For example, one could look at the distribution of home prices in a city like Old Westbury, NY, and see that it’s an extraordinarily wealthy city:

Few communities have such a large percentage of active listings above $1 million.

On the other end of the spectrum, checking where homes are selling for at the bottom of the market may illustrate something about which neighborhoods are succeeding or struggling. For example, a map of homes selling for $50,000 or less in Minneapolis, Minnesota looks like this:

As a Minneapolis resident, that shows – as I know – that the quadrant of town known as North Minneapolis together with the neighborhoods directly south of Downtown, are the struggling today compared to more affluent areas near the Minneapolis Lakes or the Mississippi River.

Here are a few more examples of what $50,000 or less buys around the country:

Syracuse, NY. Syracuse University is in the SE quadrant:

Cleveland, Ohio: There are pockets in the city such as Little Italy that are the exceptions to this search.

Omaha, NE. The further west you go, the wealthier it gets.

Detroit, Michigan. More than 4,000 homes for sale for less than $50,000.

While poverty gawking can be interesting, what are some real-world applications of WhereToLive.com’s search technology?

With buyers, agents can easily show buers homes throughout an entire metropolitan area that match their search criteria. There may be neighborhoods or cities they hadn’t previously considered that suddenly become interesting once they get a better feel for what their money buys in their first-choice neighborhood or city (often overly optimistic). Perhaps driving another 10 minutes starts to look more tolerable once they see how much further their money goes?

With sellers, agents can show sellers how much competition they are facing from similarly priced homes nearby. Used well, it may help sellers face the reality check they need in order to set a truly competitive price for their property.

Every real estate website has this data, but few websites present it in ways that truly help educate buyers and sellers about the realities of their local real estate markets.

For WhereToLive.com clients, this will have little to no impact. Some of you were syndicating listings to Google, others were not. Among those who were, the traffic generated from Google Maps to your websites generated ~1% of traffic and leads. Clearly, that traffic hasn’t gone away. Consumers will simply find another path to the content they’re looking for.

Since WhereToLive.com clients have high quality sites, with top of the line search interfaces and well merchandised listings, it benefits our clients to have prospective home buyers and sellers using their sites rather than 3rd party websites like Google Maps to conduct their real estate research.

Who may be hurt?

The people who may be hurt by this are agents and brokers who have been using websites that rely upon a pseudo-IDX via the Google Base API for listings. In a nutshell, if your site’s inventory was being served by Google, you may want to talk to your vendor soon to see what impact this is going to have on their service.

Google Base, Google Maps, Organic, Places and AdWords

Here is a quick overview of some of the different services Google offers that impact real estate, and how you can use them to your advantage:

Google Base: this is the service where you could upload your listings for display on Google Maps and other websites through the Google Base API. This is what’s going away.

Google Maps: It’s critical to make sure your business shows up when someone searches for terms like “Madison, WI real estate broker” on a computer, or if they’re using a Smartphone that detects location, terms like “real estate broker”. To do this, make sure your information in Google Places is up accurate and complete.

Google Organic results: Make sure that you’re working with a website provider that has built a search engine friendly platform for your businesses. If Google can’t see your site’s content, you’re missing out on a ton of extraordinarily qualified buyers in your market. We recently witnessed this at WhereToLive.com when we turned on a new site for a client who had a non-SEO friendly site before working with us. The first month after the switch, their site’s visitors doubled, with the majority of the new traffic coming from people who were searching for specific listings on Google. Prospective clients had been running those searches all along. They just weren’t finding this particularly broker’s website (but were finding competitor’s sites).

Google Places: Places is Google’s directory of businesses, and a critical place for your company’s offices to be featured. As mentioned above, Places data is used to feed business information onto Google Maps. It’s also a place where people can leave reviews about your business, which may impact how prominently your business is displayed on Google Maps when someone searches for your services in your market. Google also tracks and syndicates in reviews from other ratings services, such as Yelp and Citysearch onto Places pages, so be sure that your information is complete and accurate on those types of sites as well.

