Does Your Site Lack Focus? Five Ways to Keep Consumers ‘On Site’

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Time to give home buyers and sellers what they want

By Eugene L. Meyer

RISMEDIA, December 21, 2006-Once upon a time, long, long ago-say the late 1990s-the real estate industry discovered the Internet. Typical real estate Web sites sold the agent or broker with a smiling photograph and a claim to 50 or so years' experience helping people buy and sell homes. Flash forward to today. Consumers don't want to see your face and resume. Yet, that's still what they get from many real estate Web sites.

Try the following five steps to make your Web site "stickier":

1) Simplify. Sticky sites are "top-heavy." Visitors should be able to get their daily dose from the very first page that they see, leaving the business of site navigation for those who want to trawl the archives. Lose the Flash intros, thin out the page furntiture (images, text etc) and don't drip-feed content. Treat your front page as it is the only one visitors will ever look at (this rule doesn't always apply).

2) Think like a blog. A little bit of new content every day makes for a stickier site than a lot of content once a month. Get into the habit of updating frequently and visitors are more likely to make your site a destination on their daily circuit of the web. If updating is a hassle, install a weblog publishing tool to take the strain.

3) Link like a blog: Outbound links generate inbound links. Maintain a list of favourite sites on your front page, including links in your regular updates and share your broswer bookmarks. Even if you don't provide the most important content, you're likely to get regular traffic.

4) Add interactivity: If syndicated content fits into your site format, pick out the feeds that suite your subject matter and include them in a sidebar so thy don't overwhelm your own content. Look for interactive content that can be fine-tuned to your site - polls and survey's are a good choice.

5) Build a community: Try to establish some community grounds with other sites that interest you or you think will bring you more traffic.

"The Web is changing more rapidly than the real estate industry is adapting," says Jim Sherry, a consultant to the industry on Internet issues. "The real estate industry has a tendency to believe that the Web is a place for classified ads, much like they use do in newspapers. But the Web demands more complete information…

"The Web continues to evolve and real estate users are actually more sophisticated at this point than real estate companies and the Realtors," says Sherry. "You have a gap between what consumers are seeing on other sites and how they interact with real estate sites. For the most part, they're finding them pretty lacking."

What consumers really want, according to Internet entrepreneurs and marketing experts bolstered by focus groups, is engagement, a deep and rich online experience that encourages "stickiness"-users lingering on the many new interactive features state-of-the-art Web sites offer.

Consumers want "more complete information about a particular listing than just a simple posting that says it's got three bedrooms and two baths," Sherry says. "Instead of just having a listing for a house, you have a listing by all the data persons want to know to make a house suitable-schools, commuting, and proximity to churches, schools, and work. It's more building a contextual view."

Kaira Sturdivant Rouda is typical of the new breed of real estate marketer. Chief operating officer of Real Living, a Columbus, Ohio-based national real estate firm, Rouda married into the business her father-in-law founded in 1956. She is a former vice-president for marketing at Stanley Steamer International, the carpet-cleaning giant, and her expertise is in "branding."

When her husband acquired RealtyOne, the Cleveland firm and his own company, HER Realtors, had their own Web sites. But both merely presented properties for sale. "We did a lot of brand essence workshops," she says. The result was a merged giant with 130 offices and 4,000 agents nationwide, and a much more consumer-focused Web site.

RealLiving.com is a feature-laden Internet portal. "What we're trying to say is that real estate is not about us and the industry, but what the consumer wants," Rouda says. "To me, the Internet is where everybody's starting. There's now no such thing as an online and an off-line customer. All of our focus has been about putting out helpful tools and engaging content to make the connection between the agent and consumer as strong and deep and long-lasting as possible. But the consumer is in control."

MyRealLiving 2.0, launched in April, is drawing 2,000 new members a month. Buyers are able to virtually "flip" saved property cards and add personal notes, share properties and events with family, friends and agents, and bookmark articles that help in the process. Sellers can track online views of their properties.

The online faces are not agents'. "Consumers want to see a reflection of themselves," says Rouda, so the site features "consumer lifestyle shots." The key to the Web nowadays "is engagement. We've got 25 in our IT department always developing, creating, moving things forward. We meet every week to talk about what each of our teams can bring to the Web."

RealLiving's newest feature, called Real Ping, "instantly connects the consumer to an agent via phone," Rouda says. "You type in your number. It's still about response time and communicating to the buyers why and how they want to be communicated with.

