Take a quick scan through the list:

• how big is 3920 sqt foot lot size
• how can i finance stamped concrete patio in (zip code)
• how can i locate easements in (city, state)
• how do we get out of our home (city state)
• how far is (address) from (city)
• how is (street) in (city state)
• how many acres is 225×1337
• how many condos at (address)
• how much are association fees at (condo name)
• how much are houses selling in (city, state)
• how much are taxes on (address)
• how much is (address) in (city) worth
• how much is a quad level worth in (city state)
• how much is the association fee at (condo name) (city state)
• how to measure road centerline footage
• what apartment or condo for lease are near the (city) in (zip)
• what are the association fees at (condo) (city)
• what are the association fees for (condo) (city)
• what are the bodies of water in (city)
• what are the condo fees at the (condo)?
• what are the condos named in (neighborhood) (city) (state)
• what are the plans for the parcel of land on (street) (city)
• what are the yearly taxes in (city) (state)
• what are the zoning laws for a commercial business in (city)
• what are they building at (intersection) (city)
• what bank owns this property at (address)
• what did (address) sell for
• what do (condo name) condo association fees cover
• what does outsd lght mean for exterior features
• what homes are for sale on (street name) street in (city) (state)
• what is being built on (street name) in (city)?
• what is the association fee at (condo name) in (city) (state)
• what is the average association fee for a condo in (city) (state)
• what is the construction on (street name) in (city) starting may 1
• what is the dominant vegetation type in the (zip) area
• what is the misconception of home loans
• what is the selling price (address)
• what is the sewer system in the (condo) (city) (state)
• what part of town is (zip) in (city) (state)
• what real estate company owns (address)
• what realty company is responsible for (address)?
• what side of town is (neighborhood) in (city)
• what subdivision is (address)
• what subdivision is (address) (city) (state)
• what the estimate value for this home : (address) (city) (state)
• what type of fuel is (address) (city) (state)
• what us the school district for (street) (state)
• what year was (address) built in
• what year was (address) build
• what’s the average water bill at (address)
• what’s wrong with (address) in (city), (state)
• whats around (address) (city) (state)

What’s interesting about this is that there’s practically no end to the variations on how people search for information. And, if you have answers to those questions, you’ll likely be rewarded with a high search engine rankings and traffic from people looking for answers.

There are some trends in lists like this. Some of these questions can be addressed with well designed property detail pages. Others are more appropriately addressed on city or neighborhood pages, and others are great topics for blog posts. None of the answers to these questions are found on the homepage of real estate sites, so visitors to the sites came in through side doors to directly access the information they were looking for.

If your site has listings but doesn’t have quality original content at the community level, or address home buyer and seller questions via blog posts, this type of traffic in your market is likely ending up on one of your local competitors’ websites instead. Or, they may end up on a national aggregator’s website that lets agents answer questions/blog. It’s going somewhere. It’s just a matter of who has platforms that support creating content beyond listings, and whether content is created.

The search technology available for his site was not good enough, cost too much and didn’t offer enough return on investment, Fischer said. Plus, his value as an agent had to do with relationships, not search, he said.

That may turn out to be the right decision for Fisher. From my perspective working with a company that works to provide high quality IDX solutions that don’t cost too much and do provide a nice return on investment, here’s my take: “It depends.”

Here are some things to consider regarding IDX solutions:

1. Quality matters. There are a lot of poor quality IDX solutions for both agents and brokers on the market. If you’re trying to decide whether it’s worth using an IDX solution that you know just isn’t very good, the choice should be fairly obvious (at any price). Use technology that you can be proud of.

2. SEO Matters. There are quite a few IDX solutions that are pretty good from a design and user interface perspective that are downright horrible from an SEO perspective. If you’d like to earn free qualified traffic from Google when people search for active listings, it’s critical to have an IDX solution that Google can see.

For example, if you’re relying on an embedded IDX service that uses an iframe to embed an IDX search interface that’s hosted elsewhere, there’s a pretty good chance that all of the inventory is invisible to Google. Google also doesn’t fill out search forms, using dropdown boxes, or navigate maps, so solutions that are dependent on those actions also inadvertently hurt agents and brokers who rely upon them.

