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.
- What’s My Home Worth?
- How’s The Market?
- 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.
5 Responses to “The Only 3 Things That Matter”
Josh Ferris June 30, 2009
I hate to agree with all three points because I absolutely loathe creating monthly data reports and our MLS software doesn't make it particularly easy. What do you use to give sellers an idea of the value of their home on your site?
|Eric Stegemann June 30, 2009
Our brokerage sites currently use a Zillow widget, but we're working with the API to create our own interface -BTW use Altos data for mrkt rpts
|Josh Ferris June 30, 2009
I hate to agree with all three points because I absolutely loathe creating monthly data reports and our MLS software doesn't make it particularly easy. What do you use to give sellers an idea of the value of their home on your site?
|Eric Stegemann June 30, 2009
Our brokerage sites currently use a Zillow widget, but we're working with the API to create our own interface -BTW use Altos data for mrkt rpts
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