Put property listings in a lot of places
Real estate websites may have different audiences
By Bernice Ross, Thursday, July 29, 2010.
Is it enough to publish your listings on your company website, your personal website, the multiple listing service, and Realtor.com? If you want to provide maximum exposure to the marketplace for your sellers, then the answer is an overwhelming "No!"
Statistics by Web research firm comScore, shared with Inman News by Realtor.com-parent Move Inc., show that the top two real estate websites for total unique visitors -- Realtor.com and Zillow.com -- together accounted for about 17 million unique visitors in May 2010.
What is surprising is that the majority of each site's Web visitors did not visit the other site that month, according to comScore data.
What this means to you, as an agent who wants to help your sellers get the maximum amount of exposure for your properties, is that it's smart to market your listings on as many real estate portals as possible. The reason: Many of these portals reach very diverse audiences.
For example, Homefinder.com, a property search site that had about 910,000 unique visitors in May according to comScore statistics, partners with over 130 newspapers, which allows real estate agents to reach those buyers and sellers who are searching on newspapers' websites but aren't necessarily visiting the major real estate portals, too.
In today's Web 2.0 environment, younger buyers and sellers are eager to engage in conversations about their homebuying and selling process. They like doing their own research. Realtor.com offers a database of how-to guides to give them a great starting place. Consumers can also pose questions at the site that will be answered by a Realtor.
For those who want to engage in a forum or ask questions of a larger user group, Zillow and Trulia are among the sites that provide forums. The forums of these two sites allow for multiple responses to the same question from multiple sources.
For example, at real estate sites Zillow.com and Trulia.com, visitors can pose questions publicly, and the answers are available for all to see. Response time to most questions can be rapid, although some questions do go unanswered.
On Trulia, visitors can rank the various responses with a "thumbs up." On Zillow, users can see how many people responded to the question and how many people viewed the answer.
The research shows that today's buyers and sellers often begin looking online 12-18 months prior to the time they are planning to transact. At that point in time, they are not yet ready to talk to an agent.
These visitors are in exploration mode rather than transaction mode. This may account for why so many people early in the search process prefer sites that are independent of the real estate brokerage business.
Several large real estate portals that are not affiliated with brokerage companies offer up a large share of the total U.S. for-sale inventory to their visitors. More importantly, they appear to be independent from Realtor-sponsored sites.
For clients who don't want to be dripped upon, called, or contacted by a Realtor for months prior to the time that they're ready to purchase, such sites provide an important alternative.
Also, it's quite common to see posts on these sites asking for feedback on how to find an agent in a specific geographical area.
What this data suggests is that agents need to go beyond some of the traditional Web marketing portals to reach a wider group of potential clients who are not visiting traditional real estate portals.
As the folks at Zillow put it, "Due to the limited audience overlap among top national listing sites, agents and brokerages must cast their net as wide as possible on the Web and broadly syndicate listings to the top sites that home shoppers visit most frequently."
In other words, to reach the broadest audience of potential buyers for your listings, you must be marketing on multiple real estate portals that include your multiple listing service, your company and personal websites, Realtor.com, plus as many other high-traffic real estate portals as possible.
The folks at Point2Agent (full disclosure: the company is a business affiliate of mine) have coined the phrase "distribution trumps destination." What this means is that as an agent trying to reach the greatest possible market for your listings, you need to throw your net far and wide rather than narrowly.
Syndicating your listings to multiple real estate portals in today's competitive real estate market is an absolute necessity. In many cases, your company or your local MLS may be providing this service on your behalf.
Remember, the greater your exposure, the more likely you are to sell that listing for the highest possible price in the shortest amount of time.
Bernice Ross, CEO of RealEstateCoach.com, is a national speaker, trainer and author of the NAR #1 Best Seller, Real Estate Dough: Your Recipe for Real Estate Success." Hear Bernice's 5 minute daily real estate show, just named "new and notable" by iTunes, at www.RealEstateCoachRadio.com, You can contact her at Bernice@RealEstateCoach.com or @BRoss on Twitter.
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Submitted by Holly Schwartz on July 29, 2010 - 11:02pm.
Really great article Bernice and thank you for making the point about syndication crystal clear. Our listings do get syndicated to many sites and on some syndication sites the agent can even edit the listing! My boss, Valerie Torelli, has coined the phrase "Engaging in the conversation of real estate." It's one of those topics that almost everyone has an opinion about and we're eager to educate and share in person or online.
Holly Schwartz
Media Producer & Marketing Director
Torelli Realty
http://www.torellirealty.com
holly@torellirealty.com
(714) 540-7355
Facebook: hollyschwartz
Twitter: hollyschwartzoc
Join Torelli Realty on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/torellir
Submitted by Russ Bergeron on July 30, 2010 - 10:18am.
