For home buyers, the Internet is a great resource that makes the days of painstakingly combing through listings in the newspaper a distant memory.
But the Web sites hosted by New York City brokerages are about more than merely providing a time-saving way to showcase properties. The Internet’s a two-way street, and the sites let firms gather information about clients and listings with an efficiency that simply wasn’t possible in the heyday of real estate print advertising.
For brokerages, the sites are living, breathing tools that constantly provide information about who’s looking at the listings, how the property is doing, and how to get that listing off the site for good. Most sites allow brokers to research the history of a listing and pinpoint what’s working and what’s not.
“If 30 people have come to see your property and no one’s biting, your property is priced out of the market, and using online tools is an effective way to show that,” says Brian Legum, a sales manager at Citi Habitats. “A broker can say to a client, ‘Here’s a printout of all the people who looked at your property, the number of times the virtual tour has been seen, the e-mail inquiries, and we’re still not getting any response. Here are the different ways I can market your property; what should we do?'”
“Ninety percent of the deals that I do are from listings on the Web,” says Corcoran Group senior vice president Deborah Rieders. “It’s such a valuable tool. If a property doesn’t sell in the first week, I’ll look for myself and try to see what’s going on. Maybe the pictures aren’t good enough. We’ll tell a seller what we think something is worth, but they still might want to price it themselves, so one of the best usages of the site is that if something is overpriced, and the first week it’s up no one buys it, you can see that on the site. Then, I can tell them what the realities of the market are and adjust the listing.”
Rieders generates graphs for clients through Corcoran’s site to illustrate how a price change might affect sales, and she can sometimes track people forwarding a particular listing to others as well as their comments about the property. She also gathers information from each sale for the company’s database so that, for example, she can prepare a report for a developer who is interested in a particular neighborhood and tell them about who’s buying there and the average prices in the area.
Some brokers have approached their own company’s technology staff about expanding their traditional reach through various Web media.
“A broker might create electronic property brochures and send them out to clients, or do blogs about themselves. They build an audience that way, and get referrals. Lately, I’m getting calls from brokers asking, ‘What can I do on the Internet to really showcase this property?,’ and I might recommend some of these outlets,” says Charles Olson, chief technology officer at Prudential Douglas Elliman.
Several New York City brokerages — including Coldwell Banker Hunt Kennedy, DJK Residential and Fenwick Keats Goodstein — now belong to the Manhattan Multiple Listings Service (www.mlsmanhattan.com), which allows them to max out their listings exposure by putting their exclusives on other firms’ Web sites; it’s viewed as an electronic expansion of the co-brokering system.
“It’s a new way of capturing buyers,” says Coldwell Banker CEO David Michonski. “It’s taking the consumer and putting them in the midst of all the traffic.”
Klara Madlin, president of Klara Madlin Real Estate, a smaller firm, was at first reluctant to try Manhattan MLS, but is now an ardent advocate of it and has had several sales generated by the new system. “It’s still co-brokering but it’s easier. We’re all on the same page, literally,” she says. “It facilitates transparency to the consumer but also gets the most exposure for the seller,” she adds. “All of the exclusives also go on Realtor.com, and that is the biggest real estate Web site in the country. People in California can see your listings.”
A system called Lead Router, which converts consumer inquiries into voice mails and guarantees a response from a broker within an hour, is built into some real estate Web sites. The program can also be a slightly less aggressive approach for consumers looking for information but don’t feel they’re ready to be paired with a broker.
When one brokerage’s listings appear on another’s Web site through the Manhattan MLS system, visitors to that listing may be directed to the host company’s Internet listings manager, who will answer questions but who will not do a hard sell.
“Many people who call don’t want an agent just yet,” says Coldwell’s Michonski. “The Internet listings manager is like a safe harbor.”
The calls can lead to something more substantial in the long run. “Internet lead managers incubate the leads,” says Pam O’Connor, president and CEO of Leading Real Estate Companies of the World, another Manhattan MLS member. “The call centers develop the relationship and hand it off to an agent when [consumers] are ready to start working.”
The technology teams behind New York brokerage sites are constantly crunching Web traffic data to develop new approaches to selling and to improve existing ones.
“We measure unique visitors, hits, page views, downloads, page views per visit, time spent per visit, specific page traffic based on project, visitor referral information and advertising strategy referral traffic,” says Matthew Shadbolt, director of Internet marketing for the Corcoran Group.
Shadbolt mentions the “Most Viewed Properties Now” section of Corcoran’s site, which features an inclusive top 10 list for listings in the city, with separate lists for Manhattan and Brooklyn. He says it’s a good example of using what he terms a “real-time competitive analysis and intelligence service” to enhance the site’s content and versatility.
“We have been able to increase our visitor traffic over the last year as a result of our strategies,” he says.