There are plenty of places to search for a home on the Internet, right? The big aggregator sites are known for being simply a place to search for properties. You want your website to be more than that. You want it to be a place where people find (not just search) for a home. Here’s how to use IDX Broker to do just that.
Become the Authority
We all know one of the biggest complaints in the web-centric world is around accuracy. Realtor.com started a whole campaign around it (check out #AccuracyMatters). Despite the amount of web traffic larger third-party syndication sites get, consumers are starting to understand that there’s often a lack of accurate results. People search for a home, fall in love with it, the (inaccurate) price, and later find out it was already sold (months ago).
Become the authority. Show what homes are actually worth. Use a high quality, integrated IDX solution. Maintain your personally branded, custom website. Bring in a direct feed of listings from your MLS. Provide your potential clients with a better sense of reality. Give them good information by providing current data on your website.
Showcase Your Local Expertise
Consumers are increasingly using local search criteria when using the Internet to find a home. The reason is people want to find a home in a specific part of town, near a distinguished school district, or in area that supports their hobbies or the family’s needs and wants.
By providing preset searches, you can create community pages with links to homes in specific price ranges, or with certain location criteria (e.g., gated community, golf course, lake front). Offering custom search forms to find town homes downtown or ranch properties in rural areas makes it easier for your potential clients to actually find a property. This also means your clients aren’t stuck searching through thousands of listings.
The more information you can provide about an area, the better. You’ll find visitors spend more time on individual community pages as they’re hungry to learn more about the area – and the homes available there. Your call-to-action will be important in order to get them to contact you about their further real estate needs; but a great first step is providing information that shows you actually know the area they’re interested in.
This allows you to give the consumer a feeling of comfort in your area of expertise and they become more likely to contact you for a showing of a property they found, not just using your site for an endless search.
Offer More Than Just Search
Aside from building community and neighborhood pages, giving the consumer something else is likely to keep them around and have them asking you for more help in their efforts to find their next home. Consumers are interested in many aspects other than just a pretty house. Most savvy consumers want to know if they are making a good investment, if the schools are rated well, if there are parks and shopping centers nearby.
Consider offering a simple emailed report as a way to get the consumer to reach out and provide their contact information. Realtors Property Resource, along with other sources, provide great Neighborhood and Market Activity Reports that are concise, easy to read, and simple to create.
If you plan on spending time and money to create a great custom website with a high quality, integrated IDX solution, be sure to provide value to those that visit your site – not just a place to run an endless search. Offer more value and you’ll find consumers stay longer on your site. They’ll learn more about you, and become more likely to reach for your help to FIND them a home.
Take the information on your site a step further and offer value to the consumer. Provide a service that attracts more people and they’ll want you to be the one to help them find (not just search) for the next place they’ll call home.
