Surprisingly, Luxury Homes and Properties began as a High School homework assignment. In April of 2000, David Freeman was given the project to create a simple website in his computer class. Scot Spalding* an Oregon Real Estate Broker and David's Father, recommended they work together and create a website focused on luxury properties. Scot had the vision of a luxury home website since 1996 but never had the opportunity to implement his idea.
Many late night hours were spent in the hallway, on the family computer by David and Scot as they attempted to build a website from the ground up. David learned computer code by trial and error and what he could study at school while Scot had the concepts. Elaine, Scot's wife assisted with layout, colors and proofing the spelling and content. The website would never have been completed without each of their efforts, patience and understanding. Building a website business can be very time consuming and initially without financial or personal rewards. Weekly meetings were held, and each one of them had their own missions to complete.
Scot’s desire to create the site was based on two observations he had picked up in his real estate career.
1) Sellers of upscale properties demanded more service from their agents because the sellers were paying twice or even three times what the owner of a typical home were paying in real estate commissions. These concerns were understandable and justified so, rather than forcing the sellers to comply with programs that are not unique to luxury homes, why not create a program solely with luxury home owners in mind
2) All real estate related website were the same. Agent Sites and For Sale by Owner Sites all were geographical driven. If an affluent buyer wanted to view expensive properties, the buyer had to search out and visit each website independently by location. Then the buyer must eliminate the lower priced properties and the end result was only a handful of homes that met the affluent buyer’s needs. The Buyer then had to begin the process all over again at each site.
The solution: www.LuxuryHomesAndProperties.Com
Luxury Homes and Properties restrict services to the luxury home market and the website is not primarily driven by the property’s location. Many buyers no longer need to be area bound and wish to search for homes in many locations at once. It is more a matter of demographics than Geographic’s which is the main objective of Luxury Homes and Properties. All homes in the site already meet strict guidelines that support the luxury designation.
Initially, more a hobby than a business, the website's growth and progress was slow and at times non-existent. The first major commitment was the construction of a functioning database. This intensive project needed to be sent out and it was the first major financial commitment they made. A local expert was hired who soon had the backend website established and functioning.
The family project was still held up in design for a few months and finally hit the Internet on July 1, 2000. To fill the site with homes, there was a special promotional email sent out to private sellers offering submission into the site free of charge. Pages were built one after the other, by hand and activated in the site. This non-profit, tedious work of building the pages seemed endless but as always, faith is a strong motivator. The company placed banners in prominent locations to fill the many blank spaces, created alliances with similar sites, exchanged links, paid for outside marketing and after a few months, it was time to time to charge. Hesitantly, the fees rose from $49.00 to $79.00. Then again the submission fee rose from $99.00 to $129.00. With each price increase, service had to parallel and new ideas were constantly added.
One of the biggest challenges was search engine ranking. This alone is almost a full time job. Without hits, a website will have a short life, so it was a priority that had to be dealt with daily. Hand entering into YAHOO, GOOGLE, ALTA VISTA, EXCITE; the list was enormous but so critical. Designing the page and the keywords so that each search engine would rank the site closer to the top was a struggle. Finally, the search engines had picked up the site and surprisingly, luxuryhomesandproperties.com was number 1 in most search engines and directories when searching for luxury homes! The hits increased and so did the submissions sending the site to Number 1 recognition in its category.
Today, the website is moving ahead to new and exciting areas beyond Scot, David and Elaine’s highest hopes back in 2000. Luxury Homes and Properties now have a team of professionals involved in design, operation and customer service. The recent release of our e-book, new undisclosed creative ventures and affiliations with national companies will soon propel the site to even greater success and added benefits to buyers and sellers. LuxuryHomesandProperties.Com is on the move - the future is exciting and promising!
* Scot has had a Real Estate Brokers license since 1982 and has been licensed in California and Oregon. A consistent multi-million dollar producer, Scot received numerous Top Listing and Selling Awards with a major franchise organization. Scot has also been the Principle Broker at All State Real Estate which is Southern Oregon’s largest independent real estate company with over 11 offices and 150 REALTORS®. His position lasted over a decade and delivered the concept for Luxury Homes and Properties.
