Hi Everyone,

I often receive questions from international realtors and developers of the sort: We'd like to market our properties for sale to Russian buyers in Russian, but translating our fully developed English website into Russian, maintaining and updating it regularly (adding the new properties for sale as they appear), and promoting it in the Russian internet would cost us an arm and a leg, what can we do to lower the Russian marketing costs?

Well, although such initial costs would be justified by the first one or two sales to the Russian buyers (depending on the sold property’s price and thus the actual commission amount), let's agree that every seller has to live within some marketing budget, and if it's not enough for now, it's not enough, period.

Let's see what one can do instead of the full version of marketing real estate to the Russian buyers - and still place the properties for sale in front of the Russian buyers' eyes, but on a budget.

To reduce the Russian marketing costs I'd suggest the following: instead of presenting all your English website in Russian you might want to create a separate page in Russian on your site.

The Russian page should be kind of a combination of the short info about your area and properties for sale, your services and how to contact you. If your country provides any visa / residence / citizenship preferences to the foreign buyers of real estate, you should mention this of course.

Also post some typical units with photos and descriptions on this Russian page of yours - you do not need to update them regularly, but will be able to offer something similar if asked. (Looking for Russian realtors to cooperate in sales with you, you will allow them to copy these typical properties of yours for their own advertising on the Russian internet platforms with their own contacts and send you potential buyers.)

Note: this page should be in proper Russian, not machine / automatically translated (see many of my articles on how machine /automatic translation of marketing texts may hurt your real estate business).

Ok, you have this info in Russian, but who will see it? You can't count on the Russian search engines to place such a single Russian page associated with an English website high in searches (never happens), but there are at least 2 major ways of presenting it to the Russian buyers:

1. Directly. Place an ad on a Russian real estate portal which is linked to your single, but informative Russian page, and you’ll have traffic of buyers from the portal.

2. Involve Russian agents. Email your offer of cooperation to as many of them as possible and include the link to your all-explaining Russian page from where they can also copy a couple of properties with the Russian descriptions for their own Russian websites, and you'll have the buyers from them.

Other possibilities of promotion are also available (actually they are the same as in English, but implemented in Russian). For example, go to Russian forums that discuss your country and allow links in posts, say something meaningful and include the link to this Russian page of yours, etc. (You'll need a Russian-speaking staff member or translator’s help of course.)

To your best business success,

Sincerely,