You’re looking for a steak for dinner, but you’re not sure which cut you’d like. You want go to the butcher and see what looks good.
Trouble is, the New Yorks are in one shop, the ribeyes in another. Flank steaks are sold from the back of a van in the alley. And they’re past their expiration date. Filets, inexplicably, are nowhere to be found.
Discouraged, you buy a chicken.
Pretty crummy shopping experience, huh? Unfortunately, this is how home search works far too often. It’s online real estate’s dirty little secret.
What passes for acceptable, even marvelous, in the world of home search is really quite poor. At the search session I moderated at Real Estate Connect, most participants seemed resigned to the fact that buyers use several sites when looking for a home, hopscotching between storefronts to find what they want.
I have harped on this before. But I keep coming back to it. It’s too important.
Because many of the leading online real estate sites have opted to source listings directly from brokers, rather than becoming brokers themselves and displaying listings via IDX, there are many gaps in the inventory they display. Consumers are either unaware of this issue, and make life-changing decisions with incomplete information, or throw down their stone and start hopping.
New companies have attempted to solve this by either becoming brokers (Estately, Sawbuck Realty) in order to get IDX feeds, or working on behalf of brokers to set up IDX sites (Roost, Terabitz) to set up IDX sites.
This is encouraging. But brokers, what gives? Seriously. I know: The big online sites have money. SEO juice. Engineers. But you’ve had IDX all along. Which means, in most markets, that you have all the listings, fresh from the MLS. You may also have a powerful local brand, feet on the street, and a desperate need to stop relying on costly print advertising to drive consumer engagement.
Why are sites with something less than what consumers really want – a clean and complete view of the homes for sale – kicking your butt?
In the past year, I hear more and more people saying "Listings are now a commodity." This makes no sense on its face, but even if it did, listings searches are certainly not. And brokers could win on this score in their markets. A clean, simple IDX search, marketed properly, could do wonders for a brokerage operation.
Making that happen is not as complicated as it was even a couple years ago. It would go something like this:
1. Destroy existing Y2K-era website
2. Partner with one of the new breed of IDX providers
3. Have a designer create a new custom website design
4, Merge the IDX solution and the new design
5. Add a roster of your agents, and a clear and immediate means of contacting them
6. Add basic information on your firm, with contacts for your office(s).
7. Include a call to action to "Search all the listings in [your market here] at [your URL here]" at every one of your brand touch points, from your office window to the jerseys worn by the local little league team you sponsor.
That’s it. Resist the urge to clutter this with bromides. Be clear, repetitive, and true.
The big online sites have their place, but I am starting to think that place is not to provide serious — and by that I mean actionable — listings search.
That lies with the broker, like it always has.
– Brian Boero
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Brian,
I think the phenomenon you describe speaks to the suspicion and trepidation that many consumers feel when forced to deal at almost any level with a broker. Today's consumer may trust in 3rd party sites not because of what they will find, but because of what they will NOT find — something akin to harrassing behavior, forced sign-in to search properties, etc.
Most of this doesn't happen. Certainly not all of the time. But it's the perception that's still carried among many of those who would otherwise be our prospective clients.
Those businesses don't want to be brokers because being a broker is a crappy embarrassing profession and no consumer will trust you.
Duh.
With all do respect(?) to John above, the businesses do not want to be Brokers because they are probably attempting to avoid the conflict of interest inssue. It's simply a different business model. We are between the before and after stages of national search web sites that will have ALL of the information. Basic capitalism will work that out but the water will get muddier before it gets clearer. In the meantime we must do a better job of suggesting to the public where they should do their fishing….and to take great care of watching out for sharks.
EDIT….my apologies to John…meant to reference Ryan in my comments.
New IDX, old IDX, new web site, old web site, it doesn't matter. The sites are handicapped by the agents. Until you can get quality info, everyone just presents the same data, formatted differently, but still the same. Agents take bad photos, they're posted on hundreds of sites. Bad photos everywhere. And that's if the agent takes more than one. Most computers sell with 19" monitors or more. Why is a picture typically 640×480 or smaller. I want to see details. I want to see what's around the corner. I want to see the details of that crown moulding, the upgraded fixtures, the closetmaid organizers. Did anyone think to stage a closet? What do people really want? Until the agents "get it", it doesn't matter who you use. Carlin said it best, "homes are place where we store our stuff". Until the agents understand their client's wants, it's the same old tired junk.
