By Sean Cutright

Working in the real estate technology industry and being an iPhone-carrying member of Generation Y, I often come across the discussion of how to market to the large pool of potential first-time home buyers in my generation. To make things easier, I made a quick list of dos and don’ts, and I’ll give you a hint up front: it all revolves around the Internet.

Most important: Your website
Get a good website (click here to see a good brokerage website).

As a prospective customer, I don’t care how many homes you’ve sold over the past 30 years without one. I don’t care how many of your agents “won’t use it.” I don't care if you're saving money with it, because I can see some of the things you're spending a lot of money on that aren't going to help you much, or much longer.

I don’t care if you’re locked into a contract with a crappy Web provider, or if you think your online bio-esque site seems good enough. If you don’t have a good enough website that allows me to efficiently research a plethora of listings online and give me the info I need to best evaluate what I want, I won’t be buying from you, nor will the rest of Generation Y.

Even if you can get by selling to a few people in this generation, as time goes on you will sell to less and less Gen Yers, and there will be more and more buyers from Gen Y.

Worry about SEO, but not THAT much
Search Engine Optimization is extremely important today because Google has become the path most of the country uses to find anything about anything. As cell phones become more sophisticated, Google’s value will only climb. Heck, when the iPhone was first released, Google had its engineers double-check their log for errors because they couldn’t believe the amount of searches they were getting from the phone. Turns out, there were no errors.

I carry with me everyday a plethora of information that trumps 50 years worth of Encyclopedia sets, and it fits in my pocket. Armed with only an iPhone and access to the Internet, I can find nearly everything—especially local real estate companies. The problem is, how good is the information once I’ve found it? I’ll trust CNN.com for fact checking before I will a 17-year-old’s blog site.

So if I find your website on the top of my Google search, then, upon entering it, it’s a terrible design, is hard to use, runs slow, or doesn’t instantly give me the info I’m looking for, I won’t be coming back to your site, nor your company.

Search engine placement is like your polling in a car race. Starting in the front is very important. But if you’re starting there in a minivan while the other racers have Vipers, kiss your chances goodbye.

Tell it like it is
Like much of my generation, I use the Internet to find homes. Upon doing so, I want to find the most information about a property to tell me it fits the profile of what I’m looking for. I don’t buy to have. I buy because it’s what I want. Sugar-coating a home online, only for me to visit the home and find it’s not what I thought it was, only turns me off from that home and that agent. It doesn’t trick me into potentially buying it.

For example, I recently saw a home online that had a property description that read: “Recent addition features master suite with private bath, family room and access to three level deck.” The three-level deck intrigued me, so I looked closer at the photos because I missed it on my first run through. Turns out, the other two levels they referred to were nothing more than small landing areas on the deck steps—too small to even put a child’s lawn chair on. They might as well have written “12 level deck,” referring to each stair.

If a listing online does not have a photo, I’m skipping it
Nearly everyone today has a cell phone. Nearly every cell phone today has a camera. It takes a matter of seconds to snap a quick photo of a listing and send it to yourself. Seeing a listing without a photo does not tell me there’s more to be seen. It tells me either A/ this place is such a dump they refused to take a photo of it, or B/ someone cares too little about this property to bother. Either way, there’s a better chance of me transferring from E-mail to hand-written letters than there is of me spending any more time on that property.

Providing too much information makes me want to work with you, not the other way around
There seems to be an under-the-breath fear in today’s market that providing too much information online will replace people’s perception of their need to work with a real estate agent. I can find everything online from how to build my own deck to how to fix my car engine. I will not use this information to do these things myself. Instead, I will use this information to make sure the person/company I’m working with knows what they are doing, and is not trying to take advantage of my lack of knowledge in the subject.

In real estate, I want as much info as I can get my hands on. This means info about the home, the updates recently done to it, what might need to be updated, what the rooms in the home are like, what the neighborhood is like, what the school district is like, what other homes around are selling for and have sold for, what the potential increase in market value and ability to resell is like, etc. When I bought my first home three years ago, I was more inclined to work with the company that would provide this information to me. Now that I started working in the real estate industry, that incline has grown. Also, the more I learn about real estate, the more likely I am to use an agent instead of representing myself.

Providing sufficient amounts of information—in way of photos, reports, and property descriptions—makes me view the agent as more of an expert. When I come across a listing that provides very little info, I self-consciously assume that the listing agent is either lazy, too busy to dedicate enough time to this listing, or doesn’t know their information as well as they should. Regardless, if this is the case, I’m still searching.