"For a while, there's been a myopic focus on lead generation that led a lot of brokers awry, because consumers aren't leads to be generated, they're people looking for houses. So for us it's always been about having them tell us when they want to be engaged with an agent, how they want to use our site, and to make sure we're not creating any roadblocks in the way of them getting information."

Internally, the changing Internet environment has created another challenge, as older agents try to adapt to the new environment. "Change is always hard," says Rouda. . "There is so much training around [RealLiving.com] now because it is such a deep site. We have a great professional team that created learning tools to get agents up to speed."

Says Nyda Jones-Church, CEO of Prudential California: "Some agents take to it very quickly and adeptly. Others struggle with what do I do, how do I adapt? We're in a learning curve. Agents are getting this is something they need to do to get in front of as many people as possible."

Her firm's Web site was redesigned two years ago. "We had a look on our Web site that dated back to our print days," Jones-Church says. "It was the traditional mode of presenting more properties to the market. It was the old way of thinking."

"If you have trouble understanding the Internet, rent a kid," she was once told. "Our tech department has an average age of 24. They're very young but very fluent in the Internet space. Now we have so much more functionality." Even in print advertising, she says, "The banner headline is our Web address." The firm's logo is still there but not as prominent.

Maximizing your Web site is both "an opportunity and a challenge because it's a financial strain," says Jones-Church. "All this technology requires a tremendous amount of resources and infrastructure. Different products have per seat charges, meaning people sitting in a chair using your services. You have to manage your cost efficiently. Plenty of vendors spin you a fantasy, charge you a lot of money, and the result may or may not show up."

Her staff vets all the vendor proposals to produce results, she says. The result has been "very sophisticated add-ons" to the Prudential California Web site, down to a home connection service that helps new homebuyers choose local and long distance phone companies, cable or satellite, and expedite change-of-address. The site also provides information about local schools, government services and community events.

"These Web environments can become total involvement," Jones-Church says. "We're currently updating our mapping technology," so that users "can zoom down into a community with greater specificity. This satellite technology is the hottest new thing. We are just looking at streaming video; that's sort of the new frontier now."

The lag in updated real estate Web sites has created an opening for outsiders, such as Rich Barton and Lloyd Frink. The Zillow.com founders had previously launched Expedia, the omnipresent travel Web site. Barton had actually created an online real estate plan years before, but the idea languished until several months ago.

The idea took on a new life when they found themselves creating big spreadsheets with information they needed to buy their own homes. "A light bulb went off," says Jorrit Van Der Meulen, a Zillow vice president. "They said, ‘This shouldn't be that hard. Wouldn't it be cool to aggregate all the information out there useful to consumers and do this math for them, so they can have a starting point?'"

The beta version launched in February. Now, says Van Der Meulen (who previously ran the toy, baby and videogame business for Amazon), the site gets as many as three million visitors a month, each spending ten minutes there. To promote its online presence, Zillow lets real estate firms to link to Zillow resources from their own sites.

"A vast majority of us have spent a vast majority of our career in Internet space in consumer-focused industries," he says. "There continues to be a huge disconnect between where consumers get their information and where advertisers spend their money. In real estate, those numbers are exasperated."

"It's a generational issue," says Sherry. "Most Realtors are boomers. They want people to relate the way they related. But Gen X-ers and Y-ers are more into instant messaging, instant information. They want a very different experience, and they live on the Web. If Realtors, brokers and agents lose first contact with the consumer or the facility to maintain that valued relationship, they are in effect being replaced."

In this battle for "first touch position," Sherry says, "you've got any number of companies attempting to get the consumers and charge the real estate industry for leads. If the realtors are not first ones people think about, then their value deteriorates."

Among Sherry's clients is the Houston Association of Realtors, whose Web site was judged best of 80 entries in 2006 by Realtor Association Executive Magazine.

HAR.com contains 57,000 listings updated every 15 minutes. It also offers a multi-lingual home search in English, French, German, Italian, Chinese, Vietnamese and Spanish. It connects users with 3,200 agents who speak 83 languages.

One of HAR.com's most popular features, says HAR's president and CEO Bob Hale, is a school finder that allows a user to search and compare schools and then find homes for sale within their boundaries. Now, HAR's tech staff is working to create an almost immediate buyer-agent connection by cell phone through the Internet.

HAR.com's six-person IT staff makes it happen. "The more HAR.com evolves, the more technical people it takes," says Hale. "It's just a continuing improvement. It will never finish."

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