Category Archives: Real Estate Search

What Does $50,000 Buy These Days?

December 9th, 2011

One of the powerful benefits of well done real estate search is the ability to learn about a community based solely on home values. This can give home buyers a good sense of the economic realities of various neighborhoods. For example, one could look at the distribution of home prices in a city like Old …Read More

What is the Impact of Google Dropping Real Estate Listings?

January 27th, 2011

Yesterday, Google announced that they are getting out of the real estate listings syndication business. As they explained it on their Lat/Long blog, they are going to stop taking data feeds of listings from agents and brokers, and will no longer be providing a real estate listings layer on Google Maps. For WhereToLive.com clients, this …Read More

National Aggregator Websites vs. Broker Reciprocity Syndication

December 8th, 2010

What are the goals of the sites where you syndicate your real estate listings? Do they profit if you profit? Or, do they profit by sending people away from your listing when they click on ads? One way to look at this is to count the number of ads that appear on listing detail pages …Read More

National Real Estate Aggregator Sites vs. Local Broker Sites

December 1st, 2010

A heated debate erupted at NAR this year regarding who’s #1 on the web for real estate search. The #1 figure in question is regarding which site, nationally, has the most traffic, nationally. Below are a few insights into what this means at the broker or agent level. 1. A ton of traffic on national …Read More

WhereToLive.com’s Mobile Real Estate Websites

November 1st, 2010

This is a quick walk-through of how we see people using our client’s mobile real estate sites. All of our client’s sites include location-aware mobile sites at the broker and agent level, so we have thousands and thousands of mobile sites on the web today. This walk-through is what we commonly see at a broker …Read More

Serving Different Types of Real Estate Searchers

June 24th, 2010

How people search for real estate listings in your market will often vary dramatically based on their familiarity with the market. Here are a few examples: Trade Up/Downs Buyers who decide to make a move within the city or neighborhood they already reside within tend not to use neighborhood or school information during their search …Read More

What Does Google Caffeine Mean for Real Estate?

June 10th, 2010

Google recently announced that they’ve redesigned how they index content on the web under the name Caffeine. What, if anything, will this mean for real estate? Faster Indexing As Google explained on their blog, the first major benefit should be faster indexing of new content on the web. Google’s robots are continuously scanning the web …Read More

Quantifying Real Estate Website Development Improvements

March 10th, 2010

Successful websites are websites that are continually improved. If you don’t keep improving what you’ve got, you’ll surely be passed by those who do. WhereToLive.com takes this seriously, by rolling on new features on a regular basis on both the consumer facing front-end of our client’s websites and within the OnlineOffices used by agents, brokers, …Read More

Real Estate Abbreviations and SEO: Ave vs Avenue; St vs Street

February 10th, 2010

Search engines face the difficult take of matching up what people mean by their search with what people mean by the content they’ve created. One small example of where this isn’t exact is abbreviations. The real estate industry loves abbreviations. Some seem to be legacy code used as cost saving measures when placing print classified …Read More

Who is the Primary Visitor to Your Website?

November 30th, 2009

Last week, I wrote about the value of neighborhood and school information on real estate websites, and pointed out that the majority of prospective buyers using a real estate website likely have no interest at all in that type of information based on their age or lifestyle. As I thought about that more, I thought …Read More

How Valuable is School Information on Real Estate Websites?

November 23rd, 2009

I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with real estate brokers over the years regarding whether school information is an important set of data to include on a broker’s website. While there are no definitively right or wrong answers to this issue, I thought it may help to share some insight into how I see …Read More

Google Maps vs MLS Listing Inventory: 10 Questions

November 2nd, 2009

Google latest move in real estate search – adding for-sale properties as a layer that can be turned on/off on Google Maps – could have a significant impact on how prospective buyers interact with listing inventory. It’s too early to say whether this is a game changer, but one thing seems clear to me today: …Read More

The Long Tail of Real Estate Search

September 15th, 2009

If you were to ask someone in the real estate industry what effective search engine optimization looks like, they’d likely explain by example. The example they’d most likely give is “ranking high on search engines for “_______ homes for sale” where the blank is the city or state where they do business. And they’d be …Read More

ColdwellBankerLegacy.com – Property Search Overview

June 2nd, 2009

WhereToLive.com client, Coldwell Banker Legacy, has published a demonstration of how visitors can navigate ColdwellBankerLegacy.com in search of their next home in New Mexico. As the video illustrates, visitors can search for locations, click to zoom in/out, and pan the map using their mouse. The results update in real-time as the location and zoom levels …Read More

URL Shorteners for Real Estate

May 19th, 2009

A common scenario we see in real estate search is what I call “neighborhood discussions.” This is where people recommend neighborhoods to their friends that they think would fit their friend’s interests. For example, a friend may tell you that they’re looking to purchase a home near trails and dog parks to make Fido happy. …Read More

Real Estate Map Mashups

May 16th, 2009

Real Estate map mashups became popular a few years ago, and since then became the industry standard in searching for properties. The concept of placing properties on a map, in a form of markers, is intuitive to users as it allows for visual geographical searches, in addition to qualitative ones. The challenge, however, has been …Read More

The Death of Print Newspaper’s Effect on Real Estate