One huge opportunity for improve content on real estate broker and agents sites is descriptions of new housing and condo developments. Websites relying solely on IDX fed content often miss this important level of content that consumers turn to when choosing a suitable community. People often buy into a building emotionally before they consider units within a building.

Across the country, we see many agents who start blogs on Wordpress, Blogger, or other popular blogging platforms in order to have a place on the web to easily publish information of this sort. Unfortunately, this leads to the need to maintain multiple websites that are often poorly integrated (if at all). WhereToLive.com chose to address this issue by integrating a blogging platform directly into the sites we build. This allows agents and brokers to create an unlimited number of content-rich pages on their primary website rather than splitting their content and online authority among multiple properties.

It’s too early to say whether this is a game changer, but one thing seems clear to me today: Inventory matters.

As an example of this, I queried Google Maps and an IDX driven Re/Max site powered by WhereToLive.com for homes in my zip code (55406).

Google Maps returned this (properties in the upper-right hand corner are from a different zip code across the river in St. Paul, MN):

The Re/Max site returned this:

There are significantly more homes in the MLS than on Google today in my zip code. Google Maps displays a combination of listings provided by organized real estate and FSBOs yet still comes up short of what the MLS provides. However, there is probably enough inventory there to keep people from being immediately stumped and turning away from the search results.

I happen to live in a market where a couple very large companies syndicate their listings to Google, so it’s possible that Google’s listing inventory could be significantly less in some markets. However, there are some real estate boards syndicating their entire MLS to Google, so Google would likely have more local inventory than organized real estate sites in those markets (since Google co-mingles MLS listings with FSBOs).

Here are a few things for brokers to consider:

1. Do I benefit from syndicating listings?

2. Should I do it myself or go through a 3rd Party Syndication service. In some cases, this leads to traffic from Google sending people to the listing service’s website rather than your own.

3. Does this level the playing field vs. companies with lower quality brands and websites?

4. What branding benefits do I receive from this?

5. Is the data accurate and in sync in a timely manner?

6. Do sellers expect this?

7. Is someone already syndicating my listings, such as a national franchise? Where does that traffic go?

8. How does this effect lead flow?

9. Will this help or hurt my website’s traffic?

10. Will ads for my competition be served alongside my inventory?

There may be other things to consider as well. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this evolving playing field in the comments.

This is an incredible achievement over a short period of time.

There are, of course, many ways to slice and dice web traffic statistics. The chart below illustrate how much value Century21.ca is providing, on average, to agents within their network when measured by visitors per agent per month. When Century21.ca is compared against their competition by this metric, the numbers currently look like this:

Century 21 isn’t currently the largest brand in Canada. But that hasn’t stopped them from having a winning website that provides tangible value to their network of brokers and sales representatives.

A winning strategy combined with powerful online marketing tools is driving Century 21 Canada’s online marketing success.

Congratulations to Century 21 on reaching the incredible milestone of #1 in Canada in less than 2 years. We look forward to many more years of growth together.

You can read more about Century 21 Canada’s website growth on their blog, or follow @Century21Canada on Twitter.

An agent or broker will find themselves craving more real estate leads. No surprise there. To crank up the conversions, they’ll turn tactics that do indeed generate more leads, yet less qualified ones. Example tactics include things like forced registration websites.

In some cases, this creates a new problem: qualifying the less qualified leads. So they then hire additional office staff our call center services to respond to the less than qualified leads. This, of course, dramatically increases the cost per lead since you need to cover the cost of salaries or services.

This isn’t necessarily good or bad. I’m sharing this to help explain the costs involved in one particular lead generation tactic. If a large enough percentage of the less-qualified leads can be curated and converted into clients at a reasonable cost, this tactic would make sense.

As I mentioned last week, if I had the opportunity to talk to only one form of online generated lead, I’d love a phone call or email from someone who’s done some searching, poured over listing photos, discussed properties with their spouse, parents, etc., and then decided to contact me. My bias is toward giving consumers the information they’re looking for while demonstrating your professionalism and expertise online.

