Halstead’s Website: A case study

Now that the vast majority of homeseekers start their hunt on the Internet, a real estate brokerage’s website and its online listings are often the first chance a firm has to interact with potential customers.

But what makes a successful site? To find out, this month The Real Deal examines Halstead Property’s website: www.halstead.com.

Why did we choose Halstead’s site to examine? Largely because the firm’s site has been singled out for its success.

In 2011, the 1,000-agent brokerage was awarded an Outstanding Website honor from the Web Marketing Association, a volunteer group of Internet marketing professionals that recognizes exceptional web design.

The firm has been “in the forefront of website development,” said David Elgrabi, owner of web design firm RealtyMX, which has crafted websites for Halstead’s competitors Bond New York and Keller Williams NYC.

To polish its interface, Halstead employs a 26-person, in-house marketing and technology team (shared with sister brokerage Brown Harris Stevens) that reassesses its online offerings at the start of every year — a relatively frequent reevaluation for a big firm — to tweak less popular features and add new capabilities.

One issue they must keep in mind is that while in most industries a company’s home page is like its front door — or entrance to the rest of its website — in real estate, many users reach a brokerage’s online profile through the “side door.” That’s because they often get there by clicking on a specific listing on aggregator sites, such as StreetEasy, Trulia or Zillow.

“The site was designed with the consumer in mind,” said James Cahill, Halstead’s chief information and technology officer.

The company wanted to make the site as intuitive and simple as possible, he said, while offering features — such as a room painter that lets users test out different paint colors on listings — that are not available elsewhere.

Home page navigation bar

In contrast to some brokerage websites, the navigation bar at the top of the home page is “pared down,” said Sarah McCormick, the engagement director at digital agency Canvas, who helps oversee clients’ digital strategies. McCormick and her colleagues helped design the website for Halstead competitor Stribling & Associates, which was nominated for a Webby Award in 2012, but her company is not involved in Halstead’s web design.

The Halstead navigation bar lists only five options — Properties, Developments, Areas & Towns, Agents and About Us — and above that, the geographic areas where the firm operates. That’s about the same number of options as Prudential Douglas Elliman’s website, but fewer than some others such as the Corcoran Group (10 options), Citi Habitats (nine) and Rutenberg Realty (eight).

Since residential firms cater to disparate audiences — from apartment hunters to developers to new brokers — this can often be a tricky feature to get right. Firms often err on the side of including too many options, experts said.

Halstead’s site used to be more complicated, Elgrabi recalled. “I remember several versions of this website,” he said. “It’s much cleaner now.”

Mobile site

The need for companies to create a mobile site — a version of their website that’s created for viewing on smartphones and tablets — is becoming increasingly necessary as more users access the Internet through these devices rather than computers.

Mobile sites are still rare in the New York City brokerage world. Like many of its peers, Halstead’s site appears in the same format on a smartphone as it does on a computer, unlike some that offer users a streamlined version. However, Halstead’s site is “mobile-ready,” meaning that its features work and its pages display clearly on mobile devices, a spokesperson for the firm said.

Listing photos

It’s no surprise that photos feature prominently on brokerage home and listing pages, including Halstead’s.

When McCormick was researching what consumers want from real estate websites, there was one response she heard over and over again: “We want pictures and we want them big!”

Not only are listing photos integral to attracting renters and buyers, they also play a role in securing the listings in the first place. “The goal is to have the seller say, ‘This is a beautiful representation of my property, and this is why I want to sell with this firm,’ ” McCormick noted.

One misstep on Halstead’s site is that the photos that accompany individual listings, as opposed to the featured property on the home page, are relatively small, experts said.

Nor do they expand when you click on them, and there is no easy way for users to click through all the photos on a listing, like a slideshow, experts said.

“When I click on the photo, it should expand immediately,” Elgrabi said.

Instead, users can hover over thumbnails to view larger images, a Halstead spokesperson noted, and properties with “distinctive images” are accompanied by full-screen photos.

Listing page

Apartment hunters can be pretty particular about what they want in a home, so brokerages often include a great deal of information about properties and neighborhoods on listings pages.

In some cases, this prompts companies to pile on more and more features like mortgage calculators, neighborhood guides, links to restaurant reviews and other additions that serve as distractions, McCormick said.

“There’s this mentality that if [a rival’s] site has it, we need to have it,” she said.

Halstead’s marketing experts acknowledged that there is a danger in piling on too many features, confusing users. But, like McCormick, they noted that the key is to organize the information in a logical hierarchy, as it is on Halstead’s most expensive listing, a $14.8 million penthouse at 120 East 87th Street (pictured above).

While Halstead’s listing pages have many of these extra features, crucial elements such as the price, neighborhood and agent contact details are prominently placed in the upper left and right corners. Less important information, such as links to nearby restaurants, are “below the fold,” at the bottom of the page.

“Some people say that more information is not good,” said Matthew Leone, Halstead’s director of web marketing and social media. “More information that is not useful is not good.”

Halstead ProperTV

In 2008, Halstead launched a dedicated website called Halstead ProperTV to showcase its now-extensive video offerings.

While many brokerage websites contain audiovisual components, Halstead has embraced video with a rare commitment to scope, including property tours and press clips as well as agent biographies, event coverage, neighborhood guides and market report interviews. To date, the firm has created about 1,200 videos that have been viewed a collective 5 million times, Cahill said.

From Leone’s perspective, the videos are one of the most effective ways to communicate — second only to in-person contact, he said. Users spend about 30 to 40 times more time with a video than with a traditional listing, Cahill noted. And agents say they help spark interest from buyers, particularly those who live outside New York.

To observers, Halstead’s videos score points for their high production values, short lengths (most are well under five minutes), and the fact that they feature real, live human beings, rather than shots of empty living rooms and kitchens.

Agent video bios

About 80 Halstead brokers have created short video biographies, made by in-house staff, which are posted on their agent profiles and on the firm’s home page.

Part listing pitch and part recruiting tool, the videos feature agents discussing their work philosophy and experience, as well as the reasons they chose to work at Halstead. In many of them, past clients appear on camera to describe an agent’s brokering style.

The goal is to give potential customers a way to interact with brokers and get a sense of their personalities before meeting them. “We create products for them to help promote themselves,” Leone said.

Agent profile

One of the trickier aspects of crafting a brokerage website is to balance the goal of marketing the company, while also featuring dozens or hundreds of brokers, all of whom have their own brands and businesses.

“A lot of real estate websites, they’re just all about the property,” McCormick said. “And there’s so much in real estate that has to do with the broker you’re working with.”

At Halstead, like at most firms, the home page is viewed as a corporate site, while agents’ pages are seen as their own, officials said.

Most agent pages, including one for top broker Richard Orenstein (pictured here), include standard features such as contact info and current listings. Brokers can also include news stories, languages spoken, client testimonials, past closings, links to social media profiles and other items.