Roost changes up their game
Perspective: From the Future of Real Estate Marketing blog
By Joel Burslem, Monday, March 30, 2009.Under the old model they ultimately were trying to sell the brokers the traffic they generated on their listings, but it was up to the broker to capture and convert any visitors into leads.
Now pulling up a property on Roost gives you the full listing description straight from the MLS. No need to go anywhere else.
However, Roost's advertising brokers show up as the contact information for the listing, brand and all. As a prospective buyer you can choose to schedule a showing or ask that broker for more information on the home. Clicking on any of these links pulls up a more traditional lead-capture form, which is then presumably delivered to the advertising broker as a hot lead.
Interestingly, the listing broker is noted, but is displayed in tiny gray text. And there is no longer any link to the listing broker's Web site either.
Other IDX-driven search sites certainly use similar lead-generation models (Estately comes to mind). But none, to my knowledge, go to quite so great a length to brand and establish other brokers as the primary point of contact for a listing. Certainly many broker Web sites do just this when they display IDX listings on their own sites, but it's definitely interesting to see a third party adopt this type of model.
Nevertheless, as a user, the new experience is far more pleasant and brings it more in line with some of the other online portals. And Roost definitely still rules with the speed it returns its queries.
It may have just regained a spot in my home-searching arsenal.
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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