3. Is there significant traffic to be had at the listing level? Absolutely. Why do you think syndicator sites want your listings? So they can earn free traffic from search engines to your listings on their sites.

I took a look at some before and after examples of WhereToLive.com clients to get a feel for how much of a role listings can play in traffic. For clients moving to WTL from IDX solutions that weren’t particularly SEO friendly, less than half of the traffic earned by the sites was landing on listing pages. They earned traffic from people landing (“landing” in web speak is the page first visited on the site) on their homepage, agent pages, and other non-listing pages, but rarely directly onto listings pages.

Once switched over to WTL’s platform, the free traffic earned at the listing level tends to increase dramatically. This is free, organic traffic from search engines earned from home buyers researching specific properties, encountering our clients’ sites among the 10 blue links on Google, and clicking through to learn more about a property that clearly interests them.

Here’s an example of a before and after traffic comparison for a WhereToLive.com client’s site. The blue bars represent how much traffic the site earned in year over year in a month from pages other than property detail pages. The yellow bars show the traffic earned by people landing directly on property detail pages.

This client has seen a 36% year over year growth in traffic to non-listing pages such as their homepage, agent pages, community pages, and blog posts. On top of that, they’ve seen a 1,000% increase in free traffic from search engines landing on their site’s property detail pages. Their overall traffic has nearly tripled year over year.

A year ago, had this client decided to drop their IDX solution, it might have made sense. It was responsible for earning approximately 13% of the traffic their site earned from search engines, and would probably fit the description of a sub-par, poor ROI service. Now, their IDX solution accounts for more than 55% of their site’s traffic and 40% of their online leads (traffic on branded terms and agent names converts at a higher rate). So, the decision comes down to the value. If the IDX solution isn’t delivering, the problem may be the IDX solution.

4. Is this traffic valuable to you? That depends. If you make money from leads it is. If your agents are more likely to stay with you if you’re dishing them leads it is. If you’re currently spending a lot of money to drive traffic to your website that you could be earning for free it is.

But, if you’re not currently positioned to follow up and convert online leads into offline contacts, and from there into transactions you could actually do more harm than good by systematically ignoring qualified customers in your market.

Over the past few decades in the music industry we’ve seen constant evolution of how we consume music. This has evolved from records to 8-tracks to cassettes to CDs then MP3s and now to streaming music. Through nearly every one of those phases, audiophiles complained that the quality of music suffered, but the typical music consumer warmly adopted the latest technology.

Why did they switch? Convenience. Over and over again, it came down to convenience. It wasn’t convenient to have a record player riding shotgun compared to an 8-track tape. It wasn’t convenient to fast forward or rewind a tape compared to jumping forward on a CD. It wasn’t convenient to have a stack of CDs compared to thousands of songs on an iPod, and it wasn’t convenient to buy MP3s compared to queuing up a station on Pandora.

Now, look at real estate. When Zillow launched, agents complained that the quality of home price data was not nearly as good as what a real estate professional could provide. And, they were right. But, people seem to like the convenience of having marginal data at their fingertips, so Zillow’s also right. The same goes for pictures of homes vs getting in a car, school information, and mortgage information. Consumers flock to convenient real estate data, even if it’s not as good as what they could get from a real estate professional.

But, that’s not the whole story.

We’ve also heard story after story about how the music industry is dying. However, let’s be clear that these stories are not about the “music industry” but one portion of the music industry: the recorded music industry. People aren’t willing to spend as much money on recorded music as they used to. But, the music industry is doing just fine if you look at live performances. For example, Madonna’s 2012 concert tour grossed $305,158,363 for 88 days of work. Why? Because people are willing to pay more than ever for a unique, live experience.

How does this apply to real estate? Real estate agents and brokers need to decide if the value they provide is data or a live experience. If they’re nothing more than gatekeepers to real estate data, they’re more aligned with what’s happening to the recorded music industry.

