Free is a great way to get your door in the door.  Offering something of value to your potential clients is a great way to build up your leads.  The key here is that free has to have value to your potential clients.  It does not necessarily have to cost you anything.  For example, a mortgage calculator or relevant articles, blog posts or a simple needs assessment survey are all things that cost next to nothing to put up on your real estate website, but have the potential to turn a visitor into a long term, money generating lead. 

Similarly, it has to have value.  Website consumers are shrewd and highly aware. Something that is thrown up without true value to them is often taken negatively. For example, while the idea of offering a handsome set of steak knives to each visitor is a nice gesture, where is the real value to your audience? As a real estate webmaster you need to ensure that what you offer up has value.  So a free ebook outlining the nature of your target real estate market cost much less then steak knives, it has a lot more value and will strengthen your site rather then diminish it. 

Free items are also a great way to develop brand recognition for your real estate website. If the free item is something that can be downloaded, such as work sheets, ebooks or tools, they can (and most definitely should) carry your branding.  Thus, it becomes an offline promotional tool for your real estate site. 

In some less scrupulous circles the notion of ‘free’ has become closely tied with cheap and often poor quality. Online, this is not the case.  Offering something for free on your real estate website is a very important means to build brand recognition, build your sites relevance and to keep your clients coming back. 

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