The domain name “VirginiaBeachEstates.com” was purchased in May of 2005 from GoDaddy.com. At this beginning stage, it was determined that the internet was going to be the future of our major endeavors. Within one month, VirginiaBeachEstates.com was up and running through a well known real estate template provider, Alamode (Agent X Sites).

In the summer of 2005, we believed that real estate template providers were not the future of the internet and investments exceeded $17,000 for a development and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) package.

Eventually, as rankings and traffic continued to increase, our site underwent a complete facelift and the second phase of VirginiaBeachEstates.com was born. Ironically, this was during the real estate boom and as colleagues continued to cultivate other marketing venues, we aggressively tried to attract unique visitors to our website.

Towards the summer of 2006, phase three of VirginiaBeachEstates.com was launched. We decided to develop a template that was still “in line” with the major search portals, such as Yahoo! and MSN, but also had the abililty to display media content and other community features. The redevelopment was a huge success and nothing short of a 50% bounce rate (meaning that 50% of our unique visitors would continue into the website and 50% would immediately leave). However, as we learned exactly what the savvy home buyer was looking for, we quickly began our search for a “final product.”

As the summer of 2007 came to an end, we’ve seen a real estate market slow to a crawl and internet advertising explode through the real estate industry. This is not the only reason that we decided to redevelop VirginiaBeachEstates.com again. It’s in this final phase (phase four) that we have learned the ins and outs of an online community structure, what the savvy home buyer is looking for, and what a local real estate portal should really consist of.

We are extremely happy to have finally launched and we look forward to enhancing and building this community for years to come. If you have already joined us, thank you! If not, we hope to see your profile and listings up and running as soon as possible!

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