Brian,
Having worked both sides of the fence, I can tell you that most brokers are still finding it hard to balance their offline and online efforts. Not just their marketing and advertising but their dedicated resources to technology. Sure brokers have had the most up-to-date data for years but most have fallen behind as it relates to powerful real estate search.
I think the problem lies in the fact that most real estate brokerage executives are so far removed from the trenches of the day-to-day real estate world that they are not reacting to today’s new real estate consumer. Now don’t get me wrong, there are a few brokerages like Baird & Warner and Prudential Fox & Roach that have jumped on the wagon and are reaping the rewards of leveraging their local brand with top-notch real estate search. But from my perspective, those examples are few and far between.
But I do want to point out one thing that clicked with me in regards to your post…Displaying listings via IDX. Before I even started working at Roost.com, I knew that the consumer was going to run into data completeness and accuracy issues with listing aggregation sites. How did I know? Well the CFO of the brokerage I worked for told me that in Santa Clara County (the largest county in the Bay Area based on population), the top three brokerages made up approximately 40% of the market share. The other 60% was spread amongst more than 800 brokers.
I never understood how it would be possible to keep the data accurate under those conditions.
Derek Overbey
Sr. Director of Partnership Strategy
Roost.com
http://www.roost.com
http://blog.roost.com
@Derek
You point out a key problem: the "long tail" of listings aggregation. Getting the big broker(s) in a market is the easy part; scooping up the small players is where many listings sites fall down.
I have zero data to support my hunch, but I would guess that MLS search is pretty far down the food chain on the list of buyer concerns and trepidation right now.
Maybe I'm in left field, but I have not run into too many buyers out there that are afraid that they are not being exposed to all of their housing options. Quite the opposite as a matter of fact.
I would guess the buyers are a little more concerned about a collapsing economy, wars, gas prices, tightening lending standards, bank failures, and mortgage meltdowns.
Just a guess. IMO, the IDX opinion is very important. The brokers that "get it" will be postured greatly for success when (errrr… if) we get out of this economic mess.
From my experience, buyers just want all the listings to be up to date and in the same place. It is really frustrating having to go from site to site just to find one property in your criteria, then call about it just to find that it isn't on the market anymore.
Some buyers just want to look at the listings.
Some want neighbourhood Vibe and flavour.
Two condo buildings beside each other can have a very different vibe that doesn't translate on a balloon pin.
That said; in Canada we have a national site that feeds all the MLS data from all the boards into one system. Therefore changes and upgrades require the majority to approve (and spend development money) and improve their sites.
Many consumers do not realise that some agents maintain access portals for online real time updates.
Amen to Greg's post regarding agents lack of quality control. We offer a TON of features with our Home Zone Mktg. system. Narrated tours, listing websites, videos for youtube, call capture audio tours and many other products – plus pushing to all the agg. feeds. All this in a few minutes… But it's really only as good as the info and photos the agents add. It is amazing how many agents upload thumbnail photos, dump in a few misspelled property points and think it's fine. The ability is there to spend 15-20 minutes and have a gorgeous electronic marketing campaign. Yet many agents won't take the time. The real answer, in my opinion, is brokers and office administrators taking control and insisting their agents do better with quality of listing respresentations. We, the vendor, can't make diamonds from dirt. It hurts to think my agent wouldn't spend more than 15 minutes on my homes online presence.
Amen to Greg's post regarding agents lack of quality control. We offer a TON of features with our Home Zone Mktg. system. Narrated tours, listing websites, videos for youtube, call capture audio tours and many other products – plus pushing to all the agg. feeds. All this in a few minutes… But it's really only as good as the info and photos the agents add. It is amazing how many agents upload thumbnail photos, dump in a few misspelled property points and think it's fine. The ability is there to spend 15-20 minutes and have a gorgeous electronic marketing campaign. Yet many agents won't take the time. The real answer, in my opinion, is brokers and office administrators taking control and insisting their agents do better with quality of listing respresentations. We, the vendor, can't make diamonds from dirt. It hurts to think my agent wouldn't spend more than 15 minutes on my homes online presence.
Anybody have a good resource list of trusted developers?
Thanks for laying out the steps in this post, Brian. That kind of education for brokers is needed. Are there IDX "coaches" out there that are trusted and intelligent sources that can help a broker develop this kind of site? Am I clueless for asking, as certainly there are plenty of web developers but I'd love to get a list of real estate focused, trusted sources.
Thanks.
EDIT….my apologies to John…meant to reference Ryan in my comments.