Apr. 30, 2009 - Localism: a 'must read' for Realtors and Association Execs
On April 29, Zillow made an important product announcement:
"Researching homes and house-hunting is inherently a mobile experience," said Rich Barton, Zillow co-founder and CEO. "The GPS-enabled iPhone untethers our Zillow users from their computers and puts the power of our database of 88 million homes in their hands when they need it most - while they are looking at homes."
I posted that announcement to Twitter because I thought it was monumental: it basically said that anyone with the right phone could discover location-based real estate information when he or she was standing in front of a property. The consumer could find prices, neighborhood info, assessed values, and properties currently on the market. “Wow,” I thought. “That makes a lot of our MLS quarreling really insignificant.” Shall we put tax numbers on listings? Shall we post addresses? Who cares? Check out that consumer over there in front of that brick ranch house. He’s researching the information on his iPhone.
Now I know there are other considerations to this issue (I've heard those concerns for almost 30 years), and I know there are other real estate phone applications—my former employer developed one long ago, when even the cell phone salespeople had a hard time understanding that their customers could do an MLS search on their cell phones.
What was really significant to me about Zillow's product, though, was the fact that a major data aggregator has made access so easy, and information so complete and location-based. “All those folks combing the countryside for a good deal on a foreclosed property are gonna love this,” I thought. This makes shopping for real estate location specific AND will produce immediate results.
Then another thing happened yesterday: The WAV Group, one of the really savvy real estate consulting companies, released its “Localism White Paper “. Subtitled “Geo-Domain Targeting trending to assist Real Estate Marketing”, this whitepaper is a MUST READ for Realtor associations, MLSs, and brokerages.
Usually, I’m not one for enthusiastic, unqualified endorsements—but this whitepaper makes a great case for an area which is mostly an unrecognized area of knowledge by real estate associations and their Realtor members: search engine placement (or SEO—Search Engine Optimization).
Why is SEO important? As the white paper points out, 76% of people using a search engine like Google or Yahoo visit the first search result that appears, and a majority of users never go beyond the first page of results. So, if you’ve got a web page, and you expect folks to visit it, you’d better concentrate on the placement of your site in the search engine results.
Go now to your search engine and try it. How does your site rate? Local aggregators, such as MLS websites will likely rate pretty high, by the way—higher than many individual brokerages.
The Localism White Paper points out an even more basic fact: if you want results you have to think like a consumer. Will a consumer sit down at the computer and think, “Well, I am going to look for a new house. Guess I will go to Smith Realty and see what they have for sale”? Not likely, though most brokerages would like to believe that's what happens.
Will the consumer type in the name of a national website, and then drill down to a location? Maybe. And a lot of national aggregators spend huge amounts of money trying to get consumers to do just that.
But it is most likely that what most consumers do is sit down, open their favorite web browser and in the search field, type “real estate (location)”. As the Wav Group paper says, “Consumers understand that real estate is local, and believe information contained on local websites more than national websites.”
Consumers will then examine the first several results the search engine provides. And what most search engines do these days is use a search technology that puts the weight on location preferences and pushes other responses further down the page.
Ok, there are some key principles here:
1. 1. Develop a website based on consumer search behavior. This is hard, by the way, because we are often still stuck on the notion that internet advertising is just an extension of print advertising. But that’s another topic.
2. 2. Understand that real estate is local (where have we heard this before?)
3. 3. Know that Search Engine Optimization is a key strategy for successful internet marketing, and SEO is a sophisticated technical skill set that is fundamental to your website success. You probably aren’t going to be an SEO FSBO, either, so you will need to know enough to make appropriate demands on your website designer.
This white paper provides some specific directions: it tells you how to use indexing keywords, and how to set up a hub and spoke web presence. And it offers some answers to some organizational hot buttons: should an association or an MLS have a public-facing website? How can a website generate money for your association? What content do you include on your website in order to maximize your search engine positioning?
The WAV group white paper is free, it’s written in English-for-nonTechs, and it contains a ton of good information. You might even come up with some great ideas for your association education programs. But in any case, read the “Localism White Paper”
A behind the scenes look at organized real estate--what works in an association, what doesn't, and what a long time AE sees as challenges facing the industry from the viewpoint of its professional organization.
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