Some Tips On Cheap Website Design

Cheap Website Design For Real Estate Websites

Let me start buy saying that when I say ‘cheap’ website design I don’t mean shabby, shoddy, or anything along those lines.

By cheap website design I mean inexpensive, cost effective, affordable.

The inexpensive website design service I wanted to share with you today is called Weebly.

I’ve been using this for quite some time on many of my websites.

=> Click here to learn more about Weebly website design

How To Use Cheap Website Design From Weebly

There are three things that I personally use cheap website design from Weebly for.

Short-Term Listing

Often times you’ll have a single property or listing that becomes available every now and then.

It may not be worth the time and effort to purchase a specific domain name, hosting service, and design a destination website for that listing.

Examples of this are be single-family homes, apartments that are rarely vacant, or single-tenant properties that are only vacant every now and then.

You can design a cheap website using Weebly without having to purchase a domain name or a dedicated website hosting service.

Weebly allows for cheap website design by letting you create a subdomain within your Weebly account.

An example of a subdomain is ‘HouseForRent.Weebly.com.

Concept Or Product Testing

Maybe you’ve got a new property that you want to try some test marketing on or a new marketing idea that you want to try out, but you’re not ready to spend the time and effort designing a full-blow WordPress website until you know the idea is going to work.


Weebly makes this type of cheap website design very easy.

You can use a domain name that you’ve purchased, or use the subdomain technique.

Weebly has A LOT of pre-made website templates to choose from, all with drag-and-drop design, targeted toward specific businesses and industries plus many for generic use as well.

You can design several cheap websites, each with a variation of your idea, do some market testing, and decide whether or not it’s worth the effort to go full scale.

Landing Or Sales Page

You may have an ebook that you’re selling, or want a landing page for your visitors to register for a program, sign up for a seminar, and more.

Cheap website design from Weebly is great here as well.

Within a few minutes you can have your landing page up and running, customized to your product plan, and simply direct visitors to this site from your online or off line advertising or your main website.

What Cheap Website Design From Weebly Offers

Weely is a great cheap website design resource for a lot of different uses.

Here are some of the things that you can do with Weebly:

• Free website hosting
• Drag-and-drop website design
• Use your own photos or graphics
• Import your own HTML
• Incorporate AWeber email marketing
• Integrate Google Analytics
• Have multiple pages and drop-down menus
• Utilize a contact form
• Embed videos
• Create a blog
• Free and paid versions

I’m probably leaving a few things out, but you get the gist of what Weebly offers from this list.

By the way, don’t let the ‘paid version’ of Weebly scare you off.

I personally use this version and it’s still way less expensive than hosting your own website, especially for the uses we covered.

=> Click here to learn more about Internet marketing

Drawbacks To Using Cheap Website Design From Weebly

Using Weebly for cheap website design is great for product testing, simple one-page sites and landing pages, and for the occasional listing.

Weebly does not offer the diverse array of plugins that WordPress does or allow as much customization of the theme.

It’s also more difficult to optimize your SEO using a cheap website design with Weebly.

Search engine optimization with WordPress is much easier, provided you do several things right.

The takeaway is – unless all you have are one-time listings - once you’ve done your product testing or need a full-blow website for your real estate business that you can fully optimize, WordPress is going to be the better option.

As with all of my other articles, I hope you've found this post on cheap website design useful for your business!

Jeffrey Roark
Basic Property Management Blog

Is Multi Family Investing A Smart Thing To Do?

Investing In Multi Family And Apartments

Multi family and apartments have always been attractive real estate investments.

One way that you can tell this is that multi family and apartments have always had very low CAP rates, relative to office and retail real estate investments, for example.

Multi family and apartments are also a ‘step up’ for the beginning residential investor who might start with one or two single family homes, is successful with those, and is ready to move up to a larger residential income producing investment.

Why Invest In Multi Family And Apartments

As the saying goes . . .

People always need a place to live

. . . and that’s what makes investing in any residential income investment financially attractive.

Other reasons to invest in multi family and apartments include:

Ease of Management

The individual units of multi family and apartment properties are not geographically spread out as are single family homes.

Also, if the number of multi family or apartment units you have is large enough you may be able to justify the expense of an on site manager.

Economies of Scale

If you’re replacing the roof on a house, you’ve replaced it for just that one house. When you’re doing a roof repair on multi family or apartments you’re taking care of multiple units.

Easier to Sell

You’ve got multiple selling exit strategies when investing in multi family and apartments.

