Roost changes up their game
Perspective: From the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog
By Joel Burslem, Monday, March 30, 2009.We haven't heard much from Roost, the IDX-driven search portal, as of late. Last we heard of them they had redesigned their search pages to deal with a growing overabundance of search filters (see Roost Redesigns Search Results).
But news this week that they have expanded the markets they serve (see Roost Makes Its Nest in Jacksonville, Fla.) caused me to go back and take another look at the Web site.
Turns out they've been really busy.
Roost has totally revamped the way that listings are displayed on their site. Under the old system you'd get an abbreviated property description and a handful of photos. For more information you'd click through to their preferred broker's landing page for that individual property.
While I always liked the speed and functionality Roost provided, this aspect of the search experience was always somewhat problematic.
Any time you pass off that visitor to the broker site the problem is those landing pages are a mixed bag -- some look half-decent, most downright miserable. This has been a particular beef of mine for a while (see Building a New Real Estate Home Page).
It also causes the user to hop back and forth between search results and property pages, making for a confusing and less-than-optimal experience. Frankly, the same holds true for Trulia, too. And this was one of the reasons I'd moved my own personal searches off these sites and onto a more contained experience.
Seems like Roost recognized this problem and has taken steps to rectify this while at the same time changing up the value proposition they deliver to their advertisers. ...CONTINUED
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Submitted by Gabriel Gross on March 30, 2009 - 8:08am.
Well looking at Compete.com: Roost needs now traffic. with 54k unique visitors a month it will be hard to make money.
roost.com 54,594 -32.4% 168.9%
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trulia.com 2,639,061 -4.3% 36.8%
Submitted by Jonathan Cardella on March 30, 2009 - 9:00am.
Compete.com's traffic numbers are about 3-4x lower than actual for websites around 250K visitors/mo and under. As the site gets larger, this multiple decreases. Thus a website getting showing 500K unique visitors/mo on compete may actually get closer to 1M. And, fyi Trulia reports over 4M uniques per month, I believe...
But even at 200K visitors/mo, we could all use some more traffic! The compete growth numbers are relatively accurate, btw.
Another consideration is the fact that the majority of the traffic that lands on the home page is passed to external broker urls, e.g. zeyphyr, prudential, etc. I am sure this has a big impact on the way traffic is reported because if a user enters at one of these broker sites and uses the Roost search/app, the traffic isn't being picked up and reported by compete.com, because it never hits the domain. But Roost still sees the traffic.
I found this post interesting because Roost isn't the only company showing customers a brokerage other than the listing broker. While the Roost model is to show the sponsoring broker (who provided the IDX feed and presumably ad dollars) the NeighborCity.com model is to bring back the most qualified local brokers and Realtors® for each given search, neighborhood, and property. For example, a search for San Francisco Real Estate provides three local Realtor® profiles, while a click deeper takes you to the Top 50 San Francisco Realtors®. This takes much of the guess work out of finding buy side representation.
Jonathan Cardella
Co-Founder, CEO
American Home Realty Network, Inc.
http://www.NeighborCity.com
Submitted by Derek Overbey on March 30, 2009 - 1:05pm.
Thanks for getting the reporting issue from Compete answered. We get that question all the time and it's hard for us because we have to abide by specific MLS rules in regards to URLs. We would love it if we could combine all that traffic in one bucket in Compete.com's eyes but understand how it must be. We just hope others will listen to people like yourself who understand how the reporting really works.
Derek Overbey
Senior Director of Marketing & Social Media – Roost.com
Web - http://roost.com
Blog - http://blog.roost.com
Twitter - @doverbey