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Are "Enhanced Listings" on Realtor.com worth the cost?

check Have you visited the NAR Wisdom site? Go vote in a poll about the value of Realtor.com enhanced listings.

Polls

Are "Enhanced Listings" on Realtor.com worth the cost?

Are you kidding me?
Sometimes, for the "right kind" of listing.
Absolutely!

Total Voters:

Check out the NAR Wisdom and cast your vote in the poll.

Jay Thompson The Phoenix Real Estate Guy is the editor of NAR Wisdom. I learned about NAR Wisdom on ActiveRain from Fred Pickard Members Only.

One of NAR Wisdon's early posts (the site has not been open two weeks has it...?) was about Monika's blog about NAR.

NAR Wisdom about Monika's post

Monika's ActiveRain post about NAR looking at blogging

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Posted by Maureen McCabe Central OH Homes on 10/26/2007 04:06 AM

Comments (43)

Realtor.com in the Online Marketing Channel

nar, polls

43 Comments on Are "Enhanced Listings" on Realtor.com worth the cost?

OCT

2007

Good grief, Maureen! Do you sleep? LOL

Thanks for the tip on the NAR site - I missed it the first time around. Will certainly check it out.

As for enhanced listings?? I don't know - my gut is telling me no. Just more money spent in a time when budgets are tough.

I have been trying to read this post for an hour, it just wouldn't load! Thanx for the linx, I'm off to read.

I'm relieved that Monika has her head screwed on straight. :)

(I recently discovered NAR Wisdom, too. Good tip. )

If the question is "worth the cost" .... the answer depends on what the cost they quote me this year!!

From what I'm hearing from agents and brokers who are up for renewal now ..... the numbers being quoted are much higher than the previous year's fee. I'm not up for renewal until January, and I have not idea what I'll be quoted. Rest assured I'll announce it to the world.

R.com says the formula is somehow based on number of listings and days on the market. Hello? More listings and longer market times usually indicates the agent is making less money. Agents making less money generally equal less advertising dollar to spend.

I've already publicly stated what I consider the max I'll pay them for this upcoming year: $3,500.00. And a few bloggers out there publicly stated that was pathetic. (Meaning I should not be paying R.com anything at all.)

Is R.com worth $3,500.00 a year? That depends on how you define "worth". Around here, sellers do search to see that their listings are on all available web sites. And r.com is one of the places they do look.

I'm off to read more before I say something really dumb. <s>

I had been paying for Realtor.com's "Enhanced listings" but I was just up for renewal and they quoted me double last year. I didn't do it.

I love the enhanced listing! I live in a military community, so alot of the buyers here come from other states. This is the first place they look for homes. It has worked for me!

I too have been paying for Realtor.com's "Enhanced listings" so far they have brought me 0 results. I'm not up for renewal until next year, however I expect them to greatly increase their prices. Will I be re-thinking my market plan - you bet I will!

I didn't do it, I have no data to prove that enhanced listings work, very few leads and no sales. The house is there, I added a virtual tour so that's it. I took it out of my marketing materials. In this market, we have to evaluate what works. R does not work.

I love the blog, Jay set up. Gave me the courage to let my enhanced expire. If I got even one sale from r dot com, in 10 years, I would have kept it but nothing !

I have a problem with them taking my listing and wanting me to pay for it to be enhanced. We need to spend our money in the marketing efforts that produce results. This site is so hard to manuver, if you have a listing in a township it is hard to find.

With all the listings I carry, you would think I would have sold or got a lead and sold one house in 10 years. Nothing and I track every lead, every sale.

Zero results here from Realtor.com enhanced. I don't plan to renew.

Realtor.com is like a necessary evil. They were first and the public has been trained to go there. Its easy to remember. Anyway, I think it is wrong for them to charge the way they do, but if you are not enhanced your not in the game. Prospects want pictures and information. If you don't provide it they are on to the next. Your ranking in Realtor.com moves to the bottom and since there are so many listings these days it will be hard to find you. I'm going to look to make my active rain site fabulous so that it rises in the Google rankings and just maybe we can thumb our noses at Realtor.com

Maureen, the only reason I use the enhanced listings is because our broker pays for it for us. Most of us in our office were going to not renew because they were going to almost double our cost. I don't have a clue how much this cost our brokerage to do this, but as far as I know I've never gotten anything from Realtor.com.

I get much more traffic off my blogs..and they're FREE!

I know that many folks are using Realtor.com and then contacting me.

I know that means that there are people using Realtor.com and NOT contacting me.

Either way, I don't get it. It is a dismal website, now the calendar says "2007," not "1998."

Maybe I should enhance.

Realtor.com is so old-school in sales technique and pricing it put me off.