Why be the dusty CD sitting on a Best Buy shelf when you can be Madonna, U2, or the Rolling Stones?

Real estate professionals who provide experiences people remember and tell their friends about – like top music performers – have unlimited upside potential.

This doesn’t mean that recorded music is dead, or that listing information isn’t important. In fact, the opposite is true. But, what’s changed is the roll that data plays in the value musicians and real estate professionals provide. Musicians may not make much from each time their song is played in Pandora, but the more people listen to their music, the more concert dates they can sell out, and at higher prices.

With real estate, the companies that provide the best real estate search experience to prospective home buyers and sellers are in the best position to kick off highly valued live real estate transaction experiences.

Here’s the problem with that: everyone’s lists look largely the same when viewed on a checklist. Every broker’s checklist is around the same length and contains roughly the same items.

Because it this, thinking beyond the checklist is the key to demonstrating your value. And, the key to demonstrating your value is to actually demonstrate it.

We run into a similar issue here at WhereToLive.com. If you compare what we do to our competitors, we’ll all look pretty similar on paper if you check boxes feature by feature. But, if we sit down with prospects and show them what the consumer experience is like when searching for homes on the site, how qualified home buyers are attracted to the site from Google, how we’ve increased conversion rates over time through user interface enhancements, how the reporting systems allow the broker to track the participation of their entire network office by off and agent by agent, and how agents can run their business using the integrated CRM system, they start to understand the value we provide to our clients.

The same thing applies when recruiting new agents. Go beyond the checkbox to show them how your company and company’s technology will help them succeed in real estate.

If you tell agents they get a website but don’t show them how the website works, you haven’t demonstrated the value to agents.

If you haven’t shown them how much better their listings will look when displayed on your site so they internalize it for use in future listing presentations, you haven’t demonstrated the value your technology provides.

If you tell them you provide great customer service, but don’t get across that you and your staff really do answer the phone when transactions turn into emergencies, you haven’t demonstrated your company’s full value.

If you tell them that you will earn them leads, but don’t demonstrate that your site is a lead machine, and that you have an e-leads staff that immediately responds to online leads and qualifies them before handing them off to agents, you haven’t demonstrated the value you provide.

On a checklist, this all looks the same. In practice, the quality of technology and service provided to agents varies dramatically, so make a point of proving that to prospects.

Where does Blackberry stand today among phones used by home buyers? I decided to look at some traffic stats for an update. Here’s a look at the top-100 mobile devices that brought visitors to a WhereToLive.com client in the Midwest over the past month ending with Super Bowl Sunday. Blackberry devices are circled:

Blackberry share looks a bit better on the East Coast, where a combination of people working in finance, Fortune 500 companies, and government agencies have the devices because of work:

The West Coast is where we’re seeing the lowest market share for Blackberry devices:

We’re seeing around one half of 1% of mobile website visitors using Blackberry devices in 2013. And that’s if we don’t count iPads as mobile devices (most are WiFi-only so aren’t mobile when it comes to internet access).

It’s worth noting that the above charts are likely not an accurate reflection of the market share of Blackberry devices vs Apple, Android, and other mobile devices. Instead, this tells us which devices are most popular for mobile web browsing of real estate sites. Today’s Blackberry devices are very good for email, texting, for Twitter, and as a phone, but Blackberry users don’t seem to spend much time using their device’s web browsers. That may be overstating things a bit. The web browsers are used for checking headlines, breaking news, and other quick bites of web content, but more intense web surfing such as searching homes, viewing specs and maps, and checking photos is not a popular task.

Will the Z10 turn things around? Looking at the specs and demos on Blackberry’s site, this looks like a phone with hardware comparable to what’s used for other top of the line smartphones. That may be enough to get current Blackberry users to consider the Z10 over non-Blackberry devices, but probably won’t convince smartphone users with modern Apple and Android devices to switch.

But, the bigger issue is software. I break the software issue into two categories:

1. Capability. Will there be enough apps available for the device to meet the needs of users? When software developers are prioritizing their time, they’ll start with iPhone and Android apps, then decide how much further they’re willing to go with creating and maintaining additional apps. It won’t be hard to find popular apps in every app store, such as Facebook and Twitter. But, it will be important to check app stores for deal-breakers before deciding to switch to this device.

