HOME > ARTICLES > Real Estate On The Web

Real Estate On The Web

Buyers in their millions have been using real estate websites for some time, and more and more real estate professionals are getting on board.

We have long known that home buyers increasingly shop the Web before contacting a real estate agent. Now a Nielsen//NetRatings survey in March indicates almost one-fourth (22.4%) of visitors to real estate sites are planning to buy within 12 months.

About 12 million people per month are going to real estate websites, the top site, realtor.com, gets 4.5 million per month.

The National Association of Realtors finds 64% of realtors say that having a website has changed the way they do business. Almost 100% are using computers, 94% use email for business, 85% use digital cameras.

Online real estate classifieds are growing (as with all online classifieds) - Jupiter Research expects the spend to reach $274 million for 2003, and $424 million by 2007.

Mortgage sites are busy too, with the top four getting around a quarter million visits each per month. Five million mortgage related searches occur every month. Online mortgage calculators are all over the Web, and 300,000 surfers still search for one in a search engine every month.

Hunter and Associates has done some work with real estate and with the mortgage industries. Mortgage is tough - hugely competitive, with a lot of very smart webmasters driving traffic through affiliate sites.

It's easy to be a Web Realtor®

Real Estate is easy. It used to be hard to compete with the national services like realtor.com, but now most MLS systems can be easily and cheaply carried as feeds in the individual Realtor's website. Back in October 2002, Keller Williams in Austin estimated 90 percent of their agents were using these kinds of feeds (known generically as IDX).

Almost all of the information articles and changing content like monthly newsletters are syndicated feeds, at very affordable rates.

Also affordable are the interactive tools such as allowing visitors to sign up for email notifications of listings in their interest range - this is the most popular and most successful tool.

Costs for the feeds and services aggregate around $200-$500 monthly at the last casual (don't quote) check. So it becomes affordable for a Realtor® to have her or his own website with a unique personality and some custom content, along with all the tools that searchers must have to buy a home with - and without which few real estate professionals will thrive in an increasingly technological industry.

HOME > ARTICLES > Real Estate On The Web