members of the HSN and approached Reapit in 2011 with a combined brief to update both his website and his estate agency software system.

“We needed to do the site and I knew what I wanted to achieve. A clean crisp design and simple navigation was the brief, I have seen other agent's sites that are too cluttered and it's hard to know where to start."

“It was also important to have an integrated website and software package for example I wanted new instructions and recent sales to appear directly on our homepage without staff having to spend valuable time putting them on manually.”

The new site (www.Michaelrhodes.co.uk) launched in December 2011 and the web hits and number of property views have increased significantly, year on year viewing levels have doubled since the launch of the website.

“We are delighted that the hits are up, we are mentioning the site when out in the field and all of the mails and Emails are directing visitors straight to the site. We have had very good feedback from the public; all of them have commented how good the site is and how easy it is to navigate.“

One unique feature of the ReapitWeb site is the My Property Tracker, michaelrhodes.co.uk/content/Selling/Property_Tracker/

Chris explains “Property Tracker is receiving great feedback in particular. Most people when you talk to them about Tracker like it a lot. In this area there are very few homes without computers or an email addresses and they are very used to going online to buy their groceries and check their banking, so we see estate agency as a natural extension of that."

“We are definitely using Property Tracker as a listing tool and to that effect we are publicising it by sending out 10,000 leaflets to promote it as we see it as a real unique selling point for us locally.”

“Fundamentally, we want to be spending our time selling houses and we don't want to be fiddling around doing a lot of admin jobs. So Reapit's integrated software and website made a lot of sense and saved us a lot of time over what we were doing before.”

“I have been impressed with the professionalism of the team at Reapit. Software and websites are such instrumental parts of an estate agency practice these days and the ease of which the changeover from our previous systems was managed was pleasing. The support in particular has been outstanding and all in all I feel we have a partner that will help us progress the firm.”