Buying a phone is similar to buying a home, where the app store is the neighborhood you’re buying into. For example, I can check and adjust my home’s thermostat using an apps on an iPhone, iPad, or Android phone/tablet, but wouldn’t be able to do so from a Blackberry today. Is that a deal breaker? Probably not. But, there need to be some deal makers to offset issues like that.

The biggest question I’d have before buying a Z10 (especially if I was a real estate agent or broker) is how the phone is from a GPS standpoint (mapping, navigation, and location-enabled app support). As an Android user currently using an HTC EVO 4G LTE, location-aware software makes my phone great, with seamless mapping and navigation, car service calling through Uber, directory lookups through Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Foursquare, and location-aware real estate apps including WhereToLive.com powered mobile-optimized broker sites.

2. Usability. While you may find the same apps or websites (through the browser) available across a variety of devices, the user experience can vary considerably. With a finite amount of time to invest in app development and refinement, where are companies going to spend their resources? On the apps with the highest usage.

Will the Z10 turn things around for Blackberry (or, at least lead to a larger percentage of people using Blackberry devices for home search)? If current Blackberry users “go glass” (give up their physical keyboards found on devices like the Bold) I would expect to see a gain in Blackberry powered web surfing. But, I don’t expect to see the Z10 taking a bite out of Apple or Android’s current smartphone market share.

Boero explains:

For many real estate companies, technology and marketing means vendors.

And – let’s be honest – many of them suck.

But they’re there – at the conferences, in your voicemail box, in your conversations with other brokers. They are the atomic material of your technology cosmos. They define your possibilities from the get-go. What you can do with “mobile”, for example, becomes bounded by the range of real estate vendors playing in that space.

This is a bad thing.

It’s limiting. And too often it leads to shoddy execution and unhappy partnerships.

Boero’s right.

Many companies treat technology like it’s a commodity available from a variety of vendors.

Many companies providing technology to the real estate industry do suck.

Many of the companies that attend trade shows and fill your voicemail box are not worth working with or even responding to.

Boero suggests taking a step back to decide what’s best for your company:

So, in 2013, don’t let vendors drive your strategy. Formulate your strategy, then see what’s out there. Or, pretend that your current vendor doesn’t exist – at least for one good day of thinking and strategizing. Forget their limitations. Their pricing structure. Their product roadmap. Sure, you need to be practical, but don’t smother strategy with the blanket of dependency.

There is nothing to disagree with there. A common reason we are contacted by real estate companies is because they’ve done what Boero suggests doing, then concluded that they’ve outgrown their current vendor.

Or, that they could provide a better technology package to their agents if they worked with a company capable of providing a more robust, integrated solution rather than a loosely stitched together technology package from multiple vendors.

Or, after an introspective look, they’ve decided to follow paths that have proven to work for companies of similar size and quality.

Boero also suggests looking outside real estate-specific technology vendors for opportunities:

And look outside of real estate too. The companies not on the NAR Expo floor. Don’t assume that just because they wouldn’t recognize RETS from REO that they can’t bring something to the table.

That’s not a bad idea if you want to do something radically different from what real estate company websites typically are designed to do. However, if your goal is to build a consumer-friendly, search engine-friendly, agent-friendly website with listings, and do so within a realistic budget, real estate-specific website development companies like WhereToLive.com are worth considering.

Great real estate sites take a lot of people with a lot of specialized skills to build. Without a team of real estate-specific design geeks, front-end programming geeks, back-end programming geeks, database geeks, SEO geeks, project management geeks, and technology support geeks, it’s tough to have a competitive website. Partnering with a company that specializes in real estate website allows you can tap into just enough of this real estate-specific talent to build a winning website without breaking the bank.

