UNBC Alumni Entrepeneur

Our group interviewed Dan Abraham, founder/creator of pglistings.ca, an online real estate listings business. Dan is an UNBC alumni who completed his undergraduate degree in anthropology and education. Recently, he was offered a full scholarship to pursue an environmental science degree at UNBC which he turned down in order to continue running his new business. Pglistings.ca is an online real estate listings website that provides users specific information and a slide show driven tour of homes for sale, lease and rent in Prince George B.C. Dan has a very good understanding of internet marketing tools such as Google ads, Analytics, and search engine optimization (SEO) which helps him analyze and forecast his budget in order to keep his business venture as profitable as possible. His philosophy is to keep his website as user friendly as possible. This allows him to target the 50+ age market.

Since starting his business 10 months ago, Dan now has 12 committed agents as clients and maintains an optimal 20% market share. Dan's photography background has allowed him to create stunning visual presentations of homes while maintaining a reasonable load time. These slide show presentations give him a competitive advantage as in the past customers were inclined towards looking at print media, television and radio as primary sources of listing their homes. One of the most powerful tools Dan, and other internet marketers have at their fingertips is Google Analytics. Google Analytics is a service offered by Google which tracks all incoming traffic and provides detailed analysis of how users interact with the site including their location, time spent on site and bounce rate. This service has allowed him to recognize the most attractive marketing tactics. Further- more it allows him to supply detailed statistics to his advertisers in order to sell ad space.

A piece of advice Dan leaves with us is that starting a business has a lot of risk and you need to be prepared to take that risk in order to be successful.