Why should I stay on your real estate website?
Jose Perez, MBA
Bilingual Business Development Executive with deep real estate industry roots. Proven producer & leader driving positive results. Extensive B2B experience in AI, SaaS, M&A, franchising, & SPIN Selling. Let's crush it!
Ever think about why someone stays on your site? After all, how much difference is there between one real estate website and another?
Most consumers are going to a national portal before they ever engage the brokerage
Once they are there, they are engaged for a number of reasons but mostly starting with valuation and search. For example, I was just on Zillow and saw the Zestimate for my Miami condo is almost double what I paid for it in 2018.
That’s awesome information to have at my fingertips without having to talk to anyone. Now I am hooked and am thinking about doing something:
Don't mean to imply I would not go to a local real estate broker’s website, but I would probably not do so until I knew what I wanted to do and was ready to speak with someone.
In the meantime, like most consumers, I am going to hang out here. I don’t have to talk to an agent but I can get a lot of good information I care about.
It's expensive to drive traffic to your site so whatever you spend on SEO, SEM, and related efforts will be at risk if you don't have something to keep the consumer there and coming back. You want to keep them engaged so you can develop a relationship that turns into business at some point.
Most brokers have some sort of valuation tool and search on their site to be able to better compete with the portals. The problem is, due to the large marketing budgets of portals, a consumer is almost certainly going to start their journey going to a portal like Zillow or realtor.com before they head over to the brokerage’s site...
Unless the broker can market they have a better search and a better valuation model that is worth coming to their site for.
And that’s what this article is about… ways to put the broker in a position to better engage online consumers by offering value they might not get from a portal and combining it with local real estate professionals who possess local market expertise.
So how can we do this? Here are a few ideas:
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Artificial intelligence.
As you have heard from me before, AI is useful in any number of use cases. One, which is very interesting, is the ability for AI to determine the home's room condition. This would allow a consumer to augment whatever valuation they get with updated photographs of the property. Now the homeowner can see how that renovated kitchen and/or bathroom is impacting the value of their home.
It would also create “stickiness” to the broker’s site since consumers tell their friends and family about this cool feature just like they did years ago when the original consumer focused AVMs came to be.
Smarter search.
With AI being able to determine room condition, it stands to reason that now search could now go beyond size, age, of home, etc. and also include the condition a consumer desires different rooms in the house to be in.
An investor might be looking for tired properties and doesn’t want to waste time looing at newer ones. Conversely, a young family might be interested in updated rooms so they can move into a home without worrying about updates, etc.
No need to look at 50 properties when only 10 might be suitable for what they are looking for.
Price index.
Another thing consumers are interested in is how their neighborhood is doing compared to others. With a solid price index, they could do that plus compare different sized homes to see what an addition might do to their value.
These are just a few examples of how brokerages can add functionality to their sites which will result in a better experience for the consumer. A better experience keeps them engaged with the brokerage instead of someone else.
Imagine a better experience, curated by the brokerage and/or agent, that doesn’t result in multiple agents calling a consumer because they are buying leads from a portal.
The “stickier” you make your site, the better chance you will have to engage a consumer earlier in the process so they do business with you instead of your competition.