There are clearly as many lead generation strategies as there are Realtors, so suggesting there is a right or wrong way would be ridiculous. Which is why we work with our clients to measure what’s working in order to build websites that accommodate their business models.

First, consider ranking the following lead examples based on quality. Then put a dollar amount next to each type of lead signifying how much that type of lead would be worth to you. Take your time and be honest. Nobody’s watching.

Ranking / Value

______ / ______ Lead generated from a visitor who has never been to your website before. They were forced to register before viewing properties.

______ / ______ Lead generated from a regular visitor to your website who keeps up to date on their neighborhood. They finally find a property that meets their needs and contact you to set up a showing.

______ / ______ Lead generated from a visitor who viewed a handful of properties but was then forced to register in order to continue interacting with your website.

______ / ______ Lead generated from a visitor who viewed a few properties, clicked through to an agent’s profile, then read a handful of blog posts written by the agent talking about local market conditions and neighborhoods.

______ / ______ Lead generated from a visitor who saw a prominent incentive that justified registering with the website, such as a Home Depot gift certificate for $25.

______ / ______ Lead generated from a visitor who found your site after typing in a single property website URL found on a sign rider.

______ / ______ Lead generated from a visitor who poured over more than a dozen photos of a property, emailed the property to their spouse, heard back that they were in agreement about the property, then contacted you.

______ / ______ Lead generated from a visitor after they watched a video of an agent explaining how long they’ve been in the business along with cities and neighborhoods they serve.

______ / ______ Lead generated from a visitor who’s interested in a listing that’s physically far away from your location in a price range you don’t normally serve.

After completing an exercise like this, it becomes pretty clear that not all leads are created equal. Efforts to increase leads should focus not just on quantity but quality in order to increase the chances of turning the lead into real business.

Forced Registration?

WhereToLive.com has implemented a large variety of technical tactics to lead generation, including forced registration during different stages of the web visitor’s experience based on our client’s requests. We’ve found that forced registrations do indeed increase the volume of form completions, although significantly dilutes the quality of leads. At its worst, “leads” with fake contact information are generated, wasting agents time and clearly frustrating website visitors who weren’t ready to contact an agent.

Improving Lead Quality

The most glaring trend we see in lead generation data is that buyers who find what they’re looking for are more likely to contact an agent. Here are the general rules the data we see illustrates:

1. Properties with more photos get more views.
2. Properties with more photos get more leads.
3. Agents with current, professional photos get more leads.
4. Agents who build out complete websites get more leads.
5. Agents who blog get more leads.

Tying that all together: Agents who take lots of high quality photos of their listings, publish them to the web in high quality formats, have high quality photos of themselves on their website, explain their professional background and interests, and write blog posts about their market are the ones who are seeing the most success online.

Imagine this happening: An agent receives a call from a prospect who says, “Earlier today, I drove past one of your listings, saw your sign in the yard and wrote down the domain name. My spouse and I checked out the property on your site and we read some of your blog posts. Would you have time to show us that property tomorrow?”

That lead is coming from someone who’s already somewhat familiar with the neighborhood. They’ve familiarized themselves with the property due to the agent’s great job loading lots of photos to the web. And they’ve familiarized themselves with the agent before contacting them. This type of lead is among the best from both an agent and consumer’s perspective since the consumer is truly qualified an no one’s time is being wasted.

The nice thing about this is that it’s an attainable goal by all real estate agents. Publishing high quality photos of listings, building out your website, and writing blog posts is time well spent. Create a habit of creating quality content. The quantity and quality of leads will follow.

And they’d be right.

But not as right as they could be.

A better answer to this would be, “To rank high on search engines for every conceivable term a prospective buyer or seller types into a search engine.”