Bernice
Good summary. However before casting your listings to the wind I would suggest that you first determine how much control the syndicator has over any sites to which they send your listings - can the syndicatee now repurpose your listings for fun and profit, how well do the syndicator and syndicatee update the listings so that they do not become stale, does the syndicator vet the syndicatee to determine if they are actually a viable web site and are actually getting visits, are they fiscally sound, etc., how much is the syndicator going to charge your brokers and agents to see what kind of activity they are getting, do they charge for leads coming back?
Russ Bergeron
CEO, MRED LLC
Submitted by Ira Luntz on July 30, 2010 - 11:15am.
Bernice, this is a great dialogue. However, the addage "distribution trumps destination" may be less true today than two or three years ago. The real estate consumer portal space (while constantly evolving- i.e. MyNewPlace) has generally stabalized with identified market leaders like Move, AOL, Google, Trulia, Redfin Cyberhomes and Zillow/Yahoo. MOST traffic ends up on these sites. An Agent or Broker who thinks that syndicating to 60 or 80 sites is better than syndicating to just the top ten sites, is potentially mis-leading their seller and opening themselves up to possible mis-representation and poor consumer experience(as Russ aptly points out). Today, many Publishers are moving "link-backs" below the first page, and are trying to discourage consumers from leaving their sites. The premise that the consumer is sent back to the Agent or Broker is less and less true (depending on the syndication site).It should be asked of the syndication distributors like Point2 and Threewide - have they done their homework to insure proper use and represetation of the listing and promotion of the Agent/Broker? Or are they just adding channels as fast as they can to beat out their competition? Maybe it is time for the MLSs to step up and bring some order to the syndication process.
Ira Luntz
VP, Data Products LPS Real Estate Group
Submitted by Jerry Hoffman on August 1, 2010 - 10:09am.
Bernice,
I find that a majority of the people confuse lead generation with marketing. Every website display of a listing is intended to generate a contact to the listing broker. If a minuscule fraction of the leads from these sites actually led to the sale of the listing, I would agree, that it does the seller some good. Moreover, more listings would be sold by the listing agent. In reality, the overwhelming number of cooperative transactions indicate agents sell property, not advertising.
Visitors on the internet are merely voyeurs. Serious buyers are working with agents. The "web" is solely intended to turn voyeurs into serious buyers by linking them to an agent. The bait is the listing. The issues with listing data displays from Realtor.com on down is a discussion for another time.
If an agent is truly interested in selling the property. They need to know how to find the agents with the buyers. The single most critical tool for "selling" property is learning how to use your MLS. It is far more the a mere database that most think it is.
The internet will give "exposure" - not all of it good or credible. The MLS will find you a cooperative (hopefully) broker with a buyer, if you know how to use the tool to its fullest extent.
Jerry Hoffman
Keller Williams Success Realty
Barrington, IL
Submitted by Barrett Powell on August 1, 2010 - 12:16pm.
Many if not most MLS systems are already syndicating listings via services like ListHub. There is nothing the agent needs to do.
However, once the listing is on a site, some sites like Trulia allow the agent to setup a profile and "claim" their listings. This is a very important step. Many firms have it setup so that they route the request back to the firm and not the agent, where they become part of the company "lead" pool.
The lesson here is that every agent should go to every site where their listings are syndicated and attempt to create a profile where available and claim their listings.
Something else that I have observed is that the public's real-estate search is NOT limited to just a few sites. More and more "specialty" sites have sprung up that further divide listings into more specific areas. The site Landwatch (http://landwatch.com) for instance caters to buyers looking for land. I have received more calls lately from buyers on Landwatch than many other sites. And there are more sites like Landwatch and more coming. The key being find your specialty, find the site(s) that play to that speciatly.
As far as most buyers coming through agents, I'm not so sure. I get a lot of calls from buyers coming out of many different sites. They contacted me because they found a listing, mine or someone elses on my profile on those sites. After speaking with the buyer and asking a few questions many times I will end up as a buyer's agent. The buyer still came through one of the syndicated sites.
Barrett Powell, Broker/Tech Consultant
Southern Advantage Team
288 East Street, PO Box 1427
Pittsboro, North Carolina 27312
http://www.ChathamCountyLand.com
http://BarrettPowell.com
wbarrettpowell@gmail.com
Google Voice 919-533-9730
Submitted by Mike Bodeen on August 3, 2010 - 8:56am.
Bernice, I appreciated the article and found each of the comments helpful. Barret's reply was good because I too find that I'm showing property to folks who have contacted me about a property listing they found on another site, and could I get them more info or show them the property. I would only add that we can spread the net as wide as the world, but not give buyer's a compelling reason to see the home. (i.e., accurate and quality photography and sharp well written text. Oh, like getting back to the basics.
Mike Bodeen
Associate Broker
Realty Executives
North Scottsdale
www.NorthScottsdale.com
Mike@NorthScottsdale.com