The Eight-fold Path to a Solid Real Estate Web Site

Awhile back, a prospective real estate client asked me rather earnestly how he could step ahead of the pack in real estate Web offerings. Having produced several real estate websites for companies in the Roaring Fork Valley as well as in Montana, I was full of suggestions about IDX providers, the tenets of good design, the importance of usability and other ideas on the subject. But these ideas came from my experience as a web developer and designer, not as a potential buyer or seller of real estate. Over the past three months, my wife and I have been looking at homes from Glenwood to Basalt in the deluded hope that we might find a single-family home for under $700,000 --- like say a three bedroom, three bath home for $435,000. Given our criteria, we will be looking at homes and searching for the right one for a long time. Faced with such a daunting undertaking, I've come to feel strongly about easy-to-use real estate web sites with the right features. So here's my eight-fold path for real estate web sites in three installments (look for the next post Monday, Nov. 5).

1. Right Notification -- If you're buying a home in a competitive market it's essential to know the minute a property that fits your criteria hits the MLS. Or, better yet, notify your subscribers before one of your new listings hits the market. Real Estate sites should allow easy sign-up for email notifications on anything that hits the MLS in their price range. If you want to be truly wired, allow those notifications to go out to people's cell phones as text messages.

2. Right Search -- It's important to appeal to different types of users with your search mechanisms. A "Quick Search" serves those who are looking for common products such as 3-Bedroom, Single Family Homes in Carbondale and should be prominently available on the home page. Have a link to an Advanced search that allows as much detail as the user can possibly be afforded by your local MLS system. Include the ability to specify only your company's listings and to search only listings that have come on the market within a specific timeframe (last 7 days, for instance). Your search should provide sortable results so that queries involving a large number of results can be sorted by price, area, bedrooms, etc. A bad habit of the old days was to have two different search boxes on your site, one for your own, "featured" listings, and another for the MLS (often presented in an iframe). This is both clunky and confusing to the user. It's important to integrate the two and have all properties searched whenever the user executes a query. Don't assume that your user even knows what the MLS is. Also, consider including search by location functionality through Google, Yahoo or MSN maps. A geographically organized presentation of your listings is a good idea.

3. Right Listings -- It's important--for obvious reasons--to make the strongest possible impact when presenting your company's listings. Unfortunately, the MLS systems often provide a limited number of photos, no virtual tours or rich media and limited information about the listing agent. Don't make the mistake of limiting presentation of your own listings to what's available via the MLS. Consider a supplementary database tied to properties by MLS# that has additional photos, Google maps, panoramic virtual tours, youtube videos, listing agent photos, and custom property titles to ensure your website doesn't give your own properties short shrift due to the limitations of the MLS system in your area. I often go to a real estate company's web site because I've seen their sign out front of a property of interest. I'm going to their site, and not another site in the area, because I expect them to offer the more information than the MLS system contains about their listings, especially rich media.