Friday afternoon Skype with Ed Kohler defines "searchers"

Mark Eibner: Welcome to Broker IPTV. My name is Mark Eibner and we are on official Friday afternoon skype in with Ed Kohler and Ed Kohler is with "Hay Stack In A Needle" and also the author of Technology Evangelist and Ed welcome to the show.

Ed Kohler: Hi Mark how are you doing?

Mark Eibner: Super, hey in the spirit of our Friday skype in, just wanted to kind of take a subject we can talk about for three to four minutes, share with our viewers today we are going to be talking about different types of searchers and could maybe you can define for our audience what do you mean by searchers.

Ed Kohler: Okay in this case by searchers what I mean are people who are over on Google or Yahoo, who are in the real estate market in some way and it turns out that if you take a step back and you kind of think about how people are you know what they are typing in search engines, they had a lot of different phases in the buying process and I think a lot of people with their websites haven't yet created content that addresses all the different stages that someone maybe at.

Mark Eibner: So what type of information should people have these different types of searches?

Ed Kohler: For example a lot of real estate websites do a pretty good job of the home search process, so it's really kind of buy side what they have out there. They tend to be a little weak sometimes on the information they provide to home sellers. For example a home seller they are trying to figure out you know what's my home work of course that's a very important question to them, but of course they are also trying to figure out if my home is worth this you know what can I expect to get out of it if I sell it and what can I achieve on my next buy with what I have left after you know selling my home and that type of information like that depth of information for sellers is something I don't see a lot of today.

Mark Eibner: You talk about just basic evaluation tools like a Zillow evaluation something like that?

Ed Kohler: Yeah it can also be in the form of blog post and just helping people understand all different things involved you know when a transaction from selling one home through buying the next, you know giving people some guidance and also you are kind of demonstrating your expertise.

Mark Eibner: Sure yeah excellent ploy actually being a little more transparent coaching people through the selling process, so they can get to the buying process, maybe area stats or zip code stats, dial stats something of that nature?

Ed Kohler: Yeah and that's in the buying process there is also the phase of trying to figure out where in town is a good place to lay off and trying to understand you know what can I get from my money, is that something that I think is still trying to be figured out of mine, for example say someone works in a downtown of a metropolitan area and they want to spend $300,000 and they hope to have a house with a yard because they have a dog or something, so you know there maybe some compromises they need to make in terms of how far they are willing to drive and different types of neighborhoods of things that, type of information that can help guide people towards what neighborhoods or suburbs or whatever should they even be considering and so that kind of stuff they kind of get people pointing the right direction is another area where when people are what said it, you are [Inaudible] [00:03:15] about what sort of terms you might type into a search engine where you could have content that kind of addresses that.

Mark Eibner: You bet any good sites you can name off the top of your head that agents or companies or demonstrating this type of information for different types of people in searches?

Ed Kohler: To me the most of I see today is mostly agents who have taken ownership in neighborhoods where whatever neighborhood they happen to work or city they happen to work in, if they have created a blog where they just decided I am going to document everything I can about this and share what's going on, people stumble across those through search because blogs tend to do very well on search engines.

Mark Eibner: You bet.

Ed Kohler: But I haven't seen much about words tying it together where they tend to be a stand alone blog and then separate you know an IDX type website, and they are starting to be some mergers there but it's not as elegantly tied together in most cases as it could be.

Mark Eibner: Okay so we are talking about kind of hyper localism really that's what it's coming down to?

Ed Kohler: Yep.

Mark Eibner: Super well once again some great information Ed on our Friday afternoon skype in; appreciate you being with us today.

Ed Kohler: Thanks Mark.

Mark Eibner: And we will see you next Friday and so for more great information make sure to keep your browser on Broker IPTV.