Emphasizing no additional costs to its customers, Realtor.com is introducing exciting new improvements to its website and enhanced listings offerings that promise to help individual Realtors compete with national information providers on the Web. Increasingly, consumers want more information than home listings, they want detailed "community information, school comparisons, local interactive maps, recent home sales and published expert commentary from agents," among other features.
"Featured Website" from Realtor.com allows agents to display a new, improved and much more competitive level of comprehensive and interactive content designed to help consumers choose homes and neighborhoods by viewing IDX listings complete with side-by-side comparisons of robust community features. Criteria includes household income, education levels, population density, climate, map-based sold comparables, shops, services, and school reports with descriptive maps, grade levels, test results and ratings.
Internet data exchange listings are facilitated by the MLS based on mutual broker agreement to share listings on public websites. Agents can also blog.
"Featured Website with IDX enhances an agent's personal brand by showcasing the agent's photo and contact information above each and every listing from the local MLS," explains Realtor.com spokesperson James Smith. "In addition, clients can quickly and easily receive daily or weekly new property alerts, compare properties side-by-side and view locations on Microsoft® Virtual EarthTMmaps.
Showcase Listing Enhancements have also been improved. Agents will soon be able to post from six to 25 photos on their listings, as well as a feature that Smith is even more excited about.
"We will be adding listing videos to their listings," says Smith. "It will be like YouTube, except it will be real estate listings."
How the videos get made is up to the agents, but virtual tour providers and TV/video partners, such as Realty Times , will be introduced to Realtor.com customers.
Why is video the next hot marketing trend? "That technology has exploded," explains Smith. "Seventy percent of the U.S. Internet audience watches videos online. In January, 2007 more than 123 million people watched 7.2 billion videos online. The Media Metrix numbers for YouTube say 43 million users viewed nearly 1 billion videos in January. Cable TV had 65 million subscribers for the same period.
"We want to push that technology to Realtors," he continues. "With Realtor.com you aren't bound to one place to promote that video, you can put it other places, too.
Now's the time. "Videos haven't been adopted because there haven't been a lot of resources until now," says Smith, "and we are trying to get our customers introduced to companies that do video (like Realty Times). We hope they will use a high quality production value, so we will put together a list of referrals."
Smith says more than six million unique real estate consumers visit Realtor.com each month, making it the most widely visited real estate site, but if you're king of the mountain, that means someone is always trying to knock you off.
Realtor.com knows very well that other national sites such as Zillow.com are importuning agents to share their listings for free.
"Part of this is we want to provide more value," acknowledges Smith. "Zillow doesn't have the traffic we do. We get 6.2 million unique users, and their consumers aren't looking for properties to purchase. Our buyer is much more qualified -- they are coming to look for properties. You're getting lookie-loos at Zillow."
In other words, Realtor.com isn't worried. "We're providing more value to our agents. They say when they get an inquiry from Realtor.com, that buyer is closer to making a purchase than inquiries from other sites, so it has more added value."
Last but not least is a new widget called Market Snapshot where consumers can get market data. "It doesn't replace the CMA," says Smith, "you can email it and it creates a localized connection between agents and their prospects and clients."
"We know how much agents value the ability to customize their site's design to better match their personality and marketing focus. We also learned how challenging it can be to assemble highly relevant local information to ensure that consumers visit the agent's Web site-rather than their competition -- again and again," said Errol Samuelson, president of Realtor.com.
