Product Review: TRIpress by Tribus

We hear many agents express frustration when they're searching for the right website solution. They want to it be easy-to-use, with all the advanced features they need to capture leads and sell more properties. For an agent or brokerage that wants to publish engaging information to consumers, WordPress is awesome. For a real estate website, WordPress publishing platform combined with a WordPress-friendly property search solution is ideal. With this in mind, we were especially intrigued by the TRIpress WordPress Real Estate Framework from Tribus. We took TRIpress for a test drive – what follows is a quick summary of what we saw during the demo.

WordPress for Real Estate
Many of you are familiar with WordPress. This blogging platform has become incredibly popular in the real estate industry and offers an alternative to the more traditional, custom-designed websites of the past. WordPress allows agents and brokers to build and publish webpages themselves without the need to contact their website provider. What Tribus has done with TRIpress is make the WordPress platform specific to real estate agents.

The front of the site is, aesthetically, simple. However, it can be customized in a variety of ways to meet your needs. (Tribus informs us that they're expanding the number of themes available to allow for greater variety in the look of the site.) Social sharing buttons are featured prominently at the top of the homepage. Next to them are two contact options: a large phone number and an "email us" link that sends people to a contact form. Leads from this contact form (and all forms on the site) are entered directly into the TribusCRM, which also offers a full drip / blast email marketing system.

The large image toward the top of the page can be customized depending on your preferences. It can be an image only (i.e. your logo) or an image with text. This is easy to change in the back end. And you have 200 different font options.

The next thing you inevitably notice is the Quick Search form. This is one place where TRIpress really shines. This is clearly well thought-out with the end user in mind. Instead of a complicated form or drop-down where the user has to hunt for the search criteria they desire, they can begin typing and see all possible results automatically populated (see below).

The rest of the home page is highly customizable. There are 9 "modules" to choose from. Some of the primary options include Featured Listings, Featured Communities, and the Featured Category. This flexibility allows the website to reflect the focus of the real estate professional.

Let's take a moment to look at the property details pages. First of all, we should mention that, currently, the IDX data for TRIpress comes from Diverse Solutions. So, if you're familiar with what property details and search results pages look like with Diverse Solutions, you have a pretty good idea what you're going to get with TRIpress with a few differences (for example, the calls-to-action for getting more info, scheduling a showing, or obtaining a property report). Of course, that's all different with the Featured Listings. These are your own, personal listings and you can add info/photos/other extras to make them super appealing.

The property details page offers:

• Detail reports: branded to the agent, these 10+ page reports share information about a property and your market.
• Parks and schools info
• "Other Properties You Might Like"

Strengths
Let's take a moment to reiterate the things we liked about TRIpress:

• TRIpress comes complete with the TribusCRM (Customer Relationship Management). To clarify, there's no extra cost for access to the CRM. Better yet, leads from your TRIpress website are automatically entered into your CRM. This feature lets you stay connected to your customer and keep track of all of your communications as well as automatically send out email marketing. At no extra cost to you.
  
• The super-slick "Quick Search" offers an excellent user experience, encouraging visitors to use and return to your website.
• The Recommended Properties keeps visitors on your site and helps ensure that they won't miss any opportunities.
• Depending on your timeline, Tribus may be able to set up your TRIpress site in as little as 24 hours. For busy agents eager to get started with online marketing, this can be a relief.

The nice folks at Tribus tout Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as one of the strengths of the TRIpress platform. We are aware that SEO is a foreign concept to many real estate professionals and the vast majority of agents would like to have the responsibility taken off their hands. So it's definitely a bonus that Tribus monitors each TRIpress site and takes care of all the SEO – services that are included in the price (not a surprise fee that pops up later). An SEO check is done at least 2 times a month, after which the agent is notified and provided with recommendations. If you're interested in the efficacy of Tribus SEO efforts, they're happy to share; they suggest you fill out a request at: http://tripressrealestate.com/get-more-info-on-tripress/.

Brokers
Hey brokers, don't feel bad, Tribus has a solution for you too. They create custom sites for brokers. Contact them for more information.

Next Steps

• To explore your other website options, visit our product directory.
• To learn more about websites, read past agent articles and broker articles.