Some of Realtor.com's competitors and agents are taking pot shots at the site, saying that Realtor.com's business is in jeopardy from localized marketing solutions for brokers, including IDX. But they're wrong, says Steve Ozonian, president of Realtor.com. Realtor.com is a lot more local than people think it is, and Ozonian says he's got the statistics to prove it.

According to Realtor.com's latest statistics, 66 percent of homebuyers using the Internet chose to visit Realtor.com. That translates to a whopping 4.7 million unique visitors a month. Visitors perform 24 million searches on Realtor.com's 2.2 million listings, and view 400 million cumulative homes a month.

While these figures seem attractive for Realtor.com and its operator Homestore, how does it drill down to the local level?

A sampling of recent local average monthly searches on Realtor.com's internal logs paints the picture.

• Austin - 84,800
• Boston - 812,230
• Columbus - 117,200
• Detroit - 490,900
• Greensboro - 58,100
• Jacksonville - 83,650
• Philadelphia - 714,450
• Pittsburgh - 201,600
• Raleigh Durham - 127,000
• Sacramento - 197,700
• San Diego - 300,000
• San Jose - 192,800
• St. Louis - 204,200
• Tampa Bay - 275,600
• Washington D.C. - 704,000

Where Realtor.com's strength lies, says Ozonian, is in how it gets people to these local destinations.

”Most consumers start their searches through a national portal – the subscriber base of AOL, MSN, and Yahoo!,” says Ozonian. “When you look at the subscriber base of those portals, they begin the process of searching, the vast majority don't use a browser and type in an address to go downstream. The majority go through a portal and type in generic words like “real estate” to get to homes.

”These aren't lookie-loos, they are real prospects,” he adds. “Forty-six percent are buying and selling; 54 percent are moving locally, and 94 percent find a home of interest. We have very few who don't like something on the site - we have over 95 percent of available listings in the U.S."

That's why Ozonian doesn't believe that local marketing solutions for brokers and agents aren't a threat to Realtor.com.

He says, “The reason for that is we believe that for the foreseeable future consumers are going to initially come to the Internet and type in words like real estate or Realtor and go to house and home channels like AOL to search for real estate. As long as that is the case, the national portal is extremely important.”

But there are broader issues at stake than whether or not Realtor.com is local, he suggests.

“If Realtors don't take control and have their own national site, then someone else will. What happens when consumers come to this national source and the source has a brokerage license and starts referring the person back to the Realtor? A company like eBay can stitch together a national listing database, and can capture consumers without having a real estate office, and can charge referrals to the people who got the listings in the first place.”

Further, brokers and agents will find that they haven't saved any marketing costs with their own solutions. “They have to advertise to draw eyeballs and having media reach capability, the data, standards, security, that's easier talked about than done - it takes maintenance," says Ozonian.

”Franchises, brokers, and agents should have great Web sites,” he says. They are great to connect with a national site. The Internet is reach and exposure, but people cannot come into it saying 'I expect to get five leads a month.' It doesn't work that way because the consumer will contact the agent if and when they want to.”

Published: July 17, 2002

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