About Oconee County, SC

Seneca, SC – A new, Web-based company has gone live to help real estate professionals and prospective buyers navigate the cluttered marketplace for Lake Keowee homes and land, just in time for a projected rebound of the national real estate market. Leveraging the most modern Web technologies and an in-depth knowledge of Lake Keowee real estate,KeoweePremier.com is the newest, most effective way for real estate professionals to market their high-end, lake-area properties to buyers nationwide.

As national home sales begin to recover and the foreclosure market thins out, local real estate professionals are poised to start selling more homes, including those on and around Lake Keowee. KeoweePremier.com utilizes a variety of Web platforms and social media avenues including Google+, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest to spread the word about exceptional Lake Keowee properties. By focusing on search returns that curate a carefully filtered set of listings, prospective buyers can rest assured that they are looking at only the most exceptional lakefront homes and lots. Occasionally, this will include higher-end interior homes, as well as properties that feature wide-open lake and mountain views.

Founder Steven Matthews is a nine-year resident of the Upstate and an information technology expert who serves as director of information technology for a Seneca-based national nonprofit that supports 69 state/jurisdictional boards across the U.S. His expertise in new and social media, as well as his in-depth knowledge of technology, provides agents – many with two and three decades of experience – with a new set of tools to help them better market their unique, lakefront listings.

“My expertise compliments their expertise,” Matthews offers.

KeoweePremier.com features large photos and high-definition videos, but it also incorporates a Lake Living Blog and live Twitter feed, to keep buyers, homeowners, and real estate professionals alike in the know – about Lake Keowee, the real estate market in general, and trends in information technology that lend themselves to real estate searches. Along with a clean interface, simple property search, and a full page of listing details with agent profile, buyers and Realtors are provided a seamless and easy-to-navigate online experience.

“Many real estate Web sites are rather cluttered, and they find a small place to stick a complex property search feature,” explains Matthews. “That search ends up netting tiny photos, and the result is that potential buyers never really connect with a home they might otherwise be very interested in.”

Matthews obtained his South Carolina real estate license in 2007 to help friends and himself acquire property on Lake Keowee. The KeoweePremier.com brand is simply the next step in his mission to help potential homebuyers, near and far, filter out the noise and hone in on their dream piece of lake property.

“By featuring premier Lake Keowee real estate listings, premier agents, premier business directories, as well as an informative and frequently updated lake living blog, readers of KeoweePremier.com are assured only the best of what this area has to offer,” says Matthews.

If a real estate video or virtual home tour is the next best thing to an in-person showing of a home, what’s the best way for a real estate agent to make that viewing experience one that will encourage a potential buyer to take the next step? Photo galleries and video tours have made it easier for buyers (especially out-of-town ones) to peruse a high volume of homes and properties in a short period of time. But it’s also made it that much tougher for Realtors to get an audience with their potential customers – to say nothing of the time buyers exhaust trying to wade through the good, bad, and ugly of homes for sale on the Internet.

Bill Koepnick is an EMMY-awarding winning sound editor from Los Angeles who retired to the Upstate six years ago and now produces high-quality real estate videos. He is able to offer unique insight into this creative and highly technical process.

“I try to make the video move through the house the way a Realtor would show it and offer comments about the salient points of each room,” Koepnick offers. “I start by learning what the seller wants to highlight, and then I make sure to get good footage of that and everything else I will need to build the whole tour.”

Continue Reading on my Lake Keowee Real Estate site with a blog section dedicated to helping agents with tech.

Great location for this 3.68 acre tract of land close to Seneca or Clemson.

Wooded with a nice mix of hardwoods and pine trees. Several great home sites. Doublewide mobiles OK.

More pictures or details of this property at

Land for Sale on Owens Road Seneca South Carolina

Users who follow KeoweePremier on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and the like will start to notice our new nifty custom short url instead of the more generic ones from Bit.ly or TinyURL.

As many of you know, services like bit.ly and its competitors are great for getting analytics on the content that you share through your various social media channels. They can give you a much better idea of how your content spreads throughout each service. Facebook and Twitter are obviously the heavy hitters, but Google+ is quickly giving them a run for their money as well. Some newer players to the game like Pinterest are also generating a lot of sharing, commenting, and general engagement. With their recent Facebook integration upgrade, we will all start seeing "Pins" flying around our new Facebook timelines before we know it.

Being that high-end Lake Keowee property is KeoweePremier.com's specialty and social sharing is a part of what I do everyday, I thought I would try to start using something that stood out a little more than a bit.ly link. I knew I didn't want to lose their free analytics and tools that make using them a breeze, but they recently made the custom url pro function available free to all users. This meant I could use my own custom short domain and still get to keep their great tools to use with it. I did some looking around, and found that keow.ee was available and I snapped it up for about $50. I used Domai.nr to check for availability, and once I saw that la.ke was already taken, keow.ee seemed like the perfect one. It is one character longer than bit.ly links, but certainly short enough to reduce a very long blog url to something much more reasonable for sharing on your networks.

Once I purchased the domain, it took about 48 hours before it was active. Once active, it let me edit the DNS records to add an A record pointing to the IP address that bit.ly specified in the "Use Your Own Custom Domain" process. Once that step was complete, it took bit.ly about 12 hours before it could see the new domain. Now that they can, I can shorten any url with my custom keow.ee short name instead of using the default bit.ly links.

Here is an example of one of them in action that links to my home page http://keow.ee/xa073C. Certainly not a necessity, but I think it ads a nice touch and brings a little more brand recognition and awareness to everything you share online.

I am a full-time Information Technology Director with a National non-profit, and the founder of KeoweePremier.com, a unique Web experience for potential home buyers, premier real estate agents, and exceptional businesses in the Lake Keowee marketplace. A native of South Florida, I have adopted the Upstate of South Carolina as my second hometown.

KeoweePremier.com markets exclusively premier Lake Keowee Real Estate. Lake Keowee is a man-made reservoir that originally was constructed in 1971. The natural beauty of the lake, however, soon drew visitors from far and wide to the many luxury lakefront communities on its 300-mile shoreline.

3/2 on Over an Acre!

More details of this property at

House for Sale at 403 Lilly Court Seneca SC