So old-school, they put doubt and disgust in my mind.

I don't even know what it would cost me, because they are not up-front with pricing.

Realtor.com gives the impression of being out of step with the times, especially to people here. The future of real estate marketing is NOT to have to spend $3K to promote your listings. There are too many great marketing vehicles out there that cost little or nothing.

Ira Serkes gave a great speech about this at the CRS Sell-a-bration in Las Vegas earlier this year. He said "why pay for marketing that you can obtain for free"?

Are "Enhanced Listings" on Realtor.com worth the cost?

Are you kidding me? (80%, 12 Votes)
Sometimes, for the "right kind" of listing. (13%, 2 Votes)
Absolutely! (7%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 15

It was 8 votes when I went to sleep so maybe some of you went to NAR Wisdom and did your civic duty and voted. If not VOTE!

Thanks for all of the comments.

Carol my Twitter during the middle of the night often says:

What am I doing?

Not sleeping.

Here is my opinion on this. I thought it wasn't bad and is probably the biggest website exposure you'll get but..... I have had the enhanced features in the past and it was for one year at a great price. When I was to renew they wanted me to pay double. I was not very happy about that. Also when you reach a certain amount of listings...they charge you even more. Also the only thing I see out of it is you get your picture and contact on the sidebar and you can put in the amount of additional pictures. I can do a virtual tour with my REMAX design center and put in more photos and only pay $39 on a case by case basis to have it posted as a virtual tour there...I am not selling my picture...I am selling the home so if a call comes into the number at my office...the lead goes directly to me...I find it a waste of money and have not gotten too many real leads from it.I get more and better leads from my point2 site. Just my opinion.

I get a couple of leads a week from Realtor.com. It's a necessary evil. If I did not enhance my listings the leads would go to my broker and then be sold to other agents.

Thanks for posting this MM. NARWisdom will be two weeks old this Sunday. We should get our 1,000th visitor sometime today. RSS readers aren't counted in those numbers. Not huge numbers, but not bad for a new blog.

I'm trying to find a way to poll about the price increases. If you want to see some really scary R.com price increases, read Russell Shaw's post here. (The picture is priceless). Russell is a "mega producer" here in Phoenix, and a super nice guy.

Thanks to all for stopping by NARWisdom.com! If you have anything you'd like to see discussed there, let me know. Anyone is welcome to contribute too (normally I'm no fan of anonymous blog posts, but I know some are uncomfortable saying how they feel in public. Anonymous contributions to NAT Wisdom will be honored.)

Jay referred to Russell Shaw's post on Bloodhound a couple weeks ago...

I'm quoting Russell here: "Last year I paid Realtor.com about $3,300 to enhance my listings. Now they want to charge me $14,000 for the same thing. Dean Selvey's rate went from $3,800 to $30,000."

Although it would be rudely presumptious on my part to compare my little team with Russell Shaw, we did pay about the same ($3,300) for the current year. If they quote me $14,000 (as they quoted Russell) for the upcoming year, I'll just say NO. Sorry, I'll take my chances.

I've used it for years and can't really say it's worth it. I'm glad they finally allowed us to add more than just 6 photos. Without the enhancement, there's no reference to us so any leads would go to someone else.

One additional benefit is that R.com uploads to AOL as well, so there's double exposure for the money. Even so, their price is ridiculous compared to all the other free ways we can advertise. If they're doubling the cost, they may just have pushed the envelope too far.

Aol and realtor dot com are not working together anymore. According to I think Russell's post. 68% of traffice went away but prices go up.

I did not re-up this year for the enhanced. I went back and forth with them and got nowhere. There are many reasons I did not go enhanced this year. Number one - the price surged and it was ridiculous. "Well, you had so many listings last year..." That may be the case but there was not one person - not ONE - who said, "I saw it on Realtor.com." Not a single person and I am the type that always asks, "How did you find out about this property?" If they say online then I ask them where. Some can't remember so did they come from Realtor.com? Don't know. Maybe. Also, even if you do have an enhanced listings, at least here in S. FL., you might still be on the 3rd or 4th page!! Regardless of how many scrolling banners and what type of copy and how many photos, you still could be hidden in the back pages. That is crazy. Also, when you update it could take over 24 hours to show the new photos, etc... I told their rep that I could use the few grand to do things that I know for a fact work for me. Things like more signs, more websites that produce (I also told him I get a better response from the free sites I utilize: AR, Craig's List, etc...), joining more networking clubs and attending more events. These things work and I know this and have concrete evidence they do - at least for my business. Realtor.com on the other hand just has a good url. Other than that, I have nothing to show as a direct result. Yes, they show you how many people saw your listing but my biggest concern is how many converted into sales? None that I could point to last year at least! I don't care that you have a ton of traffic if it does not convert into business. I would rather you have half the traffic but real results!

