Written by: Maureen Francis
Realtor, miOaklandCounty.com
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Friday, August 24, 2007
Disclosure: I have been a Homes.com customer since 2002.
Homes.com offers template web sites for Realtors and brokerages. The sites are easy to modify. Homes.com is able to import and agent’s listings directly from the MLS. The company offers a decent selection of templates, though I only recall them adding new template options once since I started using their services. They also offer customization and search engine optimization services that one can purchase separately.
When I bought my homes.com site, I did almost no research into the other sites that were available at the time. Frankly, I did not even know where to begin such a search. I was a new agent and all I knew was that I wanted a web presence. My naiveté had me believing that “if I built it, they would come.”
When I first got the site, I spent at least 20 hours customizing it and adding more content. Over time, I added city pages and more localized content as I began to get a better sense of what would help the site to perform better. If you are not going to spend a little time adding content to these sites, don’t even bother getting one.
Today my Homes.com site is just one of 3 sites that I maintain. I have outgrown the site, and feel limited by its lack of functionality. I still use it because it does something important: gets good traffic.
Dominion Enterprises, the company that operates Homes.com, also owns Advanced Access and Number1Expert. Number1Expert sites, which are more expensive than Homes.com sites, seem to have much better search engine placement.
Here are some specifics on my personal view of Homes.com’s sites for agents. I have not used their brokerage solution, so I cannot speak to that.
Analytics: Weak.
Homes.com provides poor information on where my traffic is coming from, compared to my point2agent site and my personal blog. I use the analytics to tell me where I need to improve my efforts and I would like more robust information than homes.com offers. I would also like it live, not 24 hours later. I really know very little about the traffic I get other than how many came. To me this is a major flaw.
Ease of Use: Not bad
Homes.com offers course on how to use their sites. I have never taken one. I found the site easy to use, though some of the navigation for setting up pages is cumbersome.
Adding Listings: Easy
They can be fed automatically from your MLS or you can input manually.
Display of Listings: Nice
I like the slide show feature for 10 pictures. I wish they would allow more than 10 as most other sites do now (Realtor.com and Point2Agent.com).
Technology: Weak
As far as template sites go, I think Homes.com falls low on the technology curve. I have asked them about a blog feature since 2004. They never could support it so I went out and set up my own. This is not ideal. I would like to have my site and my blog on the same site because it has great advantages for SEO.
Templates: OK, not great.
I find the current selection of templates to be dated and there are only a few that really interest me at all. There is not much of appeal for those who work in a luxury market and there is a major bias for southern themes and styles.
Customer support: OK. Maybe.
I wish they had longer tech support hours. Email support can be very slow. I have had an ongoing problem with Homes.com ability to take photos from my MLS for 2 years. So it is hard to give that a high grade.
Cost: Higher than it should be for what you get.
Overall: Today, Homes.com would not be my personal first choice for a template web page provider. I would prefer to work with a company with a bigger commitment to new technology. On the other hand, these sites are easy to use, which is a consideration for many agents. No matter what provider an agent choses, a personal web site will not perform unless you input original content and you update it frequently.
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Written by: Teresa Boardman
Broker, StPaulRealEstateBlog.com
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Monday, June 25, 2007
Connecting Neighbors is a neighborhood web site. The Connecting Neighbors program provides exclusive sponsorship of a specific neighborhood to a local real estate professional. The sponsor provides the service to the neighborhood at no cost and through that offering establishes them as the Neighborhood Expert in that area. The Connecting Neighbors program includes an interactive web site with a unique web address and a newsletter created from the content of the web site. Neighborhood web sites can include links to job searches, recipes, financial news, neighborhood classified, businesses, artists, real estate listings, links to home searches and more. Generic content like recipes is provided through ConnectingNeighbors.com, and site owners can provide additional content, as can neighbors. Neighbors visiting the web sites can add announcements and classified ads which are moderated and approved by the site sponsor.
Pricing is based on the number of households in the selected neighborhood. A neighborhood site for a neighborhood with 400 homes will have a one time set up fee of about $500.00 and a monthly hosting fee of $60.00. additional money should be budgeted for post card, newsletter and other types of print advertising to promote the site. Connecting Neighbors also provides training and support. Site sponsors are encouraged to sell advertising to area businesses on the web sites for additional revenue.