Google AdWords: This is Google’s advertising platform. The ads served near the top of search results, along the right column of search results, and on millions of newspapers, blogs, and other types of sites across the web are purchased through this program. AdWords can be an extremely powerful advertising medium (if used well) or a gigantic waste of money (if used poorly). It largely depends on the advertising and bidding strategies you use, together with the quality of the content you send visitors to from your ads.

One way to look at this is to count the number of ads that appear on listing detail pages of syndication partners. Below, I’ve tallied up the ads served against a listing on three major syndication sites: Realtor.com, Trulia, and Zillow, as well as the presentation of the same listing on a broker site.

For this test, I’m considering the following to be ads:

• Google AdSense
• Other Banner Ads
• Ads for agents other than the listing agent
• Ads for moving companies
• Ads for lenders
• Ads for advertising on the website.
• Ads for other services offered by the company
• Ads for rental properties
• Similar properties (but not sold properties)
• Credit score ads

I’ve highlighted the ads on each listing detail page below in yellow and added the tally below the image.

Realtor.com

32 Ads

Trulia

21 Ads

Zillow

24 Ads

Results.net

3 Ads

As I run the numbers, I see three ads being served against a syndicated listing on a real estate broker’s website vs. 21-32 ads on major national syndication sites. While a broker could serve ads against listings, a broker will generally make more money by earning leads than sending people away from their sites through ads.

Consider thinking about it this way: If 100 people visited your listing on a broker’s website vs. visiting the same listing on syndication sites that profits from advertising, what percentage of visitors would convert to leads for you rather than leave through one of the many advertisements?

Syndication isn’t necessarily good or bad. And, not all syndication is the same. We syndicate listings for some of our clients. Others do it through their MLS. And others do not syndicate. The point here is to research whether your listings are being used as advertising bait or to help you generate leads.

1. A ton of traffic on national sites is not in-market traffic. Yahoo manages to get a ton of traffic onto Yahoo Real Estate by linking to celebrity listings from Yahoo.com, celebrity gossip pages, and other news sections of the site. Ask yourself: If someone checking out Tiger Woods’ house a qualified visitor to their site? While there is a chance that someone visiting Yahoo Real Estate to check out Tiger’s house could go on to search local listings and contact an agent, it’s pretty safe to assume that this type of traffic is much less qualified than what brokers and agents tend to receive on their own websites. This type of celebrity-driven traffic gaming is not unique to Yahoo.

2. On a per-agent basis, none of the national sites are very big. For example, Realtor.com states that they have 11.2 million unique visitors. NAR has 1,084,202 members. That comes to 10.3 unique visitors per agent per month. For comparison, I’m visiting one of WhereToLive.com’s clients this week that sees many times Realtor.com’s unique visitors/agent/month. Not a few times more. Many. Try running the numbers for your company to see how your website stacks up.

3. Brands Matter. Which online property would you like to see prospective home buyers and sellers using to research their next real estate transaction? Your site, where you control the branding and have your agent’s contact information? Or a site where ads for your competitors appear alongside your agent’s listings? One where your agents professionally present well merchandised properties? Or one where your agents have to pay a monthly fee to look credible next to their own listings?

If you think that your brand is irrelevant, you don’t need a website. If you want to provide value to prospects and earn their business, you need a great website.

This isn’t to say that national sites provide no value. Far from it. My intent here is to help brokers gain a proper perspective on how much value national sites provide. It seems clear to me that, by choosing the right technology partner, you can provide much more value to your network of agents at a lower cost to your agents than what national sites are offering. You deserve to have local buyers and sellers on your site, and you can if you partner with the right marketing platform partner.

People arriving at RE/MAX Result’s website from a mobile device are automatically redirected to a mobile-optimized version of the site. There are things we can do on a computer’s browser than don’t work as well (or, at all) on a phone, and some things actually work better on a phone than a computer if we optimize each user’s experience to the device they use to access the site.

The main three options we present is searching for homes, finding an agent, or accessing their account. Since the mobile site is fully integrated with the main website, we can make the experience seamless from one device to the next.

The property search page is the most common choice. From here, a person can choose from common search criteria, location, etc. They could also type in an address of a listing, a city, zip code, etc., to start their search. Additionally, they can take advantage of their phone’s location to search for properties nearby by turning on the “Search Nearby” feature with the flip of a switch.