Thanks all for the comments. I am disappointed there were still only 16 votes when I stopped by Editor Jay's NAR Wisdom site the last time.

Missy thanks for the info "Aol and realtor dot com are not working together anymore." I have not yet read Russell Shaw's post... yes I think I did... is this the pencil sharpener post? Is that the image?

Thanks for stopping by editor JT. And thanks for the link to the post Russell Shaw wrote which I am going to have to go check out, to see if it is the one I think I read to see if "the picture is priceless" jogged my memory....

I think the approach that Frances took on the NAR Wisdom blog was so interesting, I am looking forward to the second act. I guess I never thought you were trying to pull anything as far as taking anonymous pot shots at NAR because I knew it was you because Inman said the site was registered to you? Because of your spelling of stupid?

Happy two week anniversary to NAR Wisdom on Sunday, that is good traffic.

Maureen = I voted "are you kidding me?"

I used the enhanced for 5 years and only received 2 transactions from it. I dropped them last year because Realtor.com wanted over $4000 for me to renew.

I think they are way over their heads. They will be the next one to file bankruptcy. They are just plain greedy.

Yep... I had read Russell's post betwen Missy's info about AOL and Jay's "(The picture is priceless)" ... the image came swimming out of my subconcious. Once you've seen it. It is branded into your brain with the little logo over the pencil sharpener.

Chuck, I have never paid for enhanced listings but I voted for "are you kidding me?" too. I have never been a fan of the Realtor.com site but I am less disgruntled with NAR than some members seem to be... maybe because I have never paid for the enhanced listings.

Do you think maybe the NAR Wisdom answers to the poll are a little leading? I think the results would be similar no matter how the "are you kidding me?" was worded but it is not neutral... I don't know about bankruptcy but I believe they are greedy and if I may borrow the unique spelling of a word, stoopid. Or maybe they just think Realtors are "stoopid."

I've paid for enhanced listings the past three years, and have found them to be valuable at listing presentations. That's it. I certainly don't think I've sold any properties because of the extra money. I just came up for renewal, and I'm not even going to bother checking the price-- I'm ditching the program this year.

We have paid for the enhanced listings in the past on R.com but didn't really see any major results even after a couple of years. An agent in my office was catching some flack recently for not having more photos and information available on R.com so he called and was quoted an insanely ridiculous number... somewhere in the $3,500 range. ARE YOU KIDDING ME, is exactly right.

I realize that R.com is almost a household name but that pricing structure is out of the ballpark. I'm still trying to figure out why in the he!! R.com charges us to enhance OUR content. If not for OUR content, R.com would be but a shell. It's completely insane. I wouldn't mid paying a nominal fee to enhance my listings... to the tune of $500+/- but that's it. Until they become more agent centric, they are not getting even a tiny slice of my marketing budget.

This is so funny. I told the rep, after i told him NO that I would like to see exactly how many agents actually sign up again this year. I told him they were going to loose money. It's a rough market for many. Why would you boost prices instead of lowering to work with people??? I told him to call me when they miss their numbers and proffits are down for the year and they are starting to offer super bargain basement pricing to try and get anyone they can to sign up for something! Don't bite the hand that feeds!!

Thanks for the info about the blog. I have added it to my google reader, which now takes me days to get through!

OCT

2007

Let me see. We put up a brand new pristine listing with 8 pictures on our MLS and lots of detail about the house. Realtor.com strips it down to 1 picture with almost no description. Then they want me to pay them $1250 per year to put it back like it was.....

Maureen - thanks for the link to NAR Wisdom!

It will be interesting to see if they lose a lot of business. Or if agents still buckle for the sellers who think that is the way to get relocation buyers looking at their property.

I wonder who the polls on NAR Wisdom are from....

I looked at it again and the are you kidding me is not bolded in the question... just when you pull the results of the poll.

Are "Enhanced Listings" on Realtor.com worth the cost?

Are you kidding me? (78%, 21 Votes)
Sometimes, for the "right kind" of listing. (19%, 5 Votes)
Absolutely! (4%, 1 Votes)

Total Voters: 27

Who can tell me what the "right kind" of listing is?

Thanks for the comments.

Great post and some good comments! From everything I hear from my coaching clients and the agents in my GRI Classes...it is NOT worth the money....too many other ways to spend that money that will give a better pay off!!

"I wonder who the polls on NAR Wisdom are from...."

From me Maureen. I am by no means a professional pollster, so if the answers are misleading or unclear, I guess that's my fault.

The polling plug-in bolds the answer with the highest number of votes.