It turns out that there is a significant difference between those two perspectives, and that difference is generally referred to as the Long Tail. The long tail of real estate searches consists of terms that are more obscure than “_______ homes for sale”; precise terms by motivated buyers and sellers.

To illustrate this, here is an chart of the popularity of the top-100 search terms that drive traffic into a typical broker’s website over a month. To the far left are the terms that are used most often (over 1000 visitors used the most common search phrase over the past month). Moving right, we see a drop off to a steadily declining slope of terms through the 100th most popular (8 people used the 100th most popular term over the past month):

Tomorrow, if this broker lost all of the traffic they currently receive from those 100 search terms, they’d lose only 25% of their search traffic. That’s because the other 75% of their search traffic comes from with only a handful of visits per month to only one visit.

Obsessing over rankings for a single popular term has merit, but raising the bar for thousands of terms will have a larger impact on your website’s traffic.

How long is the long tail? For the broker listed above, the full graph of search terms over the past month would be 175X wider if every term that produced traffic was listed. At that graph’s current scale, it would need to be around 70 feet long to account for every unique search phrase that brought in at least one visitor over the past month.

Quantity or Quality?

More precise terms are also often used by motivated buyers. For example, a person typing in “Minneapolis Homes for Sale” is probably going to work their way through neighborhood research before narrowing down to homes matching her lifestyle and financial criteria. While it’s great to show up for terms that broad, the conversion rate from more precise terms further down the long tail is considerably higher.

For another perspective on this, consider watching this video from Rand Fishkin at SEOmoz called “Ignore the Long Tail at Your Own Peril“. Rand does a great job breaking this concept down in a whiteboard lecture format:

Here’s an interesting nugget about SEOmoz: They work with Zillow, who does a great job making sure they show up on on long tail searches. When Rand says, “Ignore the Long Tail at Your Own Peril,” he could very well be referring to real estate brokers around the country who do just that. In fact, Zillow and Trulia’s success is largely built on their ability to sweep up valuable long tail search engine traffic that brokers continue to ignore.

While this layer of home buying conversation happens with agents, it first happens with friends, family, and coworkers. And what happens next? Buyers turn to the web to learn more about the neighborhoods, developments, and condos their friends, family, and coworkers mentioned might be worth checking out.

And what do they find? Not much. At least not yet. Today on the web, there tends to be an information gap at this decision layer.

But some people are working on closing the gap. Here are a few examples of video work done to help document neighborhood information:

Jason Sandquist narrates videos of housing developments such as this community in Mendota Heights, Minnesota.

If someone wasn’t familiar with this development before watching the video, they’d not have a good sense of the styles of homes and walkable retail establishments.

Craig Rushton toured the Shangri La condo development in downtown Vancouver and put together this video of the views from the penthouse suite:

Craig’s video helps illustrate the incredible views and height of the building while quickly demonstrating his own knowledge of the geography.

TurnHere.com has put together a series of neighborhood videos where they work with locals to describe areas of town they’re familiar with:

This has clearly has more more post-production work.

Those are just three examples. Feel free to point out additional examples in the comments.

While it’s hard to know for sure what’s going to connect with prospective buyers, I think a few things may come into play:

1. Create something that’s fair. Don’t over-hype a neighborhood. Show it for what it is.

2. Make the videos easy to share. Publish them somewhere that’s easy to link to, embed, etc. such as YouTube.

3. Make something worth sharing. This doesn’t mean high-production values. By this, I mean create something someone will find enough value in to justify sending it to their spouse to check out as well. Help buyers understand the neighborhood’s story and why people choose to live there.

4. Consider interviewing people who live or work in the neighborhood to get their perspectives on why it’s a great place to live.