We then ask for permission to use your location for searching.

With “Search Nearby” turned on, I ran a search for properties between $200k-$300k nearby.

This worked well. As you can see from the “Courtesy:” statements, this site is pulling from the entire local MLS, and not just RE/MAX Results’ listings.

I clicked on one of the listings to learn more about the property. Users can toggle Descriptions, Property Details, Features, and Rooms on/off in order to make efficient use of the limited space.

But, more importantly, people want to see photos. By tilting your phone into landscape mode, you can take a tour of the property you’re standing in front of. Find out, on the spot, if it’s a listing worth pursuing further.

Scrolling down the page, I can see the listing agent, and click to call the agent directly from the page. Receiving a call from someone standing in front of one of your listings is as good as it gets. Additionally, interested buyers can email the agent, email the listing to friends, post it to their Facebook account or Tweet it on Twitter. They can also save the listing to their own account for further review when they get back to a computer.

Interested buyers can also click to find out more about the listing agent. For example, people may want to know if Mike Kohler has ever done any business before. By checking his Solds, or his current inventory, it’s pretty clear that Mike has been in the business for a while, works in the area, and does a great job with his listings. A true professional. That type of vetting should help Mike earn more business through the mobile site.

Also, it’s worth pointing out that Mike Kohler automatically gets his own mobile site at http://m.results.net/mike.kohler. Mike may choose to market that, or purchase a domain to market that redirects people into his mobile site.

A lot of thought and work goes into making great real estate sites. We believe that professionally designed, fully integrated mobile sites allow client’s agents make best use of their limited time. Focus on earning, then publishing, quality listings with lots of photos. We’ll make sure that they’re presented well no matter how prospects choose to search for them.

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 process. Why? Because they live there.

Relocations

People relocating to new cities often search based on a landmark they’re familiar with. This may be the location of their new job, a school, or an area they previously had a chance to visit. Being new to a community, they may not be familiar with the names of counties, suburbs, neighborhoods, and other ways that locals describe the market. If your site requires that type of local knowledge, it will be very difficult for non-locals to navigate.

Motivated Buyers

The most motivated of buyers tend to pour over listings online, but also get out of the house to drive around neighborhoods and properties that interest them. When they turn to the web, they run searches based on cities, zip codes, property addresses and MLS numbers. They know what they’re looking for. Getting them to that content quickly provides a good experience to them.

The quality of listing presentations may be what convinces this type of buyer to rely upon your site for their online research. It also increases the chance that they’ll share your site’s versions of listings with their friends, thus introducing your site to future prospects in your market for free.

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 for new content. This change should allow them to get more fresh content into their search results faster. For real estate, this may mean faster indexing of new listings or blog posts.

Annotating Content

Former Google employee, Vanessa Fox, writing at Search Engine World, explains that Google will be able to associate more information with the content they index:

The Caffeine infrastructure provides more flexibility in the type of details that can be stored with a document. As the web changes and new valuable data about web content emerges, Google won’t have to build new code to take advantage of it. This means that while Caffeine itself is not a ranking algorithm change, it could impact ranking in the future (as new signals are associated with pages).

So, what does that mean? Here are a few possibilities. This doesn’t mean that Google is or will do any of these, but they seem possible.

1. Better tracking of country of origin (mentioned in Fox’s piece) in order to help people find content from their own country.

2. Geocoding of content. If an address or lat/long are included with a page, Google could use that to improve “what’s nearby” type searches.

3. Industry specific content. If Google could detect and classify content as real estate related, they could use that to improve results for terms that have proven to be real estate related.

In practice, Google may be able to do provide better results than they do today for terms like “3 bedroom 2 bath home for sale”. Today, that term appears to be too broad to deliver quality results. However, if Google detects where you are (they can do to varying degrees based on what you allow them to do), determines that this is a real estate related search, checks their index for relevant real estate related content, then serves it up in a relevant manner, they’ll provide a better experience to searchers.

What do real estate sites need to do to take advantage of this? The same sort of things they should be doing today:

A. Make sure Google can see your website’s content. If they can’t, you simply will not show up in search results.

B. Make sure you’re creating original content for your site. If you have the exact same content as every other site competing in your market, you’re not giving Google a particularly good reason to bother indexing your site. Blog posts are one of the easiest ways to publish original content.