As for "right kind" of listings, I was thinking that certain listings might lend themselves better to "enhancement" on R.com than others. What that "certain"might be is probably different in every market -- price, location, amenities, whatever. Which is why I didn't get specific.

The polls on NAR Wisdom are certainly not statistically valid polls. They're mostly just for fun. If anyone here has a poll they'd like to see, feel free to let me know. Anyone is welcome to supply questions and answers.

OCT

2007

I meant what widget, plug-in or do-hickey the polls were made with, not the questions and answers. I don't know that I have seen polls before where the answers get bold to accentuate one answer that way. I had not noticed that the right answer or the top answer is not bold when you see the poll only when you see the results.

-- Start Of Script Generated By WP-Polls 2.20 -->
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.narwisdom.com/wp-includes/js/tw-sack.js?ver=1.6.1'></script>
<script type='text/javascript' src='http://www.narwisdom.com/wp-content/plugins/polls/polls-js.php?
</style> blah, blah ,blah

NOV

2007

I am a seller and a buyer and I do all my searching on realtor.com. Then I send the MLS number to my agent and we go look at the house. Therefore, it won't show up to those agents tracking where the buyers came from as a realtor.com referral. As for enhanced listings, they only matter on houses that have ugly exteriors and need more pictures, otherwise, if a house sounds good and looks nice on the outside, I may still request to see it. On the seller side, if R.com doesn't lead to sales (for those who mentioned they keep track of how buyers find the home)...what are some of the better ways to get my house sold?

S.H. In my way of counting who gets credit for the buyer is your agent , rather than R.com I think I would assume in most cases the buyer was getting emails of the listings from from the agent (from the MLS buyer report in my market with more photos and info) or using a search on the agents / brokers website /IDX (more photos and a LOT more information) rather than roughing it on Realtor.com, but your market may vary from what I am used to.. I think Realtor.com is a horrible search, but if that's what works for you and your agent, it works.

I like the idea that only houses with ugly exteriors need an enhanced listing on R.com

NOV

2007

Thanks for the outstanding post Maureen, as with most of these tools, I find the value in the listing end. And to me, the value plummeted when I can't attach aol's name with realtor anymore, because I present to an older crowd who are not that familiar with the internet but react to brand names that they know

Thanks Bill. That is interesting. Having never done enhanced listings on R.com I had never really thought about aol, in fact the discussion here about aol being part of it and then not part of it, is the first time I thought about who an aol user is, how that would impact the R.com enhanced listings. Does your client know the Zillow and Trulia brands?

For anyone following the poll on the NAR Wisdom site heres an update

Are "Enhanced Listings" on Realtor.com worth the cost?

Are you kidding me? (76%, 45 Votes)
Sometimes, for the "right kind" of listing. (15%, 9 Votes)
Absolutely! (8%, 5 Votes)

Total Voters: 59

FEB

Are "Enhanced Listings" on Realtor.com worth the cost?

Are you kidding me? (75%, 336 Votes)
Sometimes, for the "right kind" of listing. (13%, 58 Votes)
Absolutely! (12%, 52 Votes)

Total Voters: 446

Above is current status of the poll on NAR Wisdom. The skeptics have not changed much... still 75% of this voting but the Absolutelies (those that say Absolutley! ) went up considerably..

I love polls!!!

This post is getting a lot of views.... lately.

MAY

Comment removed and edited because of an extra link member put in. I don't allow comment spam on my blog. It is against community guidelines.

There's a new comment on the blog entry Are "Enhanced Listings" on Realtor.com worth the cost?

Comment by Michael Layton:

Enhance Listings worth It?

Totally no! I got quoted 3 times what I paid for the showcase sercvice for the last three years. I asked the rep on the phone if anyone at realtor.com has noticed that listings are selling lots slower and for much less than ever before. I am spending the money on Active rain and Trulia and getting much better results.

Someone at Realtor.com must be asleep at the switch to think that, in this economy, anyone would pay a penny more for enhanced listings. There are far too many choices out there to attract buyers with. I constantly find my listings on sites I have never heard of.

Not all markets are the same and it may work for other elsewhere but here in Southern California I see need to spend that kind of money.

JUN

A Form ARS regarding Move, Inc. has been filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. To view this filing, please click here

JUN

What is a " Form ARS " I saw an anonymous comment you left on someone else's AR post.

Why anonymous?

"ARS" = Annual Report to Shareholders. It's required by lw to be filed, and made public. Usually contains a bunch of drivel, redargless of the company filing it.

Thanks Jay I looked it up after commenting and realized of course it's only the annual report. I tried to read it and lost interest... I was intrigued by a comment on another blog...whether there was a scoop...

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