One of the many factors used by Google to determine which sites or pages deserve to rank at the top of search results is the freshness of the content. For example, if someone searches for “Selena Gomez” there’s a decent chance that people conducting that search would be interested the latest “Selena Gomez” news rather than who she is. That’s reflected in how Google serves up results for that search term:

Notice that Google leads with links to recent news about Gomez. Google has determined that this query deserves freshness, and provides a mix of search results that do that. The fresh content is then followed by the best information about Gomez Google can find, including links to her official site, her Twitter account, and her Wikipedia entry.

Are You a News Source or Local Resource?

For newsworthy topics, being the source of news will help you earn more visibility on Google. However, local real estate markets generally aren’t as newsworthy as national celebrities, which is reflected in how Google treats them in search results. Local real estate is . . . local . . . so Google swaps out the breaking news headlines for a map. And, they provide search results that they believe to be local businesses relevant to a geographic area:

The above screenshot of a search result for “albuquerque real estate” shows three paid ads followed by a Google Local result then traditional organic search results. In this case, top free result on the page happens to be our client in Albuquerque, Coldwell Banker Legacy.

This suggests that Google considers real estate to be a local business rather than a news industry, so chooses to serve search results in a format that matches that assumption. Working off that assumption, we at WhereToLive.com have been working to make sure our clients earn the local search traffic they deserve through appropriate, local, on-site and off-site SEO tactics.

For locally relevant searches like many real estate topics, Google wants to serve up links to high quality local websites that answer the questions people type into Google’s search engine. Give Google what it wants by giving your audience what they want.

Here’s a breakdown:

1. Don’t terms like “Homes for sale in ___X___” have high search volumes? Yes, relative to any specific property. But, in aggregate, the traffic from listings dwarfs traffic on high level terms.

2. Isn’t “Homes for sale in ___X___” a valuable term? Yes, but not as valuable as a search for someone who’s searching for information about a specific property. The latter is far enough into their home search process that they’re interested in contacting an agent. The former is earlier in their search process so isn’t ready to turn themselves in. Both have value, but the value varies. Based on the stats we see, people arriving at our clients’ websites from property-specific searches are at least 50% more valuable than “Homes for sale in ___X___” visitors.

3. Isn’t it easy to earn traffic at the listing level? Not necessarily. WhereToLive.com clients have seen a bump in traffic up to 5X from what they received with their previous website vendor due to increases in traffic to listings from Google. If it was easy, everyone would be #1 on Google for every listing. That’s clearly not the case. Some sites sweep up that type of traffic. Some are essentially invisible. Many broker websites invisible and syndicate their listings to sites than then charge them to advertise next to their own listings.

4. How can listings really account for so much traffic? Here’s a chart of the organic search traffic each of the top-100 search terms to a real estate site earning ~100,000 visits in a month received:

The most popular term – a search for this broker’s company name – earns around 1,000 visits/month. The first “Homes for sale in ___X___” term (and first non-company branded term) comes in 8th and brings in a bit over 200 visits/month. The top-100 terms represented above include a lot of “homes for sale in ___X___” type terms.

But, here’s where it gets interesting: the 100th most popular term brings in 17 visits/month. The 500th most popular term (imagine the chart above being 5X wider) bringing traffic to the site still earns 8 visits/month. But, the “long tail” of search is just beginning there. With professional SEO work like WhereToLive.com does, the length of the long tail of search terms sweeping up free traffic from Google extends well beyond 500 search terms. In the case of the broker site I’ve referenced for these examples, there were 40,165 unique search phrases typed into Google this month where a page within our client’s site popped up high enough in the results to draw a searcher’s attention and entice them to click.

A full the chart of all 40,165 unique search terms would be 400 times wider. And that’s where the money’s at. While each of those terms bring in only a handful of visitors per month, they bring in a ton of traffic in aggregate. This represents qualified traffic from motivated buyers and sellers seeking out answers to specific questions by typing in terms such as street adresses of properties.

None of this is meant to discount the value of the “short head” terms compared to the long tail. Short head terms do drive traffic and can be used effectively for recruiting and listing presentations. The SEO difference comes down to how dependent your site is on a relatively small number of search terms for traffic (and the traffic/leads those terms generate). If your website is not earning a significant amount of long tail search traffic, it’s being lost to competitors or to syndicators who’ll sell it back to you at a premium.

