In a time and date when potential clients are confused on what to do, the only thing that can help them make up their minds is hard core facts and statistics.  Unfortunately, real estate data had previously been difficult to come by.  Some MLSs offered the ability to get data, but the ones that did had numerous issues, since most MLSs restrict what data can be shared with clients.  But even the ones that did offer data usually made it hard to find and extremely clunky.  Others offered no data at all.

One of the biggest issues is getting good data that people can understand.  In our opinion charts are the easiest way to make a point.

This chart explains a lot about the market.  In one quick glance I can see that obviously the number of homes on the market, or Inventory, clearly has affected the median price.  It’s simple supply and demand and quickly answers a question.

There are a few different choices for real estate data out there, but at Tribus we integrate many of our systems with the real estate data provided by Altos Research.  It’s a simple strategy to build long term clients.  Only a small percentage of people at any given time want to sell their home, but over the long run the average person will sell their home every 6 years or so.  The key is follow up during the 6 years in between with meaniful information to the potential client.  Who doesn’t want to know what their real estate market for their area is doing.  Altos has made it easy to keep in touch with charts and auto drip emails.  See an example of our implementation of Altos Charts and client capture at one of our example pages for Homes in Ofallon, MO.

]]> http://www.TribusGroup.com/data-and-why-it-matters/feed/ 2 http://www.TribusGroup.com/the-only-3-things-that-matter/ http://www.TribusGroup.com/the-only-3-things-that-matter/#comments Tue, 30 Jun 2009 22:12:46 +0000 Eric Stegemann http://www.tribusgroup.com/category/blog/?p=358 There Are Only Three Things That Matter On A Real Estate Website

- The original text behind this idea comes from a presentation I saw by Michael Simonsen at Altos Research

The truth is that there is only  three things that potential clients care about when visiting a real estate related website.

1. What’s My Home Worth?
2. How’s The Market?
3. What Homes Are For Sale?

Really you only need to  answer one of these questions well to have a sticky brokerage site, but if you can answer more than one you start building a premier site.

Consider that people don’t care about your “featured listings,” they want to see all listings.  They don’t care about seeing pictures with you and your dog, they don’t stay on websites that only has a giant picture of your team above the fold (the line at which you can see the website without scrolling).  Get them where tehy want to go, listings and data.  For example with our St Louis affiliate, River City Real Estate, the primary item you see on their site is the map based real estate search.  People know exactly what they can do on the site and they know exactly how to do it.  This is the ultra simplicity you should consider including on your site.

Maybe you have market data you’d like to include on your site, again, make the site focused on that and answering people’s questions about the area.  Perhaps you could integrate Zillow’s API service to even answer the question of “What’s my home worth?”

Begin to offer these major items and you’ll create long term sticky users to your site.  The kinds of users that build long term sales pipelines.