You can sell to a beginning single family home investor ready to move up.

You can sell to another investor who already owns multi family and apartments.

Or you can ‘go condo’ and sell the individual units to owner-occupants or beginning single family investors.

The Risk Of Investing In Multi Family And Apartments

This graph caught my eye the other day.

Shadow housing inventory is property that COULD come on the market for sale and eventual rental. The reason this product is not on the market is that the banks are sitting on it, for now.

So far the banks have been able to manage the gradual flow of short sale and foreclosure property coming to market.

When this REO-type of property comes to the market, for the most part it’s real estate investors that snapping the product up, rehabbing of needed, and turning the investment into residential rental property.

As an investor in multi family or apartments you’ve got to consider the very real risk that at some point the lenders will increase the flow of foreclosures – or maybe lost control of the flow altogether.

At which point there will be a lot of single family home property that was formerly owner-occupied now coming onto the market as rental property.

Many smart real estate investors don’t think this will happen.

But then, very few real estate investors envisioned the crash of the real estate market that we’re now muddling through.

Think Outside The Box

When analyzing what type of investment real estate is right for you it’s important to think outside of the box and consider the competitive threats to your real estate investment from as many angles as possible.

In The Basic Property Management eBook there’s a lot of time spent on teaching you the proven, real world techniques that the professionals use to minimize the risk and maximize the return of your real estate investment.

Click here to learn more about The Basic Property Management eBook

More About Multi Family And Apartments

As always, I hope you've found this investment property management training article on multi family and apartment investing useful!

Jeffrey Roark
Basic Property Management Blog

Some Rental Tips For Tenants

A Few Rental Tips For New Tenants

You’ve probably noticed that rental tips for tenants are tough to find.

That’s because most property management training articles are focused on landlords and property managers, not on giving rental tips to tenants.

Today we’re going to turn the tables a little bit and review a few rental tips for tenants that will give you an idea of how a landlord thinks when he or she is trying to rent their house.

These rental tips are based on my personal experience renting houses, condos, and apartments to a lot of different tenants. They’re based on fact, not fiction.

Know Why You Are Calling

Rental tip #1 is be prepared and keep a list.

One thing that landlords look for is if the prospective tenants knows what they’re calling about. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten calls from a tenant who saw my ad on the internet, but because they called so many different places, they had no idea where my rental house was.

See, if the landlord has to play guessing games, you’re not coming across as somebody who is serious about renting a house – even if you are.

Be Up Front

Your second rental tip is to be up front about any credit issues you might have.

The fact is that in today’s market very few people have perfect credit. There have been a ton of foreclosures, short sales, job losses, credit card debt increases, and much more.

Often times it’s not your fault that there’s a credit issue.

Rental tips that we give landlords are to first, see if a tenant has the provable income to meet your rental requirements. Then, consider any credit issues after that.

As long as the rent gets paid on time and the house is taken care of, most landlords will be pretty flexible.

It’s best if you’re up front with a landlord about any credit issues you might have. Doing this goes a long way to showing that you’re serious about renting and also saves both you and the landlord a lot of time if in fact they’re not willing to work with you.

Let’s face it, there is a lot of rental property out there, and if one landlord is unreasonable about something, you’ll very likely find another one that is willing to work with you.

Submit A Complete Application Package

Having a simple website set up for the house for rent is one of the top rental tips that we give landlords, owners and property managers.

Doing this makes it easy for you as a tenant to download the rental application, see what documents and information are required from you, and then put everything together in one neat package.

You might be surprised at how many prospective tenants DO NOT do this, even when the instructions are right there on the page.

This is always a big mistake.

See, in the eyes of the landlord, this is the first time they’re dealing with you. It’s kind of like a ‘first date’.

If somebody who wants to rent my house is sloppy in the application information they give me, or keep forgetting things, it makes me very nervous about how often they’ll pay the rent on time and how well they’ll take care of my house for rent.

More Rental Tips

As a tenant it’s a good idea if you can think like a landlord or owner – to get inside their head.

It puts you on more even ground when you’re trying to rent a house, and it’s always good to know how the other side thinks.

Our best selling 5 Step House Rental eBook is written for landlords and owners trying to rent a house.

Click here to learn more about The 5 Step House Rental eBook

We’ve discovered that more and more serious tenants are investing in the eBook also. They find that by understanding what a landlord is looking for, it helps them rent the house that they really want.

As always, I hope you've found this article on rental tips for tenants useful!

Jeffrey Roark
How To Rent My House