1. Facebook Page Generation Services are Dying. Last year’s Expo included many companies that built Facebook pages for real estate companies and agents. This year almost all of them were gone. Replacing them were property description writing services based on Mad Libs style writing where property specs are used to fill in the blanks.

2. Are Listings Sites Dead? I heard comments from people saying that real estate listings sites are dead. But, I get the impression that the people saying that have never had a good listings website. The largest and fastest-growing websites in real estate are sites where their primary content is listings. The quality of the execution (site design and user interface) together with SEO and other forms of online marketing are the big differentiators.

3. Online agent reviews. Online agent reviews are coming whether you like it or not. They may end up on general online review sites such as Angie’s List or Yelp, sites within the industry such as realtor.com or local MLS board sites, on real estate specific 3rd Party Sites, on broker sites, or – more likely – some combination of all of these. This is going to happen with the people like it or not so it’s time to start thinking about how to best use review systems wherever they exist. The industry can create platforms to host reviews but that won’t stop third-party sites outside the industry from publishing reviews.

4. Managing Leads. Conversations are shifting from generating leads to managing needs. Companies are waking up to the fact that they can make a lot more money if they simply converted a larger number of the leads they are already receiving. That said, companies who have figured out how to convert a larger percentage of leads want to open the floodgates to receive as many leads as they can. Every lead is worth more once you start converting them at a higher rate.

5. Integrated Solutions. Brokers running large companies are turned off by the idea of managing yet another vendor relationship in order to gain a small incremental benefit with technology. Driving agent participation is difficult enough without needing to get agents to log into multiple websites to manage various aspects of their work day. They’re done looking at technology one bell and whistle at a time.

First, here’s a look at the national real estate franchise website scene:

It looks like Century 21 has had the best year among that group, moving into the #1 position by out-growing remax.com.

Here’s another perspective on the above chart. This one includes realtor.com and top national aggregators, Trulia and Zillow:

This perspective takes the national aggregator sites down a notch. Also, Compete.com’s numbers show Realtor.com down a bit year over year while Trulia and Zillow are growing their already big numbers.

What about growth rates? Here’s what that looks like for September 2012 over 2011:

Looks like the sites with the most traffic, the national aggregators, are also the sites that are growing the fastest.

But, another way to look at this is who’s earning the most traffic on a per capita basis? If you divide website traffic by agent count, you can get a feel for where home buyers and sellers are spending their time.

At a high level, the national sites represent the entire industry. If that’s the case, those sites are earning between 8-12 unique vistiors/agent/month* based on Compete.com’s reporting.

The national franchise sites appear to be earning between 7-23 unique visits/agent per month*. Century 21 would be on the high end and Keller Williams on the low end of the sites mentioned above.

If we get more local, high quality broker sites drive far more traffic than today’s national franchise or aggregator sites. For example, large broker clients with WhereToLive.com are earning between 33-140+ unique visitors/agent/month.

For example, Coldwell Banker Prime in Albany, NY earned 27,852 unique visitors* by Compete.com’s measure in September. With 422 agents, that brings their unique visitors/agent/month metric to 66 for September 2012.

Based on our experience, high quality local broker websites (such as those powered by WhereToLive.com) outperform national syndicator or franchise sites in the United States.

However, the key phrase there is “high quality”. We see far too many high quality companies whose websites are underperforming. They run far higher quality businesses offline than they do online. It’s like a world class race car driver choosing to drive a mediocre car. They’re driving, but they have no chance of winning.

If you want to get a feel for where you stand, go to Compete.com and look up how many unique visitors your website receives then divide that number by how many agents are in your network. If you’re not earning at least 20 unique visitors/month, your competitors are earning traffic that you deserve.

* Compete.com’s numbers tend to under-report traffic. Our clients receive far more traffic than the numbers Compete reports, but they seem to be consistent in their under-reporting, so the relative comparisons are still valid. For an apples to apples comparison of traffic or testimonials, give us a ring.