C. Make sure your site has high authority. Google’s measure for this is called PageRank. If two page have identical or nearly identical content, which one will Google rank higher in their results, or bother indexing at all? The one that they’ve determined has higher authority. This comes down to link popularity. The quantity and quality of websites that link to your website help Google determine whether your site is an authority site. Fly by night sites have a hard time gaining links. If you’re a credible business, people will link to you. And people will link to you more often and faster if you’re creating the type of content that they want to talk about, such as definitive blog posts on why certain neighborhoods are family friendly.

In conclusion, Google’s goals haven’t changed. They want to provide high quality results to searchers in order to keep them coming back and occasionally clicking on an ad. If you’re creating quality content on your website, you should be rewarded for this if you’ve done your A-B-C’s.

Every once in a while, it’s fun to step back and try to quantify the value of changes that are made. Here are two examples that I think help illustrate how much impact design changes can have on the front-end of our client’s websites. Both of the graphs below illustrate a month by month perspective of a representative client’s website’s performance. First, let’s look at page views per visit:

Notice the significant lift last fall. At that time, we made a significant number of changes to the search interface on our client’s websites that made their site’s more usable for consumers. By learning from website visitors experiences, looking at website traffic statistics, and listening to feedback from clients, we came up with a series of revisions that let to a 40% increase in page views per visit on average. That’s a huge difference. The beauty of this is that the increase in page views came from an increase in visits to property detail pages. Exactly the type of pages we want prospects to get to during their home search process.

Slicing this data another way, here’s a look at a representative view of the lift in Time on Site statistics:

If people are looking at more content per visit, they’re also spending more time on the site per visit. The more time they spend on our client’s sites, the less time they have in their day to spend on our client’s competitor’s websites. Over the past few months, our clients have benefited from a 35% increase in time on site among their website’s visitors.

Continuous improvement. Measurable results. That’s real estate web development experience in action.

The real estate industry loves abbreviations. Some seem to be legacy code used as cost saving measures when placing print classified ads. Others are nice shortcuts and obvious to everyone. Well, almost everyone.

While humans are pretty good at parsing out the meanings of most abbreviations, computers may or may not possess similar skills. At WhereToLive.com, we work hard to identify common abbreviations, then get people to what they’re looking for regardless of how the prospective buyer asked for it or how the agent entered it. This creates a better user experience for website visitors.

However, we know that not all sites where our client’s content may appear possess sophisticated search algorithms. Because of this, we recommend that agents use the most common format of addresses when inputting their listings.

St > Street
Ave > Avenue
Blvd > Boulevard
Rd > Road
Dr > Drive
Hwy > Highway
Pike > Pk
Parkway > Pkwy
Lane > Ln

This is one small form of search engine optimization (SEO) at a real estate property search level. While search engines – including real estate specific ones such as broker websites – work hard to resolve differences, it never hurts to give people exactly what they’re asking for.

As I thought about that more, I thought I could distill this further into something that seems to often get missed in real estate website design: Who is the primary visitor to your website?

Looking through website visitor stats, it’s clear to me that

- The primary visitor is someone who’s searching within a market where they already reside. (Based on locations of visits.)

- They’re often familiar with the company behind the website they’re using (based on search referrals and direct visits).

- They know what they’re looking for. (Based on internal searches conducted on the site.)

- They pour over photos. (Based on internal stats.)

- They share properties that are well-merchandised. (Based on internal stats.)

- They contact agents most often about listings that are well-merchandised. (Based on internal stats.)

When I add all of this up, I see the biggest opportunity in real estate marketing coming from getting the basics right. Syndicating additional data onto the site from third parties doesn’t help your primary visitors achieve their goals and is probably more of a distraction than an enabler. Look no further than the differences between Google and their competition in search to see how effective doing the core service right can be. It doesn’t matter how many bells and whistles you have if people can’t find what they’re looking for.

Are all of your agents doing the best job they can of merchandising their listings on your website? If not, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to win over the most important visitors in your market one listing at a time.