Site owners need to market their sites in the neighborhood and are encouraged to use paper flyers, post cards, and newsletters to promote the site and build traffic. When asked if these web sites help real estate professionals win business the sales representative I talked to said that they do and that in some neighborhoods 95% of the houses holds use the web site.
Possible benefits of the site include access to national content, a site that can be refreshed with new information, and access to a connecting neighbors marketing specialist. The philosophy behind the site is a soft sell where the real estate professional gives to the community and in return gets business.
Some draw backs to the sites include the need to spend time and money marketing the site. A quick google search did not yield any results other than the Connecting neighbors web sites. Since the sites are for the neighborhood they are directly marketed in the neighborhood but in doing that hey may not attract home buyers who want to relocate to the nieghborhood or be found by other people interested in the area like many traditional real estate web sites do.
The site does not provide an RSS, (Real simple syndication) feed. Web sites with RSS feeds may have an advantage over those that do not. Modern browsers have RSS readers built into them as does the the new Windows Vista computer operating system. The sales rep I talked to did not know what an RSS feed is.
Getting information about the product is difficult. Persons interested in learning more or in purchasing the product must leave their contact information on a web site or call the sales staff. There are no examples of a neighborhood we site on the connectingneighbors.com web site. The sites I looked at had fairly low page ranks and did not appear to be getting a huge amount of traffic. It is possible that the sites were for smaller neighborhoods.
The sites are not an example of cutting edge technology or ideas but if a site owner were to spend the necessary time and money to market the site and to keep it updated with fresh content neighbors will read it. There are less expensive competing products like real estate blogs that could have a domain name for a neighborhood, come with an RSS feed and could be marketed with print advertising, include the same categories, and reach a larger audience.
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Written by: Teresa Boardman
Broker, StPaulRealEstateBlog.com
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Reply.com is a lead aggregation site. They put information about home values and homes for sale on the internet to attract consumers who may want more information. Consumers can fill out a contact form, which goes to an real estate agent, and the consumer becomes a “lead” for that agent. Web sites like Reply.com should be examine from the point of view of the consumer, who is looking for real estate services and from the point of view of the agent who is looking for business, because the service is designed to be used by both.
For Consumers
There is a home search. It says “Search Homes For Free”, which seems misleading. I have not yet found any company that charges money to search the internet for homes. To use the free home search consumers must give there email address and other information. Any consumer can search sites like Realtor.com or local real estate web sites and find all of the homes listed in the MLS and in most cases they do not have to provide any information about themselves, or pay a fee.
There is a section for home owners to get a free home valuation. Again most agents provide this service for free in the first place. To get a free home valuation the consumer must describe the home and then are contacted by an agent who is a local expert. That agent does a market analysis. The agent who contacts the consumer is not necessarily a neighborhood expert, they are an agent who signed up for leads.
There is also a section that claims to have “almost” everything a person wants to know about any home. They did a nice job with the design and it was easy to quickly find my own home. Unfortunately when I looked up my home it was missing about 500 square feet, had inaccurate bath descriptions and an extra room. I will not comment on the stated value they listed but will say that the number is a bit below the average value of a home like mine in my neighborhood. Comparable homes were displayed that are in a different neighborhood. There isn’t any information on the site about where the data comes from, but the fine print on the bottom of the site states that the information is deemed reliable but not guaranteed.
For Agents
Agents pay a flat fee of $44.95 per month, and an additional $44.95 per lead, if the agent chooses to work with the lead. There is a guarantee that if a member agent does not close at least one transaction through the leads in 12 months they will get 12 months of leads for free. The service can be canceled at anytime. Sounds reasonable for agents who want to buy leads through a lead aggregation sites.
I did some testing to see if consumers would actually find the Reply.com web site when searching for home values. The site did not come up on any search term I used in Google. If it did it was so low on the page that I did not go far enough. I looked at the keywords and meta tags that the site uses and found generic terms like “home value”. Often consumers include references to geographic areas when they search for homes or for home values. Real estate is local. The same site also generates leads for car sales professionals.
With the money back guarantee the site might be worth a try for some. A flat fee of $44.95 a month is not a large investment and lead generation is expensive. From a consumer point of view I think it is in their best interests not to become a lead. Sites like Reply.com are used to “capture” leads. Who wants to be captured?
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