Westin Hotels

I travel a lot for work and often stay in popular national and international hotel chains such as The Westin. According to The Westin’s website, they have 201 properties around the world. While I’ve only stayed in a small fraction of their properties, based on my experiences to date, I’m confident that I’d have a positive stay at any of their properties worldwide. My confidence is based on the real-world experiences I’ve had interacting with this company one property at a time and one person at a time. My experiences with their brand have been so good, I’d be surprised to have a negative experience. That’s not to say that everything has always been perfect during my says. But they’ve always been polite and professional resolving unforeseen issues.

McDonald’s

I’ve eaten more than my share of meals at McDonald’s over the years, but have barely made a dent in hitting all 31,000 restaurant locations. However, based on my experiences at the many McDonald’s I have been to, I expect I’d find hot fast food and relatively clean bathrooms at any McDonald’s I visited in the world. When I see the Golden Arches along a highway, I know what to expect.

Real Estate

When consumers visit real estate websites today they see the following:

- Listings with no photos
- Listings with few photos
- Agents with no photos
- Small photos
- Listings with no descriptions
- Agents with no personal information
- Minimal neighborhood information
- Minimal city information
- Minimal guidance for home buyers or sellers

If the consumer experience is the brand, the brand is stating that it’s inconsistent, which defeats the purpose of a brand.

Companies like Westin and McDonald’s have done a phenomenal job creating consistently positive consumer experiences regardless of which location consumers visit or which employee they interact with. Real estate, on the other hand, still has room for improvement. To me, property listings without photos are the equivalent of a visiting a Westin with unmade beds or a McDonald’s without fries. That rarely happens.

I’d like to see more real estate companies create a culture of online quality across their entire network similar to what brands like Westin and McDonald’s have managed to achieve. Put real estate marketing systems in place that make it easy for agents to create consistently great consumer experiences. Done right, this should create consistently better experiences for consumers, which will keep them coming back to interact with your website and do business with your network of agents.

The price and implementation of single property websites vary considerably from one vendor to the next. Erion Shehaj at GeekEstate Blog gives a rundown of three examples that he feels fall short of what can be done and proposes a concept for a fourth single property website implementation he’d personally find valuable.

As I looked through the 3+1 options outlines by Shehaj, I thought about what single property websites are aiming to achieve. To me, the goal of such a site is very similar to what open houses hope to achieve since single property websites are essentially acting as virtual open houses for those interested in learning more about a specific property.

With that in mind, I believe effective single property websites achieve two things:

1. Provide interested consumers with access to more information about a property in order to sell the property faster.

2. Help listing agents connect with active prospective home buyers who found one of your listings interesting.

As I look through many of the single property website services’ implementations today, I see a heavy emphasis on #1 with nearly no emphasis on #2. Why so? Because single property websites are generally designed as virtual silos. The reality of single property websites, like open houses, is most people visiting them will not end up buying that property. There are many reasons for that, including price, specs, condition of property, etc.

Single property websites, like open houses, are a great place to start a conversation with a motivated buyer. In the virtual world, a smart way to do this is to provide access to all of your inventory (and all other local properties) within a click of the single property website in order to guide prospective buyers to homes that better suit their needs.

At WhereToLive.com, we’ve thought about how to provide the most valuable single property website experience possible to our clients. We’ve learned that effective single property website solutions should be:

1. Easy to use. Ideally, little to no additional work should be required by agents to set them up.

2. Provide a professional presentation of a property.

3. Be branded to the listing agent.

4. Provide easy consumer access to additional listing inventory.

5. Be cost effective.

We believe we have achieved this by:

1. Requiring no additional logins, passwords, forms, uploads, etc.

2. Provide full-screen photo tours, maps of property location, driving directions, school information, mortgage calculators, etc.

3. Brand the listing to the listing agent.

4. Easily click to view the agent’s website, additional listings, and other listings in their local market.

5. Low 1-time cost (no recurring fees).

WhereToLive.com’s single property websites implementation is a good example of how we seamlessly integrate tools that enable agents to focus on winning new business and marketing properties rather than remembering passwords to a variety of vendors’ services.